EA - My takes on the FTX situation will (mostly) be cold, not hot by Holden Karnofsky

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My takes on the FTX situation will (mostly) be cold, not hot, published by Holden Karnofsky on November 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The FTX situation is raising a lot of good questions. Could this have been prevented? What warning signs were there, and did people act on them as much as they should have? What steps could be taken to lower the odds of a similar situation in the future?I want to think hard about questions like these, and I want to have a good (and public) discussion about them. But I don’t want to rush to make sure that happens as fast as possible. (I will continue to communicate things that seem directly and time-sensitively action-relevant; what I don’t want to rush is reflection on what went wrong and what we can learn.)The overarching reason for this is that I think discussion will be better - more thoughtful, more honest, more productive - to the extent that it happens after the dust has settled a bit. (I’m guessing this will be some number of weeks or months, as opposed to days or years.)I’m hearing calls from various members of the community to discuss all these issues quickly, and concerns (from people who’d rather not move so quickly) that engaging too slowly could risk losing the trust of the community. As a sort of compromise, I’m rushing out this post on why I disprefer rushing.1My guess is that a number of other people have similar thoughts to mine on this point, but I’ll speak only for myself.I expect some people to read this as implicitly suggesting that others behave as I do. That’s mostly not right, so I’ll be explicit about my goals. My primary goal is just to explain my own behavior. My secondary goal is to make it easier to understand why some others might be behaving as I am. My third goal is to put some considerations out there that might change some other people’s minds somewhat about what they want to do; but I don’t expect or want everyone to make the same calls I’m making (actually it would be very weird if the EA Forum were quiet right now; that’s not something I wish for).So, reasons why I mostly expect to stick to cold takes (weeks or months from now) rather than hot takes (days):I think cold takes will be more intelligent and thoughtful. In general, I find that I have better thoughts on anything after I have a while to process it. In the immediate aftermath of new information, I have tons of quick reactions that tend not to hold up well; they’re often emotion-driven, often overcorrections to what I thought before and overreactions to what others are saying, etc.Waiting also tends to mean I get to take in a lot more information, and angles from other people, that can affect my thinking. (This is especially the case with other people being so into hot takes!)It also tends to give me more space for minimal-trust thinking. If I want to form the most accurate possible belief in the heat of the moment, I tend to look to people who have thought more about the matter than I have, and think about which of them I want to bet on and defer to. But if I have more time, I can develop my own models and come to the point where I can personally stand behind my opinions. (In general I’ve been slower than some to adopt ideas like the most important century hypothesis, but I also think I have more detailed understanding and more gut-level seriousness about such ideas than I would’ve if I’d adopted them more quickly and switched from “explore” to “exploit” mode earlier.)These factors seem especially important for topics like “What went wrong here and what can we learn for the future?” It’s easy to learn the wrong lessons from a new development, and I think the extra info and thought is likely to really pay off.I think cold takes will pose less risk of doing harm. Right now there is a lot of interest in the FTX situation,...