The Nonlinear Library EA - We need an independent investigation into how EA leadership has handled SBF and FTX by AnonymousEAForumAccount
Jul 24, 2024
28:31
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: We need an independent investigation into how EA leadership has handled SBF and FTX, published by AnonymousEAForumAccount on July 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
Rebecca Kagan believes "EA needs an investigation, done externally and shared publicly, on mistakes made in the EA community's relationship with FTX." She is far from the only person who has called for an independent investigation, but Kagan's experience and knowledge as a former board member of Effective Ventures makes her perspective particularly relevant.
Explaining her decision to resign from EV's board, Kagan wrote:
"I want to make it clear that I resigned last year due to significant disagreements with the board of EV and EA leadership, particularly concerning their actions leading up to and after the FTX crisis… I believe there were extensive and significant mistakes made which have not been addressed.
(In particular, some EA leaders had warning signs about SBF that they ignored, and instead promoted him as a good person, tied the EA community to FTX, and then were uninterested in reforms or investigations after the fraud was revealed).
In this post, I describe a large and growing body of evidence that is consistent with Kagan's concerns about (some parts of) EA leadership.[1] To summarize my review of the public record:
Communications from EA leaders have not been forthcoming about important factual matters including SBF's tenure on CEA's board, his brief tenure as a CEA employee, and his status as one of 80k and CEA's largest donors before he even founded Alameda.
There are worrisome discrepancies between comments (or lack thereof) from EA leaders and credible media reports about important issues. These include whether leaders knew about allegations of unethical behavior by SBF in the wake of the Alameda dispute, whether they were aware of allegations of inappropriate sexual relationships, and whether a Slack group of EA leaders ignored warnings just four months prior to FTX's collapse that SBF was under criminal investigation.
EA leaders have made public claims about post-FTX reforms that could easily be construed as misleading, most notably framing Effective Ventures' board changes as "institutional reform" when Kagan resigned precisely because she thought such reform was lacking.
I don't claim to have a complete understanding of these issues, and I've included lists of the outstanding questions I think are most important in the hopes that other community members can shed light on them. It's quite possible that answering these questions would reveal additional instances of troubling behavior[2] (though I believe it is incredibly unlikely that anyone in EA leadership was aware of, or should have anticipated, FTX's massive fraud).
It's also quite possible that answering these questions would uncover mitigating factors I'm not aware of that would justify how EA leaders have behaved.
But with the current state of public knowledge, the community as a whole has a poor understanding of what happened. Relevant information is incomplete and/or highly dispersed. No single person or entity has a grasp of the full picture. That makes it impossible to know which behaviors were reasonable, and which were mistakes that the community should be learning from.
An independent investigation would solve this problem. It could answer open questions, collect wide-ranging perspectives, and share critical lessons with the entire community. And an independent post-mortem could do so in a credible and responsible way.
In Rob Bensinger's words, "An investigation can discover useful facts and share them privately, and its public write-up can accurately convey the broad strokes of what happened, and a large number of the details, while taking basic steps to protect the innocent."
Kagan's allegations, together...
Summary
Rebecca Kagan believes "EA needs an investigation, done externally and shared publicly, on mistakes made in the EA community's relationship with FTX." She is far from the only person who has called for an independent investigation, but Kagan's experience and knowledge as a former board member of Effective Ventures makes her perspective particularly relevant.
Explaining her decision to resign from EV's board, Kagan wrote:
"I want to make it clear that I resigned last year due to significant disagreements with the board of EV and EA leadership, particularly concerning their actions leading up to and after the FTX crisis… I believe there were extensive and significant mistakes made which have not been addressed.
(In particular, some EA leaders had warning signs about SBF that they ignored, and instead promoted him as a good person, tied the EA community to FTX, and then were uninterested in reforms or investigations after the fraud was revealed).
In this post, I describe a large and growing body of evidence that is consistent with Kagan's concerns about (some parts of) EA leadership.[1] To summarize my review of the public record:
Communications from EA leaders have not been forthcoming about important factual matters including SBF's tenure on CEA's board, his brief tenure as a CEA employee, and his status as one of 80k and CEA's largest donors before he even founded Alameda.
There are worrisome discrepancies between comments (or lack thereof) from EA leaders and credible media reports about important issues. These include whether leaders knew about allegations of unethical behavior by SBF in the wake of the Alameda dispute, whether they were aware of allegations of inappropriate sexual relationships, and whether a Slack group of EA leaders ignored warnings just four months prior to FTX's collapse that SBF was under criminal investigation.
EA leaders have made public claims about post-FTX reforms that could easily be construed as misleading, most notably framing Effective Ventures' board changes as "institutional reform" when Kagan resigned precisely because she thought such reform was lacking.
I don't claim to have a complete understanding of these issues, and I've included lists of the outstanding questions I think are most important in the hopes that other community members can shed light on them. It's quite possible that answering these questions would reveal additional instances of troubling behavior[2] (though I believe it is incredibly unlikely that anyone in EA leadership was aware of, or should have anticipated, FTX's massive fraud).
It's also quite possible that answering these questions would uncover mitigating factors I'm not aware of that would justify how EA leaders have behaved.
But with the current state of public knowledge, the community as a whole has a poor understanding of what happened. Relevant information is incomplete and/or highly dispersed. No single person or entity has a grasp of the full picture. That makes it impossible to know which behaviors were reasonable, and which were mistakes that the community should be learning from.
An independent investigation would solve this problem. It could answer open questions, collect wide-ranging perspectives, and share critical lessons with the entire community. And an independent post-mortem could do so in a credible and responsible way.
In Rob Bensinger's words, "An investigation can discover useful facts and share them privately, and its public write-up can accurately convey the broad strokes of what happened, and a large number of the details, while taking basic steps to protect the innocent."
Kagan's allegations, together...