1/10/2024 0 Comments Retrospect vs hindsight![]() One evening, a friend and I dropped by the group house and hung out. He employed a bunch of my friends, and (briefly) worked in the same office building as me. Sam had moved into a group house a few blocks away from my house, while (co)founding Alameda Research. ![]() This is the context in which I formed my first impressions. We launched into an extended argument, and did not come to any consensus. If memory serves, somebody introduced me to him as a person who was a staunch causal decision theorist, and someone who didn’t buy this logical decision theory stuff. The very first time I met Sam was at the afterparty of an EA Global. (And even if I hadn’t made this error, I don’t think I would’ve been able to change much, though I might have been able to change a little.) And instead of assembling this evidence to try to form a unified picture of the truth, I pit my evidence against itself, and settled on some middle-ground “I’m not sure if he’s a force for good or for ill”. ![]() I had some impression that Sam had altruistic intent, and I had some second-hand reports that he was mean and untrustworthy in his pursuits. In one case, a friend warned me about Sam and I (foolishly) misunderstood the friend as arguing that Sam was pursuing ill ends, and weighed their evidence against other evidence that Sam was pursuing good ends, and wound up uncertain. Multiple of my friends had bad experiences with him, though. My firsthand interactions with Sam were largely pleasant. Maybe it will even spark some candid conversation, as I expect might be healthy, if the discussion quality is good. Hopefully this helps people get a better sense of the degree to which at least one EA had at least some warning signs about Sam, and what sort of signs those were. I was pretty tangential to the whole affair, which is why I can fit something this thorough into only ~7k words, and is why it doesn’t seem to me like a huge invasion of privacy to post something like this (especially given what I’m keeping vague). I am not particularly recommending that others in the community who had qualms about Sam write up a similarly thorough account.As such, I’ve kept the recounting somewhat vague. But the most salient raw observations were shared in confidence, and much of the remainder felt like airing personal details unnecessarily, which feels like an undue violation of others’ privacy. My original draft of this post started with a list of relatively raw observations.I endorse comparing yourself to a high standard, if doing so helps you notice where your thinking processes could be improved, and if doing so does not cause you psychological distress. I'm against self-flagellation, and I don't recommend beating yourself up for failing to meet an implausibly high standard. The genre of this essay is "me accounting for how I failed my art, while comparing myself to an implausibly high standard".(My high-level reaction at the time was one of surprise, anger, sadness, and disappointment, with tone and content not terribly dissimilar from Rob Wiblin’s reactions, as I understood them.) ![]() It's not a reaction to the whole FTX affair. This post consists of some of my own processing of my mistakes.My impression is that they think I have some of the emphasis and framings wrong (but it’s not worth the time/attention it would take to correct). Some info was shared with me in confidence, and I asked those people for feedback and gave them the opportunity to veto this post, and their feedback made this post better, but their lack of a veto does not constitute approval of the content. I don’t speak for any of the people who shared their thoughts or experiences with me.This post is structured as a chronological account of the facts as I recall them, followed by my own accounting of salient things I think I did right and wrong, followed by general takeaways. Rob argued that accounts such as this one might be useful to the larger community, because they help strip away a layer of mystery and ambiguity from the situation by plainly stating what particular EAs knew or believed, and when they knew or believed it. I’m posting this now (with various details blurred out) because early last week Rob Bensinger suggested that I do so. This ultimately led to me shelving it (after completing enough of it to extract what lessons I could from the whole affair). I’d previously intended to post a version of this publicly, on account of how people were worried about who knew what when, but in the writing of it I realized how many of my observations were second-hand and shared with me in confidence. The following is a personal account of my (direct and indirect) interactions with Sam Bankman-Fried, which I wrote up in early/mid-November when news came out that FTX had apparently stolen billions of dollars from its customers.
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