- I didnāt (and still donāt) know Caroline very well; I think our first substantive conversation was at the Manifest Night Market.
- I do know some close friends of Carolineās quite well, eg having been to their wedding.
- I feel extremely grateful to the FTX Future Fund. For one, Manifund is heavily inspired by the Future Fundās approach: fast, transparent, ambitious. For another, they provided the seed funding for Manifold and Manifund, and also funded the conference I met my wife at.
- At this point, someone might point out a missing mood, like ābut the fraud at FTX was bad, rightā? And I kind of feel obliged to say āyeah of course fraud is badā but my actual view is a lot more nuanced, something like:
- itās plausible to me that SBFās stated views are correct, that if he hadnāt filed for chapter 9 at that exact instance, then everything would have been fine
- reminder that the estate did manage to pay back everyone, and I do kind of believe that (per SBF) they could have repaid in kind
- the estate sure seems to have made some dumb mistakes that OG FTX wouldnāt have, like selling the Anthropic stock for something like 100x less than what itās worth today
- i think a lot of people who have not thought a lot about the FTX/Alameda thing conclude āoh so they made all their money via fraud, it was fraud that enabled them to get big at allā and I donāt think this is true? like my understanding is that FTX was actually a pretty profitable exchange, Alameda too for a time
- also iiuc they only discovered the hole like a couple months before things blew up, and so the timespan of the fraud was a few months at most
- IMO the EA & AI safety community has done a gross injustice to everyone who worked at FTX by blacklisting the people involved, failing to stand by them.
- The amount of deference and hero worship towards FTX was quite something at the time; as Iāve said before, the sudden turn against them felt very two-faced, disloyal.
- And even if you think the thing they did was quite bad, I think mercy and forgiveness to individuals is really important. Jesus ate with tax collectors.
- And beyond a gross injustice, this attitude leads to a waste of talent.
- FWIW Nishad Singh also previously did a 1 month work trial with Manifund (before going off to join Softmax instead.)
- Another example: my housemate and friend Joel Becker was unemployable for ~a year after his role working at FTX Foundation. Eventually METR took pity on him. Joel went on coauthor the famous METR time horizon graph paper, and the famous uplift (downlift) paper.
- Iām annoyed at having to write about this at all.
- Itās reminiscent of the past Hanania stuff. (Which, btw, I feel completely vindicated on. Like, look whoās in office currently. I want my Bayes points!)
- I feel like the the act of writing this just draws attention to controversy, but in fact Manifest is mostly not about being controversial but rather being wholesome, intellectual, fun.
- But I also canāt justā¦ not respond.
- Iām also feeling trepidatious.
- Narrowly: we (ie Manifund) is still a party in an ongoing lawsuit from the FTX estate. Common sense (or Claude) might advise not writing/posting about any of this.
- More broadly: will this come out
- I really liked Carolineās blog. I think itās quite sad that she took it down and stopped blogging.