Rethink Priorities’ Leadership Statement on the FTX situation

Makes sense! I do think it makes some, though not a huge difference that it's specifying that it's just about FTX. I think it's of course a weaker statement, but I also don't really think it changes much of the basic argument (and I think it would be quite bad if we changed our ethical standards for behavior this much based on the context in which it was committed, e.g. to think it's OK for other people to lie to corrupt regimes, but not people at FTX).

I have discussed ethics with people in RP leadership probably a decent amount over the years (few other topics that come up as frequently in EA contexts), so I think b) is accurate, though there are no hard lines here, and I have talked very little to most of the leadership, so still seems good to clarify. 

For example I've talked a pretty decent amount with Ozzie over the years, including about honesty norms, and he is on the RP board (I think not fully clear whether you should count board members as part of leadership).

and does not refer to any broad condemnation for fraud or fraud-like activities relevant to hiding jews from nazis or cooperating with corrupt government regimes.

I do think FTX is pretty close to the top of the list where I can imagine them having run into having to interface with a bunch of corrupt government regimes. The Bahamian government really did not strike me as a very lawful and non-corrupt institution, and they had international operations in dozens of different countries,  often interfacing with areas of legal ambiguity where I expect corruption to come through more strongly than in other areas.

I of course still agree that saying "at FTX" limits the type of fraud that is being condemned to fraud that might have occurred at FTX, but I think we at the moment have such large uncertainty about what actually happened at FTX that I don't this actually rules out that many types of fraud (I do agree it rules out specifically lying to nazis, since there are no nazi governments during the period where FTX existed, though it might does not rule out lying e.g. to the Chinese government, which indeed might actually be quite likely to have occurred given that they were stationed in Hong Kong and strikes me in many ways as a highly analogous situation). 

Also, I just reread my top-level comment. It seems quite clear about the "at FTX" part? Like, there are like 4 paragraphs of examples and argument I give, all of which are pretty obviously set in the context of FTX. I still care about not being misunderstood, but I would currently be surprised if someone actually walked away thinking that the OP, or my comment, was not fully aware that the original statement said "at FTX".

I read the original comment not as an exhortation to always include lots of nuanced reflection in mostly-unrelated posts, but to have a norm that on the forum, the time and place to write sentences that you do not think are actually true as stated is "never (except maybe April Fools)".

The change I'd like to see in this post isn't a five-paragraph footnote on morality, just the replacement of a sentence that I don't think they actually believe with one they do. I think that environments where it is considered a faux pas to point out "actually, I don't think you can have a justified belief in the thing you said" are extremely corrosive to the epistemics of a community hosting those environments, and it's worth pushing back on them pretty strongly. 

There's a time and place to discuss exceptions to ethics and when goals might justify the means, but this post clearly isn't it.

Wait, if now isn't the time to be specific about what actions we actually condemn and what actual ethical lines to draw, when is it? Clearly one of the primary things that this post is trying to communicate is that Rethink condemns certain actions at FTX. It seems extremely important (and highly deceptive to do otherwise) to be accurate in what it condemns, and in what ways.

Like, let's look ahead a few months. Some lower-level FTX employee is accused of having committed some minor fraud with good ethical justification that actually looks reasonable according to RP leadership, so they make a statement coming out in defense of that person. 

Do you not expect this to create strong feelings of betrayal in previous readers of this post, and a strong feeling of having been lied to? Many people right now are looking for reassurance about where the actual ethical lines are that EA is drawing. Trying to reassure those people seems like one of the primary goals of this post. 

But this post appears to me be basically deceptive about where those lines are, or massively premature in its conviction on where to make commitments for the future (like, I think it would both have quite bad consequences to defend an individual who had committed ethically justifiable fraud, and also a mistake to later on condemn that individual because I guess RP has now committed to a stance of being against all fraud, independently of its circumstances, with this post written as is). 

I think one of the primary functions of this post is to reassure readers about what kind of behavior we consider acceptable and what kind of behavior we do not consider acceptable. Being inaccurate or deceptive about that line is a big deal. I think indeed being accurate about those lines is probably the most important component of posts like this, and the component that will have the longest-ranging consequences.

There is of-course an easy way out, which is to just express uncertainty in where the ethical lines are, or to just not make extremely strong statements about where the lines are in the first place that you don't believe. I think we are still learning about what happened. Holden's post and ARC's posts for example do not strike me as overstepping what they believe or know. 

There's a time and place to discuss exceptions to ethics and when goals might justify the means, but this post clearly isn't it.

Other folks in this comment thread mentioned that Ollie's request doesn't require any long philosophical analyses; it just requires leaving out sentences that are hyperbole.

I want to separately bid for a norm on the EA Forum that we err on the side of "encouraging factual discussion at awkward times and in awkward places", as opposed to erring on the  side of "people wait around for a maximally clear social sign al that it's Okay to voice their thoughts". If a post like this belongs on the EA Forum at all, then I think it should be fine to do our normal EA-Forum thing of  nitpicking phrasings, asking follow-up questions, etc.

It's RP giving an update/statement that's legally robust

I don't think that in this case, saying false things improves RP's legal situation. I'd assume the goal is reputational (send the right social signals to EAs and random-journalists-and-social-media-users-paying-attention-to-EA), as opposed to legal.

But yes, there might be legal reasons to leave out the sentence altogether, if the alternative is to try to hammer out a much more concrete and detailed version of the sentence? Also, this is a co-written post, and it can be hard to phrase those in ways that are agreeable to every co-author.

Sorry, I think the key thing to evaluate is the counterfactual (like, I can say "I have a dispreference for food like this", which means I would prefer other food more, while also not thinking it's worth cooking completely new food, and would definitely prefer it over no food at all). 

I think the post is net-positive compared to no post at all from Rethink, and I think the information is helpful. 

I think it's easy to improve the post by a lot by being more careful with words. I also separately think (even outside of situations like this, but even more so in this situation) that large co-authored "statements" have pretty broad distortionary effects and I think often say things that nobody really believes (by introducing a new, not clearly defined, "we"), and I have a longer-running policy to encourage people to use more "I" statements, so I do think there is a decently large negative component here.

I feel confused here. Why would you use the word "unequivocally" to mean "still maybe some exceptions", that's like, almost literally the opposite of what it means? 

I agree that this is still how many people would use the word, but I think the reason why this happens is not because people aren't thinking carefully, it's because when you use the word "unequivocally", without actually meaning "unequivocally", there is a rhetorical trick that gives your words more weight, and makes you seem like you have conviction, in a way that tricks many readers into giving you credit for your conviction, even if they would on-reflection also think you likely don't mean it.

I also separately think that within EA, especially for ethical statements where a lot of EAs claimed expertise lies, I think it's just really valuable to be precise with the words you use. A lot of what makes EA valuable for me is in exactly that kind of reasoning (a place to actually think carefully about when it's correct to lie, instead of trying to oversimplify the rules of ethics into a something that doesn't actually end up having to do much with my daily decision making). 

Separately, I also think the risk of using imprecise language when condemning something, or threatening substantial social censure, is greatly magnified. I think being polemic here creates much worse group dynamics than for most other forms of speech, and there are just too many instances of people (including within EA) indeed taking things like this seriously and then engaging in substantial misguided censure on the basis of this (or even worse, use the conviction as an excuse to attack their political enemies, but fall back on "well, we didn't mean that literally" when it affects their allies).

Seems kind of crazy to me, for what it's worth. Really seems like if someone's life was at stake, that you should do something else than just "not tolerate it". 

Like, we do live in a world where our grandparents (or parents) were sometimes faced with the real decision on whether to lie to gestapo officers about the jews in their basement. Please, if you are an accountant and you have to do some slight tweaking of numbers to save the jews in your basement, please do that. This is not a pure hypothetical, misappropriating funds under immoral and illegal regimes is an actual decision that people alive right now, and people in the future will face. 

Maybe it is the right call for you to swear some undying oath to the accounting principles, but I don't think most people should do that.

It is very weird that this comment got downvoted so much even though that this was my experience in the business world. I'm getting the impression that many do not understand fraud and that is why it keeps on repeating like a pattern that affects so many people negatively. 

I would appreciate proper criticisms so I can explain further why fraud is unacceptable at all levels especially in organizational or business setting.

I think it's pretty straightforward. I think some of the other announcements got this right. An alternative would be: 

As far as I can tell a substantial fraction of the behavior that was going on at FTX was highly unethical and I condemn it in some of the strongest terms that I can think of. It currently looks like billions of dollars of customer deposits were misappropriated, in direct violation of FTX's terms of service and public statements by FTX and Sam Bankman Fried. This was a gross violation of trust and looks likely to be a straightforward example of extremely large-scale financial fraud, possibly the biggest case of financial fraud since Enron.

This is a tragedy, and I think FTX has caused great harm for the world. I am saddened to hear about the harm to many of FTX's depositors, investors and grant-recipients and am worried that I myself have contributed some to this harm by lending FTX indirectly some of my reputation, and I am reflecting deeply on how I should learn from this situation. 

Or alternatively just a minimally edited version of the OP's sentence: 

We strongly condemn the misuse of customer funds and trust that occurred at FTX.

But a good question is how do you tackle something that is hard earned truths?

Like utopian visions ending up to corrupt all of its founders and the people who believed in it (communism in Russia, China or Cambodia)? Are we always going to leave open ends and keep inquiring even if we have basically tried to repeat the same errors that even have caused massive hurt, deaths and suffering as a civilization? 

I see a trend now in fraud that we just as a society is very vulnerable to it - is it really to complex for us? or is it a but that we have in our cognitive ability and only few can understand significant effects of small deceptive actions that aggregates like snowballs growing to avalanches of suffering?

I would appreciate your comment on this Habryka. Thank you.

Thank you, Peter, there seems to be promising hope for longtermism from RP.
It's unfortunate that due to this collapse, longtermism projects have been affected majorly and I worry that the damage from FTX may cause additional neglectedness or potential skepticism in future funding from interested parties. My speculation is that a large group of orgs will likely to pause funding on longtermism and focus more on how to strategically build credibility and trust in order to raise more support from external funders, at least for the upcoming 6 months.