EA - A personal reflection on SBF by So8res

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A personal reflection on SBF, published by So8res on February 7, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.MetaThe following is a personal account of my (direct and indirect) interactions with Sam Bankman-Fried, which I wrote up in early/mid-November when news came out that FTX had apparently stolen billions of dollars from its customers.I’d previously intended to post a version of this publicly, on account of how people were worried about who knew what when, but in the writing of it I realized how many of my observations were second-hand and shared with me in confidence. This ultimately led to me shelving it (after completing enough of it to extract what lessons I could from the whole affair).I’m posting this now (with various details blurred out) because early last week Rob Bensinger suggested that I do so. Rob argued that accounts such as this one might be useful to the larger community, because they help strip away a layer of mystery and ambiguity from the situation by plainly stating what particular EAs knew or believed, and when they knew or believed it.This post is structured as a chronological account of the facts as I recall them, followed by my own accounting of salient things I think I did right and wrong, followed by general takeaways.Some caveats:I don’t speak for any of the people who shared their thoughts or experiences with me. Some info was shared with me in confidence, and I asked those people for feedback and gave them the opportunity to veto this post, and their feedback made this post better, but their lack of a veto does not constitute approval of the content. My impression is that they think I have some of the emphasis and framings wrong (but it’s not worth the time/attention it would take to correct).This post consists of some of my own processing of my mistakes. It's not a reaction to the whole FTX affair. (My high-level reaction at the time was one of surprise, anger, sadness, and disappointment, with tone and content not terribly dissimilar from Rob Wiblin’s reactions, as I understood them.)The genre of this essay is "me accounting for how I failed my art, while comparing myself to an implausibly high standard". I'm against self-flagellation, and I don't recommend beating yourself up for failing to meet an implausibly high standard.I endorse comparing yourself to a high standard, if doing so helps you notice where your thinking processes could be improved, and if doing so does not cause you psychological distress.My original draft of this post started with a list of relatively raw observations. But the most salient raw observations were shared in confidence, and much of the remainder felt like airing personal details unnecessarily, which feels like an undue violation of others’ privacy. As such, I’ve kept the recounting somewhat vague.I am not particularly recommending that others in the community who had qualms about Sam write up a similarly thorough account. I was pretty tangential to the whole affair, which is why I can fit something this thorough into only ~7k words, and is why it doesn’t seem to me like a huge invasion of privacy to post something like this (especially given what I’m keeping vague).Hopefully this helps people get a better sense of the degree to which at least one EA had at least some warning signs about Sam, and what sort of signs those were. Maybe it will even spark some candid conversation, as I expect might be healthy, if the discussion quality is good.Short versionMy firsthand interactions with Sam were largely pleasant. Multiple of my friends had bad experiences with him, though. Some of them gave me warnings.In one case, a friend warned me about Sam and I (foolishly) misunderstood the friend as arguing that Sam was pursuing ill ends, and weighed their evidence against other evidence that Sam was pursuing...