@AlexbGoode Come on dude. Spend two minutes reading about it before asking.

@AlexbGoode Nevermind. Let me Google that for you. https://www.google.com/search?q=ea+sbf+ftx&rlz=1CDGOYI_enFR957US960&hl=en-US&sxsrf=APwXEdfrlww6wvKvncA0IzQq8vi9HqTOng%3A1679838293201&ei=VUwgZN35C5-SwbkP9eigyAE&oq=&gs_lcp=ChNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwEAEYADIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzIHCCMQ6gIQJzoKCAAQRxDWBBCwA0oECEEYAFAAWABglewBaARwAHgAgAEAiAEAkgEAmAEAoAEBsAEPyAEIwAEB&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp

@KatjaGrace You actually asked it yourself a few months ago. (I had also forgotten.) My mistake for not adding it to the description at the time; I've now added it.

@IsaacKing lol glad past me has my back here, if we are all very forgetful. Thanks!

@Gigacasting Is this new reporting, or just a rehash of the TIME article?

@GeorgeVii The FTX Future Fund team is much smaller than all of EA leadership.

@MaggieDelano Sorry, I missed that this was shared below already: https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/by-the-end-of-2023-will-substantial#5cLSdKZK2VuHhw85tQLp

I agree and I doubt the charity commission would be lenient about misconduct/mismanagement because of 'motivated reasoning'.

Also, it's surely much more important for EAs to think about these CC markets? I doubt this market sitting at 10% or 90% would affect people's decisions very much, whereas these CC actions would have a big impact on EA as a whole and would be worth preparing for.

@berealistic As the creator of those markets, I'd say that Issac's market is both broader and narrower. His definition of leader is pretty broad, while my markets implicitly cover only people associated with EVF. On the other hand, his other terms are narrower than what would trigger my markets, both for the reason @DavidMathers mentioned but also because the CC would likely make a finding or take significant regulatory action on a lower mental state than a leader having "strong suspicions" of a particular type of fraud.

@GeorgeVii also at 20

Wow, Bouscal - the insider tradoor

@GeorgeVii What's this last comment in reference to? I don't recall hearing about Bouscal before.

@IsaacKing Ah, she who is quoted in recent time article - presumably knew it was coming out and bought a ton of yes on the 8th (3rd largest yes holder)

@GeorgeVii Oh, I didn't see that they had bought YES here. Neat! I approve. :)

@IsaacKing I don't. This updates me towards considering her less credible, since she had a motivation to play up how bad it was, even if it's only a play-money market. In general I don't think whistleblowers should bet on prediction markets about what they are whistleblowing about, for this reason.

@JavierPrieto Do you think anything in this resolves it Yes?

I think if this is all we find out I expect it to resolve no

@NathanpmYoung even if it's not "substantial evidence" yet, it's quite a bad look. This is frankly maddening.

@NicoDelon I think it's a bad look in terms of strategy - we shouldn't have tied our name to SBF, but I think less a bad look in general, except maybe wills protection.

But also I'm asking a specific question about this market.

@NathanpmYoung Given the high standard for this market, I agree that this is insufficient. But in real life, where standards are different, it's embarrassing—lacking judgment, looking away, dismissing testimony...

@NathanpmYoung Would 'didn't distinguish between firm capital and trading capital' maybe count as 'spending other people's money without their permission'? I don't understand finance enough to have a firm sense of what that means, but it was the line that caused me to buy 'yes'. (At 15%, I'm not necessarily over 50% on this resolving yes.)

@DavidMathers That lack of distinction wouldn't necessarily imply they're spending other people's money without permission (since they'd fundraised a lot of cash). You should probably make sure that the cash you need for payroll isn't being used for trading, though.

@finnhambly 'You should probably make sure that the cash you need for payroll isn't being used for trading, though.' Sounds like a fair chance of a yes from this to me.

I agree with @NathanpmYoung that I expect this will resolve no if this is all we find out. This excerpt is in keeping with what we already knew and discussed here:

None of the early Alameda employees who witnessed Bankman-Fried’s behavior years earlier say they anticipated this level of alleged criminal fraud. There was no “smoking gun,” as one put it, that revealed specific examples of lawbreaking. Even if they knew Bankman-Fried was dishonest and unethical, they say, none of them could have foreseen a fraud of this scope.

and Isaac made this clarification last month:

My intention is that the EA leader must have had a strong suspicion of the actual large financial crime that occurred. Other crimes are useful evidence towards that; if I see someone break a bunch of regulation laws, maybe defraud someone in an unrelated business, it would certainly increase my credence that they're defrauding people in their main business. Does that answer your questions, or am I misunderstanding?

Obviously EA leaders ≠ early Alameda employees, and EA leaders who were involved more recently may have known more. I don't think this article is a big update though (unless you didn't realise that EA leaders ignored those earlier warnings).

@finnhambly Ah, that clarification makes it sound like this would only resolve positively if they suspect that FTX was dipping into customer deposits to trade. If that's the case, I think no is still 92-3% or so. (Not because I think 'Will and Nick and other top EAs are lovely people who wouldn't do that, but because I can't imagine why anyone with knowledge of the actual ongoing fraud at FTX would have informed them, but not blown the whistle more generally.)

@DavidMathers Agreed, and also I don't think observing a lack of distinction between funds means you're observing other people's money being spent. If someone asks me to look after £50 for them, and I put it with my other money without ringfencing it, I don't think I'm necessarily spending it (until my balance is under £50).

@finnhambly It's not a huge update but it does provide more background and ties together a few disjointed pieces. IMO, if that's all we know, there's likely to be a lot more that we don't know which, if it emerged, would make it resolve YES. It all hinges on whether it emerges by the end of 2013, and it may never. But at this point, the idea that no EA leader had reasonable suspicions of fraud (and as a matter of fact didn't blow the whistle) looks to me like comfortable self-deception.

@finnhambly "Obviously EA leaders ≠ early Alameda employees" - Idk Tara being the ex-CEO of CEA puts here in the 'EA leader' category to me, no?
Tho I suppose you could argue she did "whistle-blow" but was simply shutdown/ignored by the other "leaders" she whistle-blowed to for whatever reasons (seemingly internal drama/politics of CEA?)

@NicoDelon

there's likely to be a lot more that we don't know which, if it emerged, would make it resolve YES. It all hinges on whether it emerges by the end of 2013, and it may never.

Note that we can still take into account evidence we expect to exist that has not been made public.

This article seems to mostly be a rehash of what we had already pieced together months ago. However, their portrayal of the planning document does make it sound a little worse than we thought:

The document, which has not been previously reported, accuses Bankman-Fried of dismissing calls for stronger accounting and inflating the expected value of adding new exchanges, and said a majority of employees thought he was “negligent” and “unethical.” It also alleges he was “misreporting numbers” and “failing to update investors on poor performance.” The team “didn’t trust Sam to be in investor meetings alone,” colleagues wrote. “Sam will lie, and distort the truth for his own gain,” the document says.

Misrepresenting numbers and lying to investors sounds a lot like fraud.

Would be really nice if we could read the document itself rather than rely on TIME's summary.

@IsaacKing Would you be able to say how you'll decide whether "they had enough evidence to conclude there was fraud happening"?

It seems pretty unlikely that any EA leader is going to come out and say 'I put a pretty decent chance of fraud' more strongly than was given in this comment, so it's probably going to come down to your judgement on whether the evidence available to others was enough.

The Slack messages were deemed insufficient evidence on their own, and I'd expect that misrepresenting numbers and lying to investors would also not be enough for someone to have "a strong suspicion of the actual large financial crime that occurred" — but maybe you think differently?

(and please forgive me if quoting your words back to you looks antagonistic, I'm just attempting to keep track of what the criteria are without misrepresenting the previous discourse!)

@GeorgeVii I meant that EA leaders aren't precluded from seeing smoking guns of specific lawbreaking just because early Alameda employees didn't (as the article claims) — was just adding the caveat that they could have ended up seeing more

@NathanpmYoung That seems optimistic. I hope you're right.

@NathanpmYoung What's a shortcut in this context? I think I agree with your general guess that people will have had good evidence Sam was shady, but this will probably resolve negatively because they didn't know about the actual fraud, and so it's unlikely (though certainly possible) that they had strong, evidence-backed suspicions that meet the 'involve spending other people's money without their permission' bit.

@DavidMathers I can imagine people knew he was sloppy in his accounting. That he didn't use normal processes if he didn't think he ought to.

@KatjaGrace I think it depends on how widespread the rumor is. If it's a rumor that only spreads among EA leadership and their friends/co-workers, then I think that still counts. It's it's a rumor that thousands of people have heard, gets mentioned on the EA forums, etc., then I don't think that should count.

@IsaacKing Thanks! In the Slack story, it sounds like it's 'some circles' plus some part of the government/law enforcement. Intuitively that sounds more like the former case (something like thousands of people have heard, and they are not EAs), so if one of the Slack users came to have a strong suspicion from this, I would not be inclined to say they covered it up. Would you?

@KatjaGrace Interesting, I have the opposite impression of the same information. I feel like if it was restricted to people in the government investigating the crime and people in a private Slack channel, that doesn't seem like public knowledge. There's no plausible way I could have found out about it, for example, even if I had gone looking.

@IsaacKing I read it as additionally spread among 'some circles', which sounded to me like probably many people, especially as the circles' view is described as 'a reputation'. But I don't know if it sounds like 'public' information, just not 'private'.

(Separately, it seems intuitively especially not like a 'cover up' if the people you received the information from were law enforcement of some kind, since they seem like the primary people you are meant to report crimes to.)

Fwiw, even if info were private, it would often seem strange to call failure to share it 'covering up' to me. e.g. if in general I hear a rumor about an acquaintance, am I morally required to post the rumor on Twitter? I don't think normal social norms say I should, even if I suspect that it is true. And I don't think most people would say that I 'covered it up' if I didn't actively spread it. (Seems different if someone asked me about the person and I misled them for instance.)

@KatjaGrace I agree my definition of "cover up" may be noncentral, but I think it's a little more reasonable than you make it out to be. Its usage in the resolution criteria isn't referring just to the spreading of unfounded rumors, but to anyone who has a serious belief that there's an issue and chooses not to say anything about it.

@IsaacKing I thought the situation here that might trigger resolution yes was that someone in the Slack discussion got a serious belief in high P(fraud) as a result of hearing the rumor

@IsaacKing "fraudulent investiment strategies that involve spending other people's money without their permission" is pretty narrow. Reports are that as few as 4 people at FTX/Alameda actually knew about the mechanism. Would probably be higher for "fraud" or "illegal conduct that is malum in se"

@IsaacKing There are a bunch of outstanding questions about the resolution criteria in the comments IIRC, and I don't think they're easily summarisable unfortunately

"If he does and he confirms that the knowledge about Alameda's gambling house funds was limited to those four coconspirators, I see no reason not to take him at his word, here, and would think this should be at <5%"

Why do you believe this? Seems to me that if SBF has friends who also knew, he would prefer them to not be thrown under the bus, all things being equal.

@NeelNanda prisoner's dilemma iterated basically

@DeanValentine I've recently seen how hard it was for Coffeezilla to get SBF to admit commingling of funds. I think his overall strategy might have been conversational aikido and sleight of hand. Counting on conversational partners not having enough working memory to keep track, but not not leaking

Caroline on the other hand didn't seem to have employed obfuscation to the same degree. Surface impression is less message discipline, anyway.

So I think there's a high chance someone might have figured it out.

@NeelNanda Because he would be in violation of his plea agreement for lying. As would Caroline.

@BetsByAnon "Keep track" of what? Just don't tell people you're committing massive fraud? It's harder when you've already been caught doing it, but I don't understand what hard questions you expect he would have had to answer in September of this year.

@DeanValentine Keep track of moving parts in the explanation. For example, when pressed on the FTX TOS, he always started talking about margin trading.

Questions like "did you, or did you not knowingly lend out user funds?" seems pretty hard for him to answer straight.

@BetsByAnon But under what circumstances would he have had to explain any such things before FTX's balance sheet was leaked in November?

@DeanValentine Right about the moment customers are asked to send their holdings to Alameda in order to get it onto FTX?