I read this as an admission of guilt and responsibility. What do you wish he had said?
I think it’s a decent opening and it clearly calls for reflection, but you might notice that indeed no further reflection has been published, and Will has not published anything that talks much about what lessons he has taken away from them.
To be clear, as I understand the situation Will did indeed write up a bunch of reflections, but then the EV board asked him not to because that posed too much legal and PR risk. I agree this is some evidence about Will showing some remorse, but also evidence that the overall leadership does not care very much about people learning from what happened (at least compared to increased PR and legal risk).
I think this is a potentially large cost of the fiscal sponsorship umbrella. Will can’t take on the risk personally or even for just his org, it’s automatically shared with a ton of other orgs.
That seems quite plausible. If that is his reasoning, then I think he should say that.
“I had planned to write in more details about my relationship to Sam and FTX, what actions I took, and in what ways I think my actions did and did not enable these crimes to take place; but due to concerns about risking the jobs of 100+ people I have chosen to not share information about this for the following 1-4 years (that is, until any legal and financial investigation of Effective Ventures has concluded, an org that I’m on the board of and that facilitated a lot of financial grantmaking for FTX).
This obviously largely prohibits the Effective Altruism ecosystem from carrying out a collective fact-finding effort around those who were closely involved with Sam and FTX within the next 1-4 years, and substantially obstructs a clear fault analysis and post-mortem from occurring, and I expect as a result of this many readers should correctly update that by-default that the causes of these problems will not be fixed.
I hope that this is not the death of the Effective Altruism ecosystem that I have worked to build over the last 10+ years, but I am not sure how people working and living in this ecosystem can come to trust that crimes of a similar magnitude will not happen again after seeing little-to-no accounting of how this criminal was funded and supported, nor any clear fixes implemented in the ecosystem to prevent such crimes from occurring in the future, and I sadly expect many good people will rightly leave the ecosystem because of it.”
I think it’s a decent opening and it clearly calls for reflection, but you might notice that indeed no further reflection has been published, and Will has not published anything that talks much about what lessons he has taken away from them.
To be clear, as I understand the situation Will did indeed write up a bunch of reflections, but then the EV board asked him not to because that posed too much legal and PR risk. I agree this is some evidence about Will showing some remorse, but also evidence that the overall leadership does not care very much about people learning from what happened (at least compared to increased PR and legal risk).
I think this is a potentially large cost of the fiscal sponsorship umbrella. Will can’t take on the risk personally or even for just his org, it’s automatically shared with a ton of other orgs.
That seems quite plausible. If that is his reasoning, then I think he should say that.
Pretty big if true. If EV actively is censoring attempts to reflect upon what happened, then that is important information to pin down.
I would hope that if someone tried to do that to me, I would resign.
That’s what I told Will to do. He felt like that would be uncollaborative with broader EA leadership.