EA - Reflecting on the Last Year — Lessons for EA (opening keynote at EAG) by Toby Ord

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Reflecting on the Last Year — Lessons for EA (opening keynote at EAG), published by Toby Ord on March 24, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I recently delivered the opening talk for EA Global: Bay Area 2023. I reflect on FTX, the differences between EA and utilitarianism, and the importance of character. Here's the recording and transcript.The Last YearLet’s talk a bit about the last year.The spring and summer of 2022 were a time of rapid change. A second major donor had appeared, roughly doubling the amount of committed money. There was a plan to donate this new money more rapidly, and to use more of it directly on projects run by people in the EA community. Together, this meant much more funding for projects led by EAs or about effective altruism.It felt like a time of massive acceleration, with EA rapidly changing and growing in an attempt to find enough ways to use this money productively and avoid it going to waste. This caused a bunch of growing pains and distortions.When there was very little money in effective altruism, you always knew that the person next to you couldn’t have been in it for the money — so they must have been in it because they were passionate about what they were doing for the world. But that became harder to tell, making trust harder.And the most famous person in crypto had become the most famous person in EA. So someone whose views and actions were quite radical and unrepresentative of most EAs, became the most public face of effective altruism, distorting public perception and even our self-perception of what it meant to be an EA. It also meant that EA became more closely connected to an industry that was widely perceived as sketchy. One that involved a product of disputed social value, and a lot of sharks.One thing that especially concerned me was a great deal of money going into politics. We’d tried very hard over the previous 10 years to avoid EA being seen as a left or right issue — immediately alienating half the population. But a single large donor had the potential to change that unilaterally.And EA became extremely visible: people who’d never heard of it all of a sudden couldn’t get away from it, prompting a great deal of public criticism.From my perspective at the time, it was hard to tell whether or not the benefits of additional funding for good causes outweighed these costs — both were large and hard to compare. Even the people who thought it was worth the costs shared the feelings of visceral acceleration: like a white knuckled fairground ride, pushing us up to vertiginous heights faster than we were comfortable with.And that was just the ascent.Like many of us, I was paying attention to the problems involved in the rise, and was blindsided by the fall.As facts started to become more clear, we saw that the companies producing this newfound income had been very poorly governed, allowing behaviour that appears to me to have been both immoral and illegal — in particular, it seems that when the trading arm had foundered, customers’ own deposits were raided to pay for an increasingly desperate series of bets to save the company.Even if that strategy had worked and the money was restored to the customers, I still think it would have been illegal and immoral. But it didn’t work, so it also caused a truly vast amount of harm. Most directly and importantly to the customers, but also to a host of other parties, including the members of the EA community and thus all the people and animals we are trying to help.I’m sure most of your have thought a lot about this over last few months. I’ve come to think of my own attempts to process this as going through these four phases.First, there’s: Understanding what happened.What were the facts on the ground?Were crimes committed?How much money have customer’s lost?A lot of t...