[anthonypasq]

this is the dumbest critisicm ever. Everyone was perfectly justified in championing him around as a posterboy because no one in the world besides him and a few coworkers knew he was a fraud. and now that everyone knows hes a fraud, they no longer parade him around.

youre really going to get mad at the EA movement for not realizing FTX was a fraud when literally, and i actually mean literally, no one knew it until a couple weeks ago. He bamboozled every government and financial institution in the world, but the humble EA movement should have known.

[ben_w]

While it may feel a bit unfair for those reasons, it's not at all dumb.

Why?

Effective Altruism can't be fully effective if it can't spot scammers.

Yes this is hard, yes extra hard when the first encounter is them parachuting a promise of a billion dollars into your lap… but while I have no solutions and absolutely don't blame anyone who took that money, it's not dumb to criticise.

In fact, I'd say that failures you couldn't spot in advance are the learning opportunities; failures you did spot in advance would make you a co-conspirator in my view, even if not by law.

[anthonypasq]

expecting effective altruism to not trust every single institutional indicator of legitimacy (dozens of governments, central banks, the entire media) is dumb.

its a fairly decentralized movement, its just a random collection of people donating money.

[ben_w]

I don’t blame for the same reason I wasn’t expecting, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a learning opportunity.

If you skip the learning opportunity, then I will blame, given the association with big-R Rationality causes an expectation.

[anthonypasq]

there's absolutely no indication they aren't using this as a learning opportunity. William MacAskill who is one of the leaders of the movement has already put out multiple posts about this whole affair.