Picking on you, Oliver, because I agree with all your other commentary in this thread, and because I come in with a very high opinion of you to begin with, but there was one part of your comment that I had a strongly negative reaction to. Sorry for the negativity bias.
Austin hiring Caroline is a lot of evidence that Austin has a kind of seriously messed up relationship to fraud, and FTX, and ethical and moral responsibility.
I’m sorry, what? How? What?
Maybe I’m just misinterpreting your wording, or something. But “Austin has a kind of seriously messed up relationship to fraud” sounds like you’re making dark insinuations about Austin’s moral character. Is that not what you meant?
Because I feel like Austin’s choice to hire someone like Caroline is clear evidence of the opposite. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to not hire Caroline, or for him to hire her but do it quietly and on the down-low. Instead, he announced it to the world, because he thought she was the best person for the job, and because he considered her worthy of a second chance. (I 100% do too, by the way. I completely agree with everything Austin wrote about Caroline in his post. But that’s beside the point I’m trying to make here.) You think that makes him dishonest?
You know who had a messed up relationship to fraud? Sam Bankman-Fried. I guarantee you, were he in Austin’s shoes he never would have hired 2026-Caroline to a prominent role. He was obsessed with his image and reputation. I think you’ve grokked this, in this thread and in other writings of yours that I’ve read and agreed with—that the reputation-managey, optics-obsessive personality type is on a spectrum with Sam. Yes, yes, you have go much, much further along a bad path to do what Sam did. It’s a very wide spectrum. But it’s not a coincidence that Sam was like that and that he did what he did. You yourself are one of the people who did the best job of figuring that out and explaining it, Oliver.
Austin is very clearly not like Sam. He (and Caroline too, by the way) has shown a lot of courage in the way he’s handled this whole thing. So I consider it despicable that you would impugn his character, to suggest he doesn’t take fraud seriously or might commit it himself (or what? Did I misunderstand you?) because he hired Caroline. It’s thuggery. “Sure would be a shame if some of Caroline’s cooties got on you, Austin.”
@Austin Chen, I hope you won’t let these people bully you. Keep doing what you’re doing. I wish I had your courage.
Maybe I’m just misinterpreting your wording, or something. But “Austin has a kind of seriously messed up relationship to fraud” sounds like you’re making dark insinuations about Austin’s moral character. Is that not what you meant?
I mean… sure? I think Austin is like 90th percentile likely among people I know to e.g. end up doing something as dumb as investing Manifund funds earmarked for specific projects into volatile assets and then end up not being able to pay out promised grants. I think this is correlated with his takes on FTX.
Like, in my conversations with Austin over the years his general take has been that FTX mostly didn’t really do anything bad, and wasn’t even convinced they did anything illegal until I think a few months ago, and was very sympathetic to Sam’s takes that basically everything would have been fine and no one should be in jail if people hadn’t convinced him to declare bankruptcy and hand over control of the company over to the bankruptcy receivership (not like totally convinced, but my best memory is that he thought it was like 50% likely or something).
I am here definitely not impugning Austin’s decision to be transparent about hiring Caroline. I think that’s great and to his credit. I just also think that the way Austin is making this decision is entangled with the way I think he views various other aspects of financial responsibility, entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and sociopathy on which I have had strong disagreements with Austin since I’ve known him.
And like, it’s those underlying disagreements that make me very concerned about this decision by Austin. I think if Austin believed different things about these topics that seemed to me more calibrated, then I can imagine it being a good idea for him to hire Caroline. But as is, him hiring Caroline is evidence to me that these issues on which I have long disagreed with Austin about are influencing his actions in concerning ways.
Whether this blowup was caused by intentional deception or an honest mistake, the EA community has been extremely quick to change its tune. In less than a week, everyone has gone from “SBF, golden boy” to “What a criminal, don’t be like that guy”. EA leaders have posted denunciations of fraud, and distanced themselves from Sam; the most upvoted all-time EA Forum post is a community condemnation; the entire Future Fund team up and resigned.
To be fair, the rest of the world is dogpiling on him too. Elon Musk called Sam “full of shit”; Sequoia deleted their glowing profile of SBF published one month ago; Miami took the FTX name off their arena.
But from EA folks, this behavior strikes me as cowardly, coldhearted, opportunistic, bandwagon-y, two-faced and distasteful. I am extremely confused, because these EA leaders are some of the smartest and “good-est” people in the world, whose work I respect and admire, who have shaped the way I think. So it’s very possible that I’m just in the wrong here, but…
Whatever happened to loyalty? To supporting those who have helped you in the past? Are EA folks only fair-weather friends, happy to accept your money in good times but also ready to eviscerate you to maintain deniability and a glossy PR sheen? What distinguishes altruism from selfishness is “being good to people who cannot help you back”. It is extremely suspicious that EA as a whole was happy to laud praise on SBF while the money was flowing, and then turn their backs as soon as it was clear the gravy train dried up.
SBF:
Is a committed vegan
Earned to give while at Jane Street
Led CEA for a few months
Sent money to Ukrainians in time of need
Incubated hundreds of millions worth of good longtermist causes through Future Fund and related spending on eg Anthropic
Take a step back: what are we assessing here? If the question is “should I associate with a person who has this track record, and also once fraudulently misused customer money, but has repented and is trying as hard as possible to fix it”… the answer seems like a clear yes to me. And as a prosaic consideration, I continue to believe that Sam and the rest of the FTX leadership team are extremely talented and aligned people. Even with tarnished reputations today, I expect them to accomplish good and great things. To jump immediately to cutting ties seems like a large strategic error.
And:
Austin [27:23]: “I don’t know, still debatable… everyone made their money back…”
Austin [27:43]: “My sense is that if SBF hadn’t actually declared bankruptcy, as he says, and held onto the assets and tried to resuscitate FTX exchange and maintain the franchise value there, I think he maybe could have done it.”
[...]
Austin [28:09]: “Some things that I do feel to be true, like right now, is… I think we should free SBF and put him to work.”
[...]
Elizabeth [34:52]: “Won by cheating.”
Austin [34:53]: “I don’t think a lot of it was cheating.”
Austin [34:55]: “I think a lot and a lot of it was actually just doing the actual right things, like hiring good people and being good at fundraising and identifying a good market opportunity.”
[...]
Austin [35:11]: “Somebody who understands the whole story of Alameda better might tell me that, ‘Oh, actually the mixing customer funds was very important, and if not for that FTX would never have won compared to Binance,’ whatever. That just seems like not that true to me…”
I agree it could be possible for someone’s decision to hire Caroline in the way Austin did to be positive evidence about their relationship to e.g. financial responsibility and risk-taking. But given my priors it isn’t. And IDK, this really doesn’t seem like that galaxy-brained of a take. I think Austin’s decision to hire Caroline is very substantially “I think the thing she did is much less bad than other people seem to think, so she has less deep of a hole to dig out of”, and this line of reasoning also straightforwardly extends to SBF.
Honestly, I think it’s slightly more likely than not that Austin would work with SBF himself if he was e.g. given a pardon.
Again, I appreciate Austin’s transparency here, and think that part is to his credit. But I think given the evidence available, his actual decision to hire Caroline is mostly evidence of bad judgement of IMO a very concerning kind.
To be clear, I have in my capacity as CEO of Manifund, invested into specific projects, with the understanding that some risk would be involved. One of these cases you should be intimately aware of—we loaned Lightcone 300k so that you could make interest payments for Lighthaven. We’ve also done a similar loan on behalf of Marcus Abramovitch’s crypto fund; and also once invested a portion of our treasury into VARA, alongside other donor balances for large donors who had opted in, each action below $500k total at risk from the Manifund’s end.
(I think I’m a bit irked at your accusation given that you/your org were beneficiaries of me having a somewhat higher risk tolerance than is common in the EA/AI safety space, but I understand if you didn’t previously have the context for these decisions. Or if you believe but just didn’t spell out that there are many situations where a higher risk tolerance is indeed the correct attitude to take.)
I took each of these actions with a pretty clear understanding of the risk and payoff profile of each, with the consent of our board. In two of these cases I created a public Manifold market both for accountability and to get more feedback about the likelihood of return. I’ve always made it clear to the board that any unexpected losses for these would first be borne by my personal Manifund balance, then by my own finances, as necessary. (The board has agreed that some portion of the gains would also go to my personal Manifund donation balance)
I think some of these actions might make it into an upcoming hit piece for Manifund, but I and I hope my board fully stand by them. (For what it’s worth, we’ve closed out all of these actions, profitably.)
One of these cases you should be intimately aware of—we loaned Lightcone 300k so that you could make interest payments for Lighthaven.
Yep, and I was very grateful for that! But I strongly reject the implication that hence I should be more hesitant to be concerned. I aspire to not have being a beneficiary influence my judgement either way, which usually means I will err actively on the side of expressing concerns about things I am a beneficiary of, not the other way around.
To be clear, Manifund should feel totally fine to make risky investments with its own unrestricted funds, and should often feel fine to do risky things with more restricted funds, especially when you insure those with personal funds, or solid external funding guarantees. I don’t know the full provenance of the funds you mentioned, but these investments/actions do not immediately strike me as concerning.
And in general I think your transparency greatly reduces my concerns on this dimension, but not enough to leave me unconcerned.
I see. Maybe there’s some interesting philosophical disagreement behind our respective attitudes around what to do when you are a beneficiary of an action; to be very very exaggerated, my attitudes seems more towards “duty, loyalty, obligation, consider how to repay your benefactors” and yours are more “neutrality, impartiality, universalizability, consider what rules society should adopt”. Obviously I think both attitudes have their time & place.
I’d characterize a chunk of my recent work as stemming from the former motivation. For example, I/Manifund have hosted the last two rounds of ACX Grants at no charge and some months of work from my side, because I know how important ACX Grants round 1 was in the creation of Manifold. Similarly, I feel strongly about promoting regranting as a concept partly because regranting was how Manifold got its seed investment. I run Surplus, not because I’ve been in YC myself, but partly because PG’s essays have been formative for how I operate my projects. And obviously, I’ve been much more consistently willing to work with people who have “FTX/Future Fund/Foundation” on their resume—Caroline, but also again Ross Rheingans-Yoo, Joel Becker, Nishad Singh among others. (But in all these cases, I’m also trying to ensure that the work or collaboration can stand on its own merits.)
All this is to say that I think it’s reasonable and honorable to express concerns about people/orgs you’ve benefited from, but, also, maybe about as important to emphasize the degree to which you benefited from their actions, because the beneficiaries are best placed to describe what the impact of those actions were, compared to neutral third parties.
---
Anyways, I’m trying to write more in general about both my viewpoints and my history of actions so that, among other things, you and others will have a good picture of eg whether I am really 90th percentile to lose Manifund funds in an irreplaceable/harmful way. Let me know if there are any cruxes or questions that would help you understand me better; I appreciate all the effort you’ve put into speaking with and advising me to date.
Really appreciate you taking the time to write out such a detailed response. It does seem that I stepped into a conversation that was bigger and longer-running than I’d realized.
I see a lot better where you are coming from, now. And certainly there are plenty of Austin’s takes here that I disagree with (e.g., I don’t think we should free SBF and put him to work).
Still, some of your claims about what Austin would do in various hypotheticals are a bit hard for me to square with the person I’m seeing Austin to be. Austin’s post specifically called out that Caroline was repentant and had fully served her time in prison as a reason why it was permissible to hire her. Maybe that paragraph was only included instrumentally, and it wasn’t actually a crux for Austin. In that case, I disagree with him—I do strongly agree it would be wrong to hire a hypothetical pardoned-SBF for the same role Caroline was hired for now. It’s relevant that she’s contrite, and that she explained her crimes in gruesome detail for the world to know, while Sam did the opposite.
So—fine, I grant Austin has or has had some number of bad takes. I’ve had bad takes too. I still see him as having one unpopular good take now, which is that 2026-Caroline would be a good hire. One of the main reasons I admire you so much, Oliver, is that you had an unpopular good take too (that FTX was bad/sketchy, a take you importantly held before its crimes were brought to light).
>I think Austin is like 90th percentile likely among people I know to e.g. end up doing something as dumb as investing Manifund funds earmarked for specific projects into volatile assets and then end up not being able to pay out promised grants.
This exchange is making me realize that I don’t really know any of you guys all that well, besides for Caroline, and maybe I shouldn’t have waded into this. But… are you saying Austin would do this without consent? You really think Austin would commit some kind of FTX-style fraudulent scheme where user assets get nonconsensually invested into risky investment vehicles? That just… still doesn’t seem like his apparent personality type, to me, at all. And if that was his plan, Caroline would be the worst possible hire. Not only because of increased scrutiny, but also because I’d expect she herself will be severely allergic to any kind of impropriety in any role she takes on for the rest of her life.
Of course, that’s just my judgment. And it’s fair if you want to be like, “well, Adam publicly endorsed Sam in 2021, so his judgment sucks.” Nevertheless, I think I am a better judge of character than I was in 2021 (though I admit that I have nothing I can point to to convince anyone here), and I disagree with the consensus view in this thread that 2026-Caroline would be likelier than most to commit fraud in her role at Manifund. I’m happy to throw whatever nonexistent social capital I have here behind that.
I see a lot better where you are coming from, now. And certainly there are plenty of Austin’s takes here that I disagree with (e.g., I don’t think we should free SBF and put him to work).
Glad I made at least some sense!
This exchange is making me realize that I don’t really know any of you guys all that well, besides for Caroline, and maybe I shouldn’t have waded into this. But… are you saying Austin would do this without consent? You really think Austin would commit some kind of FTX-style fraudulent scheme where user assets get nonconsensually invested into risky investment vehicles? That just… still doesn’t seem like his apparent personality type, to me, at all. And if that was his plan, Caroline would be the worst possible hire. Not only because of increased scrutiny, but also because I’d expect she herself will be severely allergic to any kind of impropriety in any role she takes on for the rest of her life.
I am saying Austin is in my 90th percentile for people likely to do this. I think this still leaves him unlikely to do this, but yeah, I am tracking it as a risk that seems higher for him than most people.
Caroline would be the worst possible hire
I don’t know Caroline well. In general the history of financial fraud strongly suggests that people who previously committed financial fraud have a much higher likelihood of doing so again. You might have special information about Caroline that I do not have that give you appropriate confidence that this base-rate doesn’t apply to Caroline, but it’s at least not clear to me, from where I am standing.
Of course, that’s just my judgment. And it’s fair if you want to be like, “well, Adam publicly endorsed Sam in 2021, so his judgment sucks.” Nevertheless, I think I am a better judge of character than I was in 2021 (though I admit that I have nothing I can point to to convince anyone here), and I disagree with the consensus view in this thread that 2026-Caroline would be likelier than most to commit fraud in her role at Manifund. I’m happy to throw whatever nonexistent social capital I have here behind that.
I appreciate you sharing your take, I do think it’s valuable evidence. I do discount it a good amount given your mixed track record, but not completely.
Thank you, Adam; I very much appreciate the kind words. (And please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I knew you before this exchange. I’d heard Caroline mention your name, and now I see you knew both her and SBF well and worked at FTX yourself, eg per this article. I appreciate you speaking up all the more.)
And, I hope this doesn’t undercut you, but I’ll try to explain what Oli may have meant, context that you might be missing. 4 years ago, I wrote in support of SBF shortly after the FTX collapse; more recently, I spoke on a podcast about my controversial views on SBF and FTX. I think some people may have rounded this off to “Austin condones fraud, or at least, is permissive of fraud for a greater good”. (Certainly, my appetite for working with Caroline and others like Ross and Nishad and Joel, might lead people to conflate these.)
But, I don’t condone fraud. I try pretty hard to be honest and open, and also to bake transparency into my actions. I desperately hope that, in the position of the FTX inner circle, I would have had the courage to speak up. (I worry that in some ways, my disposition is too agreeable/conflict-averse). I think about this partly because Manifund has some similarities to FTX and Future Fund: we’re custodians of people’s money and trust, and operate from a similar startup-y, move fast, do-good-for-the-world mentality. And so, it feels optically (but also, truly) important that I draw the right lessons from FTX’s collapse. But also, not the wrong ones.
I’ll admit that for a while, I clung on to some hope that SBF was actually right about his claims: that emergency funding was coming if not for bankruptcy; that creditors could have been repaid in-kind; that the estate then punted a generational portfolio. I read these things with the interest of a conspiracy fanboy, and I think Oli and others noticed. I’ve since updated downward on SBF’s claims being true (partly after talking to Caroline), maybe from 50% ⇒ 10%; and maybe it just doesn’t matter if those claims were true, given how things played out. I apologize for the soldier-y way I persisted.
Maybe the disagreement with the rationalists like Oli and Elizabeth comes from how we value truthseeking. (Meanwhile, the EAs are mad at me for optics-y reasons, I believe). While important and admirable, I wouldn’t choose “truthseeking” as my highest value, per the podcast.
Perhaps neither Lightcone nor idk CG express my core values as well as Future Fund did. For instance, I’ve never seriously considered leaving my job to work at Lightcone or CG, but considered it for the Future Fund (and volunteered for them for a week). I’ve tried, like 2-3 times now, to write about what the Future Fund got right, and maybe when all this is over I will finally publish that piece. In lieu of that, a DM I’ve previously sent:
A lot of my/Manifund’s current strategy and thinking is “Future Fund did the right things for a money-rich ecosystem (but, fraud bad). Now that we’re money-rich again, seems good to do Future Fund things”
The main pieces of their approach that seemed good to me fwiw: regranting, moving money quickly, working with a small sharp team, openness to individuals & for-profits, transparency
Yup, don’t think we’ve met. But Caroline’s told me about you. From what she’s said and what writing I’ve read of yours, you seem great.
It does sound like there’s a lot of history here that I didn’t know about and context I was missing. Thanks for explaining it to me.
Still, the original sentence I was reacting to seems clear that it was the act of hiring Caroline he was talking about, so I think I still stand by the substance of my original comment.
Picking on you, Oliver, because I agree with all your other commentary in this thread, and because I come in with a very high opinion of you to begin with, but there was one part of your comment that I had a strongly negative reaction to. Sorry for the negativity bias.
I’m sorry, what? How? What?
Maybe I’m just misinterpreting your wording, or something. But “Austin has a kind of seriously messed up relationship to fraud” sounds like you’re making dark insinuations about Austin’s moral character. Is that not what you meant?
Because I feel like Austin’s choice to hire someone like Caroline is clear evidence of the opposite. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to not hire Caroline, or for him to hire her but do it quietly and on the down-low. Instead, he announced it to the world, because he thought she was the best person for the job, and because he considered her worthy of a second chance. (I 100% do too, by the way. I completely agree with everything Austin wrote about Caroline in his post. But that’s beside the point I’m trying to make here.) You think that makes him dishonest?
You know who had a messed up relationship to fraud? Sam Bankman-Fried. I guarantee you, were he in Austin’s shoes he never would have hired 2026-Caroline to a prominent role. He was obsessed with his image and reputation. I think you’ve grokked this, in this thread and in other writings of yours that I’ve read and agreed with—that the reputation-managey, optics-obsessive personality type is on a spectrum with Sam. Yes, yes, you have go much, much further along a bad path to do what Sam did. It’s a very wide spectrum. But it’s not a coincidence that Sam was like that and that he did what he did. You yourself are one of the people who did the best job of figuring that out and explaining it, Oliver.
Austin is very clearly not like Sam. He (and Caroline too, by the way) has shown a lot of courage in the way he’s handled this whole thing. So I consider it despicable that you would impugn his character, to suggest he doesn’t take fraud seriously or might commit it himself (or what? Did I misunderstand you?) because he hired Caroline. It’s thuggery. “Sure would be a shame if some of Caroline’s cooties got on you, Austin.”
@Austin Chen, I hope you won’t let these people bully you. Keep doing what you’re doing. I wish I had your courage.
I mean… sure? I think Austin is like 90th percentile likely among people I know to e.g. end up doing something as dumb as investing Manifund funds earmarked for specific projects into volatile assets and then end up not being able to pay out promised grants. I think this is correlated with his takes on FTX.
Like, in my conversations with Austin over the years his general take has been that FTX mostly didn’t really do anything bad, and wasn’t even convinced they did anything illegal until I think a few months ago, and was very sympathetic to Sam’s takes that basically everything would have been fine and no one should be in jail if people hadn’t convinced him to declare bankruptcy and hand over control of the company over to the bankruptcy receivership (not like totally convinced, but my best memory is that he thought it was like 50% likely or something).
I am here definitely not impugning Austin’s decision to be transparent about hiring Caroline. I think that’s great and to his credit. I just also think that the way Austin is making this decision is entangled with the way I think he views various other aspects of financial responsibility, entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and sociopathy on which I have had strong disagreements with Austin since I’ve known him.
And like, it’s those underlying disagreements that make me very concerned about this decision by Austin. I think if Austin believed different things about these topics that seemed to me more calibrated, then I can imagine it being a good idea for him to hire Caroline. But as is, him hiring Caroline is evidence to me that these issues on which I have long disagreed with Austin about are influencing his actions in concerning ways.
Some of this is publicly reflected in this blog post by Austin and his more recent interview with Elizabeth about the topic:
And:
I agree it could be possible for someone’s decision to hire Caroline in the way Austin did to be positive evidence about their relationship to e.g. financial responsibility and risk-taking. But given my priors it isn’t. And IDK, this really doesn’t seem like that galaxy-brained of a take. I think Austin’s decision to hire Caroline is very substantially “I think the thing she did is much less bad than other people seem to think, so she has less deep of a hole to dig out of”, and this line of reasoning also straightforwardly extends to SBF.
Honestly, I think it’s slightly more likely than not that Austin would work with SBF himself if he was e.g. given a pardon.
Again, I appreciate Austin’s transparency here, and think that part is to his credit. But I think given the evidence available, his actual decision to hire Caroline is mostly evidence of bad judgement of IMO a very concerning kind.
To be clear, I have in my capacity as CEO of Manifund, invested into specific projects, with the understanding that some risk would be involved. One of these cases you should be intimately aware of—we loaned Lightcone 300k so that you could make interest payments for Lighthaven. We’ve also done a similar loan on behalf of Marcus Abramovitch’s crypto fund; and also once invested a portion of our treasury into VARA, alongside other donor balances for large donors who had opted in, each action below $500k total at risk from the Manifund’s end.
(I think I’m a bit irked at your accusation given that you/your org were beneficiaries of me having a somewhat higher risk tolerance than is common in the EA/AI safety space, but I understand if you didn’t previously have the context for these decisions. Or if you believe but just didn’t spell out that there are many situations where a higher risk tolerance is indeed the correct attitude to take.)
I took each of these actions with a pretty clear understanding of the risk and payoff profile of each, with the consent of our board. In two of these cases I created a public Manifold market both for accountability and to get more feedback about the likelihood of return. I’ve always made it clear to the board that any unexpected losses for these would first be borne by my personal Manifund balance, then by my own finances, as necessary. (The board has agreed that some portion of the gains would also go to my personal Manifund donation balance)
I think some of these actions might make it into an upcoming hit piece for Manifund, but I and I hope my board fully stand by them. (For what it’s worth, we’ve closed out all of these actions, profitably.)
Yep, and I was very grateful for that! But I strongly reject the implication that hence I should be more hesitant to be concerned. I aspire to not have being a beneficiary influence my judgement either way, which usually means I will err actively on the side of expressing concerns about things I am a beneficiary of, not the other way around.
To be clear, Manifund should feel totally fine to make risky investments with its own unrestricted funds, and should often feel fine to do risky things with more restricted funds, especially when you insure those with personal funds, or solid external funding guarantees. I don’t know the full provenance of the funds you mentioned, but these investments/actions do not immediately strike me as concerning.
And in general I think your transparency greatly reduces my concerns on this dimension, but not enough to leave me unconcerned.
I see. Maybe there’s some interesting philosophical disagreement behind our respective attitudes around what to do when you are a beneficiary of an action; to be very very exaggerated, my attitudes seems more towards “duty, loyalty, obligation, consider how to repay your benefactors” and yours are more “neutrality, impartiality, universalizability, consider what rules society should adopt”. Obviously I think both attitudes have their time & place.
I’d characterize a chunk of my recent work as stemming from the former motivation. For example, I/Manifund have hosted the last two rounds of ACX Grants at no charge and some months of work from my side, because I know how important ACX Grants round 1 was in the creation of Manifold. Similarly, I feel strongly about promoting regranting as a concept partly because regranting was how Manifold got its seed investment. I run Surplus, not because I’ve been in YC myself, but partly because PG’s essays have been formative for how I operate my projects. And obviously, I’ve been much more consistently willing to work with people who have “FTX/Future Fund/Foundation” on their resume—Caroline, but also again Ross Rheingans-Yoo, Joel Becker, Nishad Singh among others. (But in all these cases, I’m also trying to ensure that the work or collaboration can stand on its own merits.)
All this is to say that I think it’s reasonable and honorable to express concerns about people/orgs you’ve benefited from, but, also, maybe about as important to emphasize the degree to which you benefited from their actions, because the beneficiaries are best placed to describe what the impact of those actions were, compared to neutral third parties.
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Anyways, I’m trying to write more in general about both my viewpoints and my history of actions so that, among other things, you and others will have a good picture of eg whether I am really 90th percentile to lose Manifund funds in an irreplaceable/harmful way. Let me know if there are any cruxes or questions that would help you understand me better; I appreciate all the effort you’ve put into speaking with and advising me to date.
People were unwilling to work with Ross Rheingans-Yoo?! People were unwilling to work with Joel Becker?!
Absurd. Obviously neither of them did anything wrong whatsoever. Nor did anyone else at the satellite orgs.
Really appreciate you taking the time to write out such a detailed response. It does seem that I stepped into a conversation that was bigger and longer-running than I’d realized.
I see a lot better where you are coming from, now. And certainly there are plenty of Austin’s takes here that I disagree with (e.g., I don’t think we should free SBF and put him to work).
Still, some of your claims about what Austin would do in various hypotheticals are a bit hard for me to square with the person I’m seeing Austin to be. Austin’s post specifically called out that Caroline was repentant and had fully served her time in prison as a reason why it was permissible to hire her. Maybe that paragraph was only included instrumentally, and it wasn’t actually a crux for Austin. In that case, I disagree with him—I do strongly agree it would be wrong to hire a hypothetical pardoned-SBF for the same role Caroline was hired for now. It’s relevant that she’s contrite, and that she explained her crimes in gruesome detail for the world to know, while Sam did the opposite.
So—fine, I grant Austin has or has had some number of bad takes. I’ve had bad takes too. I still see him as having one unpopular good take now, which is that 2026-Caroline would be a good hire. One of the main reasons I admire you so much, Oliver, is that you had an unpopular good take too (that FTX was bad/sketchy, a take you importantly held before its crimes were brought to light).
>I think Austin is like 90th percentile likely among people I know to e.g. end up doing something as dumb as investing Manifund funds earmarked for specific projects into volatile assets and then end up not being able to pay out promised grants.
This exchange is making me realize that I don’t really know any of you guys all that well, besides for Caroline, and maybe I shouldn’t have waded into this. But… are you saying Austin would do this without consent? You really think Austin would commit some kind of FTX-style fraudulent scheme where user assets get nonconsensually invested into risky investment vehicles? That just… still doesn’t seem like his apparent personality type, to me, at all. And if that was his plan, Caroline would be the worst possible hire. Not only because of increased scrutiny, but also because I’d expect she herself will be severely allergic to any kind of impropriety in any role she takes on for the rest of her life.
Of course, that’s just my judgment. And it’s fair if you want to be like, “well, Adam publicly endorsed Sam in 2021, so his judgment sucks.” Nevertheless, I think I am a better judge of character than I was in 2021 (though I admit that I have nothing I can point to to convince anyone here), and I disagree with the consensus view in this thread that 2026-Caroline would be likelier than most to commit fraud in her role at Manifund. I’m happy to throw whatever nonexistent social capital I have here behind that.
Glad I made at least some sense!
I am saying Austin is in my 90th percentile for people likely to do this. I think this still leaves him unlikely to do this, but yeah, I am tracking it as a risk that seems higher for him than most people.
I don’t know Caroline well. In general the history of financial fraud strongly suggests that people who previously committed financial fraud have a much higher likelihood of doing so again. You might have special information about Caroline that I do not have that give you appropriate confidence that this base-rate doesn’t apply to Caroline, but it’s at least not clear to me, from where I am standing.
I appreciate you sharing your take, I do think it’s valuable evidence. I do discount it a good amount given your mixed track record, but not completely.
Thank you, Adam; I very much appreciate the kind words. (And please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I knew you before this exchange. I’d heard Caroline mention your name, and now I see you knew both her and SBF well and worked at FTX yourself, eg per this article. I appreciate you speaking up all the more.)
And, I hope this doesn’t undercut you, but I’ll try to explain what Oli may have meant, context that you might be missing. 4 years ago, I wrote in support of SBF shortly after the FTX collapse; more recently, I spoke on a podcast about my controversial views on SBF and FTX. I think some people may have rounded this off to “Austin condones fraud, or at least, is permissive of fraud for a greater good”. (Certainly, my appetite for working with Caroline and others like Ross and Nishad and Joel, might lead people to conflate these.)
But, I don’t condone fraud. I try pretty hard to be honest and open, and also to bake transparency into my actions. I desperately hope that, in the position of the FTX inner circle, I would have had the courage to speak up. (I worry that in some ways, my disposition is too agreeable/conflict-averse). I think about this partly because Manifund has some similarities to FTX and Future Fund: we’re custodians of people’s money and trust, and operate from a similar startup-y, move fast, do-good-for-the-world mentality. And so, it feels optically (but also, truly) important that I draw the right lessons from FTX’s collapse. But also, not the wrong ones.
I’ll admit that for a while, I clung on to some hope that SBF was actually right about his claims: that emergency funding was coming if not for bankruptcy; that creditors could have been repaid in-kind; that the estate then punted a generational portfolio. I read these things with the interest of a conspiracy fanboy, and I think Oli and others noticed. I’ve since updated downward on SBF’s claims being true (partly after talking to Caroline), maybe from 50% ⇒ 10%; and maybe it just doesn’t matter if those claims were true, given how things played out. I apologize for the soldier-y way I persisted.
Maybe the disagreement with the rationalists like Oli and Elizabeth comes from how we value truthseeking. (Meanwhile, the EAs are mad at me for optics-y reasons, I believe). While important and admirable, I wouldn’t choose “truthseeking” as my highest value, per the podcast.
Perhaps neither Lightcone nor idk CG express my core values as well as Future Fund did. For instance, I’ve never seriously considered leaving my job to work at Lightcone or CG, but considered it for the Future Fund (and volunteered for them for a week). I’ve tried, like 2-3 times now, to write about what the Future Fund got right, and maybe when all this is over I will finally publish that piece. In lieu of that, a DM I’ve previously sent:
Yup, don’t think we’ve met. But Caroline’s told me about you. From what she’s said and what writing I’ve read of yours, you seem great.
It does sound like there’s a lot of history here that I didn’t know about and context I was missing. Thanks for explaining it to me.
Still, the original sentence I was reacting to seems clear that it was the act of hiring Caroline he was talking about, so I think I still stand by the substance of my original comment.
Oops, I didn’t see this before my response to Adam, which covers a lot of the same ground.