Hiring Caroline Ellison was a straightforwardly directly evil act. It’s bad to continue to associate with and do business with literally the worst people ever; it directly incentivizes people in the future to do catastrophically evil things, and sets a norm that you can do catastrophically evil things and get away with it. It reflects poorly on the moral character of Austin and the broader community he is a part of that he was unable to resist doing something so moronic. The people who looked at that behavior and concluded that Effective Altruists are bad and unscrupulous are making a correct inference about Austin and by extension EAs. There is no eight dimensional underwater backgammon required to arrive at any of these conclusions and the particular details of her employment bear virtually no weight on them.
I think you are underestimating the space of possible employment relationships. I agree with you that hiring Caroline is bad, and many of your inferences here are correct, but it’s not because of some super simple rule that “everyone agrees with”.
I think it’s IMO pretty clearly fine for Caroline to work for an organization in a non-executive, non-financial capacity without much ability to cause harm, with compensation less than she could make on the market even given her employment history, and with little to no social authority. The latter is tricky to arrange, but there are many roles for which it would be true.
Caroline was not given the death penalty, she was sentenced to prison, did her time, and while I do not think people should come to trust her readily again, it seems fine for people to work with her in roles that visibly and transparently do not require trust in her.
Whether it’s possible to hire her into a financial role depends on the details of how it is set up. Caroline working as the equivalent of an open-source contributor and contractor to something like the Manifund platform, making pull requests to a repository where other people reliably review the code, seems like a potential good fit for her skillset, and does not give her much power or social authority.
And beyond that, it’s just generally not the community’s business to judge who organizations hire into commoditized non-trust-requiring roles. Yes, leadership roles and roles with social authority, especially ones that have any risk of being mistaken as representative of our extended ecosystem, deserve scrutiny. But contractor-like roles with well-defined outputs that are relatively commoditized do not. I think Martin Shkreli sucks (though not as much as people think he sucks), but if I want to hire him to set up some Airtable automations for me, and people try to get angry at me about that, I will tell them to pound sand and please tell me any actual mechanism by which that could end up causing harm to anyone, and if they don’t have an answer, to please stop bothering me.
Narrow pedantry point; my guess is you’re saying a thing which you know is false but doing so for emphasis. May I suggest not doing that? I don’t think it helps.
My list of literally the worse people ever is a list of mass murders and prolific serial killers. Is your cluster much larger than mine, are you sorting it differently, or is there some third thing?
Huh, I think SBF is among the worst people ever. I think Caroline is at least a candidate for it. It requires a lot of skill to be bad. SBF has caused much more harm for civilization and the future of humanity than prolific serial killers. My guess is he makes the top 100?
I see the line of reasoning on SBF vs prolific serial killers, it’s not crazy to me though my own moral reasoning disagrees with it, and I think on that note I’ll leave Elizabeth’s replies (EDIT: on this tangent at least) here and possibly muse out loud on my own shortform or something.
Hiring Caroline Ellison was a straightforwardly directly evil act. It’s bad to continue to associate with and do business with literally the worst people ever; it directly incentivizes people in the future to do catastrophically evil things, and sets a norm that you can do catastrophically evil things and get away with it. It reflects poorly on the moral character of Austin and the broader community he is a part of that he was unable to resist doing something so moronic. The people who looked at that behavior and concluded that Effective Altruists are bad and unscrupulous are making a correct inference about Austin and by extension EAs. There is no eight dimensional underwater backgammon required to arrive at any of these conclusions and the particular details of her employment bear virtually no weight on them.
I think you are underestimating the space of possible employment relationships. I agree with you that hiring Caroline is bad, and many of your inferences here are correct, but it’s not because of some super simple rule that “everyone agrees with”.
I think it’s IMO pretty clearly fine for Caroline to work for an organization in a non-executive, non-financial capacity without much ability to cause harm, with compensation less than she could make on the market even given her employment history, and with little to no social authority. The latter is tricky to arrange, but there are many roles for which it would be true.
Caroline was not given the death penalty, she was sentenced to prison, did her time, and while I do not think people should come to trust her readily again, it seems fine for people to work with her in roles that visibly and transparently do not require trust in her.
Whether it’s possible to hire her into a financial role depends on the details of how it is set up. Caroline working as the equivalent of an open-source contributor and contractor to something like the Manifund platform, making pull requests to a repository where other people reliably review the code, seems like a potential good fit for her skillset, and does not give her much power or social authority.
And beyond that, it’s just generally not the community’s business to judge who organizations hire into commoditized non-trust-requiring roles. Yes, leadership roles and roles with social authority, especially ones that have any risk of being mistaken as representative of our extended ecosystem, deserve scrutiny. But contractor-like roles with well-defined outputs that are relatively commoditized do not. I think Martin Shkreli sucks (though not as much as people think he sucks), but if I want to hire him to set up some Airtable automations for me, and people try to get angry at me about that, I will tell them to pound sand and please tell me any actual mechanism by which that could end up causing harm to anyone, and if they don’t have an answer, to please stop bothering me.
While I disagree with the particulars, I share a sense of moral disgust.
Narrow pedantry point; my guess is you’re saying a thing which you know is false but doing so for emphasis. May I suggest not doing that? I don’t think it helps.
Not really no
My list of literally the worse people ever is a list of mass murders and prolific serial killers. Is your cluster much larger than mine, are you sorting it differently, or is there some third thing?
Huh, I think SBF is among the worst people ever. I think Caroline is at least a candidate for it. It requires a lot of skill to be bad. SBF has caused much more harm for civilization and the future of humanity than prolific serial killers. My guess is he makes the top 100?
I see the line of reasoning on SBF vs prolific serial killers, it’s not crazy to me though my own moral reasoning disagrees with it, and I think on that note I’ll leave Elizabeth’s replies (EDIT: on this tangent at least) here and possibly muse out loud on my own shortform or something.
I think you can take a wild guess based on the website we’re speaking on why I might think that Caroline Ellison is one of the “worst people ever”
I can take many wild guesses, but it sounds like my pedantry point was incorrect and I retract it. Thanks for correctly expressing what you think.