SBF is a tribalism litmus test for the EA movement

Will the movement rise up to it?

If you don’t care about the Effective Altruism movement, feel free to skip this post. Note that while I do not consider myself a part of EA, I generally respect the movement as a group of smart and well-intentioned people, with whom I have some disagreements.

FTX, one of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world is imploding. My understanding of the reason it’s imploding is that it (through a sister hedge fund called Alameda) gambled with customer funds and lost. There is more to the story, you can read about it in the thread below (though the situation is still developing, the acquisition may well fall through).

jonwu.eth @jonwu_

FTX was the world's 3rd largest crypto exchange. Today it's said to be insolvent and in the midst of an acquisition by Binance. Here's everything you need to know about Alameda Research and the collapse of FTX: 👇

I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea who, if anyone, might regulate a Bahamas-based crypto exchange, but in the world of traditional finance, an exchange gambling with customer funds, while telling the customers that their funds are safe is called a fraud. I strongly suspect that when the dust settles, in the court of popular opinion, FTX will be considered a fraud.

How is that related to Effective Altruism? Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the former billionaire founder of FTX is the biggest funder of the movement (definitely in terms of promises, and most likely in terms of funds committed).

Source https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Wpr5ssnNW5JPDDPvd/some-thoughts-on-recent-effective-altruism-funding

Therefore, effective altruists REALLY like SBF. The top comment on the developing story of FTX’s demise on the EA Forum is giving Sam best wishes.

Most of the world is very tribal. When a tribal leader does something wrong, the most common reaction is to deny that, as the leader losing status leads to the tribe losing status. Effective Altruism is supposed to be better than that. They understand tribalism and at least verbally try to acknowledge its dangers.

Now the question is, if (and it’s still an IF, though I strongly suspect how it will play out) the whole world decides that SBF/FTX was a fraud, what will Effective Altruists do? Will they acknowledge that their biggest funder was a fraud and reckon with the consequences, or will they die on the hill of “SBF did nothing wrong”?

For the world’s sake, I really hope Effective Altruists can rise above tribalism. If they cannot do it, what movement can?

Lastly, there is a curious way to reconcile all of the facts, but it is… Quite odd. In a nutshell, the EA movement believes that one’s duty is to make as much money as one can and then donate it to the most effective charities. SBF… Did that. Except the money was likely obtained fraudulently. A perfectly reasonable (if antisocial) way to reconcile that is to say that obtaining money illegally/unethically is fair game if the benefits of how it’s used outweigh the social harm the process of obtaining it caused. I suspect that some in the movement will go down that road, I am curious to see if it will be widely accepted, something about EAs becoming cybercriminals to buy malaria nets is amusing to me.