December 30, 2024

I may have been effective altruism’s (EA) first major whistleblower. See my related company’s statement on the matter.

I do not wish to discuss the incident in detail given it was extremely traumatic and led to the loss of a substantial amount of value for the movement (and myself). If the incident had not occurred, likely hundreds of thousands of hours would have otherwise been put to much better use improving the world. 

Fortunately, most of the bad actors involved were eventually removed from the movement (insofar as that is possible). 

Unfortunately, EA leadership did not appear to learn much from the incident, as the Machiavellian pattern I outlined to them was repeated years later in Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). The FTX fraud was foreseeable. Indeed, I spent tens of thousands of hours trying to prevent such a case from arising, only to have my efforts be mostly ignored by EA leadership.*

I think there’s a 30% chance that if EA leadership had shown more wisdom with the proto-SBF individual that I blew the whistle on, then the FTX fraud would not have later happened.

It does appear that now, many years and scandals later, leadership has started to understand its role as steward of the effective altruism community somewhat better. But it does this without the consent of the community it effectively governs, which is a mistake it could correct.

For those who are curious, here are my EA Network Governance System and EA Network Funding Guidelines.

 

* For 10+ years I’ve offered personal advisory boards and fractional executive support to help influential leaders–especially EAs–think and execute more efficiently, effectively, and ethically. We explicitly designed the Upgrade Program (UP) to attract, support, and guide the altruistic high-achieving type–SBF, Will MacAskill, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Helen Toner, and others–knowing how their stress, isolation, overwhelm, and need for privacy would occasionally lead to poor decision-making that would massively affect us all. I also did a fair amount of other behind-the-scenes work to improve the integrity of the EA ecosystem in other ways.