Hacker News Reader

Comment by polygamous_bat | Hacker News Reader

Surely it was Oxford, the institute older than most nations, being incompetent, and nothing to do with the easy money tap called Sam Bankman Fraud being thrown in jail. Oxford just seems like a easy scapegoat as they can’t just say “our biggest donor is in jail for the foreseeable future and we have no money left because we used it to buy a mansion [0]”

[0] https://twitter.com/paulmainwood/status/1600433194691502081

View on HN

You obviously missed this part: > This is the actual administrative effort it took for FHI to have a small grant disbursed into its account within the Philosophy Faculty so that we could start using it - after both the funder and the University had already approved the grant.

They make quite a clear difference between Oxford (i.e. the University) and the faculty.

Everybody who disagrees with me is incompetent.

They froze the institute "starting in 2020", three years before anybody suspected SBF was anything other than the Great Tech Messiah.

FTX didn't even get its initial funding until the last months of 2019.

I mean sure, FTX might be a stain on FHI's reputation now, but it certainly can't have been the initial cause of these actions by Oxford. The dates just don't work.

Center for Effective Altruism is different from FHI

Sure, and Beria is different from Marx.

Nobody in this entire movement wants to take responsibility for what anybody else does, and it's honestly exhausting. They have this dense belief that once a thinker releases his ideas into the water, he bears no responsibility for the crimes and excesses they inspire.

Ugh. Looking back at this comment of mine, I wish I could delete/retract. It's misdirected in the context of the thread, and an overreaction at best. GP was only talking about certain budgeting decisions, so it makes total sense to distinguish between the orgs here. Oxford did not buy the mansion.

Sorry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com