Episode Twenty-Nine: The Methods of Rationality

The high-profile collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX has brought the Effective Altruist (EA) community into the public spotlight for the first time. Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, had long identified an Effective Altruist, previously working at the Centre for Effective Altruism before setting up the FTX Foundation, a body that gave grants to a wide variety of EA-aligned causes (AI safety research, forecasting).

In the wake of the revelations surrounding the massive levels of fraud that FTX and its associated hedge fund Alameda Research were engaged in, most people have very reasonably assumed that Bankman-Fried’s public posture as a charitable dogooder was all part of the long con. This view has a lot of intuitive appeal, but is probably wrong given quite how extensively networked he was within the tight-knit EA subculture, and far how back his ties to their general worldview go (his mother is a utilitarian philosopher). An awful lot of EA people, both those who received grants and those were helping to give them out, got flown out to the Bahamas to meet the FTX gang. Huge sums were spent on pet projects such as the California ballot initiative to tax high-earning individuals in order to pay for the world’s most expensive think-tank (focussed on pandemic prevention) and Carrick Flynn’s ill-fated run for Congress in Oregon.

Bankman-Fried, in other words, spent a lot of money on causes that could not realistically be explained away as part of a cunning ploy to obtain favourable regulatory treatment for his businesses. We think it much more likely that his commitment to EA ideology and cultural practices were sincere. Two of the scene’s more eccentric cultural practices seem to have been fully implemented at FTX and Alameda: polyamory and stimulant abuse. Both of them likely played a considerable role in what went wrong.

The longstanding relationship between FTX and Alameda should have been enough to set off red flags. In mainstream finance, an exchange and a hedge fund would never be allowed to share management because of the likelihood of the fund gaining access to privileged information from the exchange. What was not public knowledge prior to FTX’s collapse, however, was the sexual relationship between Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda, part of what seems to have been a wider FTX-Alameda polycule. This sort of thing would be very strange in normal financial institutions, which generally have fairly strict rules about workplace relationships because of the risk of fraud, but is entirely routine in the Effective Altruist scene, which has long been associated with polyamory. One recent account of a woman’s experiences in these circles runs as follows:

"EA circles, much like the group house in Bahamas, are widely incestous where people mix their work life (in EA cause areas), their often polyamorous love life and social life in one amalgomous mix without strict separations. This is the default status quo. This means that if you’re a reasonably attractive woman entering an EA community, you get a ton of sexual requests to join polycules, often from poly and partnered men. Some of these men control funding for projects and enjoy high status in EA communities and that means there are real downsides to refusing their sexual advances and pressure to say yes, especially if your career is in an EA cause area or is funded by them. There are also upsides, as reported by CoinDesk on Caroline Ellison. From experience it appears that, a ‘no’ once said is not enough for many men in EA. Having to keep replenishing that ‘no’ becomes annoying very fast, and becomes harder to give informed consent when socializing in the presence of alcohol/psychedelics. It puts your safety at risk. From experience, EA as a community, has very little respect for monogamy and many men, often competing with each other, will persuade you to join polyamory using LessWrong style jedi mindtricks while they stand to benefit from the erosion of your boundaries. (Edit: I have personally experienced this more than three times in less than one year of attending EA events and that is far too many times. )

A lot could be said about the sexual dynamics going on here, but suffice it say for now that Effective Altruism just doesn’t really do conventional corporate governance (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse). We don’t think this is necessarily a reason not to give the EAs some of your money, since for all their faults they have many more good ideas about how to spend it than mainstream philanthropic institutions. One should, however, always be aware there are probably, in the background, some bizarre group house sexual dynamics that you have no idea about, and these things have more to do with who does and doesn’t get money than you might like to think.

The other strange thing going at FTX/Alameda seems to have been drug abuse. This was almost certainly downstream of the general EA cult of productivity. We have never met a group of people anywhere in the world more worried about how to be as productive as Elon Musk, despite the fact that Elon is by definition irreproducible and – while he no doubt works extremely hard – has always taken enough time off to engage in the highest possible form of recreation (posting on Twitter). The most amusing example of this was the EA org that sought to hire a “medical mysteries investigator” to boost the productivity of some high-profile but apparently ailing EAs. We are not making this up.

Bankman-Fried himself was clearly taking a variety of substances during his tenure as FTX CEO – as became obvious to Elon himself during a brief phone call. Subsequently, the Twitter hive mind spotted a bottle of Emsam on Bankman-Fried’s desk in a photo:

Eminent Twitter user “fbifemboy”, who blogs at “Milky Eggs” (perhaps better not to know) compiles a variety of evidence concerning Bankman-Fried’s use of stimulants, noting furthermore the fact that heavy use of these dopaminergic medications has been linked to compulsive gambling and risk-taking. Intriguingly, fbifemboy also notes Bankman-Fried’s puzzlingly low League of Legends ranking despite (at least) hundreds of hours’ experience. Our own sources confirm that for a gamer presumed to have played as much as he did - he was known to play during podcast interviews and even VC pitches - his ranking is unusually low. We find the theory that his drug-taking habits have somehow fried his brain remarkably plausible, especially given his bizarre behaviour in the aftermath of FTX’s collapse – compulsively giving lengthy interviews to virtually any media outlet that asks, despite the fact that every lawyer would tell you to shut up in his situation, and he has confirmed that several in fact have done so.

In the aftermath of FTX’s collapse, the EA community has engaged in extensive handwringing as to what it should do differently in the future, with all sorts of elaborate governance reforms for EA institutions such as the Oxford-based Center for Effective Altruism proposed via the Forum. We, however, have some rather simpler and more direct fixes. Gently sideline the more egregiously polyamorous people, take a few more holidays, and stop taking the drugs. Make the culture just 5% more normie and it might attract a more intellectually diverse, slightly more cynical crowd less vulnerable to stimmed-up crypto degens au fait with the language of existential risk. We won’t hold our breath, but if they start serving meat for lunch at Trajan House, perhaps we’ll really be on the road to making Effective Altruism great again and fulfilling its genuine potential.