EA - Thoughts on EA, post-FTX by RyanCarey

Welcome 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: Thoughts on EA, post-FTX, published by RyanCarey on September 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.IntroductionThis is a draft that I largely wrote back in Feb 2023, how the future of EA should look, after the implosion of FTX.I. What scandals have happened and why?1.There are several reasons that EA might be expected to do harm and have scandals:a) Bad actors. Some EAs will take harmful actions with a callous disregard for others. (Some EAs have psychopathic tendencies, and it is worth noting that that utilitarian intuitions correlate with psychopathy.)b) Naivete. Many EAs are not socially competent, or streetsmart, enough to be able to detect the bad actors. Rates of autism are high in EA, but there are also more general hypotheses. Social movements may in-general by susceptible to misbehaviour, due to young members having an elevated sense of importance, or being generally impressionable. See David Chapman on "geeks, mops and sociopaths" for other hypotheses.c) Ideological aspects. Some ideas held by many EAs - whether right or wrong, and implied by EA philosophy or not - encourage risky behaviour. We could call these ideas risky beneficentrism (RB), and they include:i. High risk appetite.ii. Scope sensitivityiii. Unilateralismiv. Permission to violate societal norms. Violating or reshaping an inherited morality or other "received wisdom" for the greater good.iv. Other naive consequentialism. Disregard of other second-order effectsThere are also hypotheses that mix or augment these categories: EAs might be more vulnerable to generally psychopathic behaviour due to that kind of decision-making appearing superficially similar to consequentialist decision-making2.All of (a-c) featured in the FTX saga. SBF was psychopathic, and his behaviour included all five of these dimensions of risky beneficentrism. The FTX founders weren't correctly following the values of the EA community, but much of what would be warning signs to others (gambling-adjacency, the Bahamas, lax governance) weren't to us pursuing a risky, scope-sensitive, convention-breaking, altruistic endeavour. And we outside EAs, perhaps due to ambition and naivete, supported these activities.3.Other EA scandals, similarly, often involve multiple of these elements:[Person #1]: past sexual harassment issues, later reputation management including Wiki warring and misleading histories. (norm-violation, naive conseq.)[Person #2]: sexual harassment (norm-violation? naive conseq?)[Person #3] [Person #4] [Person #5]: three more instances of crypto crimes (scope sensitivity? Norm-violation, naive conseq.? naivete?)Intentional Insights: aggressive PR campaigns (norm-violation, naive conseq., naivete?)Leverage Research, including partial takeover of CEA (risk appetite, norm-violation, naive conseq, unilateralism, naivete)(We've seen major examples of sexual misbehaviour and crypto crimes in the rationalist community too.)EA documents have tried to discourage RB, but this now seems harder than we thought. Maybe promoting EA inevitably leads to significant amounts of harmful RB.4.People have a variety of reasons to be less excited about growing EA:EA contributed to a vast financial fraud, through its:People. SBF was the best-known EA, and one of the earliest 1%. FTX's leadership was mostly EAs. FTXFF was overwhelmingly run by EAs, including EA's main leader, and another intellectual leader of EA.Resources. FTX had some EA staff and was funded by EA investors.PR. SBF's EA-oriented philosophy on giving, and purported frugality served as cover for his unethical nature.Ideology. SBF apparently had an RB ideology, as a risk-neutral act-utilitarian, who argued a decade ago why stealing was not in-principle wrong, on Felicifia. In my view, his ideology, at least as he professed it, could best b...