Candidly, I find the conflation of the FTX bankruptcy and EA’s general credibility to be a big stretch - kind of a square peg / round hole situation, where people keep trying to put a scandal somewhere where it doesn’t belong. Were SBF pulling the strings at any of these charities (which seems plausible only at most as to never-got-off-the-ground GAP) that would be one thing, but in general we don’t hold the credibility of charitable institutions hostage to their donors’ moral virtue — how many dyed-in-the-wool liberals see productions at Lincoln Center in buildings named for the Koch brothers?
The fact that someone who favored a lot of the same good causes that a lot of rationalist types do turned out to be engaging in suspect transactions in a space whose only demonstrable value is in facilitating illicit transactions (crypto) just isn’t that intrinsically interesting (Hitler was a vegetarian and loved dogs etc. etc.) because there’s no evidence that this was the result of the dispassionate application of utilitarian values as opposed to just, like, one guy being kind of scummy.
The stuff about risk aversion is a good point but the EA framing is masking it: while Kelsey Piper’s recent piece discussing SBF makes clear he’s full of it on a lot of public pronouncements in any event, what he’s reciting is just a bog-standard argument that e.g. Daniel Kahneman makes that people don’t employ proper EV analysis enough and so the appropriate corrective is to be more rational about it. The very real problems Matt points to seem less a function of diminishing marginal utility (there’s probably a lot more than $15 billion of need in the world) and more about how reliance interests actually break nominal parity of outcomes because telling people you’ll give them money creates downstream effects that are now at risk beyond just the upstream sum of money possessed by the donor (see Scott Alexander’s discussion thereof).
Ultimately this isn’t that much of a story for EA. The take away for normies is “libertarian SF tech bro nerd type makes bad.” which is not only not that interesting on its own, but even less so as a minor variation on “libertarian New York finance type makes bad,” which is dog-bites-man banal.
Sorry for the long post but I just can’t help but view the tie-in between SBF and EA credibility as this bizarre attempt at making fetch happen.
I wonder if Matt thinks time spent actually serving others might have an effect on a person. I know spending the morning at a soup kitchen ‘doesn’t even try to maximize blah blah’ (whatever that is supposed to mean...). But maybe setting up an annual recurring payment to against malaria fails to nurture something inside the donator?
Notably the current info on FTX’s balance sheet (it’s stated assets and liabilities) [1]
> But there is a range of possible badness, even in bankruptcy, and the balance sheet that Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange FTX.com sent to potential investors last week before filing for bankruptcy on Friday is very bad. It’s an Excel file full of the howling of ghosts and the shrieking of tortured souls. If you look too long at that spreadsheet, you will go insane. Antoine Gara, Kadhim Shubber and Joshua Oliver at the Financial Times reported on Saturday:
>> Sam Bankman-Fried’s main international FTX exchange held just $900mn in easily sellable assets against $9bn of liabilities the day before it collapsed into bankruptcy, according to investment materials seen by the Financial Times.
> But then there is the “Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account,” with a balance of negative $8 billion. I don’t actually think that you’re supposed to subtract that number from net equity — though I do not know how this balance sheet is supposed to work! — but it doesn’t matter… You cannot apply ordinary arithmetic to numbers in a cell labeled “HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT.” The result of adding or subtracting those numbers with ordinary numbers is not a number; it is prison.
Everything we know so far suggests at minimum extreme negligence from FTX and SBF; and outright criminal fraud seems almost certain.
I regard crypto as a complete and utter trashfire. It facilitates every kind of fraud and environmental degradation while creating nothing of value. A generation of young men (for that is typically who invests in crypto, just like MLMs are typically favoured by women) think it is their passport to wealth and privilege. If SBF helps to kill it, then he will actually have done effective altruism perfectly well.
Will McAskill’s promotion of longtermism is probably the worst thing to happen to EA.
Let’s assume you’re McAskill and you genuinely believe in longtermism (I think it’s epistemic and effectiveness issues are damning, but I’ll leave that aside). Should you do a huge book tour and give a bunch of interviews that result in EA getting more press than it ever has, and focus it all on AGI risks?
Well, are most people going to find that credible? No. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is; most people aren’t going to believe the robots are coming to kill us, so branding a philanthropic movement with that cause area can only hurt it. FTR, I think this is somewhat true of farm animal animal welfare as well, despite my greater agreement with that as a high priority cause.
Every opportunity EA gets, it should be branding itself as fighting poverty, supporting global health, and preventing pandemics. For some audiences, the EA’s interest in prison reform is probably helpful too.
Once you’ve got people interested - sending some donations, reading the forum, etc. - you can start trying to persuade them on the weirder stuff, if you truly believe that weirder stuff is important.
Don’t let your freak flag fly. EA isn’t about self-expression; it’s about impact.
I’m sorry, I still think that the premise of ea is stupid. The idea that you can quantify “the greater good” is idiotic , for one missing the fact that values are subjective (and there are a thousand other problems with this). Also, anyone who has read history (or Harry Potter) should immediately get chills from people convinced they’ve cracked the code for “the greater good “ and feel entitled to do whatever with that justification (esp. if it just so happens to benefit themselves). SBF surely did us a favor in exposing this nonsense pretty early on. I’m still troubled however by the crisis in education+values that allowed it to happen in the first place.
P.S. note the vox interview with SBF where he defines his moral philosophizing as nothing more than “woke shibboleths so people like me” probably his only honest words. One of way too many vain and morally empty sociopaths.
Crypto has never been an effective store of value, it’s as volatile than paper money during a major war. That so many smart people have taken such a ludicrous idea seriously makes me doubt faddish one percenters when they talk about climate change, AI risk and gender.
I was initially skeptical of forcing a connection between the FTX affair and the EA philosophy, but this piece helped me grasp something more clearly that’s always bugged me about EA and Utilitarianism. To be clear, I’m pretty pro-utilitarianism, not in an “ends justify the means” kind of way but a “the way things actually turn out in the end matter more than what you thought would happen or hoped would happen.” And what’s always been suss about the EA vibe is the way some people used the logic to justify earning as much money as possible, so long as they felt the good they could do with the money would outweigh the bad of whatever their day job was. (I’m thinking hedge fund managers, for example.) But this whole logic is based on an extreme amount of hubris that you have the capacity to fully play out the likely consequences of all your actions, and you are free from bias to the extent you’ll be able to accurately calculate good vs bad and redirect your actions if the balance goes off. I’m pro-rationality but I’m skeptical of rationalists whose philosophy is based on the claim that people can be rational all or most of the time. In short, human morality evolved to give us easy rules and shortcuts that avoid the need for extreme mental calculus that’s susceptible to self-serving biases. Anyone who thinks they can or should make it up from scratch themselves just hasn’t been properly humbled (yet). All that said I think 95% of EA is on the right track, and I agree with all of Matt’s numbered points above!
I’ll say it: SBF is almost certainly guilty of fraud. Good old-fashioned fraud, the kind that would put you in prison regardless of what asset you are dealing with. Crypto makes everything riskier and more irreversible, but mingling customer deposits and profits recklessly and lying about it and using them like normal capital to prop up a failing investment firm (Alameda) after it made too many bad bets is just fraud.
How bad was it? FTX’s new CEO, John J. Ray, was tapped to run Enron during its bankruptcy, and handled other similarly impressive corporate clusterfucks:
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”
Vox’s interview with SBF, published yesterday, is quite damning about his intentions. [1] He is quite hostile to financial regulations (“Fuck regulators.”) and appears openly duplicitous about his public persona ("A dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us.") And he confirms that FTX lent customer assets to his crypto hedge fund, Alameda.
I can’t believe he is even talking to journalists as well as “tweeting through it.” With his parents both being distinguished law professors, I would assume he’d know to shut up.
I agree that the worst outcome of the FTX blowup would be to discredit and discourage the EA movement. We should all have the intellectual discipline to separate the two.
I have real issues with "longtermism" as well, having to do with applying an appropriate discount rate for uncertainty way into the future.
But the idea of rigor in measuring philanthropy combined with focusing on causes where marginal dollars may have a huge difference (e.g., AI risks) is very appealing.
Including risks of AI next to malaria nets is deranged. I'm a software security engineer and like to think computers are important, but this is simply nuts.
However, even if we take it seriously, the major investments in this space don't have remotely plausibly theories of action. DALL-E is the best example of this.
OpenAI, DALL-E's creator, has a stated theory that it's important for someone responsible to be at the vanguard of AI research so that we get responsible outcomes. They built DALL-E, and they put in a bunch of restrictions so you can't do bad things, like make deep-fake pornography of people. And then about 5 minutes later Stable Diffusion came out and let you do all those things. OpenAI's work in no way prevented Stable Diffusion, if anything at the margin it made it easier by paving the way with research!
Should SBF's polyamorous lifestyle be a consideration in discussing FTX, EA, etc. It seems odd that there were ten people all living together in the Bahamas running his various companies who were also romantically involved with each other and who have also possibly stolen billions.
"Cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don't produce anything. They don't reproduce, they can't mail you a check, they can't do anything, and what you hope is that somebody else comes along and pays you more money for them later on, but then that person's got the problem. In terms of value: zero." — CNBC, February 2020
"Probably rat poison squared." — Fox Business interview at 2018 meeting
I keep coming back to this point: SBF repeatedly and publicly stated that he was going to take these kinds of foolhardy risks. So why were the VC firms giving him money? Yeah he's made a lot of money in the past, but at some point you have to read the business plan and understand that there's a pretty good chance of this blowing up.
The other thing -- I know a lot of pretty smart people, even some close to the level of SBF (I'm not anywhere near that league). They've been told their whole life how smart they are and in some cases (like SBF) how morally good they are. Eventually they can self-rationalize a lot of bad behavior in the service of what they believe to be a greater good. And they don't have anyone on their intellectual level to convince them that hey, maybe that's a bad idea.
Candidly, I find the conflation of the FTX bankruptcy and EA’s general credibility to be a big stretch - kind of a square peg / round hole situation, where people keep trying to put a scandal somewhere where it doesn’t belong. Were SBF pulling the strings at any of these charities (which seems plausible only at most as to never-got-off-the-ground GAP) that would be one thing, but in general we don’t hold the credibility of charitable institutions hostage to their donors’ moral virtue — how many dyed-in-the-wool liberals see productions at Lincoln Center in buildings named for the Koch brothers?
The fact that someone who favored a lot of the same good causes that a lot of rationalist types do turned out to be engaging in suspect transactions in a space whose only demonstrable value is in facilitating illicit transactions (crypto) just isn’t that intrinsically interesting (Hitler was a vegetarian and loved dogs etc. etc.) because there’s no evidence that this was the result of the dispassionate application of utilitarian values as opposed to just, like, one guy being kind of scummy.
The stuff about risk aversion is a good point but the EA framing is masking it: while Kelsey Piper’s recent piece discussing SBF makes clear he’s full of it on a lot of public pronouncements in any event, what he’s reciting is just a bog-standard argument that e.g. Daniel Kahneman makes that people don’t employ proper EV analysis enough and so the appropriate corrective is to be more rational about it. The very real problems Matt points to seem less a function of diminishing marginal utility (there’s probably a lot more than $15 billion of need in the world) and more about how reliance interests actually break nominal parity of outcomes because telling people you’ll give them money creates downstream effects that are now at risk beyond just the upstream sum of money possessed by the donor (see Scott Alexander’s discussion thereof).
Ultimately this isn’t that much of a story for EA. The take away for normies is “libertarian SF tech bro nerd type makes bad.” which is not only not that interesting on its own, but even less so as a minor variation on “libertarian New York finance type makes bad,” which is dog-bites-man banal.
Sorry for the long post but I just can’t help but view the tie-in between SBF and EA credibility as this bizarre attempt at making fetch happen.
I wonder if Matt thinks time spent actually serving others might have an effect on a person. I know spending the morning at a soup kitchen ‘doesn’t even try to maximize blah blah’ (whatever that is supposed to mean...). But maybe setting up an annual recurring payment to against malaria fails to nurture something inside the donator?
If anyone wants to learn more about the FTX fiasco, I’d recommend checking out Matt Levine’s recent columns, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine
Notably the current info on FTX’s balance sheet (it’s stated assets and liabilities) [1]
> But there is a range of possible badness, even in bankruptcy, and the balance sheet that Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange FTX.com sent to potential investors last week before filing for bankruptcy on Friday is very bad. It’s an Excel file full of the howling of ghosts and the shrieking of tortured souls. If you look too long at that spreadsheet, you will go insane. Antoine Gara, Kadhim Shubber and Joshua Oliver at the Financial Times reported on Saturday:
>> Sam Bankman-Fried’s main international FTX exchange held just $900mn in easily sellable assets against $9bn of liabilities the day before it collapsed into bankruptcy, according to investment materials seen by the Financial Times.
> But then there is the “Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account,” with a balance of negative $8 billion. I don’t actually think that you’re supposed to subtract that number from net equity — though I do not know how this balance sheet is supposed to work! — but it doesn’t matter… You cannot apply ordinary arithmetic to numbers in a cell labeled “HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT.” The result of adding or subtracting those numbers with ordinary numbers is not a number; it is prison.
Everything we know so far suggests at minimum extreme negligence from FTX and SBF; and outright criminal fraud seems almost certain.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-14/ftx-s-balance-sheet-was-bad
I regard crypto as a complete and utter trashfire. It facilitates every kind of fraud and environmental degradation while creating nothing of value. A generation of young men (for that is typically who invests in crypto, just like MLMs are typically favoured by women) think it is their passport to wealth and privilege. If SBF helps to kill it, then he will actually have done effective altruism perfectly well.
Will McAskill’s promotion of longtermism is probably the worst thing to happen to EA.
Let’s assume you’re McAskill and you genuinely believe in longtermism (I think it’s epistemic and effectiveness issues are damning, but I’ll leave that aside). Should you do a huge book tour and give a bunch of interviews that result in EA getting more press than it ever has, and focus it all on AGI risks?
Well, are most people going to find that credible? No. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is; most people aren’t going to believe the robots are coming to kill us, so branding a philanthropic movement with that cause area can only hurt it. FTR, I think this is somewhat true of farm animal animal welfare as well, despite my greater agreement with that as a high priority cause.
Every opportunity EA gets, it should be branding itself as fighting poverty, supporting global health, and preventing pandemics. For some audiences, the EA’s interest in prison reform is probably helpful too.
Once you’ve got people interested - sending some donations, reading the forum, etc. - you can start trying to persuade them on the weirder stuff, if you truly believe that weirder stuff is important.
Don’t let your freak flag fly. EA isn’t about self-expression; it’s about impact.
I’m sorry, I still think that the premise of ea is stupid. The idea that you can quantify “the greater good” is idiotic , for one missing the fact that values are subjective (and there are a thousand other problems with this). Also, anyone who has read history (or Harry Potter) should immediately get chills from people convinced they’ve cracked the code for “the greater good “ and feel entitled to do whatever with that justification (esp. if it just so happens to benefit themselves). SBF surely did us a favor in exposing this nonsense pretty early on. I’m still troubled however by the crisis in education+values that allowed it to happen in the first place.
P.S. note the vox interview with SBF where he defines his moral philosophizing as nothing more than “woke shibboleths so people like me” probably his only honest words. One of way too many vain and morally empty sociopaths.
Crypto has never been an effective store of value, it’s as volatile than paper money during a major war. That so many smart people have taken such a ludicrous idea seriously makes me doubt faddish one percenters when they talk about climate change, AI risk and gender.
I was initially skeptical of forcing a connection between the FTX affair and the EA philosophy, but this piece helped me grasp something more clearly that’s always bugged me about EA and Utilitarianism. To be clear, I’m pretty pro-utilitarianism, not in an “ends justify the means” kind of way but a “the way things actually turn out in the end matter more than what you thought would happen or hoped would happen.” And what’s always been suss about the EA vibe is the way some people used the logic to justify earning as much money as possible, so long as they felt the good they could do with the money would outweigh the bad of whatever their day job was. (I’m thinking hedge fund managers, for example.) But this whole logic is based on an extreme amount of hubris that you have the capacity to fully play out the likely consequences of all your actions, and you are free from bias to the extent you’ll be able to accurately calculate good vs bad and redirect your actions if the balance goes off. I’m pro-rationality but I’m skeptical of rationalists whose philosophy is based on the claim that people can be rational all or most of the time. In short, human morality evolved to give us easy rules and shortcuts that avoid the need for extreme mental calculus that’s susceptible to self-serving biases. Anyone who thinks they can or should make it up from scratch themselves just hasn’t been properly humbled (yet). All that said I think 95% of EA is on the right track, and I agree with all of Matt’s numbered points above!
I’ll say it: SBF is almost certainly guilty of fraud. Good old-fashioned fraud, the kind that would put you in prison regardless of what asset you are dealing with. Crypto makes everything riskier and more irreversible, but mingling customer deposits and profits recklessly and lying about it and using them like normal capital to prop up a failing investment firm (Alameda) after it made too many bad bets is just fraud.
How bad was it? FTX’s new CEO, John J. Ray, was tapped to run Enron during its bankruptcy, and handled other similarly impressive corporate clusterfucks:
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”
Vox’s interview with SBF, published yesterday, is quite damning about his intentions. [1] He is quite hostile to financial regulations (“Fuck regulators.”) and appears openly duplicitous about his public persona ("A dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us.") And he confirms that FTX lent customer assets to his crypto hedge fund, Alameda.
I can’t believe he is even talking to journalists as well as “tweeting through it.” With his parents both being distinguished law professors, I would assume he’d know to shut up.
[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy
I agree that the worst outcome of the FTX blowup would be to discredit and discourage the EA movement. We should all have the intellectual discipline to separate the two.
I have real issues with "longtermism" as well, having to do with applying an appropriate discount rate for uncertainty way into the future.
But the idea of rigor in measuring philanthropy combined with focusing on causes where marginal dollars may have a huge difference (e.g., AI risks) is very appealing.
Including risks of AI next to malaria nets is deranged. I'm a software security engineer and like to think computers are important, but this is simply nuts.
However, even if we take it seriously, the major investments in this space don't have remotely plausibly theories of action. DALL-E is the best example of this.
OpenAI, DALL-E's creator, has a stated theory that it's important for someone responsible to be at the vanguard of AI research so that we get responsible outcomes. They built DALL-E, and they put in a bunch of restrictions so you can't do bad things, like make deep-fake pornography of people. And then about 5 minutes later Stable Diffusion came out and let you do all those things. OpenAI's work in no way prevented Stable Diffusion, if anything at the margin it made it easier by paving the way with research!
Should SBF's polyamorous lifestyle be a consideration in discussing FTX, EA, etc. It seems odd that there were ten people all living together in the Bahamas running his various companies who were also romantically involved with each other and who have also possibly stolen billions.
Are social/romantic normies underrated?
You could do worse than take advice from Warren Buffett: https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/warren-buffett-best-quotes-bitcoin-cryptocurrencies-investing-rat-poison-squared-2021-1-1029974898
16 quotes:;here are two:
"Cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don't produce anything. They don't reproduce, they can't mail you a check, they can't do anything, and what you hope is that somebody else comes along and pays you more money for them later on, but then that person's got the problem. In terms of value: zero." — CNBC, February 2020
"Probably rat poison squared." — Fox Business interview at 2018 meeting
I keep coming back to this point: SBF repeatedly and publicly stated that he was going to take these kinds of foolhardy risks. So why were the VC firms giving him money? Yeah he's made a lot of money in the past, but at some point you have to read the business plan and understand that there's a pretty good chance of this blowing up.
The other thing -- I know a lot of pretty smart people, even some close to the level of SBF (I'm not anywhere near that league). They've been told their whole life how smart they are and in some cases (like SBF) how morally good they are. Eventually they can self-rationalize a lot of bad behavior in the service of what they believe to be a greater good. And they don't have anyone on their intellectual level to convince them that hey, maybe that's a bad idea.