As of October 2022, I don’t think I could have known FTX was defrauding customers.
If I’d thought about it I could probably have figured out that FTX was at best a casino, and I should probably think seriously before taking their money or encouraging other people to do so. I think I failed in an important way here, but I also don’t think my failure really hurt anyone, because I am such a small fish.
But I think in a better world I should have had the information that would lead me to conclude that Sam Bankman-Fried was an asshole who didn’t keep his promises, and that this made it risky to make plans that depended on him keeping even explicit promises, much less vague implicit commitments. I have enough friends of friends that have spoken out since the implosion that I’m quite sure that in a more open, information-sharing environment I would have gotten that information. And if I’d gotten that information, I could have shared it with other small fish who were considering uprooting their lives based on implicit commitments from SBF. Instead, I participated in the irrational exuberance that probably made people take more risks on the margin, and left them more vulnerable to the collapse of FTX. Assigning culpability is hard here, but this isn’t just an abstract worry: I can think of one person I might bear some responsibility for, and another who I would be almost 100% responsible for, except they didn’t get the grant.
I think the encouragement I gave people represents a moral failure on my part. I should have realized I didn’t have enough information to justify it, even if I never heard about specific bad behavior. Hell even if SBF wasn’t an unreliable asshole, Future Fund could have turned off the fire hose for lots of reasons. IIRC they weren’t even planning on continuing the regrantor project.
But it would also have been cool if that low key, “don’t rely on Sam- I’m not accusing him of anything malicious, he’s just not reliable” type of information had circulated widely enough that it reached me and the other very small fish, especially the ones taking major risks that only made sense in an environment where FTX money flowed freely.
I don’t know what the right way to do that would have been. But it seems important to figure out.
I also suspect that in an environment where it was easy to find out that SBF was an unreliable asshole, it would have been easier to discover or maybe even prevent the devastating fraud, because people would have felt more empowered to say no to him. But that might be wishful thinking.
As of October 2022, I don’t think I could have known FTX was defrauding customers.
If I’d thought about it I could probably have figured out that FTX was at best a casino, and I should probably think seriously before taking their money or encouraging other people to do so. I think I failed in an important way here, but I also don’t think my failure really hurt anyone, because I am such a small fish.
But I think in a better world I should have had the information that would lead me to conclude that Sam Bankman-Fried was an asshole who didn’t keep his promises, and that this made it risky to make plans that depended on him keeping even explicit promises, much less vague implicit commitments. I have enough friends of friends that have spoken out since the implosion that I’m quite sure that in a more open, information-sharing environment I would have gotten that information. And if I’d gotten that information, I could have shared it with other small fish who were considering uprooting their lives based on implicit commitments from SBF. Instead, I participated in the irrational exuberance that probably made people take more risks on the margin, and left them more vulnerable to the collapse of FTX. Assigning culpability is hard here, but this isn’t just an abstract worry: I can think of one person I might bear some responsibility for, and another who I would be almost 100% responsible for, except they didn’t get the grant.
I think the encouragement I gave people represents a moral failure on my part. I should have realized I didn’t have enough information to justify it, even if I never heard about specific bad behavior. Hell even if SBF wasn’t an unreliable asshole, Future Fund could have turned off the fire hose for lots of reasons. IIRC they weren’t even planning on continuing the regrantor project.
But it would also have been cool if that low key, “don’t rely on Sam- I’m not accusing him of anything malicious, he’s just not reliable” type of information had circulated widely enough that it reached me and the other very small fish, especially the ones taking major risks that only made sense in an environment where FTX money flowed freely.
I don’t know what the right way to do that would have been. But it seems important to figure out.
I also suspect that in an environment where it was easy to find out that SBF was an unreliable asshole, it would have been easier to discover or maybe even prevent the devastating fraud, because people would have felt more empowered to say no to him. But that might be wishful thinking.