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Notes -
That's a fairer critique of utilitarianism in general, and while a lot of both Sequence-era and modern rationalist thought has been focused on solving problems related to it (most famously Parfit's Hitchhiker, but it underlies the strict version of Newcomb's Problem and some related matters that aren't as obviously tied to honesty), there's a reasonable complaint that even if you're running off a 'better' decision theory, outside of thought experiments it's really hard to prove it.
And then there's the reasonable rejoinder that the same issues exist for other foundations of morality : there's no way to prove that a deontologist's virtue of honesty doesn't have an asterisk for 'unless under duress' or 'unless I really want otherwise' or some other exception.
If you're interested in that discussion, we can have it. I've actually got mixed feelings on a lot of it!
But this isn't particularly related to FTX, or to your misunderstanding of what locus of control means, et cetera, or even that in terms of being dismissed because it would never happen in practice, that We've Seen The Skulls here to the point where Yudkowsky spent (too much, imo) time and focus on it!
FTX isn't someone throwing people under the bus the second they think it might increase global (or even personal!) utility; they're garden-variety scammers who caught the car they were chasing, and then fell off at sixty miles an hour. They donated more to their personal funds than they did to outreach, and hell, they spent more on a concussionball stadium endorsement than any individual grant. And that's the numbers if they'd managed to hold onto the bumper another few months: as is, they're extremely likely to end up in jail, with their (claimed) cause discredited, and many of the individual charities they said they were going to donate to broken.
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