EA - Who's at fault for FTX's wrongdoing by EliezerYudkowsky

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: Who's at fault for FTX's wrongdoing, published by EliezerYudkowsky on November 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Caroline Ellison, co-CEO and later CEO of Alameda, had a now-deleted blog, "worldoptimization" on Tumblr. One does not usually post excerpts from deleted blogs - the Internet has, of course, saved it by now - but it looks like Caroline violated enough deontology to be less protected than usual in turn, and also I think it's important for people to see what signals are apparently not reliable signs of honesty and goodness.In a post on Oct 10 2022, Caroline Ellison crossposted her Goodreads review of The Golden Enclaves, book 3 of Scholomance by Naomi Novik. Caroline Ellison writes, including very light / abstract spoilers only:A pretty good conclusion to the series.Biggest pro was the resolution of mysteries/open questions from the first two books. It wrapped everything up in a way that felt very satisfying.Biggest con was . I think I felt less bought into the ethics of the story than I had for the previous two books?The first two books often have a vibe of “you can either do the thing that’s easy and safe or you can do the thing that’s hard and scary but right, and being a good person is doing the right thing.” And I’m super on board with that.Whereas if I had to sum up the moral message of the third book I might go with “there is no ethical consumption under late capitalism.”For someone like myself, this is a pretty shocking thing to hear somebody say, on a Tumblr blog not then associated with their main corporate persona, not in a way that sounds like the usual performativity, not like it's meant to impress anybody (because then you're probably not writing about anything as undignified as fantasy fiction in the first place). It sounds like - Caroline might have been under the impression, as late as Oct 10, that what she was doing at FTX was the thing that's hard and scary but right? That she was doing, even, what Naomi Novik would have told her to do?The Scholomance novels feature a protagonist, Galadriel Higgins, with unusually dark and scary powers, with a dark and scary prophecy about herself, trying to do the right thing anyways and being misinterpreted by her classmates, in an incredibly hostile environment.The line of causality seems clear - Naomi Novik, by telling her readers to do the right thing, probably contributed to Caroline Ellison doing what she thought was the right thing - misusing Alameda's customer deposits. Furthermore, the Scholomance novels romanticized people with dark and scary powers, and those people not just immediately killing themselves in the face of a prophecy that they'd do immense harm later, i.e., sending the message that it's okay for them to take huge risks with other people's interests.I expect this to be a very serious blow to Naomi Novik's reputation, possibly the reputation of fantasy fiction in general. The now-deleted Tumblr post is tantamount to a declaration that Caroline Ellison was doing this because she thought Naomi Novik told her to. We can infer that probably at least $30 of Scholomance sales are due to Caroline Ellison, and with the resources that Ellison commanded as co-CEO of Alameda, some unknown other fraction of Scholomance's entire revenues could have been due to phantom purchases that Ellison funded in order to channel customer deposits to her favorite author.My moral here? It can also be summed up in an old joke that goes as follows: "He has no right to make himself that small; he is not that great."The best summary of the FTX affair that I've read so is Milky Eggs's "What Happened at Alameda Research?" If you haven't read it already, and you're at all interested in this affair, I recommend that you go read it right now.Pieced together from various sources, including some alleged...