Let's get back to the basics. The non-profit is 100% funded by stolen money. How much money? Who knows? I don't know how many non-profits exist solely because of FTX, but this is an important issue to come clean about.
I am not asking something difficult, such as "giving back spent salaries". As EY pointed out, if the money was given as a salary, it was given as a salary. However, GOING FORWARD, people should not be funded with stolen funds.
If a non-profit is funded 50/50 by FTX and OpenPhil, then yeah, having some funding shouldn't affect how we evaluated their work. However, if it's funded 100% by FTX, then we absolutely should assume the non-profit is net negative until someone else picks up the tab.
Somehow implying that this "not using stolen funds" is somehow a punishment is 100% proof that you are not at all serious about "fraud is not ok in service of EA."
The brother issue isn't a punishment issue, it's a RISK issue. Any reasonable law enforcement / civil suits looking for co-conspirators will look at this non-profit first and foremost. This isn't even a "risk," it's a near certainty.
I learned about this org not from EA but from a search about news on other sites with people pointing out how sketchy this is. To a person outside of the "bubble", this looks really BAD and every person defending this looks deeply out of touch with how much hurt FTX has caused.
Thanks for saying you are glad the group exists, it helps me feel better.
I am not trying to make a general case here. I am talking about "against pandemics" specifically.
They are run by Sam's brother. This alone paints a target on them by EVERY LAW ENFORCEMENT agency. On top of that, they are involved in politics. EA's involved in politics is ok, but you've gotta be in a tip tip-top clean shape if you want to do that. I suspect what they are lobbying for might have a ton of problems and be a net-negative, but that's a separate discussion and the above points should be sufficient.
It's possible other non-profits also present a heavy reputational or even legal risk, but to find them, someone from EA needs to do a full review of the funding targets.
[mod of Dank EA Memes here, but not speaking on behalf of the entire team]
I agree with parts of what you say "in theory." The memes you tagged don't seem like the most dank ones in the group, there are certainly better ones. It's unclear to what extent you are trying to cast shade on the moderation rules, mods' own opinions, or the group behavior of likes. Your comment to me in the group feels like a massive nitpick on the world "firmly," when my tagging of SBF was a very basic question. I have also mentioned that we don't condone "vigilante violence" and would start banning posts if there's too much insinuation of that. So we already have lines that we don't want to cross, maybe yours is way more strict.
Given the above, it's unclear what your critique is proposing in a positive sense? We are not going to forgive SBF. We should not ignore the situation without looking at it. Should we make "less memes"? It's a distributed forum, many people are contributing. We are even spreading important information regarding the hack and the need to remove people's apps. Has EA forum done that? No. Why not?
As SE Montgomery mentioned humor is an important mechanism for coping, however, it's not just "coping" to create "fake feelings" of better. It is also about getting everyone on the same page about certain philosophical stances and stating that particular bad behaviors are, in fact, bad.
It is very clear to me that EAs have massive blind spots that have led to this debacle. While the responses so far have been good, I worry that people expect them to be enough.
As I have mentioned, extremely shady FTX funded non-profilts as such as https://www.againstpandemics.org are still operating and have not taken the correct move of employees resigning or shutting down.
I personally have a ton of disagreement with EA on the meta-level and DAEM feels like the only place I could surface them with any reach.
Ah, did not see it. I think your conclusion there "None of these measurements met my goals of being easy to measure and capturing the entire impact of mental illness." is correct and it's probably worth thinking a bit about the metrics. That said, even improvement on an imperfect metric could do a lot of good.
I like this report and it's a good start. In some ways i wonder if even this report underestimates the real costs. Mass shootings, divorce, funding of crime, poor financial choices are things that come to mind as negative flow-through effects of poor mental health.
With that in mind, I find that it is difficult to even talk about mental health interventions without a good metric. Reducing number of suicides is great, but it's not going to capture large groups of people going through "slightly depressed" to "not depressed," unless the intervention is correlated with reducing suicides as well. Things like improving self-reported happiness are probably good, but it's not clear that's captures what we mean by mental health.
I feel that the next step in improving the situation is more along the lines of figuring out metrics that we can measure that specifically target mental health.
Similarly for interventions, there is probably a large number that are hard to evaluate at this point. Interventions are generally in two categories: biological and cultural with biological being the easy one. Things like diet, promoting better sleep / less screen time. Cultural would be more tracking how communities evolve and help / hurt mental health and what can be done to promote them.
You seem to be misreading my comment.
Let's get back to the basics. The non-profit is 100% funded by stolen money. How much money? Who knows? I don't know how many non-profits exist solely because of FTX, but this is an important issue to come clean about.
I am not asking something difficult, such as "giving back spent salaries". As EY pointed out, if the money was given as a salary, it was given as a salary. However, GOING FORWARD, people should not be funded with stolen funds.
If a non-profit is funded 50/50 by FTX and OpenPhil, then yeah, having some funding shouldn't affect how we evaluated their work. However, if it's funded 100% by FTX, then we absolutely should assume the non-profit is net negative until someone else picks up the tab.
Somehow implying that this "not using stolen funds" is somehow a punishment is 100% proof that you are not at all serious about "fraud is not ok in service of EA."
The brother issue isn't a punishment issue, it's a RISK issue. Any reasonable law enforcement / civil suits looking for co-conspirators will look at this non-profit first and foremost. This isn't even a "risk," it's a near certainty.
I learned about this org not from EA but from a search about news on other sites with people pointing out how sketchy this is. To a person outside of the "bubble", this looks really BAD and every person defending this looks deeply out of touch with how much hurt FTX has caused.
Thanks for saying you are glad the group exists, it helps me feel better.
I am not trying to make a general case here. I am talking about "against pandemics" specifically.
They are run by Sam's brother. This alone paints a target on them by EVERY LAW ENFORCEMENT agency. On top of that, they are involved in politics. EA's involved in politics is ok, but you've gotta be in a tip tip-top clean shape if you want to do that. I suspect what they are lobbying for might have a ton of problems and be a net-negative, but that's a separate discussion and the above points should be sufficient.
It's possible other non-profits also present a heavy reputational or even legal risk, but to find them, someone from EA needs to do a full review of the funding targets.
[mod of Dank EA Memes here, but not speaking on behalf of the entire team]
I agree with parts of what you say "in theory." The memes you tagged don't seem like the most dank ones in the group, there are certainly better ones. It's unclear to what extent you are trying to cast shade on the moderation rules, mods' own opinions, or the group behavior of likes. Your comment to me in the group feels like a massive nitpick on the world "firmly," when my tagging of SBF was a very basic question. I have also mentioned that we don't condone "vigilante violence" and would start banning posts if there's too much insinuation of that. So we already have lines that we don't want to cross, maybe yours is way more strict.
Given the above, it's unclear what your critique is proposing in a positive sense? We are not going to forgive SBF. We should not ignore the situation without looking at it. Should we make "less memes"? It's a distributed forum, many people are contributing. We are even spreading important information regarding the hack and the need to remove people's apps. Has EA forum done that? No. Why not?
As SE Montgomery mentioned humor is an important mechanism for coping, however, it's not just "coping" to create "fake feelings" of better. It is also about getting everyone on the same page about certain philosophical stances and stating that particular bad behaviors are, in fact, bad.
It is very clear to me that EAs have massive blind spots that have led to this debacle. While the responses so far have been good, I worry that people expect them to be enough.
As I have mentioned, extremely shady FTX funded non-profilts as such as https://www.againstpandemics.org are still operating and have not taken the correct move of employees resigning or shutting down.
I personally have a ton of disagreement with EA on the meta-level and DAEM feels like the only place I could surface them with any reach.
Ah, did not see it. I think your conclusion there "None of these measurements met my goals of being easy to measure and capturing the entire impact of mental illness." is correct and it's probably worth thinking a bit about the metrics. That said, even improvement on an imperfect metric could do a lot of good.
I like this report and it's a good start. In some ways i wonder if even this report underestimates the real costs. Mass shootings, divorce, funding of crime, poor financial choices are things that come to mind as negative flow-through effects of poor mental health.
With that in mind, I find that it is difficult to even talk about mental health interventions without a good metric. Reducing number of suicides is great, but it's not going to capture large groups of people going through "slightly depressed" to "not depressed," unless the intervention is correlated with reducing suicides as well. Things like improving self-reported happiness are probably good, but it's not clear that's captures what we mean by mental health.
I feel that the next step in improving the situation is more along the lines of figuring out metrics that we can measure that specifically target mental health.
Similarly for interventions, there is probably a large number that are hard to evaluate at this point. Interventions are generally in two categories: biological and cultural with biological being the easy one. Things like diet, promoting better sleep / less screen time. Cultural would be more tracking how communities evolve and help / hurt mental health and what can be done to promote them.
I am wondering if there has been any research into reducing suicide rates. These may include: