or like, if you're close  with someone who did a significant bad thing and is now facing significant consequences for it, it can make sense to be loyal in the sense of - trying to help them make it through this time, trying to not make things worse for them. but not in the sense of denying or defending their wrongdoing.

Yeah I wouldn't upvote every post that makes an unpopular argument. But I upvote posts that I want to encourage on the margin, which includes posts that are wrong but better to make than not to.

I guess he could have also not been reading carefully and missed that somehow?

I think we should definitely not be loyal to people who commit massive fraud, or praise ambitious destruction! I know "stand fully by my people no matter how right or wrong they are" is a common moral stance but I think it's enormously wrong and destructive. It's an important virtue to support things that are good and not things that are bad, even if we're very attached to them. (Also, like, I think SBF betrayed "us" first.)

(Sorry this is more of a skeleton of an argument than an actual argument, I keep meaning to write out more of my thinking here and not finding time)

But Kelsey said in her email that she was going to write about their conversation, and he didn't object. What do you think his epistemic state was, if he knew she was writing about the conversation but objected to the actual damning things he said being included? It seems like for those things to both be true, it would have to be the case that he expected her to write a piece that somehow left out the most damning things, i.e. to write a weirdly positively distorted piece.

I really love the upvote:agreement ratio on this comment. There is some disagreement as to whether this is a good comment, but everybody agrees that what the fuck.

Strongly disagree with most of this but upvoting because I am actively in favor of people laying out their reasoning for unpopular positions so that people can engage with the reasoning directly, rather than only operating only on the level of "this is wrong and you should feel bad".

To be fair sometimes people make accusations that are incorrect? Your decision procedure does need to allow for the possibility of not taking a given accusation seriously. I don't know who knew what and how reasonable a conclusion this was for any given person given their state of knowledge, in this case, but also people do get this wrong sometimes, this doesn't seem implausible to me.

That's very surprising!!

Do you know if anybody attempted to propagate this information to any of the EAs who were promoting SBF publicly? (If so, do you know if they succeeded in conveying that information to them?)

And just to check, did any of the people who warn you privately promote SBF/FTX publicly?

I ask because it seems weird for a lot of EAs to be passing around warnings about SBF being untrustworthy while a lot of (other?) EAs are promoting him publicly; I very much hope these sets were disjoint, but also it's weird for them to be so disjoint, I would have expected better information flow.

I think there's at least some difference between [money you've already been paid for work you've already done] and [money you've been granted for future work that you have not yet done / money you haven't yet spent on hiring other people / etc.]; I very clearly agree with you in the first case and think it's at least murkier in the second case.