From: Zack M. Davis Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2023 03:38:28 +0000 (-0800) Subject: memoir: FTX footnote X-Git-Url: http://534655.efjtl6rk.asia/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=edaf1ecd791f6e5415c78de2b54a78e101379eb7;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git memoir: FTX footnote --- diff --git a/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md b/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md index 7824346..c6acf94 100644 --- a/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md +++ b/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md @@ -449,7 +449,9 @@ Ben replied that it didn't seem like it was clear to me that I was a victim of s I said I would bite that bullet: yes! Yes, I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abusers, and it was an important question to get right! "Other people's lack of standards harmed me, therefore I don't need to hold myself to standards in my response because I have [extenuating circumstances](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYrcTJFJoYKX2DxNL/extenuating-circumstances)" would be a lame excuse. -This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if the word ever meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important pattern of false representations optimized to move resources, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's perspective that this usage of "fraud" was [motte-and-baileying](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) between different senses of the word. (Most people would say that the things we were alleging MIRI and CfAR had done wrong were qualitatively different from the things Enron and Bernie Madoff had done wrong.) I wanted to do more work to formulate a more precise theory of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things were messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge. +This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if the word ever meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important pattern of false representations optimized to move resources, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's perspective that this usage of "fraud" was [motte-and-baileying](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) between different senses of the word. (Most people would say that the things we were alleging MIRI and CfAR had done wrong were qualitatively different from the things Enron and Bernie Madoff had done wrong.[^ftx]) I wanted to do more work to formulate a more precise theory of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things were messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge. + +[^ftx]: Three years later, the FTX cryptocurrency exchange founded by effective altruists as an earning-to-give scheme, [turned out to be an enormous fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_FTX) à la Enron and Madoff. I'm inclined to give the posse some amount of epistemic credit for this: the collapse of FTX seems less surprising on Ben and Michael's view of [the influence-seeking tendencies that characterize EA](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), even if an ordinary grown-up would say that the crimes of Sam Bankman-Fried as an individual have no bearing on the EA movement as a whole. -------