Caroline Ellison (Alameda Research CEO) Deleted Her Goodreads Account
web.archive.orgI have no idea who this is. What's the significance of this?
She is one of the devils in nerd's clothing: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2022/11/12/the-devil...
She was an advocate of effective altruism who seems to be part of a conspiracy to have pilfered billions of dollars from investors: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/carolineellison
But what's really interesting about her deleted Goodreads account is the last books she was in the midst of reading:
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
The Metropolitan Man
> effective altruism who seems to be part of a conspiracy to have pilfered billions of dollars from investor
If I'm understanding you correctly - which perhaps I'm not - I don't know as I agree. Are you saying that the concept of "effective altruism" is "part of a consp..."?
The concept of effective altruism, as far as I know, is simply to maximize the good-accomplished-per-dollar. In the past, after being pointed there by proponents of effective altruism, I've donated to organizations giving malaria nets, etc.
If you are saying this, I'd appreciate knowing more about what backs up your claim.
But if you're saying that there's some entity cloaking itself as 'effective altruism' but carrying out a Ponzi scheme, then that I'd have no opinion on.
I think the argument is that a huge number of the EA types have been caught without their pants on in the FTX / SBF / Alameda fiasco. Those like Will McAskill have distanced themselves, but it still gives the collection of people a look that isn't great, even if it doesn't tarnish the conceptual basis of EA, as philosophized. Perhaps in practice, maximizing wealth leads ones to do morally sketchy things under the moral cover of maximizing good.
> Perhaps in practice, maximizing wealth leads ones to do morally sketchy things under the moral cover of maximizing good.
And perhaps, in the process of maximizing wealth for good, the goblin whispers in your ear to keep some for yourself.
> She was an advocate of effective altruism who seems to be part of a conspiracy
What if she gets much more happy about keeping the money than those it used to belong to?
Then surely this is most effective.
Effective altruism has lead to funny conclusions in the past such as:
Spend all the money on animal welfare (PeTA), or spend no money on the environment (Bjørn Lomborg).
Her review of Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco https://web.archive.org/web/20221113051430/https://www.goodr...
My very uninformed impression of how companies work is something like:
- there is a CEO, who is a guy
- there is a board, consisting of a bunch of guys who are friends with the CEO
- they all have fiduciary duties and if they fail to meet them they will get yelled at by a judge in Delaware
- ???
- shareholder value gets maximized
But it does kind of feel like whenever you package and reallocate some risk, there is some tradeoff in which you might be increasing systemic risk but it's opaque and hard to measure.
This is crazy in the same review than the one that's talking about fiduciary duties.
Money is not just numbers on a paper.
She is destroying lives of millions of people.
CEO of Alameda, one of the companies related to FTX and which just filed for bankruptcy after losing billions of dollars from alleged misuse of customer funds (ponzi scheme).
This doesn't explain why anyone should care about whether she does or doesn't have a Goodreads account.
I guess I'm still struggling with a question of "so what?"
There's a whole controversy brewing with her and Sam Bankman-Fried. If you look on Twitter people are digging up all kinds of questionable interviews and such from both of these folks where they basically admit and lay out in detail how they're running an alleged ponzi scheme. People are digging up all kinds of fascinating dirt.
People have been piling on making fun of anything they can find such as her reading habits even if they're not related to the FTX/Alameda fraud.
it's funny to see these people scrambling around trying to bury themselves before someone else does it for them
i wonder how long the list of accounts that she cancelled was