You may be familiar with Curtis Yarvin's idea that Covid is science's Chernobyl. Just as Chernobyl was Communism's Chernobyl, and Covid was science's Chernobyl, the FTX disaster is rationalism's Chernobyl.
The people at FTX were the best of the best, Ivy League graduates from academic families, yet free-thinking enough to see through the most egregious of the Cathedral's lies. Market natives, most of them met on Wall Street. Much has been made of the SBF-Effective Altruism connection, but these people have no doubt read the sequences too. FTX was a glimmer of hope in a doomed world, a place where the nerds were in charge and had the funding to do what had to be done, social desirability bias be damned.
They blew everything.
It will be said that "they weren't really EA," and you can point to precepts of effective altruism they violated, but by that standard no one is really EA. Everyone violates some of the precepts some of the time. These people were EA/rationalist to the core. They might not have been part of the Berkley polycules, but they sure tried to recreate them in Nassau. Here's CEO of Alameda Capital Caroline Ellison's Tumblr page, filled with rationalist shibboleths. She would have fit right in on The Motte.
That leaves the $10 billion dollar question: How did this happen? Perhaps they were intellectual frauds just as they were financial frauds, adopting the language and opinions of those who are truly intelligent. That would be the personally flattering option. It leaves open the possibility that if only someone actually smart were involved the whole catastrophe would have been avoided. But what if they really were smart? What if they are millennial versions of Ted Kaczynski, taking the maximum expected-value path towards acquiring the capital to do a pivotal act? If humanity's chances of survival really are best measured in log odds, maybe the FTX team are the only ones with their eyes on the prize?
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Notes -
I don't know if I'd say that exactly, but I do think it's one big red flag for the EA movement, where they do seriously need to sit down and reconsider what their goals and aims are, what they are doing to achieve those, and what their current slate of recommendations/deeds have been.
The first big red flag was trying to get involved in politics, with the Carrick Flynn election. Though the EA movement seems to have been on a trajectory over the past few years of moving away from their initial goals (e.g. "bednets save more lives, donate to bednets" persuasion) into "okay, now we have got so much money committed to this, there aren't enough [bednets or whatever] to spend it on, now what do we do?"
And that's a good question, but their answer seems to have been "start taking in one another's washing" - conferences where it's all net-working and 'how to get a job at an organisation running conferences about EA' and talking-shops, rather than the concrete "we bought 10,000 bednets last year and sent them on to So-and-So distribution centre".
EA has gotten big and influential, and this is the trap they fell into: becoming one of the same old political lobbying groups. Sam Bankman-Fried and his band of merry persons was a symptom of this, not a cause.
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