Perhaps my wording was too broad. What I meant by “strict deontological behaviours and never be willing to engage or condone even very mildly greyish-white stuff” was specifically in reference to the failure modes that brought her to her current situation. I would expect her now to be exceptionally reluctant to lie, conceal material facts, cross clear legal or fiduciary boundaries, let consequentialist reasoning talk her into something she independently thinks is wrong, or defer to a charismatic authority figure against her own judgement.

I can understand why many EAs would be extremely wary of the reputational consequences of having her work in anything associated with EA. But from her point of view, assuming she is a well-intentioned person who wants both to do as much good as she can and, perhaps, compensate in some measure for the enormous harm she helped cause, I don't think it would make much sense to adopt a rule of avoiding any high-impact work for which she is unusually well suited merely because her involvement will itself be controversial. And, as this thread illustrates, her options for that kind of work are presumably much narrower than they otherwise would be.

I also don't think the Manifest example is very probative here. EA isn't ideologically homogeneous. There is, at least in my mental model, a substantial divide between a more left-oriented tendency that places greater weight on movement growth, reputational considerations, socially acceptable causes and “Classic EA™”, and a more Rationalist-influenced tendency that places greater weight on radical truth-seeking, willingness to explore weird or unpopular ideas and interventions, quantitative arguments even when their conclusions are socially uncomfortable, and comparatively more attention to AI and longtermism.

You can certainly disagree with the latter tendency, and particular decisions made under that banner can of course be bad. But merely inviting heterodox or objectionable people to a conference is not, to my mind, evidence of the kind of ethical laxity that would make me worry about Caroline repeating her Alameda failure mode. “Works for a company that makes controversial judgement calls about whom to platform” and “is willing to lie, commit fraud, or override serious moral reservations because a charismatic superior has produced a consequentialist justification” are very different things!

Fair. Neither of us has access to detailed information, so for the last part, we just have to trust our instincts and our mental models of people. I'd still say the opposite: precisely because of what she's been through, my guess is that she's probably less vulnerable to fall again into anything resembling the past, and to overcompensate in the opposite direction, i.e., adopt strict deontological behaviors and never be willing to engage or condone even very mildly greyish-white stuff.

I don't agree with your argument when you put aside the reputation stuff (that one is pretty correct, I feel). People aren't static. The definition of Caroline as "smart, hardworking, well-intentioned individual who is vulnerable to doing things she disagrees with when encouraged to do them by a sufficiently 'charismatic' individual" is a snapshot of her at the time of FTX. I'd make the guess that her experiences have taught her a lot since then ("Zeus set mortals on the path to wisdom, establishing as a law that through suffering comes learning"). While the first three traits likely haven't changed much, her surrounding psychological situation definitely has. This is not an excuse of what she did, but if the question is whether her behaviour at Alameda gives us good reason to think she is currently unsuitable for a high-leverage role, I would in fact make the opposite prediction, and be willing to bet on this against pretty unfavorable odds.     

This is obviously going to be a very controversial post and action. I'll start by disclosing that I have always been very sympathetic to Caroline, and even with all that's happened, I think any exploration in depth of the whole FTX-Alameda fiasco will still show her to be 1) extremely talented,  2) hard-working (these two should be uncontroversial) and 3)  morally serious and conscientious (even though she participated in fraud and made catastrophic mistakes in her life). For argumentative purposes, I think premise 3 is not needed, but I think it is true.

If one wanted to speculate about the possible consequences of Caroline's hire by Manifund, I think it makes sense to consider two levels: the one that affects Manifund and the one that affects EA as a whole.

For the first, I think one can make a case that hiring Caroline is positive expected value for the company. Given premises 1 and 2 and the fact that her actions under SBF have effectively made her unemployable and (I presume) a pariah for most of the EA community, Austin may be getting access to an unusually valuable employee whom much of the labor market is unwilling to hire because of reputational risk. I know lots of you would dispute premise 3 -I have no personal knowledge of Ms. Ellison, but from everything I've read from/about her, I think it is inconsistent not to consider her a deeply moral even if flawed person (and aren't we all?). But even if you're skeptic here, there is no rational incentive for her to be less than extremely, scrupulously honest in the future for the second chance she gets. And I am willing to bet that it will pay out (so direct message me if you want to place a bet). The worst downside for Manifund I can envisage is that donors will refuse to collaborate with them. Will this be a big issue? I don't know. I do feel that there was a subset of possible donors who were already unlikely to donate to the anyway, given that  Manifund is, I think, an offshoot of Manifold. And this connects to what I perceive as a battle for the soul of EA that has been taking place for some time, with those who favor maximizing outcomes through making EA more mainstream, more aligned with left values and organizations and more publicly palatable EA causes versus those closer to Longtermism, Rationalism and maximizing outcomes through exploring riskier, unpopular but numerically/theoretically backed actions and interventions, and Manifund would clearly align with the latter. 

For the second case, I think it is likely that in the short run, having Ms. Ellison working in a charity that seems at least to some degree aligned to EA will likely be pretty terrible PR for EA. Perhaps in the mid-term too. Then again, given that I think Caroline satisfies premises 1, 2 and 3, I can also imagine her doing a lot of good, impactful work. In fact, my rough forecast for the next couple of years would be something like this:

• ~65%: the controversy fades, Caroline becomes an extremely competent but relatively low-profile Manifund worker, and little by little she  develops a respectable second career in philanthropy.
• ~20%: she becomes considerably more prominent, writing serious pieces about grantmaking, philanthropy, perhaps forecasting or institutional design, eventually becoming a recognizable intellectual/operational figure around Manifund and perhaps in the philanthropy space at large.
• ~15%: donor or partner backlash makes her employment sufficiently costly that either her role becomes more private or she eventually moves elsewhere.

I see some people seem to find it troubling that Caroline would be specifically landing a a 'finance job', but to my limited knowledge, the functions she's going to be doing (technical infrastructure, operations, customer support, and the Manifund newsletter, research on how philanthropic money should be invested) do not sound like a typical 'finance' job to me. Definitely not like executive ones, or implying she's going to be personally investing people's money. 

I dunno, but I feel like... I dispute your framing? Like, the stereotype is real, and EAs are, on average, weird under most definitions of the term. Some of the weirdness is WEIRDness, so it approximates, even if taken to the limit, standard Western liberal views and beliefs. But most normal people will react with 'this gives culty, weird vibes' to a lot of EA beliefs and practices. There's no helping this or covering it up. One can try to shift the Overton Window in that direction, for example, and yes, one can try to make a more savvy use of the media. But one must choose one's weirdness points wisely.

I think worries about AI are percolating more widely into mainstream society, even if you get pieces like this from time to time. 

Yes, that post was hilarious... xD

I don't really know, but my starting model would be... unless AGI is applying utilitarian models, it would likely rate human welfare well above and beyond animal one, in enough orders of magnitude as to make any animal welfare insignificant. The developments could allow for an end of farmed meat and the like, but that would also make the need to have animals as such... mostly redundant? You might have reservations for animals... Dunno.

Just made a search and, rather embarrassingly, I couldn't find an actual long discussion in the forum (memory didn't serve as well as I had thought). I think I conflated the 2 comments of Ian Turner and Jason on this topic (in the forum post The ugly sides of two approaches to charity by Julia Wise from January 13th 2025) with EA-focused criticisms of MacKenzie Scott's donations from this reddit thread, starting from PEEFsmash's post:

This is bad and neoliberals should be economically literate enough to know why.

Cost effectiveness of interventions + room for additional funding. Scott is completely disregarding both concepts and giving money to whatever sounds good. Mostly trendy social topics. There will eventually be a book written on Scott's philanthropy and it will probably have accomplished nothing at all. Would be better off as capital for Bezos to have allocated privately with the intention of profit (Amazon and other Bezos projects will do more total good for humanity than all of Scott's cockamamey donations do) and the money would certainly do more good via the Gates/Effective Altruism style of hyper targeting the most cost effective causes, giving to each only as much as they can each deploy, and funding research into high financial risk but high expected return research, both for profit and not-for-profit.

A very enlightening book on these principles: https://smile.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-Altruism/dp/1592409660/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=3VU1ZFHVZ0ICE&keywords=doing+good+better&qid=1638468006&sprefix=doing+goo%2Caps%2C93&sr=8-1

I mean... if I were a conservative billionaire, I would be extremely wary about misuse and subversion of the principles that started some foundations (Mellon is the most egregious, but also Rockefeller, Ford, MacArthur...) and a few months ago we had in this very forum a discussion, if memory serves, of the terrible philanthropic choices of MacKenzie Scott. While I obviously think it is desirable for billionaires to spend money on effective charity giving, I also feel there's a reasonable case to be made for that money that would conventionally be routed into philanthropy to do more good if directed toward innovation: sometimes through philanthropy to individuals and early projects, sometimes through investment in companies capable of creating major breakthroughs.

I feel this is directionally correct. I also feel most EAs have a set of axioms and priors (and possibly biases) that will make indifferent to any sort of criticism like this.