You are not directly vouching for anyone here, but as a general point I’d like to argue that friendship is a poor predictor of ethical behavior.
It may be tempting to consider positive social experiences and friendship as evidence that someone behaves generally ethically and with high standards, but when dealing with more capable people, it’s not. Maintaining ethical behavior and building trust in low-stakes settings like friendship with few temptations to try and exploit for profit is trivially easy. Especially if you are socially skilled and capable of higher level power games and manipulation. The cutthroat moves are saved exclusively for situations where the profits are large enough.
(And a skilled manipulator will rarely engage in obviously cutthroat moves anyways, because the cost of being outed as an unethical cutthroat is high enough to outweight the potential profit of most situations..)
Because you’re someone with influence in the community, anyone with a manipulative bent and any smarts will absolutely give you their best impression. You have more value as an ally, and probably provide few opportunities for direct profit otherwise.
I think one of the key lessons from the OpenAI board fiasco is the value of pausing, and how critically our rationality can suffer under (false) urgency.
My rationality failed in a similar situation as well. Last year was the best of my life. This year has been the worst. It’s almost entirely because I didn’t pause.
I didn’t pause to think, consult, and reorient before critical action.
I was not under any real time pressure, only false and self-imposed pressure.
If only I had paused.
The lesson applies broadly. The more time you have to think and reorient before action, the better your actions are.
The times when you least feel like pausing, might be the exact situations where pausing holds the most value. When the stakes are high you may feel like you can not pause, but consider if this is actually true. Pause at least to think if you can pause more. If you notice that you actually could pause more, consider also that you probably should pause for a lot longer than you initially feel like. Pausing is a rationality superpower.