This is so common that short sellers like Kyle Bass actually look for it as an additional red flag when hunting down fraudulent companies.

I don’t know if it was started in earnest or if there was some ulterior motive.

I don't think that's right. In his head, it wasn't fraud. He was moving money around to backstop losses, sure, and OK, technically it wasn't his. But it was all going to be OK in the end and no one would know. No one was going to lose any money, so no fraud. QED.

In the real world, criminals don't think they're criminals. Everyone's got a good reason for doing what they do.

1) SBF is an crook

2) SBF is an idiot

Its debatable whether the EA stuff was rationalisation of those impulses or reputation laundering, but he was quite explicit about the fact that his idea of "saving humanity" involved making massive financial bets whilst dismissing the idea of hedging against the downsides even in fawning interviews published by VCs that had invested in him. In that respect, his public image was entirely in keeping with the sort of person that wouldn't be bothered by a few regulations about customer funds, because what if he could double them by ignoring the regulation?...

That's pretty easy, actually. He seems to see himself as some kind of Robin Hood-esque figure, taking money from the rich and distributing it to the poor (or, more specifically, distributing the money of the rich to the places where its most effective).

The argument is about whether EA naturally leads to this "the ends superseed the means"-type of actions, which is what the article argues.

But, of course, what he didn't do was get the consent of his depositors to have their deposits rerouted and gambled with in the way that he did. Even if he had been right, if he had been able to ride the wave and cryptocurrency became everything he thought it could be - his actions were legally found to be fraudulent.

In terms of a broader pattern with regards to consent and power dynamics, there's another inescapable data point of the EA movement's problems with internally handling sexual harassment allegations - I won't link to the time.com article on the EA movement, as it horrifyingly orientalizes and conflates polyamory with harassment, but assuming that the article's quotes from primary sources are accurate, it suggests a culture of protection for those who would abuse their power.

I think that the EA community needs to grapple with the notion that just because one believes a certain pathway to be optimal, it does not absolve them of the need to gather explicit consent, given freely, with information discrepancies and power dynamics taken into account, from those who would be impacted. Optimization under constraints can still be optimization, and people's freedom to choose the extent to which they participate is the most important constraint of all.

I mean, Caroline Ellison herself is the one who said her relationship goals (which was to a large degree coterminus with company structure) was "best characterized as something like 'imperial Chinese harem'" no? It's not Time "orientalizing", it's one particular fucked up polycule.

Polyamory takes on a distinctly awful flavor when imported into EA (and before that Rationalist, which I would assume is where it reached EA from) communities. I would assume abuse and codependence before healthy relationships in these cases, because frankly I see 99% of this movement is at best emotionally immature.

I also think this is really a non-issue, millennials and later mostly don't care at all and the people who don't like them aren't going to be convinced by anything ever, let alone some more carefully-crafted magazine article.

And I doubt the idea that they were all liars that never believed in what they preached would withstand scrutiny.

Suppose, your ethics are unworkable or irrational and you are unwilling to question them. If you think about it, by necessity, you must become more amoral as time goes by. At the very least the luxury of a palace probably helps silence one's moral instincts.

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gest_of_Robyn_Hode#Summary

He's still (for the largest part) taking investment money from the top 1% or at least top 10% of the world and is (in his opinion) putting it to work saving actual lives. I don't think it's that hard to see how he could justify his actions to himself.

> and when things are settled, it's almost assuredly the whales that will get paid out first.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I'm pretty sure that "how is the remaining money re-distributed once my company implodes" didn't make it into his calculations. Also, where the remaining funds go is pretty irrelevant to the calculation anyway, as it's not going to be funneled towards EA causes.

Well, and to himself. At one point, didn't he own three private jets?

There is zero evidence that this was his intent.

There is a lot of evidence that he intended to maximize trading profits and use those profits to help people.

The fact that he failed does not mean that he intended to steal from the rich.

The federal jury seems to have disagreed, finding him guilty on all charges, all of which require intent. As do his co-conspirators who testified to their fraud.

This is such a bizarre take; this was one of the most lopsided financial prosecutions of all time and you're out here saying it had no foundation in fact at all?

The commenter was very clearly disputing SBF's _intent_ to steal. _You_ may doubt his good intentions for that theft (quite reasonably), but that's not the point that we are debating.

Juxtaposed with zero evidence of intent to steal.

I'm sorry, but I believe you have misread the thread completely.

the second problem is that we tend to redefine what things are based on the actions of those that promote them. it's the same thing that happens with religions. a lot of people now and in the past did things in the name of those religions that were a discredit to them.

the difficulty is to keep these things apart.

the consequence for me is that i can not associate myself with things like EA or blockchain development, because in the eye of the public now these do more harm than good. and for the same reason many not only leave their particular religion but disassociate themselves from the concept of religion itself.

at best i can see that high earners claim effective altruism for themselves, and are discrediting it with their actions, just like i said.

if you talk to people promoting effective altruism on the ground (which i had the opportunity to do recently) then you get a different picture.

He was pretty open even before the collapse about how he decided to get as rich as possible, as fast as possible, at all costs, as long as (in his own moral calculus) the net benefits were positive.

EAs are arguably a 'cult' obsessed with AI risk, which they mostly believe will end the world in the next few years. So to them, that pretty much justifies anything that could help mitigate that risk. He would see it as immoral not to become a criminal in order to fund AI risk research.

Personally, I think these AI risk concerns are legitimate, but I don't agree with these methods.

They don't. Everyone in EA (AFAICT) has been pretty clear about this. Lying and undermining trust and institutions does tremendous lasting harm.

I am also tired of "people are very concerned about X and think that it's important, so they're basically a cult".

Literally anyone from the outside would easily be convinced they were pretty much your standard apocalyptic sex cult, just from accurately describing it.

I don't really care if people on EA forums don't all agree with SBF, but his type of thinking is standard if you use utilitarianism to make decisions in the real world, and it leads to some pretty horrific stuff. Consequentialism / utilitarianism are widely accepted in EA, and if you take that to the extreme, it can justify things like this.

But the fact that a few extremists would take an idea way beyond any measure of reason is a human effect, not an EA effect.

I can't think of any good ideas that haven't been distorted by a few. That's no reason to abandon them.

My personal opinion is that EA is mostly worthless navel gazing, but that doesn't mean that we should dismiss it over the SBFs.

The existence of extremists implies the existence of moderates. What are they? When their moral code says "Fraud, in this particular circumstances, is good", are they the ones that can't shake off the vice of honesty?

Or are they the ones who use motivated reasoning to bring their moral philosophy to conformance with their instinctual moral feelings?

https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruis...

Edit for reply:

> around October/November 2022

i.e. after the run and it's clear he's going to be arrested... Usual EA bullshit.

> Institutionally, EA was defending SBF up until he was arrested,

Nope, here's why & evidence

> i.e. after the run and it's clear he's going to be arrested... Usual EA bullshit.

Nice moving goal posts :)

Clearly this is a false assumption. He was not stealing from rich people (as if stealing from reach people is a justifiable EA practice), and was not spending the majority of the stolen money on worthy causes (worthy by EA standards). He was buying property for himself and his circle, signing deals with stadiums, covering Alameda Research losses, etc. Even for a deluded man like SBF, don't think it's possible to interpret that as an improvement of the world's conditions.

I am not familiar with all of the intimate details, I did not think that the scam was targeted at "rich people" but rather advertised generally and preyed upon get-rich-quick crypto attitudes. Am I mistaken?

Are you sure? My gut says that he mostly damaged not-rich people. I don't know too much about the specific case, but I know enough about the general crypto space to have an opinion, although not sure how to provide data to support it. You don't provide data either, though.

If you own a car and/or a home - are you rich? Is it acceptable to steal your $1K investment and spend it on pseudo-EA causes? An argument so ethically bankrupt, I can't believe people even type it on a public forum.

My point is that I suspect that SBF stole mostly from non-rich people, which is also NOT ok.

Edit: for context this was a large aggregator for “effective charities” with other billionaires and if you sorted by max he was on top for the years I did data analysis

I mean I get the idea of trying to optimize the value of charitable donations. But donating something is infinitely better than chatting all day and donating nothing.

Even on a small scale, the number of times I've seen non-EA people do something nice is way, way more than the number of times I've seen an EA person come out of their "circle" and do something nice.

There's substantial discussion:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7uJcBNZhinomKtH9p/...

I do agree that utilitarianism provides too much room for mental gymnastics which bad actors can use to feign benevolence.

It has a side benefit of discouraging accelerated inheritance schemes.

all sorts of interesting slicing and dicing of charitable activities are tracked, and it's really curious.

https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/statistics-on...

It’s a ridiculous high school level argument.

  KP: you were really good at talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers
  SBF: ya
  SBF: hehe
  SBF: I had to be
  SBF: it's what reputations are made of, to some extent
  SBF: I feel bad for those who get f***** by it
  SBF: by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] and so everyone likes us

However EA logic is wrong because utilitarianism is wrong. It doesn’t matter whether stealing and fraud create good outcomes or not. Theft and fraud are evil in themselves irrespective of outcomes. To put it in an extreme sense, even if it would save the planet you should still not steal nor defraud others. The fact that some actions are in essence evil is enshrined in the legal system, is commonly accepted, and philosophically sound.

Extreme moral relativism like you’re mentioning here is just as wrong as utilitarianism.

It’s not preferable to steal than to lose the planet. Some things really are worse than death, and committing an evil action is wrong no matter what the justification the evildoer makes.

For many other ethical systems, good and evil aren’t weighed against each other. Instead evil deeds may be forbidden flat out. Good deeds are optional but commendable. Since evil is forbidden and good is optional, you cannot justify good with evil - you cannot justify the unjustifiable.

Why is deontology a better system than utilitarianism? There’s a lot of reasons, but here’s two.

First deontology solves a lot of thought puzzles much more cleanly than utilitarianism does, and avoids the weirdness such as that torturing one person is ok if it makes everyone else happy (see the short fiction story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” for a empathetic example). Deontology has a strong philosophical basis outside of theology, especially beginning with Kant.

Second it prevents those in power from justifying evil deeds because of the good outcome. Take politics, where politicians will justify evil actions to their followers by arguing it’s necessary to prevent the other side from winning. If people accept a better theory of ethics, those types of arguments won’t take and politics will be forced to a higher standard.

The fraud is still illegal. He would still have gone to jail.

EA strikes me as the same sort of ambiguous slime as "breast cancer awareness."

You read the words and think hey, that sounds right. Benefit others as efficiently as possible. Guy's a Robin Hood type, stealing from the rich to benefit others. Good for you, buddy. Godspeed.

Except you look at what he's actually doing and see he's not stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. He's stealing from the foolish and giving to "others," who turn out to be his friends and associates. $500m to Anthropic? $5b for Twitter? This shit isn't charity.

It's kleptocracy masquerading as charity. I can't see his charitable causes as anything more than an ephemeral funds-parking scheme storing funds in a chain of IOUs.

It will be interesting how he fares in prison. Martin Shkrelli wants to be his friend. Perhaps they can be pen pals. Maybe he'll get special treatment or early release.

Even if SBF was following the EA playbook to the letter, it did not work. The attempt was ineffective. He failed.

Michael Lewis shared some SBF story where the scenario (the bet) presented to SBF was a chance to make the world better or, if it failed, the entire world would be destroyed. SBF allegedly would take that bet. All or nothing. Where have we seen this type of thinking before.