Why was Caroline Ellison at Manifest?

(very much still a draft/wip)

I didn’t (and still don’t) know Caroline very well; I think our first substantive conversation was at the Manifest Night Market.

I might have some kind of parasocial relationship with Caroline, having read a lot of her (very excellent) blog & followed her work
But to be fair, this is true of many of the speakers at Manifest. To me, they start as a person I first know through having read thousands upon thousands of words they have written. Then I work up the courage to see if they might like to come to my little festival. And, miraculously, they say yes! And then I get to meet them IRL and see the human behind the words. I thought that I would like to go through this arc with Caroline as well.

I do know some close friends of Caroline’s 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 Fund’s approach: fast, transparent, ambitious. For another, they provided the seed funding for Manifold and Manifund, and also funded the conference where I met my wife.

At this point, someone might point out a missing mood, like “but the fraud at FTX was bad, right”? And I kind of feel obliged to say “yeah of course fraud is bad” but my actual view is a lot more nuanced, something like:

it’s plausible to me that SBF’s stated views are correct, that if he hadn’t 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 wouldn’t have, like selling the Anthropic stock for something like 100x less than what it’s worth today
i think a lot of people who have not thought a lot about the FTX/Alameda thing conclude “oh so they made all their money via fraud, it was fraud that enabled them to get big at all” and I don’t 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 I’ve 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.

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.

It’s reminiscent of the past Hanania stuff. (Which, btw, I feel completely vindicated on. Like, look who’s 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.

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 and hurt the projects I’m involved with (Manifest, Manifund, Mox, and the fledgling Surplus)? Will it hurt my favorite institutions (Lighthaven)? My favorite movements? Or worse, will they turn on me, decide that associating with me is toxic as well?
But currently I feel righteous enough, that this is a situation that calls for bravery and standing for my beliefs. To post, and let the cards fall where they may.