memoir: poke at FTX epilogue

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 b91b021..d23b3ef 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md
+++ b/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md
@@ -449,18 +449,23 @@ 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 reply that this usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between different senses of _fraud_. (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 reply that this usage was [motte-and-baileying](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) between different senses of _fraud_. (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.
 
 Looking back four years later, I still feel that way—but my desire for nuance itself demands nuance.
 
 [TODO— FTX and nuance epilogue—
- * On the one hand, I think I'm right to worry about the "jump to evaluation" failure mode, where you substitute a compressed hostile description
+On the one hand, I think I'm right to worry that our posse's discourse was prone to a "jump to evaluation" failure mode, 
  * If Gloria does a crime and lies about it and you call her a fraud, people are going to correctly notice that your description failed to match reality; you're obscuring what's actually bad about it
- * On the other hand, I want to give the posse's worldview credit
- * In April 2019, Ben tried to describe the Blight to me, saying, "People are systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done"
- * ordinary grown-up EAs would describe this as uncharitable, rude, &c.
- * But look at the FTX blowup. This was, actually, one of the greatest financial frauds of our time, and it was made possible by EA: Lewis's book explains that early Alameda recruited from movement EAs, https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/10/24/book-review-going-infinite/
- * Ordinary grown-ups say, "How could we have known?", but this is much less surprising on Ben's view of what EA is. (And doing good as a charity is even harder than running a crypto exchange, where the job you're doing for stakeholders is more legible; if a health intervention doesn't owrk)
+ * my mentioning my CfAR donation to Said actually belongs here
+]
+
+On the other hand, I want to give the posse's worldview massive credit for seeing things that everyone else in "rationalist" Berkeley prefers not to see. Trying to describe the Blight to me in April 2019, Ben wrote, "People are systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done." I imagine an ordinary EA grown-up looking at this text and shaking their head at how hyperbolically uncharitable Ben was being. Dominance, corruption, theft? Where was his evidence for these sweeping attacks on these smart, hard-working people trying to make the world a better place?
+
+But look at [the implosion of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_FTX). This was one of the largest financial frauds of our time, and it was made possible by EA. In _Going Infinite_, Michael Lewis's book on FTX mastermind Sam Bankman-Fried, Lewis describes Bankman-Fried's "access to a pool of willing effective altruists" as the secret weapon of FTX predecessor Alameda Research: Wall Street firms powered by ordinary greed would have trouble trusting employees with easily-stolen cryptocurrency, but ideologically-driven EAs could be trusted to be working for the cause. Lewis describes Alameda employees seeking to prevent Bankman-Fried from deploying a trading bot with access to $170 million for fear of losing all that money "that might otherwise go to effective altruism".
+
+[TODO—
+ * as Zvi notes in his review of _Going Infinite_, https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/10/24/book-review-going-infinite/
+ * tie into specific cites in Ben's EA-critical writing
 ]
 
 -------