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We must be very clear: fraud in the service of effective altruism is unacceptable
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evhub
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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: LessWrong
Published days after FTX's collapse in November 2022, this post reflects EA/LessWrong community reckoning with the ethical failures of longtermist-affiliated actors, and is relevant to discussions of how AI safety organizations should handle conflicts between ends and means.
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lesswrong
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Effective altruismCommunity
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Summary
Written in response to the FTX collapse in November 2022, this post argues that fraud is categorically unacceptable even in service of effective altruism. The author, a committed utilitarian, contends that humans are prone to self-deception when justifying rule-breaking for noble ends, and that the EA community must unequivocally condemn fraudulent means regardless of intended beneficiaries.
Key Points
- •Even a hardcore utilitarian should reject fraud done in service of EA goals, because the expected harms of normalizing such reasoning outweigh benefits.
- •Humans run on 'corrupted hardware' when justifying self-serving rule-breaking as altruistic, making bright-line rules against fraud essential.
- •The EA community had an obligation to publicly and unambiguously condemn the FTX collapse to clarify that EA does not endorse unethical methods.
- •Compassion for victims of FTX's collapse—customers and employees who lost savings and careers—should be central to the community's response.
- •A consequentialist case for deontological constraints: rule-based commitments guard against motivated reasoning and galaxy-brained justifications.
Cited by 2 pages
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| EA Epistemic Failures in the FTX Era | -- | 84.0 |
| Sam Bankman-Fried | Person | 55.0 |
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x This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality. We must be very clear: fraud in the service of effective altruism is unacceptable — LessWrong Effective altruism Community Personal Blog 42
We must be very clear: fraud in the service of effective altruism is unacceptable
by evhub 10th Nov 2022 3 min read 56 42
I care deeply about the future of humanity—more so than I care about anything else in the world. And I believe that Sam and others at FTX shared that care for the world.
Nevertheless, if some hypothetical person had come to me several years ago and asked “Is it worth it to engage in fraud to send billions of dollars to effective causes?”, I would have said unequivocally no.
At this stage, it is quite unclear just from public information exactly what happened to FTX, and I don't want to accuse anyone of anything that they didn't do. However, I think it is starting to look increasingly likely that, even if FTX's handling of its customer's money was not technically legally fraudulent, it seems likely to have been fraudulent in spirit.
And regardless of whether FTX's business was in fact fraudulent, it is clear that many people—customers and employees—have been deeply hurt by FTX's collapse. People's life savings and careers were very rapidly wiped out. I think that compassion and support for those people is very important. In addition, I think there's another thing that we as a community have an obligation to do right now as well.
Assuming FTX's business was in fact fraudulent, I think that we—as people who unknowingly benefitted from it and whose work for the world was potentially used to whitewash it—have an obligation to condemn it in no uncertain terms. This is especially true for public figures who supported or were associated with FTX or its endeavors.
I don't want a witch hunt, I don't think anyone should start pulling out pitchforks, and so I think we should avoid a focus on any individual people here. We likely won't know for a long time exactly who was responsible for what, nor do I think it really matters—what's done is done, and what's important now is making very clear where EA stands with regards to fraudulent activity, not throwing any individual people under the bus.
Right now, I think the best course of action is for us—and I mean all of us, anyone who has any sort of a public platform—to make clear that we don't support fraud done in the service of effective altruism. Regardless of what FTX did or did not do, I think that is a statement that should be clearly and unambiguously defensible and that we should be happy to stand by regardless of what comes out. And I think it is an important statement for us to make: outside observers will be looking to see what EA has to say about all of this, and I think we need to be very clear that fraud is not something
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