From what I’ve heard, SBF was controlling, and fucked over his initial (EA) investors as best he could without sabotaging his company, and fucked over parts of the Alameda founding team that wouldn’t submit to him. This isn’t very “EA” by the usual lights.
SBF seems to have successfully come across as a much friendlier and trustworthy player than he actually is, in large part thanks to EA, and a propensity to be thankful for another large funder showing up.
From what I’ve heard, SBF was controlling, and fucked over his initial (EA) investors as best he could without sabotaging his company, and fucked over parts of the Alameda founding team that wouldn’t submit to him. This isn’t very “EA” by the usual lights.
It’s not immediately clear to me that this isn’t a No True Scotsman fallacy.
You may draw what conclusions you like! It’s not my intention to defend EA here.
Here’s an attempt to clarify my outlook, though my words might not succeed:
To the extent EA builds up idealized molds to shove people into to extract value from them, this is fucked up. To the extent that EA then pretends people like Sam or others in power fit the same mold, this is extra fucked up. Both these things look to me to me rampant in EA. I don’t like it.
That does clarify where you’re coming from. I made my comment because it seems to me that it would be a shame for people to fall into one of the more obvious attractors for reasoning within EA about the SBF situation. E.G., an attractor labelled something like “SBF’s actions were not part of EA because EA doesn’t do those Bad Things”.
Which is basically on the greatest hits list for how (not necessarily centrally unified) groups of humans have defended themselves from losing cohesion over the actions of a subset anytime in recorded history. Some portion of the reasoning on SBF in the past week looks motivated in service of the above.
The following isn’t really pointed at you, just my thoughts on the situation.
I think that there’s nearly unavoidable tension with trying to float arguments that deal with the optics of SBF’s connection to EA, from within EA. Which is a thing that is explicitly happening in this thread. Standards of epistemic honesty are in conflict with the group need to hold together. While the truth of the matter is and may remain uncertain, if SBF’s fraud was motivated wholly or in part by EA principles, that connection should be taken seriously.
My personal opinion is that, the more I think about it, the more obvious it seems that several cultural features of LW adjacent EA are really ideal for generating extremist behavior. People are forming consensus thought groups around moral calculations that explicitly marginalize the value of all living people, to say nothing of the extreme side of negative consequentialism. This is all in an overall environment of iconoclasm and disregarding established norms in favor of taking new ideas to their logical conclusion.
These are being held in an equilibrium by stabilizing norms. At the risk of stating the obvious, insofar as the group in question is a group at all, it is heterogeneous; the cultural features I’m talking about are also some of the unique positive values of EA. But these memes have sharp edges.
From what I’ve heard, SBF was controlling, and fucked over his initial (EA) investors as best he could without sabotaging his company, and fucked over parts of the Alameda founding team that wouldn’t submit to him.
Woah, I did not hear about this despite trying nontrivially hard to figure out what happened when I was considering whether to take a job there in mid-late 2019 (and also did not hear about it afterwards). I think I would’ve made pretty different decisions both then and afterwards if I had the correct impression.
Specifically, I knew about the management team leaving in early 2018 (and I guess “fucked over” framing was within my distribution but I didn’t know the details). I did not in any way know about fucking over the investors.
From what I’ve heard, SBF was controlling, and fucked over his initial (EA) investors as best he could without sabotaging his company, and fucked over parts of the Alameda founding team that wouldn’t submit to him.
I’m drawing on multiple (edit: 3-5) accounts from people I know who were involved at the time, and chose to leave. I don’t think much is written up yet, and I hope that changes soon.
If true, definitely makes him seem like an unpleasant character on the inside.
In any case the folks over in the EA leadership really should have done some more due diligence before getting intermeshed. The management team leaving in 2018 should already have been a really strong signal, and ignoring that is the sign of amateurs.
From what I’ve heard, SBF was controlling, and fucked over his initial (EA) investors as best he could without sabotaging his company, and fucked over parts of the Alameda founding team that wouldn’t submit to him. This isn’t very “EA” by the usual lights.
SBF seems to have successfully come across as a much friendlier and trustworthy player than he actually is, in large part thanks to EA, and a propensity to be thankful for another large funder showing up.
It’s not immediately clear to me that this isn’t a No True Scotsman fallacy.
You may draw what conclusions you like! It’s not my intention to defend EA here.
Here’s an attempt to clarify my outlook, though my words might not succeed:
To the extent EA builds up idealized molds to shove people into to extract value from them, this is fucked up. To the extent that EA then pretends people like Sam or others in power fit the same mold, this is extra fucked up. Both these things look to me to me rampant in EA. I don’t like it.
That does clarify where you’re coming from. I made my comment because it seems to me that it would be a shame for people to fall into one of the more obvious attractors for reasoning within EA about the SBF situation.
E.G., an attractor labelled something like “SBF’s actions were not part of EA because EA doesn’t do those Bad Things”.
Which is basically on the greatest hits list for how (not necessarily centrally unified) groups of humans have defended themselves from losing cohesion over the actions of a subset anytime in recorded history. Some portion of the reasoning on SBF in the past week looks motivated in service of the above.
The following isn’t really pointed at you, just my thoughts on the situation.
I think that there’s nearly unavoidable tension with trying to float arguments that deal with the optics of SBF’s connection to EA, from within EA. Which is a thing that is explicitly happening in this thread. Standards of epistemic honesty are in conflict with the group need to hold together. While the truth of the matter is and may remain uncertain, if SBF’s fraud was motivated wholly or in part by EA principles, that connection should be taken seriously.
My personal opinion is that, the more I think about it, the more obvious it seems that several cultural features of LW adjacent EA are really ideal for generating extremist behavior. People are forming consensus thought groups around moral calculations that explicitly marginalize the value of all living people, to say nothing of the extreme side of negative consequentialism. This is all in an overall environment of iconoclasm and disregarding established norms in favor of taking new ideas to their logical conclusion.
These are being held in an equilibrium by stabilizing norms. At the risk of stating the obvious, insofar as the group in question is a group at all, it is heterogeneous; the cultural features I’m talking about are also some of the unique positive values of EA. But these memes have sharp edges.
Woah, I did not hear about this despite trying nontrivially hard to figure out what happened when I was considering whether to take a job there in mid-late 2019 (and also did not hear about it afterwards). I think I would’ve made pretty different decisions both then and afterwards if I had the correct impression.
Specifically, I knew about the management team leaving in early 2018 (and I guess “fucked over” framing was within my distribution but I didn’t know the details). I did not in any way know about fucking over the investors.
Link?
I’m drawing on multiple (edit: 3-5) accounts from people I know who were involved at the time, and chose to leave. I don’t think much is written up yet, and I hope that changes soon.
If true, definitely makes him seem like an unpleasant character on the inside.
In any case the folks over in the EA leadership really should have done some more due diligence before getting intermeshed. The management team leaving in 2018 should already have been a really strong signal, and ignoring that is the sign of amateurs.