Quick Update on Leaving the Board of EV

Update Apr. 4: I’ve now spoken with another EA who was involved in EA’s response to the FTX implosion. To summarize what they said to me:

• They thought that the lack of an investigation was primarily due to general time constraints and various exogenous logistical difficulties. At the time, they thought that setting up a team who could overcome the various difficulties would be extremely hard for mundane reasons such as:
  • thorough, even-handed investigations into sensitive topics are very hard to do (especially if you start out low-context);
  • this is especially true when they are vaguely scoped and potentially involve a large number of people across a number of different organizations;
  • “professional investigators” (like law firms) aren’t very well-suited to do the kind of investigation that would actually be helpful;
  • legal counsels were generally strongly advising people against talking about FTX stuff in general;
  • various old confidentiality agreements would make it difficult to discuss what happened in some relevant instances (e.g. meetings that had Chatham House Rules);
  • it would be hard to guarantee confidentiality in the investigation when info might be subpoenaed or something like that;
  • and a general plethora of individually-surmountable but collectively-highly-challenging obstacles.
• They flagged that at the time, most people involved were already in an exceptionally busy and difficult time, and so had less bandwidth for additional projects than usual.
• A caveat here is that the EV board did block some people from speaking publicly during the initial investigation into EV's legal situation. That investigation ended back in the summer of 2023. 
• Julia Wise and Ozzie Gooen wrote on the EA Forum that this is a potentially useful project for someone to take on, which as far as this person knew isn’t something any EA leadership did or would try to stop, and the impression of the person I spoke to was that Julia and Ozzie indeed tried to investigate what reforms should happen, though the person I spoke to didn’t follow that situation closely.
• The person I spoke to didn't want to put words in the mouth of EA leaders, and their information is mostly from ~1 year ago and might be out of date. But to the extent some people aren't currently champing at the bit to make this happen, their impression (with respect to the EA leaders they have interacted with relatively extensively) is that this has little to do with a desire to protect the reputation of EA or of individual EAs.
• Rather, their impression is that for a lot of top EA leaders, this whole thing is a lot less interesting, because those EAs think they know what happened (and that it's not that interesting). So the choice is like "should I pour in a ton of energy to try to set up this investigation that will struggle to get off the ground to learn kinda boring stuff I already know?" And maybe they are underrating how interesting others would find it, but that made the whole idea not so important-seeming (at least in the early days after FTX’s collapse, relative to all the other urgent and confusing things swirling around in the wake of the collapse) from their perspective.

I vouch for this person as generally honest and well-intentioned. I update from the above that community leaders are probably less resistant to doing some kind of fact-finding inquiry than I thought. I’m hoping that this take is correct, since it suggests to me that it might not be too hard to get an SBF postmortem to happen now that the trial and the EV legal investigation are both over (and now that we’re all talking about the subject in the first place).

If the take above isn’t correct, then hopefully my sharing it will cause others to chime in with further objections, and I can zigzag my way to understanding what actually happened!

I shared the above summary with Oliver Habryka, and he said:

Hmm, I definitely don’t buy the "this has little to do with EA leadership desire to protect their reputation". A lot of the reason for the high standards is for PR reasons.

I think people are like "Oh man, doing a good job here seems really hard, since doing it badly seems like it would be really costly reputation-wise. But if someone did want to put in the heroic effort to do a good enough job to not have many downsides, then yeah, I would be in favor of that. But that seems so hard to do that I don’t really expect it to happen."

Like, the primary thing that seems to me the mistake is the standard to which any such investigation is being held to before people consider it net-positive.

I'll also share Ozzie Gooen's Twitter take from a few days ago:

My quick guess (likely to be wrong!)

• There are really only a few people "on top" of EA.
• This would have essentially been "these top people investigating each other, and documenting that for others in the community"
• These people don't care that much about being trusted in the community. They fund the community and have power
• the EA community really doesn't have much power over the funders/leaders.
• These people generally feel like they understand the problem well enough.

And, some corrections to my earlier posts about this:

• I said that "there was a narrow investigation into legal risk to Effective Ventures last year", which I think may have overstated the narrowness of the investigation a bit. My understanding is that the investigation's main goal was to reduce EV's legal exposure, but to that end the investigation covered a somewhat wider range of topics (possibly including things like COI policies), including things that might touch on broader EA mistakes and possible improvements. But it's hard to be sure about any of this because details of the investigation's scope and outcomes weren't shared, and it doesn't sound like they will be.
• I said that Julia Wise had "been calling for the existence of such an investigation"; Julia clarifies on social media, "I would say I listed it as a possible project rather than calling for it exactly."
  • Specifically, Julia Wise, Ozzie Gooen, and Sam Donald co-wrote a November 2023 blog post that listed "comprehensive investigation into FTX<>EA connections / problems" as one of four "projects and programs we'd like to see", saying "these projects are promising, but they're sizable or ongoing projects that we don't have the capacity to carry out". They also included this idea in a list of Further Possible Projects on EA Reform.

JWS @ 2024-04-05T09:36 (+43)

(I'm going to wrap up a few disparate threads together here, and will probably be my last comment on this post ~modulo a reply for clarification's sake. happy to discuss further with you Rob or anyone via DMs/Forum Dialogue/whatever)

(to Rob & Oli - there is a lot of inferential distance between us and that's ok, the world is wide enough to handle that! I don't mean to come off as rude/hostile and apologies if I did get the tone wrong)

Thanks for the update Rob, I appreciate you tying this information together in a single place. And yet... I can't help but still feel some of the frustrations of my original comment. Why does this person not want to share their thoughts publicly? Is it because they don't like the EA Forum? Because their scared of retaliation? It feels like this would be useful and important information for the community to know.

I'm also not sure what to make of Habryka's response here and elsewhere. I think there is a lot of inferential distance between myself and Oli, but it does seem to me to come off as a "social experiment in radical honesty and perfect transparency" , which is a vibe I often get from the Lightcone-adjacent world. And like, with all due respect, I'm not really interested in that whole scene. I'm more interested in questions like:

1. Were any senior EAs directly involved in the criminal actions at FTX/Alameda?
2. What warnings were given about SBF to senior EAs before the FTX blowup, particularly around the 2018 Alameda blowup, as recounted here.
   1. If these warnings were ignored, what prevented people from deducing that SBF was a bad actor?^[1]
   2. Critically, if these warnings were accepted as true, who decided to keep this a secret and to supress it from the community at large, and not act on it?
3. Why did SBF end up with such a dangerous set of beliefs about the world? (I think they're best described as 'risky beneficentrism' - see my comment here and Ryan's original post here)
4. Why have the results of these investigations, or some legally-cleared version, not been shared with the community at large?
5. Do senior EAs have any plan to respond to the hit to EA-morale as a result of FTX and the aftermath, along with the intensely negative social reaction to EA, apart from 'quietly hope it goes away'?

Writing it down, 2.b. strikes me as what I mean by 'naive consequentialism' if it happened. People had information that SBF was a bad character who had done harm, but calculated (or assumed) that he'd do more good being part of/tied to EA than otherwise. The kind of signalling you described as naive consequentialism doesn't really seem pertinent to me here, as interesting as the philosophical discussion can be.

tl'dr - I think there can be a difference between a discussion about what norms EA 'should' have, or senior EAs should act by, especially in the post-FTX and influencing-AI-policy world, but I think that's different from the 'minimal viable information-sharing' that can help the community heal, hold people to account, and help make the world a better place. It does feel like the lack of communication is harming that, and I applaud you/Oli pushing for it, but sometimes I wish you would both also be less vague too. Some of us don't have the EA history and context that you both do!

epilogue: I hope Rebecca is doing well. But this post & all the comments makes me feel more pessimistic about the state of EA (as a set of institutions/organisations, not ideas) post FTX. Wounds might have faded, but they haven't healed 😞

1. ^{^}

   Not that people should have guessed the scale of his wrongdoing ex-ante, but was there enough to start to downplay and disassociate?

Ben_West @ 2024-04-09T23:57 (+34)

the choice is like "should I pour in a ton of energy to try to set up this investigation that will struggle to get off the ground to learn kinda boring stuff I already know?"

I'm not the person quoted, but I agree with this part, and some of the reasons for why I expect the results of an investigation like this to be boring aren’t based on any private or confidential information, so perhaps worth sharing.

One key reason: I think rumor mills are not very effective fraud detection mechanisms.

(This seems almost definitionally true: if something was clear evidence of fraud then it would just be described as "clear evidence of fraud"; describing something as a "rumor" seems to almost definitionally imply a substantial probability that the rumor is false or at least unclear or hard to update on.^[1])

E.g. If I imagine a bank whose primary fraud detection mechanism was "hope the executives hear rumors of malfeasance," I would not feel very satisfied with their risk management. If fraud did occur, I wouldn’t expect that their primary process improvement to be "see if the executives could have updated from rumors better." I am therefore somewhat confused by how much interest there seems to be in investigating how well the rumor mill worked for FTX.^[2]

To be clear: I assume that the rumor mill could function more efficiently, and that there’s probably someone who heard "SBF is often overconfident" or whatever and could have updated from that information more accurately than they did. (If you’re interested in my experience, you can read my comments here.) I’m just very skeptical that a new and improved rumor mill is substantial protection against fraud, and don’t understand what an investigation could show me that would change my mind.^[3] Moreover, even if I somehow became convinced that rumors could have been effective in the specific case of FTX, I will still likely be skeptical of their efficacy in the future.

Relatedly, I’ve heard people suggest that 80k shouldn’t have put SBF on their website given some rumors that were floating around. My take is that the base rate of criminality among large donors is high, having a rumor mill does not do very much to lower that rate, and so I expect to believe that the risk will be relatively high for high net worth people 80k puts on the front page in the future, and I don't need an investigation to tell me that.

To make some positive suggestions about things I could imagine learning from/finding useful:

1. I have played around with the idea of some voluntary pledge for earning to give companies where they could opt into additional risk management and transparency policies (e.g. selecting some processes from Sarbanes-Oxley). My sense is that these policies do actually substantially reduce the risk of fraud (albeit at great expense), and might be worth doing.^[4]
   1. At least, it seems like this should be our first port of call. Maybe we can’t actually implement industry best practices around risk management, but it feels like we should at least try before giving up and doing the rumor mill thing.
2. My understanding is that a bunch of work has gone into making regulations so that publicly traded companies are less likely to commit fraud, and these regulations are somewhat effective, but they are so onerous that many companies are willing to stay private and forgo billions of dollars in investment just to not have to deal with them. I suspect that EA might find itself in a similarly unfortunate situation where reducing risks from "prominent individuals" requires the individuals in question to do something so onerous that no one is willing to become "prominent." I would be excited about research into a) whether this is in fact the case, and b) what to do about it, if so.
3. Some people probably disagree with my claim that rumor mills are ineffective. If so, research into this would be useful. E.g. it's been on my backlog for a while to write up a summary of Why They Do It, or a fraud management textbook.
   1. Why They Do It is perhaps particularly useful, given that one of its key claims is that, unlike with blue-collar crime, character traits don’t correlate well with propensity to commit white-collar crimes crimes, and I think this may be a crux between me and people who disagree with me.

All that being said, I think I'm weakly in favor of someone more famous than me^[5] doing some sort of write up about what rumors they heard, largely because I don't expect the above to convince many people, and I think such a write up will mostly result in people realizing that the rumors were not very motivating. 

 

1. ^{^}

    Thanks to Chana Messinger for this point

2. ^{^}

    One possible reason for this is that people are aiming for goals other than detecting fraud, e.g. they are hoping that rumors could also be used to identify other types of misconduct. I have opinions about this, but this comment is already too long so I'm not going to address it here.

3. ^{^}

    e.g. I appreciate Nate writing this, but if in the future I learned that a certain person has spoken to Nate, I'm not going to update my beliefs about the likelihood of them committing financial misconduct very much (and I believe that Nate would agree with this assessment)

4. ^{^}

    Part of why I haven't prioritized this is that there aren't a lot of earning to give companies anymore, but I think it's still potentially worth someone spending time on this

5. ^{^}

    I have done my own version of this, but my sense is that people (very reasonably) would prefer to hear from someone like Will

David Mathers @ 2024-04-10T12:43 (+52)

I feel like "people who worked with Sam told people about specific instances of quite serious dishonesty they had personally observed" is being classed as "rumour" here, which whilst not strictly inaccurate, is misleading, because it is a very atypical case relative to the image the word "rumour" conjures. Also, even if people only did receive stuff that was more centrally rumour, I feel like we still want to know if any one in leadership argued "oh, yeah, Sam might well be dodgy, but the expected value of publicly backing him is high because of the upside". That's a signal someone is a bad leader in my view, which is useful knowledge going forward. (I'm not saying it is instant proof they should never hold leadership positions ever again: I think quite a lot of people might have said something like that in similar circumstances. But it is a bad sign.) 

RobBensinger @ 2024-04-11T02:40 (+18)

I feel like "people who worked with Sam told people about specific instances of quite serious dishonesty they had personally observed" is being classed as "rumour" here, which whilst not strictly inaccurate, is misleading, because it is a very atypical case relative to the image the word "rumour" conjures.

I agree with this.

[...] I feel like we still want to know if any one in leadership argued "oh, yeah, Sam might well be dodgy, but the expected value of publicly backing him is high because of the upside". That's a signal someone is a bad leader in my view, which is useful knowledge going forward.

I don't really agree with this. Everyone has some probability of turning out to be dodgy; it matters exactly how strong the available evidence was. "This EA leader writes people off immediately when they have even a tiny probability of being untrustworthy" would be a negative update about the person's decision-making too!

Rebecca @ 2024-04-11T07:32 (+2)

I took that second quote to mean ‘even if Sam is dodgy it’s still good to publicly back him’

David Mathers @ 2024-04-11T18:58 (+2)

I meant something in between "is" and "has a non-zero chance of being", like assigning significant probability to it (obviously I didn't have an exact number in mind), and not just for base rate reasons about believing all rich people to be dodgy. 

Habryka @ 2024-04-10T03:55 (+37)

I'm not the person quoted, but I agree with this part, and some of the reasons for why I expect the results of an investigation like this to be boring aren’t based on any private or confidential information, so perhaps worth sharing.

One key reason: I think rumor mills are not very effective fraud detection mechanisms.

Huh, the same reason you cite for why you are not interested in doing an investigation is one of the key reasons why I want an investigation. 

It seems to me that current EA leadership is basically planning to continue a "our primary defense against bad actors is the rumor mill" strategy. Having an analysis of how that strategy did not work, and in some sense can't work for things like this seems like it's one of the things that would have the most potential to give rise to something better here.

Ben_West @ 2024-04-10T17:37 (+12)

Interesting! I'm glad I wrote this then.

Do you think "[doing an investigation is] one of the things that would have the most potential to give rise to something better here" because you believe it is very hard to find alternatives to the rumor mill strategy? Or because you expect alternatives to not be adopted, even if found?

Habryka @ 2024-04-11T15:32 (+9)

My current sense is that there is no motivation to find an alternative because people mistakenly think it works fine enough and so there is no need to try to find something better (and also in the absence of an investigation and clear arguments about why the rumor thing doesn't work, people probably think they can't really be blamed if the strategy fails again)

Ben_West @ 2024-04-11T17:21 (+17)

Suppose I want to devote some amount of resources towards finding alternatives to a rumor mill. I had been interpreting you as claiming that, instead of directly investing these resources towards finding an alternative, I should invest these resources towards an investigation (which will then in turn motivate other people to find alternatives).

Is that correct? If so, I'm interested in understanding why – usually if you want to do a thing, the best approach is to just do that thing.

Habryka @ 2024-04-11T17:47 (+15)

It seems to me that a case study of how exactly FTX occurred, and where things failed, would be among one of the best things to use to figure out what thing to do instead. 

Currently the majority of people who have an interest in this are blocked by not really knowing what worked and didn't work in the FTX case, and so probably will have trouble arguing compellingly for any alternative, and also lack some of the most crucial data. My guess is you might have the relevant information from informal conversations, but most don't. 

I do think also just directly looking for an alternative seems good. I am not saying that doing an FTX investigation is literally the very best thing to do in the world, it just seems better than what I see EA leadership spending their time on instead. If you had the choice between "figure out a mechanism detecting and propagating information about future adversarial behavior" and "do an FTX investigation", I would feel pretty great about both, and honestly don't really know which one I would prefer. As far as I can tell neither of these things is seeing much effort invested into it.

Ben_West @ 2024-04-11T19:04 (+21)

Okay, that seems reasonable. But I want to repeat my claim^[1] that people are not blocked by "not really knowing what worked and didn't work in the FTX case" – even if e.g. there was some type of rumor which was effective in the FTX case, I still think we shouldn't rely on that type of rumor being effective in the future, so knowing whether or not this type of rumor was effective in the FTX case is largely irrelevant.^[2]

I think the blockers are more like: fraud management is a complex and niche area that very few people in EA have experience with, and getting up to speed with it is time-consuming, and also ~all of the practices are based under assumptions like "the risk manager has some amount of formal authority" which aren't true in EA.

(And to be clear: I think these are very big blockers! They just aren't resolved by doing an investigation.)

1. ^{^}

   Or maybe more specifically: would like people to explicitly refute my claim. If someone does think that rumor mills are a robust defense against fraud but were just implemented poorly last time, I would love to hear that!

2. ^{^}

   Again, under the assumption that your goal is fraud detection. Investigations may be more or less useful for other goals.

Jason @ 2024-04-12T01:49 (+22)

Again, under the assumption that your goal is fraud detection. 

It seems like a goal of ~"fraud detection" not further specified may be near the nadir of utility for an investigation.

• If you go significantly narrower, then how EA managed (or didn't manage) SBF fraud seems rather important to figuring out how to deal with the risk of similar fraudulent schemes in the future.^[1]
• If you go significantly broader (cf. Oli's reference to "detecting and propagating information about future adversarial behavior"), the blockers you identify seem significantly less relevant, which may increase the expected value of an investigation.

My tentative guess is that it would be best to analyze potential courses of action in terms of their effects on the "EA immune system" at multiple points of specificity, not just close relations of a specific known pathogen (e.g., SBF-like schemes), a class of pathogens (e.g., "fraud"), or pathogens writ large (e.g., "future adversarial behavior").

1. ^{^}

   Given past EA involvement with crypto, and the base rate of not-too-subtle fraud in crypto, the risk of similar fraudulent schemes seems more than theoretical to me.

Jason @ 2024-04-10T01:46 (+12)

I have played around with the idea of some voluntary pledge for earning to give companies where they could opt into additional risk management and transparency policies (e.g. selecting some processes from Sarbanes-Oxley). My sense is that these policies do actually substantially reduce the risk of fraud (albeit at great expense), and might be worth doing.

I think that would be worth exploring. I suspect you are correct that full Sarbanes-Oxley treatment would be onerous. 

On the other hand, I don't see how a reasonably competent forensic accountant or auditor could have spent more than a few days at FTX (or at Madoff) without having a stroke. Seeing the commingled bank accounts would have sent alarm bells racing through my head, at least. (One of the core rules of legal ethics is that you do not commingle your money with that of your clients because experience teaches all sorts of horrible things can and often do happen.)

I certainly don't mean to imply that fraud against sophisticated investors and lenders is okay, but there is something particularly bad about straight-up conversion of client funds like at FTX/Madoff. At least where hedge funds and big banks are concerned, they have the tools and access to protect themselves if they so wish. Moreover, the link between the fraud and the receipt of funds is particularly strong in those cases -- Enron was awash in fraud, but it wouldn't be fair to say that a charity that received a grant from Enron at certain points in time was approximately and unknowingly in possession of stolen funds. 

Thankfully, procedures meant to ferret out sophisticated Enron-style fraud shouldn't be necessary to rule out most straight-up conversion schemes. Because of the risk that someone will rat the fraudsters out, my understanding is that the conspiracy usually is kept pretty small in these sorts of frauds. That imposes a real limit on how well the scheme will withstand even moderate levels of probing with auditor-level access.

If you want a reference class of similar frauds, here is the prosecution's list of cases (after the Booker decision in 2005) with losses > $100MM and fraud type of Ponzi scheme, misappropriation, or embezzlement:

For example, one might be really skeptical if auditing red flags associated with prior frauds are present. Madoff famously had his audits done by a two-person firm that reported not conducting audits. FTX was better, but apparently still used "questionable" third-tier firms that "do audit a few public companies but none of the size or complexity of FTX." Neither "the Armanino nor the Prager Metis audit reports for 2021 provides an opinion on the FTX US or FTX Trading internal controls over accounting and financial reporting" -- and the audit reports tell the reader as much (same source). The article, written by an accounting lecturer at Wharton, goes on to describe other weirdness in the audit reports. Of course, that's not foolproof -- Enron had one of the then-Big Five accounting firms, for instance.

Catching all fraud is not realistic . . . for anyone, much less a charitable social movement. But it seems like some basic checks to make fairly sure the major or whole basis for the company / for the individual's wealth is not a fraudulent house of cards seems potentially attainable at a reasonable burden level.

Ian Turner @ 2024-04-10T14:06 (+20)

I guess the question I have is, if the fraud wasn't noticed by SBF's investors, who had much better access to information and incentives to find fraud, why would anyone expect the recipients of his charitable donations to notice it? If it was a failure of the EA movement not to know that FTX was fraudulent, isn't it many times more of a failure that the fraud was unnoticed by the major sophisticated investment firms that were large FTX shareholders?

Habryka @ 2024-04-10T15:48 (+62)

I think investing in FTX was genuinely a good idea, if you were a profit maximizer, even if you strongly suspected the fraud. As Jason says, as an investor losing money due to fraud isn't any worse than losing money because a company fails to otherwise be profitable, so even assigning 20%-30% probability to fraud for a high-risk investment like FTX where you are expecting >2x returns in a short number of years will not make a huge difference to your bottomline.

In many ways you should expect being the kind of person who is willing to commit fraud to be positively associated with returns, because doing illegal and fradulent things means that the people who run the organization take on massive risk where you are not exposed to the downside, but you are exposed to the upside. It's not worth it to literally invest in fraud, but it is worth it to invest into the kind of company where the CEO is willing to go to prison, since you don't really have any risk of going to prison, but you get the upside of the legal risk they take on (think of Uber blatantly violating laws until they established a new market, which probably exposed leadership to substantial legal risk, but investors just got to reap the profits).

Jason @ 2024-04-10T14:44 (+20)

I wasn't suggesting we should expect this fraud to have been found in this case with the access that was available to EA sources. (Perhaps the FTXFF folks might have caught the scent if they were forensic accountants -- but they weren't. And I'm not at all confident on that in any event.) I'm suggesting that, in response to this scandal, EA organizations could insist on certain third-party assurances in the future before taking significant amounts of money from certain sources. 

Why the big money was willing to fork over nine figures each to FTX without those assurances is unclear to me. But one observation: as far as a hedge fund or lender is concerned, a loss due to fraud is no worse than a loss due to the invested-in firm being outcompeted, making bad business decisions, experiencing a general crypto collapse, getting shut down for regulatory issues, or any number of scenarios that were probably more likely ex ante than a massive conversion scheme. In fact, such a scheme might even be less bad to the extent that the firm thought it might get more money back in a fraud loss than from some ordinarily-business failure modes. Given my understanding that these deals often move very quickly, and the presence of higher-probability failure modes, it is understandable that investors and lenders wouldn't have prioritized fraud detection. 

In contrast, charitable grantees are much more focused in their concern about fraud; taking money from a solvent, non-fraudulent business that later collapses doesn't raise remotely the same ethical, legal, operational, and reputational concerns. Their potential exposure in that failure mode are likely several times larger than those of the investors/lenders after all non-financial exposures are considered. They are also not on a tight time schedule.

Rebecca @ 2024-04-10T08:07 (+6)

Re your footnote 4, CE/AIM are starting an earning-to-give incubation program, so that is likely to change pretty soon

Ben_West @ 2024-04-10T17:51 (+4)

Oh good point! That does seem to increase the urgency of this. I'd be interested to hear if CE/AIM had any thoughts on the subject.

Evan_Gaensbauer @ 2024-08-15T04:14 (+2)

legal counsels were generally strongly advising people against talking about FTX stuff in general

Will MacAskill waited until April to speak fully and openly on the extra cautious advice of legal counsel. If that period ended to the point Will spoke to the matter of the FTX collapse, and the before and after, has he had ever wanted to, surely almost everyone could do the same now. The barrier or objection of not talking according to the strong advice of legal counsel seems like it'd be null for most people at this point.

Evan_Gaensbauer @ 2024-08-15T04:01 (+2)

Edit: in the 2 hours since I first made this comment, I've read most of the comments with arguments both for and against why someone should begin pursuing at least some parts of what could constitute an overall investigation as has been suggested. Finding the arguments for doing so far better than the arguments against, I have now decided to personally begin pursuing the below project. Anyone interested in helping or supporting me in that vein, please reply to this comment, or contact me privately. Any number of messages I receive along the lines of "I think this is a bad idea, I disagree with what you intend to do, I think this will be net negative, please don't do this", etc., absent other arguments, are very unlikely to deter me. On the contrary, if anything, such substanceless objections may motivate me to pursue this end with more vigour.

I'm not extremely confident I could complete an investigation of the whole of the EA community's role in this regard at the highest level all by myself, though I am now offering to investigate or research parts of this myself. Here's some of what I could bring to the table.

• I'd be willing to do some relatively thorough investigation from a starting point of being relatively high-context. For those who wouldn't think I'd be someone who knows a lot of context here, this short form post I made a while ago could serve as proof of concept I have more context than you might expect. I could offer more information, or answer more questions others have, in an attempt to genuinely demonstrate how much context I have. 
• I have very little time constraints compared to perhaps most individuals in the EA community who might be willing or able to contribute to some aspect of such an investigation. Already on my own time, I occasionally investigate issues in and around EA by myself. I intend to do so more in the future. I'd be willing to research more specific issues on my own time if others were to provide some direction. Some of what I might pursue further may be related to FTX anyway without urging from others. 
• I'd be willing to volunteer a significant amount of time doing so, as I'm not currently working full-time and may not be working full-time in the foreseeable future. If the endeavour required a certain amount of work or progress achieved within a certain time frame, I may need to be hired in some capacity to complete some of the research or investigating. I'd be willing to accept such an opportunity as well.
• Having virtually no conflict of interests, there's almost nothing anyone powerful in or around EA could hold over me to attempt to stop me from trying to investigate.
• I'm champing at the bit to make this happen probably about as much as anyone.
• I would personally find the contents of any aspect of such an investigation to be extremely interesting and motivating.
• I wouldn't fear any retaliation whatsoever. Some attempts or threats to retaliate against me could be indeed be advantageous for me, as I am confident they would fail to achieve their desired goals, and thus serve as evidence to others that any further such attempts would be futile wastes of efforts.
• I am personally in semi-regular contact or have decent rapport with some whistleblowers or individuals who retain private information about events related to the whole saga of FTX dating back to 2018. They, or their other peers who've also exited the EA community in the last several years, may not be willing to talk freely with most individuals in EA who might participate in such an investigation. I am very confident at least some of them would be willing to talk to me.
• I'm probably less nervous personally, i.e., being willing to be radically transparent and honest, about speaking up or out about anything EA-related than most people who have continuously participated in the EA community for over a decade. I suspect that includes even you and Oliver Habryka, who have already been noted in other comments here as among those in that cohort who are the least nervous. Notably that may at this point be a set of no more than a few hundred people. 
• To produce common-knowledge documents to help as large a subset of the EA community, if not the whole community, to learn what happened, and what could be done differently in the future, would be a goal of any such investigation that I could be most motivated to accomplish. I'd be much more willing to share such a document more widely than most other people who might be willing or able to produce one.

I haven't heard any arguments against doing an investigation yet, and I could imagine folks might be nervous about speaking up here. So I'll try to break the ice by writing an imaginary dialogue between myself and someone who disagrees with me.

Obviously this argument may not be compelling compared to what an actual proponent would say, and I'd guess I'm missing at least one key consideration here, so treat this as a mere conversation-starter.

Hypothetical EA: Why isn't EV's 2023 investigation enough? You want us to investigate; well, we investigated.

Rob: That investigation was only investigating legal risk to EV. Everything I've read (and everything I've heard privately) suggests that it wasn't at all trying to answer the question of whether the EA community made any moral or prudential errors in how we handled SBF over the years. Nor was it trying to produce common-knowledge documents (either private or public) to help any subset of EA understand what happened. Nor was it trying to come up with any proposal for what we should do differently (if anything) in the future.

I take it as fairly obvious that those are all useful activities to carry out after a crisis, especially when there was sharp disagreement, within EA leadership, long before the FTX implosion, about how we should handle SBF.

Hypothetical EA: Look, I know there’s been no capital-I “Investigation”, but plenty of established EAs have poked around at dinner parties and learned a lot of the messy complicated details of what happened. My own informal poking around has convinced me that no EAs outside FTX leadership did anything super evil or Machiavellian. The worst you can say is that they muddled along and had miscommunications and brain farts like any big disorganized group of humans, and were a bit naively over-trusting.

Me: Maybe! But scattered dinner conversation with random friends and colleagues, with minimal following up or cross-checking of facts, isn’t the best medium for getting an unbiased picture of what happened. People skew the truth, withhold info, pass the blame ball around. And you like your friends, so you’re eager to latch on to whatever story shows they did an OK job.

Perhaps your story is true, but we shouldn’t be scared of checking, applying the same level of rigor we readily apply to everything else we’re doing.

The utility of this doesn't require that any EAs be Evil. A postmortem is plenty useful in a world where we were “too trusting” or were otherwise subject to biases in how we thought, or how we shared information and made group decisions — so we can learn from our mistakes and do better next time.

And if we’ve historically been “too trusting”, it seems doubly foolish to err on the side of trusting every individual, institution, and process involved in the EA-SBF debacle, and write them a preemptive waiver for all the errors we’re studiously avoiding checking whether they’ve made.

Hypothetical EA: Look, there’s just no reason to use SBF in particular for your social experiment in radical honesty and perfect transparency. It was to some extent a matter of luck that SBF succeeded as well as he did, and that he therefore had an opportunity to cause so much harm. If there were systemic biases in EA that caused us to err here, then those same biases should show up in tons of other cases too.

The only reason to single out the SBF case in particular and give it 1000x more attention than everything else is that it’s the most newsworthy EA error.

But the main effect of this is to inflate and distort minor missteps random EA decision-makers made, bolstered by the public’s hindsight bias and cancel culture and by journalists’ axe-grinding, so that the smallest misjudgments an EA makes look like horrific unforgivable sins.

SBF is no more useful for learning about EA’s causal dynamics than any other case (and in fact SBF is an unusually bad place to try to learn generalizable lessons, because the sky-high stakes will cause people to withhold key evidence and/or bend the truth toward social desirability); it’s only useful as a bludgeon, if you came into all this already sure that EA is deeply corrupt (or that particular individuals or orgs are), and you want to summon a mob to punish those people and drive them from the community.

(Or, alternatively, if you’re sad about EA’s bad reputation and you want to find scapegoats: find the specific Bad EAs and drive them out, to prove to the world that you’re a Good EA and that EA-writ-large is now pure.)

Me: I find that argument somewhat compelling, but I still think an investigation would make sense.

First, extreme cases can often illustrate important causal dynamics that are harder to see in normal cases. E.g., if EA has a problem like “we fudge the truth too much”, this might be hard to detect in low-stakes cases where people have less incentive to lie. People’s behavior when push comes to shove is important, given the huge impact EA is trying to have on the world; and SBF is one huge instance where push came to shove and our character was really tested.

And, yes, some people may withhold information more because of the high stakes. But others will be much more willing to spend time on this question because they recognize it as important. If nothing else, SBF is a Schelling point for us all to direct our eyes at the same thing simultaneously, and see if we can converge on some new truths about the world.

Second, and moving away from abstractions to talk about the specifics of this case: My understanding is that a bunch of EAs tried to warn the community that SBF was extremely shady, and a bunch of other EAs apparently didn't believe the warnings, or didn't want those warnings widely shared even though they believed them.

“SBF is extremely shady” isn’t knowledge that FTX was committing financial fraud, and shouting "SBF is extremely shady" from the hills wouldn’t necessarily have prevented the fraud from happening. But there's some probability it might have been the tipping point at various important junctures, as potential employees and funders and customers weighed their options. And even if it wouldn't have helped at all in this case, it's good to share that kind of information in case it helps the next time around.

I think it would be directly useful to know what happened to those warnings about SBF, so we can do better next time. And I think it would also help restore a lot of trust in EA (and a lot of internal ability for EAs to coordinate with each other) if people knew what happened — if we knew which thought leaders or orgs did better or worse, how processes failed, how people plan to do better next time.

I recognize that this will be harder in some ways with journalists and twitter users breathing down your necks. And I recognize that some people may suffer unfair scrutiny and criticism because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. To some extent I just think we need to eat that cost; when you’re playing chess with the world and making massively impactful decisions, that comes with some extra responsibility to take a rare bit of unfair flack for the sake of being able to fact-find and orient at all about what happened. Hopefully the fact that some time has passed, and that we’re looking at a wide variety of people and orgs rather than a specific singled-out individual, will mitigate this problem.

If FTX were a total bolt out of the blue, that would be one thing. But apparently there were rather a lot of EAs who thought SBF was untrustworthy and evil, and had lots of evidence on hand to cite, at the exact same time 80K and Will and others were using their megaphones to broadcast that SBF is an awesome EA hero. I don’t know that 80K or Will in particular are the ones who fucked up here, but it seems like somebody fucked up in order for this perception gap to exist and go undiscussed.

I understand people having disagreements about someone's character. Hindsight bias is a thing, and I'm sure people had reasons at the time to be skeptical of some of the bad rumors about SBF. But I tend to think those disagreements should be things that are argued about rather than kept secret. Especially if the secret conversations empirically have not resulted in the best outcomes.

Hypothetical EA: I dunno, this whole “we need a public airing out of our micro-sins in order to restore trust” thing sounds an awful lot like the exact “you’re looking for scapegoats” thing I was warning about.

You’re fixated on this idea that EAs did something Wrong and need to be chastised and corrected, like we’re perpetrators alongside SBF. On the contrary, I claim that the non-FTX EAs who interacted the most with Sam should mostly be thought of as additional victims of Sam: people who were manipulated and mistreated, who often saw their livelihoods threatened as a result and their life’s work badly damaged or destroyed.

The policies you’re calling for amount to singling out and re-victimizing many of Sam’s primary victims, in the name of pleasant-sounding abstractions like Accountability — abstractions that have little actual consequentialist value in this case, just a veneer of “that sounds nice on paper”.

Me: It's unfortunately hard for me to assess the consequentialist value in this case, because no investigation has taken place. I've gestured at some questions I have above, but I'm missing most of the pieces about what actually happened, and some of the unknown unknowns here might turn out to swamp the importance of what I know about. It's not clear to me that you know much more than me, either. Rather than pitting your speculation against mine, I'd rather do some actual inquiry.

Hypothetical EA: I think we already know enough, including from the legal investigation into Sam Bankman-Fried and who was involved in his conspiracy, to make a good guess that re-victimizing random EAs is not a useful way for this movement to spend its time and energy. The world has many huge problems that need fixing, and it's not as though EA's critics are going to suddenly conclude that EAs are Good After All if we spill all of our dirty laundry. What will actually happen is that they'll cherry-pick and distort the worst-sounding tidbits, while ignoring all the parts you hoped would be "trust-restoring".

Me: Some EA critics will do that, sure. But there are plenty of people, both within EA and outside of it, who legitimately just want to know what happened, and will be very reassured to have a clearer picture of the basic sequence of events, which orgs did a better or worse job, which processes failed or succeeded. They'll also be reassured to know that we know what happened, vs. blinding ourselves to the facts and to any lessons they might contain.

Or maybe they'll be horrified because the details are actually awful (ethically, not legally). Part of being honest is taking on the risk that this could happen too. That's just not avoidable. If we're not the sort of community that would share bad stuff if it were true, then people are forced to be that much more worried that we're in fact hiding a bunch of bad stuff.

Hypothetical EA: I just don't think there's that much crucial information EA leaders are missing, from their informal poking around. You can doubt that, but I don't think a formal investigation would help much, since people who don't want to speak now will (if anything) probably be even more tight-lipped in the face of what looks like a witch-hunt.

You say that EAs have a responsibility to jump through a bunch of transparency hoops. But whether or not you agree with my “EAs are victims” frame: EAs don’t owe the community their lives. If you’re someone who made personal sacrifices to try to make the world a better place, that doesn’t somehow come with a gotcha clause where you now have incurred a huge additional responsibility that we’d never impose on ordinary private citizens, to dump your personal life into the public Internet.

Me: I don’t necessarily disagree with that, as stated. But I think particular EAs are signing up for some extra responsibility, e.g., when they become EA leaders and ask for a lot of trust on the part of their community.

I wouldn’t necessarily describe that responsibility as “huge”, because I don’t actually think a basic investigation into the SBF thing is that unusual or onerous.

I don’t see myself as proposing anything all that radical here. I’m even open to the idea that we might want to redact some names and events in the public recounting of what happened, to protect the innocent. I don’t see anything weird about that; what strikes me as puzzling is the complete absence of any basic fact-finding effort (beyond the narrow-scope EV legal inquiry).

And what strike me as doubly puzzling is that there hasn’t even been a public write-up that CEA and others are not planning to look into this at all, nor has there been any public argument for this policy — whence this dialogue. As though EAs are just hoping we’ll quietly forget about this pretty major omission, so they don’t have to say anything potentially controversial. That I don’t really respect; if you think this investigation is a bad idea, do the EA thing and make your case!

Hypothetical EA: Well, hopefully my arguments have given you some clues about (non-nefarious reasons why) EAs might want to quietly let this thing die, rather than giving a big public argument for letting it die. In addition to the obvious fact that folks are just very busy, and more time spent on this means less time spent on a hundred other things.

Me: And hopefully my arguments have helped remind some folks that things are sometimes worth doing even when they're hard.

All the arguments in the world don't erase the fact that at the end of the day, we have a choice between taking risks for the sake of righting our wrongs and helping people understand what happened, versus hiding from the light of day and quietly hoping that no one calls us out for retreating from our idealistic-sounding principles.

We have a choice between following the path of least resistance into ever-murkier, ever-more-confusing, ever-less-trusting waters; or taking a bold stand and doing whatever we can to give EAs and non-EAs alike real insight into what happened, and a real capacity to adjust course if and only if some course-changing is warranted.

There are certainly times when the boring, practical, un-virtuous-sounding option really is the right option. I don't think this is one of those times; I think we need to be better than that this one time, or we risk losing by a thousand cuts some extremely precious things that used to be central to what made EA EA.

... And if you disagree with me about all that, well, tell me why I'm wrong.

Update Apr. 15:  I talked to a CEA employee and got some more context on why CEA hasn't done an SBF investigation and postmortem. In addition to the 'this might be really difficult and it might not be very useful' concern, they mentioned that the Charity Commission investigation into EV UK is still ongoing a year and a half later. (Google suggests that statutory inquiries by the Charity Commission take an average of 1.2 years to complete, so the super long wait here is sadly normal.)

Although the Commission has said "there is no indication of wrongdoing by the trustees at this time", and the risk of anything crazy happening is lower now than it was a year and a half ago, I gather that it's still at least possible that the Commission could take some drastic action like "we think EV did bad stuff, so we're going to take over the legal entity that includes the UK components of CEA, 80K, GWWC, GovAI, etc.", which may make it harder for CEA to usefully hold the steering wheel on an SBF investigation at this stage.

Example scenario: CEA tries to write up some lessons learned from the SBF thing, with an EA audience in mind; EAs tend to have unusually high standards, and a CEA staffer writes a comment that assumes this context, without running the comment by lawyers because it seemed innocent enough; because of those high standards, the Charity Commission misreads the CEA employee as implying a way worse thing happened than is actually the case.

This particular scenario may not be a big risk, but the sum of the risk of all possible scenarios like that (including scenarios that might not currently be on their radar) seems non-negligible to the CEA person I spoke to, even though they don't think there's any info out there that should rationally cause the Charity Commission to do anything wild here. And trying to do serious public reflection or soul-searching while also carefully nitpicking every sentence for possible ways the Charity Commission could misinterpret something, doesn't seem like an optimal set-up for deep, authentic, and productive soul-searching.

The CEA employee said that they thought this is one reason (but not the only reason) EV is unlikely to run a postmortem of this kind.

My initial thoughts on all this: This is very useful info! I had no idea the Charity Commission investigation was still ongoing, and if there are significant worries about that, that does indeed help make CEA and EV’s actions over the last year feel a lot less weird-and-mysterious to me.

I’m not sure I agree with CEA or EV’s choices here, but I no longer feel like there’s a mystery to be explained here; this seems like a place where reasonable people can easily disagree about what the right strategy is. I don't expect the Charity Commission to in fact take over those organizations, since as far as I know there's no reason to do that, but I can see how this would make it harder for CEA to do a soul-searching postmortem.

I do suspect that EV and/or CEA may be underestimating the costs of silence here. I could imagine a frog-boiling problem arising here, where it made sense to delay a postmortem for a few months based on a relatively small risk of disaster (and a hope that the Charity Commission investigation in this case might turn out to be brief), but it may not make sense to continue to delay in this situation for years on end. Both options are risky; I suspect the risks of inaction and silence may be getting systematically under-weighted here. (But it’s hard to be confident when I don’t know the specifics of how these decisions are being made.)

I ran the above by Oliver Habryka, who said:

“I talked to a CEA employee and got some more context on why CEA hasn't done an SBF investigation and postmortem.”

Seems like it wouldn't be too hard for them to just advocate for someone else doing it?

Or to just have whoever is leading the investigation leave the organization.

In general it seems to me that an investigation is probably best done in a relatively independent vehicle anyways, for many reasons.

“My thoughts on all this: This is very useful info! I had no idea the Charity Commission investigation was still ongoing, and that does indeed help make CEA and EV’s actions over the last year feel a lot less weird-and-mysterious to me.”

Agree that this is an important component (and a major component for my models).

I have some information suggesting that maybe Oliver and/or the CEA employee's account is wrong, or missing part of the story?? But I'm confused about the details, so I'll look into things more and post an update here if I learn more.

Not to state the obvious but the 'criticism of EA' posts didn't pose a real risk to the power structure. It is uhhhhh quite common for 'criticism' to be a lot more encouraged/tolerated when it isnt threatening.

I'm against doing further investigation. I expressed why I think we have already spent too much time on this here.

I also think your comments are falling into the trap of referring to "EA" like it was an entity. Who specifically should do an investigation, and who specifically should they be investigating? (This less monolithic view of EA is also part of why I don't feel as bothered by the the whole thing: so maybe some people in "senior" positions made some bad judgement calls about Sam. They should maybe feel bad. I'm not sure we should feel much collective guilt about that.)

Overall I feel relatively supportive of more investigation and (especially) postmortem work. I also don't fully understand why more wasn't shared from the EV investigation^[1].

However, I think it's all a bit more fraught and less obvious than you imply. The main reasons are:

• Professional external investigations are expensive
  • Especially if they're meaningfully fact-finding and not just interviewing a few people, I think this could easily run into hundreds of thousands of dollars
  • Who is to pay for this? If a charity is doing it, I think it's important that their donors are on board with that use of funds
    • I kind of think someone should fundraise for this specifically; I'm genuinely unsure about donor appetite to support it
• I'm somewhat worried about the "re-victimizing" effect you allude to of just sharing everything transparently
  • Worry that it would cause in-my-view-unjust headaches for people is perhaps the main inhibitory force on my just publicly sharing the pieces of what I know (there's also sometimes feeling like something isn't mine to share)
  • If there were an investigation which was going to make all its factual findings public, I'd expect this to be an inhibitory force on people choosing to share information with them
• The possible mistakes we're talking about are all nuanced
  • It's going to be a judgement call what was or wasn't a mistake
    • (This is compatible with mistakes being large)
  • So if we're hoping for an investigation which doesn't make all its factual findings public, then we're trusting in the judgement of the investigators to make a fair assessment
    • This makes me not want independent lawyers (who may most naturally be drawn to assess things from a perspective of "was this reasonably minimizing of legal exposure")
    • But then who?
      • If this was just a question about conduct at one org, the natural answer might be "some sensible but uninvolved EA", but if the whole of EA might somehow be called into question, what's even appropriate?

At the end of this I would be most interested in multiple people who seemed very sensible giving their own post-mortems. I think that this would ideally include a mix of folks in EA and outsiders. I think some fact-finding should inform these people's takes, without all of the facts themselves necessarily being made public (in order to facilitate the facts actually being shared, as well as to mitigate possible re-victimizing). I'm not certain how much it's good for this to be via some centralized fact-finding exercise which is then privately shared, vs giving them the opportunity to interview people directly (as you get some more granular data that way). Perhaps ideally a mix. (But that's making it more time-expensive as an exercise.)

I think there are people close enough to what happened that they can meaningfully give post-mortems without a fact-finding investigation. And I am interested in their views and supportive of them sharing those. But they're also the people whose judgement is most likely to be distorted by being close to things. So even among EAs I'd prefer to have very sensible people who were further from what happened.

(That's all where-I-stand-right-now. I can certainly imagine being moved on this.)

1. ^{^}

   I guess that there would have been downsides for EV in doing so, but think these might well have been outweighed by the benefits to the community. However, I want to stress that I think the boards are sensible people making sometimes-difficult trade-offs; I don't know for sure what I'd have thought with full context; I have some deference to them.

We're happy to sink hundreds of hours into fun "criticism of EA" contests, but when the biggest disaster in EA's history manifests, we aren't willing to pay even one investigator to review what happened so we can get the facts straight, begin to rebuild trust, and see if there's anything we should change in response? 

I disagree with this framing.

Something that I believe I got wrong pre-FTX was base rates/priors: I had assumed that if a company was making billions of dollars, had received investment from top-tier firms, complied with a bunch of regulations, etc. then the chance of serious misconduct was fairly low.

I have now spent a fair amount of time documenting that this is not true, in data sets of YCombinator companies and major philanthropists.

It's hard to measure this, but at least anecdotally some other people (including in "EA leadership" positions) tell me that they were updated by this work and think that they similarly had incorrect priors.

I think what you are calling an "investigation" is fine/good, but it is not the only way to "get the facts straight" or "see if there's anything we should change in response".

I've made a first attempt at this here: To what extent & how did EA indirectly contribute to financial crime - and what can be done now? One attempt at a review

I'd highlight that I found taking quite a structured approach helpful: breaking things down chronologically, and trying to answer specific questions like what's the mechanism, how much did this contribute, and what's a concrete recommendation?

"I’ll suggest a framework for how that broader review might be conducted: for each topic the review could:

• Establish the details of EA involvement, 
• Indicate a mechanism for how this could have indirectly contributed to the eventual financial crime, 
• Provide some assessment of to what extent that mechanism may have indirectly contributed, and 
• Provide a concrete recommendation for what the EA community could do differently to prevent any recurrence.

I’ll also provide some preliminary thoughts below, as an indication of what could be done in the full review. One way to approach a review is chronological, covering eight touchstone or 'gate' moments:

1. Bankman-Fried starts earning to give
2. Alameda founding 
3. FTX founding
4. Early political donations through Bankman-Fried’s family
5. FTX Foundation and Future Fund founding
6. Bankman-Fried becomes a public face of EA
7. Whistleblowing

This may be too exhaustive or “self-flagellating” for some, but I think it can identify areas to improve and fix. As will become clear, I think that step 5, the founding of the FTX Foundation and Future Fund, is where the biggest questions are raised and where I make the most recommendations."

To be fair, this could trigger lawsuits. I hope someone is reflecting on FTX, but I wouldn't expect anyone to be keen on discussing their own involvement with FTX publicly and in great detail.

but I want to wait to publicly discuss my thoughts on these issues until I have the capacity to do so thoroughly and thoughtfully, rather than attempt to respond on the fly

You did speak publicly about them, in a large newspaper nonetheless: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/28/sam-bankman-fried-effective-truism-fraud

To be clear, I think it's still fine to take some time, but it does seem like you made claims that the EA community has engaged in successful investigation and reflection here, and so saying that you want to hold off on engaging unless you can do so "thoroughly and thoughtfully" rings a bit hollow and sounds a bit like avoiding critical conversation while actively trying to spread beliefs this post calls into question (though again, I recognize you have a hard job and I don't want to be too nitpicky about this, but I do feel like the confluence of releasing an article in a major newspaper combined with saying you want to hold off publicly discussing these issues feels off).

My guess is the timing of Becca's post is related to your Washington Post article, though that's really just a random guess.

ICYMI: I wrote this in response to a previous "EA leaders knew stuff" story. [Although I'm not sure if I'm one of the "leaders" Becca is referring to, or if the signs I mentioned are what she's concerned about.]

Am I correct in interpreting your comment as something like "Rebecca says it's costly to say more which might imply she is sitting on not yet disclosed information that might put powerful EAs in a bad light"? I did not really pick up on this when reading the OP but your comment got me worried that maybe there is some information that should be made public?

For example, I again respect you said that your full thoughts would be 'highly costly' to share, but it'd be enlightening to know which members of the EV board you disagreed with so much that you felt you had to resign. 

At the time of Rebecca's resignation, how many members did the EVF USA board have? As of January 2023, the board was [Beckstead, Kagan, and Ross] with Beckstead recused from FTX-related matters for obvious reasons. In April, her resignation and the addition of Eli Rose & Zach Robinson were concurrently announced (although it is not clear if she decided to resign prior to these appointments to the board).

I felt the Sam Harris interview was disappointingly soft and superficial. To be fair to MacAskill, Harris did an unusually bad job of pushing back and taking a harder line, and so MacAskill wasn't forced to get deeper into it.

And basically nothing about how to avoid a similar situation happening again? Except for a few lines about decentralisation. Quite uninspiring.

It now turns out that this has changed into podcasts, which is better than nothing, but doesn't give room to conversation or accountability.

Formatting error; this is something Siebe is saying, not part of the Will quotation.

I think in any world, including ones where EA leadership is dropping the ball or is likely to cause more future harm like FTX, it would be very surprising if they individually had not updated substantially. 

As an extreme illustrative example, really just intended to get the intuition across, imagine that some substantial fraction of EA leaders are involved in large scale fraud and continue to plan to do so (which to be clear, I don't have any evidence of), then of course the individuals would update a lot on FTX, but probably on the dimensions of "here are the ways Sam got caught, here is what I really need to avoid doing to not get caught myself". 

It would be very surprising if a crisis like FTX would not cause at least moderately high scores on a question like the one you chart above. The key thing that I would want to see is evidence that the leadership has updated in a direction that will likely prevent future harm, and does not push people further into deceptive relationships with the world. 

The concrete list of changes below helps, though as far as I can tell practically none of them have actually been implemented (and the concrete numbers you cite for people who mention them seems quite low, given that 50+ people were at the coordination forum). 

Briefly going through them: 

Shore up governance, diversify funding sources, build more robust whistleblower systems, and have more decentralized systems in order to be less reliant on key organizations/people.

I don't think much of any funding diversification has occurred (though I do think achieving that is hard). There are no whistleblower systems in place at any major EA orgs as far as I know, and my sense is we are more reliant on a smaller number of people in leadership than we were before (as more people decided to step back due to the conflict and stress that leadership has implied over the past months).

Create crisis response teams, do crisis scenario planning, have playbooks for crisis communication, and empower leaders to coordinate crisis response.

I don't think any such crisis response teams or crisis scenario planning has been done, at least to my knowledge. I don't know what people mean by "crisis communication" though IMO it's clear that the issue with FTX was not one of EA comms, though if people mean "do investigations into bad things that have happened and communicate the results in a credible and verifiable manner" then I think it's clear nothing of that sort has occurred, neither for FTX, and it seems like we also rolled extremely low on crisis communication in the OpenAI board crisis.

Better vet risks from funders/leaders, have lower tolerance for bad behavior, and remove people responsible for the crisis from leadership roles.

I don't think any such removals have happened, and my sense is tolerance of bad behavior of the type that seems to me most responsible for FTX has gone up (in-particular heavy optimization for optics and large tolerance for divergences between public narratives and what is actually going on behind the scenes).

Invest more in communications for crises, improve early warning/information sharing, and platform diverse voices as EA representatives.

I don'.t think there are any initiatives for that kind of early information sharing. My sense is the rumor mill has gotten less functional instead of more, as the environment in which people act has become more adversarial, though it's not super clear. But it seems like there are no serious efforts in this space.

Adopt lower default trust, consult experts sooner, and avoid groupthink and overconfidence in leaders.

I think this has probably happened implicitly, which I do think is good. 

Recognize the effect of stress on behavior, and be aware of problems with unilateral action and the tendency not to solve collective action problems.

This one is kind of vague. I don't know of anything we've done that helps here, and I think the OpenAI board situation is at least one point of evidence that people in EA leadership still lack on this dimension.

Value integrity and humility, promote diverse virtues rather than specific people, and update strongly against naive consequentialism.

My sense is integrit, trying to make sure that your de-facto actions and professed virtues line up, that you are generally open and honest, and that you are willing to stand up for your beliefs, seems to overall have gotten a lot worse, as people have re-emphasized the importance of good PR and optics in the wake of FTX.

Naive consequentialist plans also seem to have increased since FTX, mostly as a result of shorter AI timelines and much more involvement of EA in the policy space. 

Overall, I don't think the coordination forum survey is much evidence about good things happening here, and the things that people did want to see have not seen much movement since the coordination forum. 

At the risk of over-emphasizing metrics, it seems that at least some of these reforms could and probably should be broken down into SMART goals (i.e., those that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).

Example: Better vet risks from funders/leaders might be broken down into sub-tasks like (1) Stratify roles and positions by risk level (critical, severe, moderate, etc.); (2) Determine priorities for implementation and the re-vetting schedule; (3) develop adjudication guidelines; (4) decide who investigates and adjudicates suitability; (5) set measurable and time-bound progress indicators (e.g., the holders of 75% of Critical Risk roles/positions have been investigated and adjudicated by the end of 2025).

[Note: The specific framework above borrows from the framework for security clearances and public-trust background checks in the US government. Obviously things in EA would need to be different, and the risks are different, so this is meant as an example rather than a specific proposal on this point. Yet, some of the core system needs would be at least somewhat similar.]

The post has a footnote, which reads:

Although EV conducted a narrow investigation, the scope was far more limited than what I’m describing here, primarily pertaining to EV’s legal exposure, and most results were not shared publicly.

As far as I know, what has been shared publicly from the investigation is that no one at EVF had actual knowledge of SBF's fraud.

Wasn't the OpenAI thing basically the opposite of the mistake with FTX though? With FTX people ignored what appears to have been a fair amount of evidence that a powerful, allegedly ethical businessperson was in fact shady. At OpenAI, people seem to have got (what they perceived as, but we've no strong evidence they were wrong) evidence, that a powerful, allegedly ethically motivated businessperson was in fact shady, so they learnt the lessons of FTX and tried to do something about it (and failed.)