I guess, it still feels weird to speak in my own defense but I’ll try to do so here:
I did in fact check in with several people about the hiring announcement, including Oli, who I’m very grateful for about his criticisms. Possibly you meant I should have sampled more people before deciding to hire Caroline. I feel like the process I ran here was kind of reasonable—a 1 month work trial, another month incognito, and then a public announcement once we knew we would work well together. I tend to think doing things like this in public is better than in private.
I think “trust with leadership” is kind of an odd frame; I mostly don’t know that anyone’s eg hired me for an executive position; insofar as I have any leadership, I think I mostly built those through my own track record of work. I agree that donors and employees and partners and the general public should look at my actions now and reassess whether they want to continue working with me or Manifund; I’ve encouraged people to do so.
I appreciate that you think I’ve been a good partner to trade with! You and Lightcone broadly have been as well, and I try to share this fact where I can. I hope to conduct many more positive sum trades in the future.
I mostly wish you had publicly argued more for your belief that a convicted criminal basically didn’t do the crimes. I suspect this would have led me to trust you more (though more likely for you to find out your evidence & arguments were weak).
Perhaps you have and I didn’t see it? But either way it seemed crazy to me to not say something in your announcement post like “I understand to many people I respect, and to many people who use and support Manifund and Mox that I hired someone who is a major convicted felon to a relevantly similar role to where they committed their crimes, and that this seems like a straightforwardly bad decision, but FYI I actually think that they largely didn’t do the crimes they confessed to, so it’s not actually that bad” and (for bonus points) some reasons why you think that.
I would say (possibly with the benefit of hindsight) that a piece of writing more shaped like this would be appropriate if you wanted your allies to come to think this was a good decision.
Both the inferential gap here and also the quality-of-the-decision-gap are both far more substantial than usual.
I appreciate the pointer and feedback! In any case, I’m currently thinking pretty hard about whether the EA or AI safety community feels like the right set of allies for me and my work. More writeups to come, I suppose.
I let EA out of my heart a long time ago. I felt the culture was rotting and its leadership abandoning it back in ~2018; I had forbid myself to even look at the EA Forum almost a year before the FTX crash, to help me separate from it. Looking at some of the threads there about this decision of yours this week has just been opening up old traumas, and I quickly closed them again. I would encourage you to focus your efforts elsewhere, I see little good that will come of that place.
I don’t relate to the AI safety community in an especially similar way. It is one of the actors in the play of what is going on, like the news media, or China; with the main difference being that I am more a part of it. I have more ability to steer it, and more responsibility for its impacts.
Not that you asked, but I thought I’d mention it anyway, in case you were interested.
I guess, it still feels weird to speak in my own defense but I’ll try to do so here:
I did in fact check in with several people about the hiring announcement, including Oli, who I’m very grateful for about his criticisms. Possibly you meant I should have sampled more people before deciding to hire Caroline. I feel like the process I ran here was kind of reasonable—a 1 month work trial, another month incognito, and then a public announcement once we knew we would work well together. I tend to think doing things like this in public is better than in private.
I think “trust with leadership” is kind of an odd frame; I mostly don’t know that anyone’s eg hired me for an executive position; insofar as I have any leadership, I think I mostly built those through my own track record of work. I agree that donors and employees and partners and the general public should look at my actions now and reassess whether they want to continue working with me or Manifund; I’ve encouraged people to do so.
I appreciate that you think I’ve been a good partner to trade with! You and Lightcone broadly have been as well, and I try to share this fact where I can. I hope to conduct many more positive sum trades in the future.
I mostly wish you had publicly argued more for your belief that a convicted criminal basically didn’t do the crimes. I suspect this would have led me to trust you more (though more likely for you to find out your evidence & arguments were weak).
Perhaps you have and I didn’t see it? But either way it seemed crazy to me to not say something in your announcement post like “I understand to many people I respect, and to many people who use and support Manifund and Mox that I hired someone who is a major convicted felon to a relevantly similar role to where they committed their crimes, and that this seems like a straightforwardly bad decision, but FYI I actually think that they largely didn’t do the crimes they confessed to, so it’s not actually that bad” and (for bonus points) some reasons why you think that.
I kind of wanted to, but some people including Oli thought I should not include FTX apologia in my hiring announcement. So, shrug.
I would say (possibly with the benefit of hindsight) that a piece of writing more shaped like this would be appropriate if you wanted your allies to come to think this was a good decision.
Both the inferential gap here and also the quality-of-the-decision-gap are both far more substantial than usual.
I appreciate the pointer and feedback! In any case, I’m currently thinking pretty hard about whether the EA or AI safety community feels like the right set of allies for me and my work. More writeups to come, I suppose.
I let EA out of my heart a long time ago. I felt the culture was rotting and its leadership abandoning it back in ~2018; I had forbid myself to even look at the EA Forum almost a year before the FTX crash, to help me separate from it. Looking at some of the threads there about this decision of yours this week has just been opening up old traumas, and I quickly closed them again. I would encourage you to focus your efforts elsewhere, I see little good that will come of that place.
I don’t relate to the AI safety community in an especially similar way. It is one of the actors in the play of what is going on, like the news media, or China; with the main difference being that I am more a part of it. I have more ability to steer it, and more responsibility for its impacts.
Not that you asked, but I thought I’d mention it anyway, in case you were interested.