(encouragement isn't market manipulation, shh!)

@EllieHigh Let's keep Manifold a friendly place and not insult each other.

@JamesGrugett no

@EllieHigh I'd welcome any persuasive arguments to convince me I'm wrong!

@Austin alas i already cashed out, incentive evaporated

@EllieHigh Buying back in is cheaper than ever~

For what it's worth I think people are way over-updating to the NO side; eg I just noticed John Roxton's comments here https://manifold.markets/post/in-defense-of-sbf#YPV4rinbR6cgjaFxwcCm and it strikes me as the kind of comment that would make me sadder to have posted the rant, at least in its current wording

@Austin You did phrase the last section pretty badly tbf; was super easy to misunderstand your point there. (Fascinatingly, your felony market was sitting at 8% earlier today.) If you regret the wording of that section but not the gist of the whole thing, how does this resolve?

He literally looted customers assets for 4b of personal loans, 9 figures of real estate, all while assets in which people had 100% title and FTX was legally prohibited from touching in any way are now gone—trading at five cents on the dollar.

Of course he’s a great propaganda artist—that’s how he strip-mined the company and fooled all of you.

But embarrassing to take this seriously.

@MattP I'm not convinced by this argument - glancing at https://www.coininterestrate.com/ there are plenty of offerings are in a similar rate range. They probably aren't all scams, I'd guess they are loaning out the money to somebody for even higher rates, or perhaps are using it as a growth strategy (i.e. they onboard a bunch of customers and then lower the interest rates later perhaps) - which certainly is something a scammer could do, but someone aboveboard could also do.

@jack I mean, it's the same thing. It's like most crypto - fundamentally a pyramid scheme that relies on continued ridiculous growth through unfounded hype to allow those who bought in earlier to make a profit, but generates nothing of actual value (economic or otherwise) in the process.

I suspect we just have different prior about crypto in general, which is fine. I'm probably in the minority in the Manifold community as a skeptic.

@MattP I don't think so, I've seen a fair number of anti-crypto people on here. I think it's around an even split.

@SneakySly Reposting in full form (because I've blocked Twitter for myself):

@SneakySly what a disaster. a fraudster, immoral and no intelligence.

@Austin Threadreader if that helps: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593262926705487872.html

@barak position*

@barak Agreed.

Starting from a presumption of innocence and trying to see the best in people is good in general. It's especially good to help combat a known human tendency to bandwagon together or react based on recent evidence rather than complete evidence.

In that way, I don't think Austin should regret posting a rant defending SBF even if he turned out to be bad all along.

@Austin https://twitter.com/211lp/status/1592073306316079106

@NathanpmYoung It already got posted. And what would be the point of having a market on whether Austin will post it? That isn't very useful to them.

(That volume number might be wrong, it's somehow showing less total volume than 24 hour volume.)

@IsaacKing Yeah, total volume is definitely wrong somehow, I've observed this before. But even if it were right, note that your shares cost <1 each, so the better number to compare is how much M$ you invested.

FWIW I also predict NO here, although I haven't decided how confident I am.

@Conflux I just now ended up reading the entire Sequoia profile of SBF, and in a vacuum it certainly makes him seem awesome, a major force for good in the world. Act utilitarianism is a fragile philosophy - if you screw up, as he did here, things can get extremely bad - but I don't know, the article makes me feel like if things had shaken out differently he had a nonzero chance of doing massive good in the world. Though again, I think I agree with Eliezer's assessment that this particular case was textbook fraud.

Anyway, the TL;DR is that I feel I learned from the rabbit hole that your rant sent me down, and I appreciate the courage it took to write it, even if it ends up damaging your reputation. I think the world is better for having more takes in it, and hope that circumstances don't force you to regret this.

@SneakySly mind sharing why you thought it was a bad idea?

@SneakySly I'm glad Austin posted it, but I'm worried the market is going to resolve to YES based on the EA forum post not getting many comments.

• This wastes a lot of my time, because it was either insignificant or generates too much controversy

@IsaacKing based on a couple private reachouts I've gotten, I'm unlikely to conclude this was too insignificant. We'll see about the controversy...

@Austin
1 - I think Fraud was committed with very high likelihood.
2 - Bad optics.
3 - Many people were personally negatively impacted by SBF here, and those negative feelings could be placed onto you through association, especially as like the only person defending him.

1. Agreed.

2. If optics are trumping our dedication to finding out what's true and right, why should we expect EA to be any more trustworthy of source of charity recommendations than anywhere else?

3. Yeah that's a risk. But then again Peter Singer and the antinatalists have done fine for themselves with some pretty controversial opinions of their own.

@IsaacKing
2 - I mean, that's valid, but I personally think optics matter a lot. Especially from a organizational perspective.
3 - Antinatalists are more like strange holders of weird quirky beliefs. Noone really cares about them. Endorsing/supporting someone who you as an individual hits very differently from a pure emotional valence standpoint.

@SneakySly Wish we had an edit button.

Should be:
"Endorsing/supporting someone who [harmed] you as an individual hits very differently from a pure emotional valence standpoint. "

@SneakySly

2. I agree they matter a lot, but if the focus on optics compromises the primary mission, what exactly is the point? When someone in EA does something controversial, people need to be able to say "what if this was actually ok?"

3. I don't know if we disagreeing on anything significant here. I agree Austin might encounter some anger from people who are (quite justifiably) mad at SBF. I just think that's ok.

@EliLifland I plan on resolving this on Jan 15 2023; 3 months feels like a reasonable amount of time to make a judgement call on whether this post was worthwhile.

I'm curious what trader expectations were, by the way -- there were 3 sections, so if I regret one section should I resolve to YES or 33% or NO?

@Austin I think if you regret the entire post on net, you should resolve YES, otherwise NO.

@Austin Yeah, I was expecting this to be a yes-or-no market, no PROB resolution.

@IsaacKing It might be the case that I had enough data at the time to eg condemn SBF completely, as many others seem to be doing already. In which case, this post may be me loudly proclaiming incorrect information and worsening community epistemics.

Other possible sources of regret:

• Somehow this causes a lot of bad things to happen to Manifold, or to EA

• This wastes a lot of my time, because it was either insignificant or generates too much controversy

Ok, but again, if you had poor epistemics at the time of writing, and then after posting you learned about your mistake and corrected it, why would you regret that?

I don't think that posts containing legible, reasonable information posted with the intent to get to the truth worsen community epistemics just because the information turned out to be wrong.

@IsaacKing Yeah, that's what I mostly think myself (and why I posted it lol). But oftentimes people seem to regret writing angry rants on the internet; I have not had this experience very often, so was curious to see if other people have thoughts on the wise way to proceed

@Austin If you haven't cross-posted this to the EA forum and/or LW, I would recommend you do so.

@IsaacKing https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/w6aLsNppuwnqccHmC/in-defense-of-sbf!

Oof, -8 votes already.

@IsaacKing +1 to this

As for whether it WAS intentional bad behavior - for the most part I assume you're going off of much of the same info as me, but I want to link this article that I just saw recently and don't know if you have, which does seem to make that more likely https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/exclusive-least-1-billion-client-funds-missing-failed-crypto-firm-ftx-sources-2022-11-12/ (specifically the "backdoor" bit)

@tcheasdfjkl Thanks for your feedback, I really value it. I had not seen the article but it actually makes me believe even more in the "bad judgement" thesis.

Of course, we're now getting into pretty definitional debates. I roughly think "ill intent" looks like "SBF consciously and with full knowledge decided to give client funds to Alameda", vs bad judgement looks more like "things were really confusing, Sam was moving fast".

I think a separate axis is "how tied into utilitarian logic was this bad call/ill intentioned call" and my guess is EA detractors are saying "haha look how utilitariansim leads you astray" while EA stalwarts are defending with "no no true utilitiarianism doesn't support fraud" whereas I mostly just think "utilitarianism just wasn't much of a decisive factor/being considered by SBF at the time"

Personally, I think right now the situation is highly unclear and I don't have a solid understanding of whether it was ill intent or not. I do think there's a reasonable general argument that it's bad to make excessively quick denunciations on the basis of unreliable, fast-changing information.

I also agree that I highly doubt EA considerations were the motivating factor. It's possible, but unlikely imo. There's plenty of motivation from standard stuff like SBF just wanting to save his companies.