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Quantumfreakonomics  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   5509 thread views

FTX is Rationalism's Chernobyl

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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  1. A giant crypto platform has collapsed

  2. Lots of the people involved were prominent figures in EA

  3. EA is popular among rationalists, or postrationalists, or neorerationalists, or whatever

Therefore...

  1. "Altruism Ineffective, Rationalism Wounded"?

I don't buy it. As much as we like to talk/praise/complain about EA, it's not synonymous with this community. Not to justify that guilt-by-association. How many people here actually gave financial support to anything EA? How about FTX? I'd never actually heard of it before this, despite hanging out in these spaces since 2014, because I don't want to mess around with crypto.

FTX was a glimmer of hope in a doomed world

Uh...sure. My read is that you're overvaluing EA to the rationalists as well as FTX to EA.

EA obviously deserves some egg on its face, especially outlets which were evangelizing for SBF (like @TheDag's Sequoia article). Is this supposed to be so surprising as to sour people on the idea? "Breaking news: Silicon Valley company commits financial crimes!"

This is akin to seeing Nixon go down and posting "haha conservatism sure is discredited. Perhaps they were moral frauds just as they were political ones?"

How many people here actually gave financial support to anything EA?

For what it's worth, I selected AMF as my charity of choice on Amazon Smile. My original choice was charity:water, which TotalBiscuit once did some fundraising for, IIRC.

Yeah, this is much more a problem with crypto than it is anything involving EA or Rationalism.

I'll say it again, as it stands right now, it's a Ponzi scheme, more or less, hoping that eventually something will be mainstreamed into broad, basically universal usage. I'm not saying that as a moral criticism, FWIW, I'm sure the people who engage in it believe that some day it'll actually get there. But until that day, it really is just a house of cards waiting to collapse.

EA obviously deserves some egg on its face, especially outlets which were evangelizing for SBF (like @TheDag's Sequoia article).

Sequoia Capital is an ordinary venture capital firm with zero relation to EA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_Capital

As I mentioned in response to his post, a search of the EA forum and Lesswrong doesn't find any evangelizing for SBF or FTX. He got occasionally discussed as a major EA donor and EA-supporting billionaire, and that's pretty much it.

From what I've heard, senior figures in EA (Will MacAskill etc) knew him well for years, associated with him, and promoted him as a big success of EA.

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