- This was a hit job. That's worth further inquiry.
- Consider lowering some proportion of the salaries instead of firing, because that way you can see who leaves.
Please include your own recommendations in the comments.
This was a hit job. That's worth further inquiry.
Disclaimer: I am not implying that this was likely to be a covert hit on EA itself. Bayesian analysis clearly indicates that it was probably an economic affair, and nothing more. This is not about accusations, this is basic risk management for any large organization that has it's own ideas about various nation-state level status quos, such as Biosecurity. A 94%/6% split between economic and covert origins is still clearly worth further inquiry, because that 6% could be subtracted from everything EA will ever do.
There's more information on this post, but basically, a run on FTX sems to have been orchestrated by strongly and deliberately-worded statements by Coindesk and Binance. The fact that this happened on election day was likely a coincidence, this is the perfect time to take an extreme act without it getting in the news. That is not a persuasive indicator that this was anything more than FTX's competitors seizing the initiative in a wild-west industry.
The fact that a leak of internal documents precipitated this, however, indicates a significant possibility that hackers or some other powerful/dangerous entity were involved (e.g. informants), including major governments. Catastrophic leaks are about as murky as it gets, and are grey-area legality at minimum. It is a constant possibility that EA will be marginalized, or even targeted, by a major government by disrupting the status quo in some way. One of the most worrisome scenarios is that the heavily marketed release of WWOTF, which was extremely unusual for philanthropic philosophy organizations and may have put EA on the radar of all sorts of people. The fact that it was released less than 3 months before the election, which the critical period for influence operations and political strategy, supports the hypothesis that this risk is worth further consideration. NGOs are well known for getting entangled in these sorts of murky international affairs; and EA is also unusual and unpredictable due to the unusually large frequency of extremely intelligent (therefore unpredictable) and motivated (therefore unpredictable) people who are often totally outside mainstream political ideologies (which cause individuals to become homogenized and predictable).
Assessing the risk of government crackdowns or marginalization is critical for the affairs and survival of Effective Altruism, especially in a changing world. I have a lot of information about this domain that I'm not comfortable referencing or mentioning on a public forum.
Consider lowering some proportion of the salaries instead of firing, because that way you can see who leaves.
EA is not a private sector organization. EA is also not an ordinary philanthropic organization. There is a powerful norm of wages being "sticky down", such to the extent that orgs in most cultures will simply lay off people without even asking them if they are willing to work for a lower salary (note that there is also complicated game theory for this). In the private sector, this is overwhelmingly the winning strategy, because most people have similarly-well paying options elsewhere and have little loyalty to the company other than the paycheck and the friends they made along the way.
People working in EA orgs will not necessarily quit their jobs due to their salary getting cut in half, because there is a wide variety of reasons to stay at an EA org and because the odds of getting hired at any other EA org, ever again, might be low. EA org workers are also very well known for using the full breadth of economic knowledge, outside-the-box thinking (such as noticing the evolutionary psychology behind wealth-signalling), willingess to sacrifice unnecessary luxuries and wealth-signalling, and willingness to coordinate with others in order to save money (e.g. group houses). The people willing to do this will, on average, be more worthy of working at an EA org than the people who aren't. Note that there are exceptions, such as extremely intelligent, skilled, and valuable people; the pareto principle holds that 80% of the work is often done by 20% of the people, but this principle is not new to anyone working in management and is probably already taken into account either way.
EA needs to adjust to a leaner time, and if the entire burden of the cuts is put on management instead of shared between management and workers, then management will have no choice but to fire a ton of people because they can't verify which people will actually choose to comfortably adjust their living standards for lower salaries.
Furthermore, FTX's cash flow brought in a new era of Goodharting by people whose involvement with EA was partially motivated by a hunger for cash. With the pareto principle in mind, this is also an excellent opportunity to mitigate the damage done over the last year by attracting large numbers of wealth-oriented people to EA organizations. Not only will they automatically leave in response to steep salary reductions, not only will they leave at an unusually high frequency, but the type of people who leave will provide data that permanently teach us which traits are strong and weak indicators for that type of person.
Note that discretion on this, by the people on the ground, is highly advised; and as I mentioned numerous times previously, there are plenty of people and even large sections of the org where you probably don't want to have any cuts at all.
More important considerations for this is watching out for people covering for their friends or eachother in order to inflate their value evaluations and persist in the org's genepool for a longer period of time, and also that there might be some way for people to donate more money to their org instead of getting laid off because tons of people will choose to donate more soon and tons of those same people would rather avoid getting laid off. There's also revolving door work, which is common in DC where I come from, where you can work in an EA org for a couple years and then work in a high-paying job for a couple years in order to vastly increase your income over the course of the decade. This heavily benefits from some sort of commitment or guarantee that all of the revolvers will be able to revolve back into an EA job after they're done raking in cash from the high-paying job.