His actions made perfect sense from his utilitarian Effective Altruist worldview. He was stealing from rich people, and giving the money to what he saw as "worthy causes."
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.
I've been involved (or at least following) the rationalist and EA communities since the beginning. I call it a cult somewhat tongue in cheek, but it certainly has a lot more cult-like aspects beyond just "pretty concerned about AI risk." I mean, they have a charismatic leader whose unusual ideas about everything from AI risk to sexuality are more or less carbon copied, and practiced in group houses, etc. in some pretty creepy ways.
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.
Institutionally, EA was defending SBF up until he was arrested, not up until the point he started saying stupid shit. He was doing that for a long time before he was arrested.
So I got "guy who posted on forum" on one side and William MacAskill and Nick Beckstead (and, well, SBF himself - he left CEA voluntarily right?) on the other - which of these would you say has the institutional support?
Will was slow to come out against SBF sure, but the majority of people were asking why he was being silent WAY before the arrest. Are you involved in anyway, out of interest? As in, were you there or are you going off of media reports? I don't know many people involved in EA who'd say it was institutionally pro SBF, just that a couple people were silent too long. Interesting if there are some.
I have no connection to CEA or SBF, I'm just someone who's desperate to recover moral philosophy from financialization by wannabe tech bros.
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.
> Nice moving goal posts :)
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. The relevant time is the ~4y period from 2018 to 2022 while he was running an obvious fraud and totally insane, not the few weeks between the run, collapse, and formal arrest. If you think he only looked bad from late 2022, that's just more proof you EAs are dumb as rocks.
What is an extremist with respect to an ethical system? An ethical philosophy is not some scripture you can interpret and misinterpret.
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?
> His actions made perfect sense from his utilitarian Effective Altruist worldview. He was stealing from rich people, and giving the money to what he saw as "worthy causes."
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?
I share your assessment, and have further observed that the financially insecure are over-represented among the get-rich-quick crowd. Rich people are by and large good at not losing money.
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.
I have a growing concern that by engaging with this argument we are making it more acceptable. It's not OK to steal from "rich people". It's not OK to blame everything on the 1%. Online platforms are filled with garbage about the 1%, and most posters are Americans, all of whom actually are in this 1% globally.
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 frustration about engaging with this argument is in agreement with you—sorry if I wasn't clear. The parent commenter made it seem like FTX only defrauded some abstract rich people, which, according to them, would somehow make it more acceptable.
I know for a fact he did give away money. I did some data analysis voluntary work for a charity aggregator he used and saw records, he absolutely donated sizeable amounts to charity (as he said he did).
Oh I didn't know that. He also got a lot of praise for saying he'd give all his fortune away someday. They called him there most generous man. Idk, maybe he would have.
I think he definitely went off the rails with spending on himself, but he absolutely donated the way he said he was too. There were a lot of questions from charity founders who received funding wondering if they should give back, and there were much larger organisations where they probably had similar discussions but not in the open so I didn’t see them
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
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.