The idea that he was trying to distance himself from EA to protect EA doesn’t hold together because he didn’t actually distance himself from EA at all in that interview. He said ethics is fake, but it was clear from context that he meant ordinary ethics, not utilitarianism.
I don’t think it’s all that clear, there are reasonable interpretations where he’s saying that he simply cared about winning as in making money, and it’s possible he was trying to unambiguously lean into that narrative but did so poorly.
In the interview, he explains what he means by saying ethics is fake by essentially saying “win + clean” is just as good as “win + shady”.
The difference between clean and shady is one of normal ethics not of EA ethics.
winning as in making money
Money is worth the thing that you are intending to buy with it. It seems like he wanted to spend his largely to fund EA causes and nothing in the recent episode suggests he changed his mind on that.
The revelation that he spent maybe 10x as much on villas for his girlfriends as EA cause areas suggests he may have changed his mind on that. I don’t know why people are so quick to take the word of billionaires who “pledge” a bunch of money to EA in the future “when their market cap increases”, as the same as actually donating money.
Someone on sneerclub said that he is falling on his sword to protect EA’s reputation, I don’t have a good counterargument to that.
I see a lot of the EA discussion is worried about the public consequences of SBF using EA to justify bad behavior. What if people unfairly conclude EA ideas corrupt people’s thinking and turn them into SBF-alikes? And some concern that EA genuinely could do this.
If you think that is the big danger then I understand how you might conclude SBF saying “I never believed the EA stuff, it was all an act.” is better for EA. Valid thing to worry about (especially about your own thinking), but it’s online rationalists who are worried about this. Looking at this as an outsider, this is missing the forest for the trees.
Much of the public starts from the assumption that rich people giving to charities is all a big scam, generally. Just a means to enrich or empower themselves. EA’s biggest donor admitting it was a scam along is not protecting EA, it’s confirming this model in everyone’s minds. They knew it all along! Every future EA donator will be trivially pattern matched to have the same motives as SBF.
I enjoy reading discussions on EAs role in sub optimal Kelly bet size conclusions. But big picture that is not the the biggest danger by far.
I’m not trying to be rude, but if you can’t see a perspective from which that is nonsensical, then perhaps you are not strong enough in the relevant way to read what bullies say about those that they hate.
I think you should be far more hesitant to question another person’s mental fortitude, and you should even more hesitant to raise such concerns on a public forum. You should only take such a step if you have very good reason to think it’s necessary and beneficial. I think fortitude is similar to a lot of other positive personal qualities in that regard. E.g., you should have an extremely high bar for publicly questioning another person’s sanity, intelligence, competence, etc.
I think the question of why SBF is talking like a movie villain psychopath is a valid one. If he’s a fanatical utilitarian who just lost (what he thought of as) a positive EV gamble, then probably the next highest utility action for him to take is to try and deflect blame away from EA and onto himself. I think this is unlikely, given the new CEO’s description of FTX insane management practices, but it’s hardly a nonsensical position for someone already skeptical of EA. I think you should not dismiss it as nonsense so offhandedly, and that you should especially not imply that failing to immediately reject such a position is cause to question someone’s ‘strength in the relevant way.’
In my head I’m making a much more specific claim than ‘mental fortitude’. A person can be able to deal with arguments and ideas from different sources well and differently — you can handle criticism from your manager but not your child, or you can sensibly evaluate arguments given to you at a whiteboard in-person but not in a fancy physics paper. I didn’t mean to say “bad at evaluating arguments in general”, I just meant specifically from one source. That said, I will consider your argument that I should be careful to criticize someone’s reasoning abilities… actually wait, I’m not sure I get it. Maybe there should be a high bar for doing this even on LW. I agree in most other places there is a high bar. I will aim to think more on it.
I’m not dismissing the position as nonsensical, and I’d be happy to engage with it if a LWer brought it up as their position. I said that not being able to see a perspective where it’s nonsense that bullies made up to paint you in a bad light is this issue. I think a pretty plausible story is “Huh, seems like this revered EA person just seems to have pretty aggressive and self-serving opinions about finance and power and crypto, as many corrupt people in finance probably do, and the proposal that this is a front in order to somehow affect EAs reputation (as if his front will really have much affect on whether EA turned out to have been led by one of the big fraudsters in history) is pretty silly”, and I think that’s definitely one of my main perspectives. My point isn’t that it’s bad to consider other opinions, my point is that it’s an issue to not be able to come up with something like this.
I currently have >50% on my read being right, but I may have mistakenly read into Ilverin’s comment, I definitely have >25% on that.
I intended to bring it up as plausible, but not explicitly say that I thought it was p>0.5 (because it wasn’t a firm belief and I didn’t want others to do any bayesian update). I wanted to read arguments about its plausibility. (Some pretty convincing arguments are SBF’s high level of luxury consumption and that he took away potentially all Alameda shares from the EA cofounder of Alameda, Tara Mac Aulay).
If it is plausible, even if it isn’t p>0.5, then it’s possible SBF wasn’t selfish, in which case that’s a reason for EA to focus more on inculcating philosophy in its members (whether the answer is “naive utilitarianism is wrong, use rule utilitarianism/virtue ethics/deontology” or “naive utilitarianism almost never advocates fraud”, etcetera) (some old and new preventive measures like EA forum posts do exist, maybe that’s enough or maybe not).
I don’t see anything here to question Ilverin’s mental fortitude. They’re not demanding people appease sneerclub or going into a shame spiral. They raised a hypothesis. I think “we don’t accept hypotheses from sneerclub and accept that we will miss the twice a day when that broken clock is correct” is a reasonable blanket policy for LW, but that doesn’t mean everyone who raises a hypothesis from them has been irretrievably corrupted.
Yes, I certainly don’t think Ilverin is ‘irretrievably corrupted’! I only meant to suggest that this particular source of ideas and arguments (bullies) was net negative for Ilverin, not that Ilverin is themselves a net-negative source of ideas and arguments.
Someone on sneerclub said that he is falling on his sword to protect EA’s reputation, I don’t have a good counterargument to that.
This conversation won’t go over well in court, so if he is selfish, then this conversation probably reflects mental instability.
The idea that he was trying to distance himself from EA to protect EA doesn’t hold together because he didn’t actually distance himself from EA at all in that interview. He said ethics is fake, but it was clear from context that he meant ordinary ethics, not utilitarianism.
I don’t think it’s all that clear, there are reasonable interpretations where he’s saying that he simply cared about winning as in making money, and it’s possible he was trying to unambiguously lean into that narrative but did so poorly.
In the interview, he explains what he means by saying ethics is fake by essentially saying “win + clean” is just as good as “win + shady”.
The difference between clean and shady is one of normal ethics not of EA ethics.
Money is worth the thing that you are intending to buy with it. It seems like he wanted to spend his largely to fund EA causes and nothing in the recent episode suggests he changed his mind on that.
Yes, but without defining winning it’s not clear that it had anything to do with EA
The revelation that he spent maybe 10x as much on villas for his girlfriends as EA cause areas suggests he may have changed his mind on that. I don’t know why people are so quick to take the word of billionaires who “pledge” a bunch of money to EA in the future “when their market cap increases”, as the same as actually donating money.
Link?
Source?
I see a lot of the EA discussion is worried about the public consequences of SBF using EA to justify bad behavior. What if people unfairly conclude EA ideas corrupt people’s thinking and turn them into SBF-alikes? And some concern that EA genuinely could do this.
If you think that is the big danger then I understand how you might conclude SBF saying “I never believed the EA stuff, it was all an act.” is better for EA. Valid thing to worry about (especially about your own thinking), but it’s online rationalists who are worried about this. Looking at this as an outsider, this is missing the forest for the trees.
Much of the public starts from the assumption that rich people giving to charities is all a big scam, generally. Just a means to enrich or empower themselves. EA’s biggest donor admitting it was a scam along is not protecting EA, it’s confirming this model in everyone’s minds. They knew it all along! Every future EA donator will be trivially pattern matched to have the same motives as SBF.
I enjoy reading discussions on EAs role in sub optimal Kelly bet size conclusions. But big picture that is not the the biggest danger by far.
I’m not trying to be rude, but if you can’t see a perspective from which that is nonsensical, then perhaps you are not strong enough in the relevant way to read what bullies say about those that they hate.
Strongly downvoted for two reasons:
I think you should be far more hesitant to question another person’s mental fortitude, and you should even more hesitant to raise such concerns on a public forum. You should only take such a step if you have very good reason to think it’s necessary and beneficial. I think fortitude is similar to a lot of other positive personal qualities in that regard. E.g., you should have an extremely high bar for publicly questioning another person’s sanity, intelligence, competence, etc.
I think the question of why SBF is talking like a movie villain psychopath is a valid one. If he’s a fanatical utilitarian who just lost (what he thought of as) a positive EV gamble, then probably the next highest utility action for him to take is to try and deflect blame away from EA and onto himself. I think this is unlikely, given the new CEO’s description of FTX insane management practices, but it’s hardly a nonsensical position for someone already skeptical of EA. I think you should not dismiss it as nonsense so offhandedly, and that you should especially not imply that failing to immediately reject such a position is cause to question someone’s ‘strength in the relevant way.’
Quick responses:
In my head I’m making a much more specific claim than ‘mental fortitude’. A person can be able to deal with arguments and ideas from different sources well and differently — you can handle criticism from your manager but not your child, or you can sensibly evaluate arguments given to you at a whiteboard in-person but not in a fancy physics paper. I didn’t mean to say “bad at evaluating arguments in general”, I just meant specifically from one source. That said, I will consider your argument that I should be careful to criticize someone’s reasoning abilities… actually wait, I’m not sure I get it. Maybe there should be a high bar for doing this even on LW. I agree in most other places there is a high bar. I will aim to think more on it.
I’m not dismissing the position as nonsensical, and I’d be happy to engage with it if a LWer brought it up as their position. I said that not being able to see a perspective where it’s nonsense that bullies made up to paint you in a bad light is this issue. I think a pretty plausible story is “Huh, seems like this revered EA person just seems to have pretty aggressive and self-serving opinions about finance and power and crypto, as many corrupt people in finance probably do, and the proposal that this is a front in order to somehow affect EAs reputation (as if his front will really have much affect on whether EA turned out to have been led by one of the big fraudsters in history) is pretty silly”, and I think that’s definitely one of my main perspectives. My point isn’t that it’s bad to consider other opinions, my point is that it’s an issue to not be able to come up with something like this.
I currently have >50% on my read being right, but I may have mistakenly read into Ilverin’s comment, I definitely have >25% on that.
I intended to bring it up as plausible, but not explicitly say that I thought it was p>0.5 (because it wasn’t a firm belief and I didn’t want others to do any bayesian update). I wanted to read arguments about its plausibility. (Some pretty convincing arguments are SBF’s high level of luxury consumption and that he took away potentially all Alameda shares from the EA cofounder of Alameda, Tara Mac Aulay).
If it is plausible, even if it isn’t p>0.5, then it’s possible SBF wasn’t selfish, in which case that’s a reason for EA to focus more on inculcating philosophy in its members (whether the answer is “naive utilitarianism is wrong, use rule utilitarianism/virtue ethics/deontology” or “naive utilitarianism almost never advocates fraud”, etcetera) (some old and new preventive measures like EA forum posts do exist, maybe that’s enough or maybe not).
I don’t see anything here to question Ilverin’s mental fortitude. They’re not demanding people appease sneerclub or going into a shame spiral. They raised a hypothesis. I think “we don’t accept hypotheses from sneerclub and accept that we will miss the twice a day when that broken clock is correct” is a reasonable blanket policy for LW, but that doesn’t mean everyone who raises a hypothesis from them has been irretrievably corrupted.
Yes, I certainly don’t think Ilverin is ‘irretrievably corrupted’! I only meant to suggest that this particular source of ideas and arguments (bullies) was net negative for Ilverin, not that Ilverin is themselves a net-negative source of ideas and arguments.