Back
FTX, 'EA Principles', and 'The (Longtermist) EA Community'
webAuthor
Violet Hour
Credibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
Written in November 2022 shortly after the FTX collapse, this post critically examines EA's philosophical vulnerabilities exposed by SBF's fraud, relevant to discussions of how AI safety communities structure norms and guard against value misalignment in their own organizations.
Forum Post Details
Karma
66
Comments
12
Forum
eaforum
Forum Tags
CommunityFTX collapse
Metadata
Importance: 52/100blog postcommentary
Summary
This EA Forum post argues that EA's core principles are indeterminate at the community level, making it unclear whether SBF genuinely violated them, since EA's safeguards against maximization misuse rely on external human judgment rather than internal constraints. The author proposes recentering the longtermist EA community around shared moral-epistemic virtues rather than explicit principles to better guard against similar failures.
Key Points
- •EA principles are indeterminate enough at the community level that claiming SBF 'violated EA principles' is not straightforwardly justified.
- •EA's own thinkers (e.g., Holden Karnofsky) acknowledge that safeguards against dangerous maximization come from human judgment, not from EA's core ideas themselves.
- •SBF's risk-neutral Benthamite reasoning was arguably consistent with certain EA frameworks, highlighting a structural vulnerability in maximization-oriented ethics.
- •The author proposes that the longtermist community should define itself through shared moral-epistemic virtues rather than explicit deontic norms.
- •The FTX collapse reveals that communities built around maximization ideals need stronger internal constraints, not just reliance on good individual judgment.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Longtermism's Philosophical Credibility After FTX | -- | 50.0 |
Cached Content Preview
HTTP 200Fetched Mar 15, 202648 KB
FTX, 'EA Principles', and 'The (Longtermist) EA Community' — EA Forum
This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality. Hide table of contents FTX, 'EA Principles', and 'The (Longtermist) EA Community'
by Violet Hour Nov 25 2022 17 min read 12 66
Community FTX collapse Frontpage FTX, 'EA Principles', and 'The (Longtermist) EA Community' 1. Intro 2. 'EA Principles’ We’d have a community full of low-integrity people, and “bad people” as most people define it. 3. Virtues and ‘The Longtermist Community’ 4. Fin 13 comments 1. Intro
Two weeks ago, I was in the process of writing a different essay. Instead, I’ll touch on FTX, and make the following claims.
I think ‘the principles of EA’ are, at the community level, indeterminate in important ways. This makes me feel uncertain about the degree to which we can legitimately make statements of the form: “SBF violated EA principles”.
The longtermist community — despite not having a set of explicit, widely agreed upon, and determinate set of deontic norms [1] — nevertheless contains a distinctive set of more implicit norms, which I believe are worth preserving at the community level. I thus suggest an alternative self-conception for the longtermist community, centered on striving towards a certain set of moral-cum-epistemic virtues.
Section 2 discusses the first claim, and Section 3 discusses the second. Each chunk can probably be read independently, though I’d like it if you read them both.
2. 'EA Principles’
This section will criticize some of the comments in Will’s tweet thread, published in the aftermath of FTX’s collapse.
I want to say that, while I’ll criticize some of Will’s remarks, I recognize that expressing yourself well under conditions of emotional stress is really, really hard. Despite this difficulty, I imagine that Will nevertheless felt he had to say something , and quickly . So, while I stand behind my criticism, I hope that my criticism can be viewed as an attempt to live up to ideals I think Will and I both share — of frank intellectual honesty, in service of a better world.
2.1.
From Will’s response :
“If those involved deceived others and engaged in fraud (whether illegal or not) that may cost many thousands of people their savings, they entirely abandoned the principles of the effective altruism community .” (emphasis mine)
Overall, I’m not convinced. In his tweet thread, Will cites various sources — one of which is Holden’s post on the dangers of maximization, in which Holden makes the following claim:
“I think “do the most good possible” is an … important idea … but it’s also a perilous idea if taken too far … Fortunately, I think EA mostly resists [the perils of maximization] – but that’s due to the good judgment and general anti-radicalism of the human beings involved, not because the ideas/them
... (truncated, 48 KB total)Resource ID:
346cc7c87b88a5f9 | Stable ID: ZTgyMmIzYz