Noting an unsubstantiated communal belief about the FTX disaster

From what I've heard, SBF was controlling, and fucked over his initial (EA) investors as best he could without sabotaging his company, and fucked over parts of the Alameda founding team that wouldn't submit to him. This isn't very "EA" by the usual lights.

SBF seems to have successfully come across as a much friendlier and trustworthy player than he actually is, in large part thanks to EA, and a propensity to be thankful for another large funder showing up.

I'm not sure why that should be the default hypothesis. Do you have specific information about them in particular or is that based on general psychology? Power corrupts is a common saying but how strong is the effect really? I'd like to see more evidence of that.

I don't think this changes anything. It's still possible for someone with EA motivations to have dark triad traits, so I wouldn't say "he was motivated by EA principles" implies that the same thing could've happened to almost anyone with EA principles. (What probably could've happened to more EAs is being complicit in the inner circle as lieutenants.)

"Feeling good about being a hero" is a motivation that people with dark triad traits can have just like anyone else. (The same goes for being deeply interested and obsessed with certain intellectual pursuits, like moral philosophy or applying utilitarianism to your life.) Let's assume someone has a dark triad personality. I model people like that as the same as a more neurotypical person except that they: 

• Feel the same way I feel about people I find annoying and unsympathetic about 99.9-100% of people.
• Don't have any system-1 fear of bad consequences. Don't have any worries related to things like guilt or shame (or maybe do have issues around shame but it expresses itself more in externalizing negative emotions like jealousy, spite).
• Find it uncannily easy to move on from close relationships or shut empathy on and off at will as circumstances change regarding what's advantageous for them (if they ever form closer connections in the first place).

There are more factors that are different, but with some of the factors you wonder if they're just consequences of the above. For instance, being power-hungry: if you can't find meaning in close relationships, what else is there to do? Or habitual lying: if you find nearly everyone unsympathetic and annoying and you don't experience the emotion of guilt, you probably find it easier (and more pleasant) to lie.

In short, I think people with dark triad traits lack a bunch of prosocial system-1 stuff, but they can totally aim to pursue system-2 goals like "wanting to be a hero" like anyone else. 

(Maybe this is obvious, but sometimes I hear people say "I can't imagine that he isn't serious about EA" as though it makes other things about someone's character impossible, which is not true.) 

For me, having listened to the guy talk is even stronger evidence since I think I'd notice it if he was lying, but that's obviously not verifiable.

Going to quote from Astrid Wilde here (original source linked in post):

i felt this way about someone once too. in 2015 that person kidnapped me, trafficked me, and blackmailed me out of my life savings at the time of ~$45,000. i spent the next 3 years homeless.

sociopathic charisma is something i never would have believed in if i hadn't experienced it first hand. but there really are people out there who spend their entire lives honing their social intelligence to gain wealth, power, and status.

most of them just don't have enough smart but naive people around them to fake competency and reputation launder at scale. EA was the perfect political philosophy and community for this to scale....

I would really very strongly recommend not updating on an intuitive feeling of "I can trust this guy," considering that in the counterfactual case (where you could not in fact, trust the guy), you would be equally likely to have that exact feeling!

As for SBF being vegan as evidence, see my reply to you on the EA forum. [EA(p) · GW(p)]

How do you know he is vegan? A sociopath would have no problem eating vegan in public and privately eating meat in order to keep a narrative.

I once saw a picture on twitter claiming to disprove him being vegan, by showing him standing in front of his fridge where there were eggs visible in the fridge in the background. The veganism might be a lie.

Edit: here it is: https://twitter.com/SilverBulletBTC/status/1591403692246589444/photo/1

This is basically a Quirrell moment in real life; a massive proportion of people on LW are deferring their entire worldview to obvious supervillains.

Who are the obvious supervillains that they're deferring their entire worldview to? And who's deferring to them?

He's not saying LessWrong is vulnerable to it, he's saying it's just what people outside of LessWrong are going to believe. He's explicitly mentioning it so as to not necessarily take it at face value.

His 80000 interview suggests that he thought the chance of FTX blowing up is something between 1% and 10%. There he gives 50% odds for making more than 50 billion dollars that can be donated to EA causes.

If someone is saying that his action was negative in expectation, do they mean, that Sam Bankman-Fried lied about his expectations? Do they mean that a 10% chance of this happening should have been enough to tilt the expectation to be negative under the ethical assumptions of longtermism that puts most of the utility that's produced in the far future? Are you saying something else?

I wish I had any sort of trustworthy stats about the success rate of things in the reference class of steal from one pool of money in order to cover up losses in another pool of money, in the hope of making (and winning) big bets in the second pool of money to eventually make the first pool of money whole. I would expect the success rate to be very low (I would be extremely surprised if it were as high as 10%, somewhat surprised if it were as high as 1%), but it's also the sort of thing where if you do it successfully, probably nobody finds out.

Do Ponzi schemes ever become solvent again? What about insolvent businesses that are hiding their insolvency?

If you believe that each future person is as valuable as each present person and there will be 10^100 people in the future lightcone, the amount of people that were hurt by FTX blowing up is a rounding error.

But you have to count the effect of the indirect harms on the future lightcone too. There's a longtermist argument that SBF's (alleged and currently very likely) crimes plausibly did more harm than all the wars and pandemics in history if...

• Governments are now 10% less likely to cooperate with EAs on AI safety
• The next 2 EA mega-donors decide to pass on EA
• (Had he not been caught:) The EA movement drifted towards fraud and corruption
• etc.

I think approximately no one audits people's books before accepting money from them. It's one thing to refuse to accept money from a known criminal (or other type of undesirable), but if you insist that the people giving you money prove that they obtained it honestly, then they'll simply give that money to someone else instead.

I am still super confused why there was apparently no due diligence by the EA leadership, assuming there is such a thing. At least Enron and MtGoX had no one to oversee them.

Enron was overseen by Arthur Andersen and audited by them.

EA leadership did not have a good way to audit FTX to find out that they have owned user funds to Almeda. 

Arthur Andersen, who's a team of professional analysts who actually has access to the books, seems to me a lot more guilty for failing oversight than people at CEA or other EA orgs. 

One would think—unfortunately we humans are really bad at judging our own ability to judge the trustworthiness of other people, even when we know about said bais. If you hire a friend or trusted community leader to do a high-stakes job, many people won't even bother with an NDA, let alone do any formal investigation into their honesty! Hopefully this will serve as a lesson that won't have to be repeated...