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suy  2yr ago (astralcodexten.substack.com)   Edited 2yr ago   4226 thread views

Scott Alexander on Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX and Effective Altruism

astralcodexten.substack.com

I made this a top level post because I think people here might want to discuss it but you can remove it if it doesn't meet your standards.

Edit: removed my opinion of Scott from the body

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I'm going to repost my comment from this:

If you think you’re better at it than all the VCs, billionaires, and traders who trusted FTX - and better than all the competitors and hostile media outlets who tried to attack FTX on unrelated things while missing the actual disaster lurking below the surface - then please start a company, make $10 billion, and donate it to the victims of the last group of EAs who thought they were better at finance than everyone else in the world. Otherwise, please chill.

Is Scott serious about this? This is like "you're not President! How dare you criticize the President?" Or like those Mormons on Usenet who told me that it doesn't matter that Mormons hide their secret ceremonies because if I wanted to know about them I could always spend a couple of years being a Mormon. (Which incidentally would also mean I could get punished for criticizing them, which defeats the whole purpose of wanting to know about them.)

"You must become a billionaire yourself or you have no right to criticize a billionaire" is an awful, awful, take and as a poisoning the well fallacy is symptomatic of the problems that got you guys into this mess in the first place. (And even when X is easier to do than becoming a billionaire, "you must do X or you don't get to criticize X" is an awful take. I probably could become a Mormon, but I shouldn't have to in order to say there's something I don't like about Mormonism.)

I think it's more like pointing out that there's no particular reason the EA charities should have been able to spot a fraud when the fraud went unspotted by a huge number of highly motivated traders whose job is, in part, to spot that sort of thing (so that they can either avoid it or make trades based around its existence).

I think that his point is not "you aren't allowed to criticize a billionaire unless you are a billionaire" but "you aren't allowed to criticize people swindled by a scammer when there's some billionaires swindled by them unless you are a billionaire".

Saying "you could have known ahead of time" implicitly criticizes the billionaires who were swindled and didn't know ahead of time, so the latter ends up being a special case of the former.

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