-Looking back four years later, I still feel that way—but my desire for nuance itself demands nuance.
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-[TODO— FTX and nuance epilogue—
-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
- * my mentioning my CfAR donation to Said actually belongs here
-]
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-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?
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-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".
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-[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
-]
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