The Nonlinear Library EA - Why hasn't EA done an SBF investigation and postmortem? by RobBensinger
Apr 1, 2024
03:23
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why hasn't EA done an SBF investigation and postmortem?, published by RobBensinger on April 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Is anyone in the world being paid to do an independent investigation of how EA handled Sam Bankman-Fried, with respect to "did we screw up" and "is there stuff we should do differently going forward"?
Last I heard, literally nobody was doing this and at least some EA leaders were mostly just hoping that SBF gets memoryholed - but maybe I'm out of the loop?
My understanding is that Effective Ventures completed a narrow investigation into this topic in mid-2023, purely looking at legal risk to EV and not at all trying to do a general postmortem for EA or any group of EAs. Is that correct, and have things changed since then?
I saw that Will MacAskill is planning to appear on some podcasts soon to speak about SBF, which seems like great news to me. If I recall correctly, Will previously said that he was going to talk about what happened with SBF once EV's narrow investigation was done, but it's now been almost a year since that investigation finished (!).
I think it would have been better to speak up way, way sooner, but I'm hopeful that Will will be able to clear up some big chunks of what the heck happened, and that a bunch of other EAs will speak up with their postmortems too, now that SBF's trial and sentencing are complete?
I unfortunately don't know the full list of who should be sharing personal or org-level postmortems on this topic, so I'm forced to single out people like Will whose involvement over the years is public knowledge. Hopefully I'll know who I should be gadflying to share the remaining puzzle pieces once Will and others start sharing some of the first puzzle pieces.
To state the obvious: I'm wary of EAs performatively self-flagellating and accepting more responsibility for the FTX thing than is warranted (given, e.g., that huge numbers of people with a very direct financial incentive in spotting FTX's fraud didn't spot it, so it's obviously not weird if random EAs failed to spot it). I want a concrete understanding of what actually happened, not vague scapegoating or self-flagellation.
But the idea of a basic investigation and postmortem seems like an obvious step to me regardless, and my sense is that there are things we could have done a lot better re SBF (e.g., better spread the word about what happened in the Alameda blow-up, so more people would've been aware of some red flags), even if those things probably wouldn't have prevented the FTX debacle all on their own. So I'd like to hear what's up with all that.
See also CEA's recent piece in the Washington Post. The WaPost piece mostly just seems like EA PR, and I'll be very sad if we stay at that level of vagueness.
The piece also (unless I'm misunderstanding something) implies some false things about whether CEA, EV, etc. have ever done an investigation into what happened with an eye toward reviewing (and possibly improving) EA institutions, practices, etc.
This doesn't match what I've heard from talking to involved parties, and Oliver Habryka mentions that he's "been shared on documents by CEA employees where the legal investigation was explicitly called out as not being helpful for facilitating a reflection process and institutional reform". (Oliver clarified to me that the document wasn't an official CEA document.)
So the narrow "are we in legal trouble?" investigation EV did last year doesn't seem like it was ever meant to fill the "figure out what happened and whether we should do anything about it, for the sake of ethics and for the sake of furthering our EA work" role. But maybe I'm missing something here.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org
Is anyone in the world being paid to do an independent investigation of how EA handled Sam Bankman-Fried, with respect to "did we screw up" and "is there stuff we should do differently going forward"?
Last I heard, literally nobody was doing this and at least some EA leaders were mostly just hoping that SBF gets memoryholed - but maybe I'm out of the loop?
My understanding is that Effective Ventures completed a narrow investigation into this topic in mid-2023, purely looking at legal risk to EV and not at all trying to do a general postmortem for EA or any group of EAs. Is that correct, and have things changed since then?
I saw that Will MacAskill is planning to appear on some podcasts soon to speak about SBF, which seems like great news to me. If I recall correctly, Will previously said that he was going to talk about what happened with SBF once EV's narrow investigation was done, but it's now been almost a year since that investigation finished (!).
I think it would have been better to speak up way, way sooner, but I'm hopeful that Will will be able to clear up some big chunks of what the heck happened, and that a bunch of other EAs will speak up with their postmortems too, now that SBF's trial and sentencing are complete?
I unfortunately don't know the full list of who should be sharing personal or org-level postmortems on this topic, so I'm forced to single out people like Will whose involvement over the years is public knowledge. Hopefully I'll know who I should be gadflying to share the remaining puzzle pieces once Will and others start sharing some of the first puzzle pieces.
To state the obvious: I'm wary of EAs performatively self-flagellating and accepting more responsibility for the FTX thing than is warranted (given, e.g., that huge numbers of people with a very direct financial incentive in spotting FTX's fraud didn't spot it, so it's obviously not weird if random EAs failed to spot it). I want a concrete understanding of what actually happened, not vague scapegoating or self-flagellation.
But the idea of a basic investigation and postmortem seems like an obvious step to me regardless, and my sense is that there are things we could have done a lot better re SBF (e.g., better spread the word about what happened in the Alameda blow-up, so more people would've been aware of some red flags), even if those things probably wouldn't have prevented the FTX debacle all on their own. So I'd like to hear what's up with all that.
See also CEA's recent piece in the Washington Post. The WaPost piece mostly just seems like EA PR, and I'll be very sad if we stay at that level of vagueness.
The piece also (unless I'm misunderstanding something) implies some false things about whether CEA, EV, etc. have ever done an investigation into what happened with an eye toward reviewing (and possibly improving) EA institutions, practices, etc.
This doesn't match what I've heard from talking to involved parties, and Oliver Habryka mentions that he's "been shared on documents by CEA employees where the legal investigation was explicitly called out as not being helpful for facilitating a reflection process and institutional reform". (Oliver clarified to me that the document wasn't an official CEA document.)
So the narrow "are we in legal trouble?" investigation EV did last year doesn't seem like it was ever meant to fill the "figure out what happened and whether we should do anything about it, for the sake of ethics and for the sake of furthering our EA work" role. But maybe I'm missing something here.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org