I'm sorry to hear about the issues your university group had — I worked in EA comms during that period, and can imagine how hard it would have been when FTX was headline news. I'm glad that EA was largely unknown when I was starting my school's group.

I still expect this story to be much smaller than the original FTX collapse. SBF has moved from one of the most famous people in the country to an occasional curiosity (e.g. stories about his prison life). Crimes are much more interesting than what the criminals do years later. Outside of tiny crypto sites, I've only seen this story get a couple of blurbs in the business press. I predict that the median university group will hear about it zero times over the course of its recruiting season this year.

When I plugged this statement into Opus, it mostly disagreed outside of direct quid pro quo cases or scenarios where the donor gets more than they gave. I could see this scenario being a legal gray area, but I generally don't think it's unethical to make private hiring decisions based on whatever criteria you want. (Though it gets more complicated when you bring in issues like racial preferences or hiring people incompetent enough to cause harm to third parties, and I understand why a lot of people put Manifund's choice in the latter category.)

I do think charities have some obligation not to "betray" their donors by using their money for things the donors would be appalled by. If some of Manifund's donors don't like the thought of their money paying for Caroline's salary, I hope they'll have some recourse (though of course it's complicated to figure out whose money pays for what within a charity).

Personal notes: I've had friendly interactions with Austin and spent some time in the Mox coworking space. I've never met Caroline, though I liked her Tumblr and hope she finds ways to do good moving forward. The FTX collapse cost me thousands of dollars, destroyed one of my favorite video games, made my job much harder for the next year, and damaged a community I love.

Thoughts on the situation, as someone who cares a lot about EA's reputation and also thinks it's sometimes good to make unusual decisions based on controversial ethical principles:

Perspective-taking: Ariel's comment is really good. Read that first if you haven't.

Competence: Having read Going Infinite and a bunch of news stories, I don't feel qualified to distinguish between "Caroline is bad at operations/finance/judging ideas" and "Caroline is good at those things — after all, FTX/Alameda had lots of early success — but she got overwhelmed by the complexities of an org with billions of dollars in assets while struggling with interpersonal entanglements". If Austin thinks her abilities are a good fit, I'm not all that inclined to doubt him.

Personal ethics: My ethical qualms are with Austin, not Caroline. I don't think her ethics matter much for this role: she is unlikely to end up in a situation where the pressures on her, and decisions available to her, even vaguely resemble her situation at FTX. I'd still feel safe using Manifund's platform while she's involved.

Is this a good decision (impact)? Seems terrible from the standpoint of furthering Manifund's goals. It's also a small ding on EA's reputation as a whole, with whatever damage that implies. But I think Austin understood those things, and impact wasn't his primary focus. 

I wouldn't have made this decision in Austin's shoes, given the chance that it could undo years of work to build Manifund, but I respect that EA contains lots of people with unusual perspectives and that they'll sometimes do things I wouldn't. That said, I'll reserve my donations for people whose perspectives are closer to mine.

Is this a good decision (ethics)? I don't think it's unethical to hire people with criminal backgrounds, and the weak "finance" connection here doesn't change my view (see "personal ethics"). But I agree with others' concerns about paying someone with money they helped steal. If Manifund doesn't pay back the FTX money, that would breach my ethical standards; I'd hope that any org self-labeling as "EA" would do better.

Using loyalty and indebtedness as hiring criteria strikes me as unwise, but not unethical, as long as Austin is honest with his donors about his motives.

What does this say about Manifund? If I wanted to predict Manifund's actions, I'd care more about the years of activity they've documented than this particular hire. If you thought they were a good grantmaker before, it's reasonable not to update much. However:

• The situation presents other reasons for concern, unrelated to their grantmaking ability.
• Manifund supports lots of small projects with unclear impact. If you find their results hard to judge, you might care more about the judgment of their staff. If I were a Manifund donor in that position, I'd be updating in the direction of "Austin sees the world and makes decisions very differently from me", and that would affect my trust in Manifund's work.

EA's reputation: Overall, this is small potatoes. FTX is famous, but the fame is fading. Caroline is much less famous than SBF. Manifund is an obscure org. From my recent experience, EA's reputation seems to hinge more on AI safety (and the age-old GiveWell/ETG stuff) than FTX. If Caroline were broadly welcomed back, that would be unusual, but the most common reactions being either severe skepticism or outright condemnation is... pretty much what you'd see elsewhere, for better or for worse.

• However, I'd still describe it as a "small ding" — if someone hears about this, and cares at all, they're more likely to update negatively than positively against EA.
• If you see someone cite Manifund's decision as a reason to distrust EA, you could point them to this thread, or the comments on Austin's Substack post. They might realize that Manifund's decision doesn't say much about the EA community or EA's principles.
• If you judge a situation by its salience on the day it happens, you'll routinely overestimate its lasting impact. The Nick Bostrom letter felt like a disaster the day it came out — a perfect intersection of hot-button social issue, prominent figure, and scissor situation for the community — but in the end, I don't think it left much of an impression on the wider world.

Should Manifund be "organizatio non grata" in EA? This is up to the loose collection of orgs and people that comprise "EA", not any single entity. I respect anyone's decision to update on Manifund as they see fit. If I ran EA Global or made grants, and I had to decide whether to invite/fund the org, I'd consider it (assuming they paid back the FTX money). But I would expect to end on "nope, this crosses too many lines even if I like Manifund's work and see Austin's perspective".

(2) For what it's worth, I don't think this particular news is likely to reach the people your friends are talking to at their university table.

You could spend years engaging with EA and never hear about Manifund, and if you did, you'd probably hear about the conference they run rather than the decision to hire the second-most-famous person involved in a financial scandal that happened when the class of 2030 were 14-year-olds.

If someone does hear about the decision, and worries that Manifest represents something bad at the heart of EA, you might show them the comment thread on this post — I think it's a good representation of the community as a whole (some people biting bullets, many people pointing out various ethical concerns).

And on (3), I don't see this feeding into any war much: it seems like ~90% of EA people and ~90% of LW people (maybe 95?) think this is a bad decision.

If every decision made by any organization under the EA umbrella can make you reconsider associating with the brand, are there any other brands you associate with that manage to maintain the standards you look for?

Every discussion I've seen makes me think that people within EA overwhelmingly think this is a bad idea, and many of them plan to interact differently with Manifund going forward; for a community without formal standards for who "belongs", that seems like as much as you could reasonably ask for (aside from even more overwhelming condemnation, I suppose).

Caveat: Our differing instincts might be informed by a different understanding of where Manifund sits within EA (I think of them as a fairly minor organization, but EA is a loose and chaotic group of orgs, and I only see certain parts of the elephant).

All good points!

Weirdly, I arrived at this comment just after rereading an internet horror comic that begins with a starfish eating someone alive. I hope shellfish aren't sentient.

Thanks, this should be fixed now.

Hi Vasco. Thanks!

I'd prefer for the submitter to write or generate a summary, so that it covers what they think is important — an AI summary of e.g. "War With The Newts" probably won't hint at the EA parallels.

I also like having less AI text around if I can help it; I don't personally mind it in this context, but think it tends to degrade reading experience for many people.

That said, I'd like to make life easier for submitters, so I've removed the mandate from "summary" and "media type". I left "EA vibes" because that still requires a human touch — my experiments in getting AI to explain a book's EA vibes have been mixed at best, and a work's connection to EA is often quite personal for the submitter (we all see EA a bit differently).

Thanks for the reminder -- didn't mean to leave out the type.

I skipped "Creator" at first because I wasn't sure it was worth the space (mostly one-time creators here), but when I thought more, it seems useful for people to be able to e.g. filter through all the Scott Alexander content once the database is bigger. And it saves people from having to specify creators in the title. And people can always filter it out for themselves. So it's in for now!