They perhaps shouldn't be interviewed on popular EA podcasts like 80,000 Hours (as far as I can tell Moskovitz or Tuna have never been on)

I personally would be pretty interested to hear an interview with Moskovitz, Tuna, or Buterin and would feel sad if 80k felt prohibited from talking to them. I don't remember being that excited about Buterin's 2019 interview (I recall it mostly being about block chain stuff which I wasn't that interested in), so I guess that's some sign that prohibiting interviews with him wouldn't cost that much, but I'm interested to hear some of his answers to these questions.

I do expect on priors that there is a decent chance that Buterin will be revealed to have committed some type of serious misconduct, and if that does happen I wouldn't be surprised to see a headline like "yet another EA billionaire is a criminal." A blanket prohibition on inviting him to the 80k podcast feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water though.

A thing that would update me here is evidence that engagement with a community/set of ideas by billionaires is on expectation negative. My sense is that EA's involvement with SBF was toward the tail of the distribution of how bad engagement with billionaires goes, but I could be wrong about that, and if it is closer to the median case then a blanket prohibition feels more warranted.

Thanks! I appreciate the concrete suggestions.

Thanks for writing this! I would find it helpful if you taboo'd EA should. e.g. "Specific recommendation: don’t allow a billionaire to become a ‘face’ of EA" - what specifically should have been done differently?

E.g. My recollection from Going Infinite is that the billboards you criticize weren't even endorsed by Sam, they were done by some marketing agency who was summarily fired after Sam realized what they had done. And, like you say, they didn't contain the phrase "effective altruism" or something where anyone could plausibly be said to have a trademark. So what mechanism are you imagining which could have prevented them from going up?

I think there are steps which could be taken to limit people's ability to identify as EAs. For example: CEA could exercise authoritarian control over the effective altruism trademark and sue anyone who self describes as an EA without jumping through whatever hoops we put in place. I think this is not a crazy idea, but it has clear downsides, and I'm not sure if this is actually what you are suggesting.

Yes, I responded to it here

Marcus Daniell appreciation note

@Marcus Daniell, cofounder of High Impact Athletes, came back from knee surgery and is donating half of his prize money this year. He projects raising $100,000. Through a partnership with Momentum, people can pledge to donate for each point he gets; he has raised $28,000 through this so far. It's cool to see this, and I'm wishing him luck for his final year of professional play!

Thanks for writing this up! Dumb question: why can't you just directly see if mantids have nociceptors? Are they hard to detect?

Okay, that seems reasonable. But I want to repeat my claim^[1] that people are not blocked by "not really knowing what worked and didn't work in the FTX case" – even if e.g. there was some type of rumor which was effective in the FTX case, I still think we shouldn't rely on that type of rumor being effective in the future, so knowing whether or not this type of rumor was effective in the FTX case is largely irrelevant.^[2]

I think the blockers are more like: fraud management is a complex and niche area that very few people in EA have experience with, and getting up to speed with it is time-consuming, and also ~all of the practices are based under assumptions like "the risk manager has some amount of formal authority" which aren't true in EA.

(And to be clear: I think these are very big blockers! They just aren't resolved by doing an investigation.)

1. ^{^}

   Or maybe more specifically: would like people to explicitly refute my claim. If someone does think that rumor mills are a robust defense against fraud but were just implemented poorly last time, I would love to hear that!

2. ^{^}

   Again, under the assumption that your goal is fraud detection. Investigations may be more or less useful for other goals.

Suppose I want to devote some amount of resources towards finding alternatives to a rumor mill. I had been interpreting you as claiming that, instead of directly investing these resources towards finding an alternative, I should invest these resources towards an investigation (which will then in turn motivate other people to find alternatives).

Is that correct? If so, I'm interested in understanding why – usually if you want to do a thing, the best approach is to just do that thing.

Oh good point! That does seem to increase the urgency of this. I'd be interested to hear if CE/AIM had any thoughts on the subject.

Interesting! I'm glad I wrote this then.

Do you think "[doing an investigation is] one of the things that would have the most potential to give rise to something better here" because you believe it is very hard to find alternatives to the rumor mill strategy? Or because you expect alternatives to not be adopted, even if found?