Thank you Will! This is very much the kind of reflection and updates that I was hoping to see from you and other leaders in EA for a while.

I do hope that the momentum for translating these reflections into changes in how the EA community is structured is not completely gone given the ~1.5 years that have passed since the FTX collapse, but something like this feels like a solid component of a post-FTX response. 

I disagree with a bunch of object-level takes you express here, but your reflections seem genuine and productive and I feel like me and others can engage with them in good faith. I am grateful for that.

Yeah, I think just buying Twitter to steer the narrative seems quite bad. But like, I have spent a large fraction of my career trying to think of mechanism design for discussion and social media platforms and so my relation to Twitter is I think a pretty healthy "I think I see lots of ways in which you could make this platform much more sanity-promoting" in a way that isn't about just spreading my memes and ideologies. 

Will has somewhat less of that background, and I think would have less justified confidence in his ability to actually make the platform better from a general sanity perspective, though still seems pretty plausible to me he saw or sees genuine ways to make the platform better for humanity.

I am the author of the linked post that DPiepgrass was commenting on: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HCAyiuZe9wz8tG6EF/my-tentative-best-guess-on-how-eas-and-rationalists

This link's hypothesis is about people just trying to fit in―but SBF seemed not to try to fit in to his peer group! He engaged in a series of reckless and fraudulent behaviors that none of his peers seemed to want.

(Author of the post) My model is that Sam had some initial tendencies for reckless behavior and bullet-biting, and those were then greatly exacerbated via evaporative cooling dynamics at FTX. 

It sounds like SBF drove away everyone who couldn't stand his methods until only people who tolerated him were left. That's a pretty different way of making an organization go insane.

Relatedly, this kind of evaporative cooling is exactly the dynamic I was trying to point to in my post. Quotes: 

People who don’t want to live up to the demanding standard leave, which causes evaporative cooling and this raises the standards for the people who remain. Frequently this also causes the group to lose critical mass. 

[...]

My current best model of what happened at an individual psychological level was many people being attracted to FTX/Alameda because of the potential resources, then many rounds of evaporative cooling as anyone who was not extremely hardcore according to the group standard was kicked out, with there being a constant sense of insecurity for everyone involved that came from the frequent purges of people who seemed to not be on board with the group standard.

Do you have links to people being very worried about gray goo stuff?

(Also, the post you link to makes this clear, but this was a prediction from when Eliezer was a teenager, or just turned 20, which does not make for a particularly good comparison, IMO)

Also, I don't think "completely uninvestigated" is a correct characterization -- they were investigated enough to be presented to a grand jury, which indicted SBF for campaign-finance violations. Federal prosecutors do not generally indict without a pretty good investigation first, especially in high-profile cases. I think we have a pretty decent idea of what he did (see pp. 18-22 of the prosecution's sentencing memo). Moreover, Salame and Singh -- who don't have extradition-related issues -- pled guilty to campaign-finance violations.

Oh, that is interesting and an update for me. I had interpreted the relevant section of the memo as more of a "we didn't really investigate it, but here is what we have", but you know this stuff much better than I do.

I... think I will continue describing this as "weird" though it makes sense that as a lawyer it's not that weird to you.

It feels very off to have a bunch of crimes uninvestigated because someone fled the country and then was extradited, and I am pretty confused why the Bahamas cooperated with Sam here (my guess is that it's a case of political corruption, though I can also imagine other reasons). It's not like the Bahamas had anything obvious to gain from Sam not being convicted of the campaign finance violations.

This is great!

Note that this list is not comprehensive. In-particular it doesn't go into detail on any of the campaign finance violations and other policy-stuff that Sam was involved in, which I think never ended up investigated due to a kind of weird agreement with the Bahamas authorities. But during the trial we did hear some pretty clear evidence of at least campaign finance violations (and my guess is there would be a bunch more if one kept digging, as well as stuff that wouldn't necessarily be crimes but stuff I think most people here would still consider highly unethical).

It seems to me that a case study of how exactly FTX occurred, and where things failed, would be among one of the best things to use to figure out what thing to do instead. 

Currently the majority of people who have an interest in this are blocked by not really knowing what worked and didn't work in the FTX case, and so probably will have trouble arguing compellingly for any alternative, and also lack some of the most crucial data. My guess is you might have the relevant information from informal conversations, but most don't. 

I do think also just directly looking for an alternative seems good. I am not saying that doing an FTX investigation is literally the very best thing to do in the world, it just seems better than what I see EA leadership spending their time on instead. If you had the choice between "figure out a mechanism detecting and propagating information about future adversarial behavior" and "do an FTX investigation", I would feel pretty great about both, and honestly don't really know which one I would prefer. As far as I can tell neither of these things is seeing much effort invested into it.

My current sense is that there is no motivation to find an alternative because people mistakenly think it works fine enough and so there is no need to try to find something better (and also in the absence of an investigation and clear arguments about why the rumor thing doesn't work, people probably think they can't really be blamed if the strategy fails again)