Earlier quoted context omitted.
> to assume that SBF only turned to a life of crime because the EA movement lured him into it. It's not an assumption. It's a matter of record, understood by anyone who knows the basics of the FTX saga. SBF is a lifelong utilitarian, and his co-conspirators were also committed EAs. Anyone who obscures that fact is abetting the campaign of obfuscation. > Many of the people involved seem to have good intentions Yup. Th…
The grandparent poster stated that "grandparent poster statement that "to assume that SBF only turned to a life of crime because the EA movement lured him into it." and you responded "It's not an assumption. It's a matter of record, understood by anyone who knows the basics of the FTX saga. SBF is a lifelong utilitarian, and his co-conspirators were also committed EAs. Anyone who obscures that fact is abetting the ca…
But if I'm reading you correctly, you're asking instead for a citation of some EA materials in which EA leadership says, "do fraud". There is no such citation. That is not how this works. Looking at history, a recurring pattern is that good-sounding ideas can have bad consequences. When it happens, they rarely come out and say "do bad stuff".
> please explain why a belief or movement should be judged by what a few members do?
A belief or movement should be judged by the total impact across all members. I'm not just talking about a naive weighted sum -- that would just be more utilitarianism, which is the evil idea we need to unlearn here.
A better framing is that you're trying to infer a risk distribution based on the observed data. In so doing, you incorporate an understanding of the history of altruism, where it's way easier to do major damage than major good. Therefore, you heavily weight a downside event, because this is merely a taste of the true tail risk.
Tail risk is easy to underestimate (see the work of Nassim Taleb on this). If you throw out negative data points, you're making it even harder to appreciate the worst case.
> I am making this post because I do not like seeing groups, organizations, and movements blamed for what a few members do.
I suppose this is a fine instinct in general. And I'm all for protecting minority viewpoints and their right to think freely.
But when a group makes wild claims about how its revolutionary thought process can discover shortcuts to astronomical benefits in the distant future, then they're operating on pure ideology without much of a feedback loop. In such a case, the question of the ideology's tail risk becomes extra important.
You may notice that by my reasoning here, the lessons from FTX should have less bearing on how we view the "neartermist" cause areas, where EAs are measuring their impact and reacting to facts on the ground. This is indeed true. I believe that early EA did a lot of good, and there are still a few "neartermist" EAs left, doing decent work.
So to bring the thread full circle, this distinction is all the more reason to celebrate the end of FHI, which helped drive the shift within EA toward longtermism, where their utilitarianism is a poor fit and, I would claim, a danger to humanity.