Charges against BitMEX and cofounders

Justifying potentially bad stuff with "the stakes of the work EA does" feels like a slippery slope and a bit fanatic.  There should be principled reasons that holds true for all charities, the cost-benefit approach you use the second part of your comment is better. Related: this thread on whether it's okay to work in the Tobacco industry.

Some other reasons I am uncomfortable with rejecting donations on such a basis:

• It seems inconsistent with the less-punitive approach to crime that EA orgs like Open Phil are supporting
• I don't think what Delo did, even assuming he is guilty, is morally worse than many behaviors that are (properly) tolerated among EAs, like a lifetime of eating factory-farmed meat

As an addendum of2) and  4), FWIW, on the object-level I'm not particularly convinced that Ben Delo has acted particularly immorally (though I have not looked in detail at the allegations). 

If we were to conflate morality with legality, we would also believe that eg anti-animal agriculture activists are evil terrorists, and that open science is similarly evil. Moreover, since there is not a particularly strong principled reason to privilege US/UK law as moral guidance over the laws of other countries, we should take seriously the possibility that we should revise our views based on the legal doctrines of other countries, which may have some counter-intuitive results.

(3) is a bit more complex, but would also be solved with anonymization.

Anonymization would probably solve (3), but would, unfortunately, likely create PR risks of its own. Lawrence Lessig made a similar argument a while ago:

Everyone seems to treat it as if the anonymity and secrecy around Epstein’s gift are a measure of some kind of moral failing. I see it as exactly the opposite. IF you are going to take type 3 money, then you should only take it anonymously.

Unfortunately, from what I can remember, public response to this argument was overwhelmingly negative, and The New York times (yes, that newspaper) published a story whose headline portrayed Lessig in a very bad light (Lessig subsequently filed a defamation lawsuit against the Times, which he withdrew after the headline was amended four months later). I personally would not have anticipated such a response, since the argument seems pretty reasonable to me, and I wonder if EAs as a whole may be apt to underestimate certain PR risks simply because they rely on their own subjective sense of the merits of the relevant arguments to predict how the broader public and the media will react to them.

Following up on this: I had a conversation that updated me to believe that CEA is doing the right thing here. Unfortunately I can't disclose much about that conversation, but I am posting this here for accountability.

My very quick take:

• I think you make a couple of good points, and overall I updated a fair bit into the direction of "accepting functionally anonymous donations is ~always OK, even if you know the money has morally questionable origin".
• I'm still not fully convinced, and suspect there are realistic cases where at least initially I'd be fairly strongly opposed to taking such donations.
• I'm not sure if I can fully justify my intuition / if the things I'm going to say are actually its main drivers, but at first glance I see two reasons to be hesitant:
  • I'd guess that in practice it can be very hard to implement the level of anonymity you suggest. E.g. relationships to large donors in practice are often handled by senior staff who do have influence over the org's strategic direction.
    • This is partly due to common (actual or perceived) donor preferences.
    • But it also makes sense from the org's perspective: e.g. knowing the details about the relationships to large donors is fairly relevant when doing risk management. But for a holistic risk management you also need to look at other information that's quite dispersed throughout the org; certainly org leadership needs to be involved. So the org has an incentive that might preclude setting up the kind of "firewalls" you advocate - and when they are in place, there will be incentives to subvert them, which seems like a bad/risky setup.
  • I think that outside perceptions are a quite significant obstacle, for reasons that go beyond "PR risks" in a narrow sense. My sense is that the stakes in the arena of "moral/political signaling" are quite high for many actors, in particular if you rely a lot on informal cooperation based on perceptions of hard-to-verify shared interests. And whom you take money from will often be quite significant in that arena.
    • One issue here is that the level of anonymization / protection from adverse incentives you advocate will often be hard to verify from the outside.
      • If I know that charity X has received a substantial donation from Y, my prior will be that Y has significant influence over X. In typical cases, it would be quite costly (in terms of time, but potentially also inside/sensitive information that would need to be shared) to convince me that this is not the case.
    • Another significant issue is a kind of "contagion" due to higher-order social reasoning: Suppose I know that charity X has received a substantial donation from Y. Suppose further that I know that X's relationship to Z is relevant for X's ability to achieve its mission (think e.g. X = MyAISafetyOrg, Z = DeepMind). Even if I'm personally not that concerned about accepting donations from Y, I might still be concerned that X made a bad move if I think that Z would disapprove of getting funded by Y. "Bad move" here might refer to a narrow sense of competence, but also again to "moral"/influence issues: if it seems to me that X is willing to accept the cost that most others are going to worry if Y has influence over X, this makes it seem more likely that Y in fact has influence over X.
    • Consider also that if it would be costly for X to publicly acknowledge it accepted a donation from Y, then in virtue of this very fact accepting an anonymous donation from Y gives Y influence/leverage over X (because Y can threaten to disclose their donation).
    • My impression is that related concepts like "virtue signalling" are often discussed in a derogatory fashion in the EA sphere. I'd like to therefore add that when I said "moral/political signalling" I'm not thinking of arguably excessive/pathological cases from, say, highly public party politics as central examples. I'm more thinking of the reasons why "integrity" (and, for philosophers, Strawsonian "reactive attitudes") is a thing / an everyday concept, and of credibility/"improving one's bargaining position".
      • (Similarly, note that "follow the money" is a common heuristics.)

Someone pointed out to me that money laundering prevention due diligence could be another reason, especially for conditional grants or organizations like CEA that regrant.

Is the idea that such controls, had they been implemented in the past, would have prevented you from accepting Delo's donations? 

Also, I am curious to see CEA's cost-benefit analysis behind this decision. Naively this seems like incurring a cost (staff time, consultant fees, lawyer fees, annoy donors) in order to reduce a benefit (donations). Based on my cursory research (talking to a lawyer and reading this) I couldn't work out if this was actually legally required given CEA's situation, though it does seem to be reasonably common.

I don’t want this all to read as commentary on Delo or BitMEX specifically. 

Well you did announce the policy change as a comment on an article about Delo!

EA has long included the idea that some ways of making money could create net negative impact even if you donate your earnings, for example 80,000 Hours’ post on Why you should avoid harmful jobs even if you’ll do more good.

I think (?) I may have pointed this out previously, but there are some significant issues with this article. For example, it suggests a $42,000 average social cost of jobs in finance:

We also made a rough estimate of the damage caused by jobs in the financial sector that increase the chance of a financial crisis, and found a figure of $42,000 per year.

...

First, the estimates are highly uncertain, and only apply to finance jobs on average. If you picked the most harmful jobs in finance, they could be much worse.

But if you follow the source link, you can see that this estimate is actually for only the 10% most harmful jobs:

The US financial sector employs some 6,000,000 people. I am going to guess that the share of people that are involved in activities that could predictably increase systemic financial risk is around 10%. ... 

That would suggest through financial instability each of these 600,000 people lowered other people’s income in the US by $42,000 on average, for each year they worked.

So the average harm is 10x less, i.e. $4,200.

Even then, I think this is quite a poor estimate. It relies on ascribing all the expected costs of financial crisis to financial workers. However, a huge deal of the responsibility should surely be borne by other actors. Depending on your views of the causes of the crisis, some collection of these groups are quite responsible:

• Politicians who passed regulations like the community reinvestment act.
• Regulators who focused on solvency over liquidity.
• The Federal Reserve for excessively tight monetary policy.
• Individual borrowers who knowingly mis-stated their ability to repay.
• Investors in ABS CLOs or Prime MMFs who did not do their due diligence.
• Academics who over-emphasised normal distributions and ignored skew/kurtosis.

Furthermore, it does not assign any monetary value to the positive aspects of finance, even though these are probably very large:

• Banks allow people to save money without being afraid it will be stolen by burglars.
• Credit card networks allow us to purchase things without needing to carry cash.
• Paypal allows us to buy things from merchants who are not physically nearby.
• The stock market provides signals to investors about where would be useful to invest their money.
• Companies can raise money in order to grow much more quickly than they would otherwise.
• The bond market allows governments to borrow money to finance additional spending during recessions and pandemics.
• (etc.)

Similarly, the article suggests that being a Tobacco CEO is unacceptable, linking to this analysis. However, I think the fermi calculation involved in this estimate was quite far off, as I explained here:

However, I think that while 80,000 Hours substantially improved on the analysis in the original paper, they omit a number of factors. Unfortunately, almost all of these factors seem to pull in the same direction, causing them to over-estimate the amount of harm done by a tobacco CEO. These include both over-estimating the direct harm done and under-estimating the benefits donating your income would cause.

At the time  Rob suggested he would think more on the issue, but to my knowledge the analysis was never updated.