[Linkpost] FLI alleged to have offered funding to far right foundation

and this seems to be another case of a major actor in our movement doing something that has massively poor consequences for the public perception of EA unless they can explain why

My only substantive disagreement with this comment (which I upvoted) is that I don't think FLI is a major actor in EA; they've always kind of done their own thing, and haven't been a core player within the EA community. I view them more as an independent actor with somewhat aligned goals.

This comment is a community service.

I had a look at the Nya Dagbladet website. My quick impression is that it looks like a somewhat milder and less sensationalist version of Breitbart News. The top stories were (and I only read the headlines and leads): (1) the newspaper itself being close to bankruptcy due to its bank account having been frozen, (2) an ex-CEO of Barclays' being connected to Jeffrey Epstein, (3) high levels of shoplifting in Sweden, (4) record number of calls to a national child abuse hotline in Sweden, (5) a Swedish pediatrician's having been subjected to hate due to a study of his which suggested that the risk of children needing emergency care for COVID-19 was low, (6) more on the frozen bank account, (7) Kiersten Hening getting a $100K settlement after BLM kneeling controversy and (8) EU and NATO collaborating more closely.

I can't imagine a good rationale for giving a grant to Nya Dagbladet or associated ventures, and can only assume that FLI agreed to give the grant based either on material provided by Nya Dagbladet itself and/or other people (but without doing any independent review).

Tegmark's brother, Per, seems to be affiliated with the Populist, anti-vax right in Sweden (note,this is only after a very cursory Google search). The reasons this seems to be relevant is that Per has been a contributing writer for Nya Dagbladet in recent years.

Do you have a source for this? I wasn't able to find anything myself with a quick search.

I wonder if anyone at FLI was ever planning to actually make the grant, or whether the intent was to simulate an intent to grant in order to deceive the Dalarna County Administrative Board into register the Nya Dagbladet Foundation. Not that either would be remotely acceptable.

If a nonprofit is associated in any way with Elon Musk, some journalist is probably digging into that organization's 990. I wonder what the plan on that front was if the grantmaking intent was actually there...

This response is highly concerning and alarming.  Some followup questions:

• Are you confirming that the grant approval letter shown by expose is entirely genuine?
• What was the nature of the media project you intended to fund?
• Why was Nya Bagdlet chosen as the foundation, and not some other more reputable news source?
• How aware were you of the political leaning of Nya Bagdlet when you approved this grant initially? In particular the publishing of articles promoting holocaust revisionism, vaccine denial, and the campaign to "defend ethnic rights"? 
•  Is it normal to hand out grant approval letters before conducting due diligence on a project?
• How long did it take for the organisation to reject the project after initially approving it?
• Do you specifically condemn the Nya Bagdlet newspaper, right now? 

This statement doesn’t disavow the idea of funding neo-Nazism, and the lacuna is worrying: by convention (pragmatics), omitting to comment on the salient thing is taken as a comment in itself. Have you sought advice from communications specalists? If not, it would be well worth it to avoid unnecessary misinterpretation, if you want to disavow the main allegation.

Here are the main bits that stood out to me as suboptimal communication.

1. I would like to understand why you decided to reject the grant proposal after doing due diligence. Was it because of their far-right politics, or a conflict of interest, reputational hazard, or something else?

The Future of Life Institute makes no apologies for engaging with many people across the immensely diverse political spectrum

I wish you would not imply your critics are politically narrow-minded for being worried FLI is alleged to have considered supporting a neo-Nazi outlet. I would like to understand if there are any limits here - are there any political views you are not willing to support?

is apparently not shared by the (center-left) former Swedish government, which not only certified the Foundation as charitable but granted $30,000 in government funding and support to Nya Dagbladet in 2021

Disclaimer: I previously knew nothing about the Swedish press; I still know almost nothing. I just thought this seemed weird and spent about 20 minutes looking into it.

Some context which I think would be useful to evaluate this claim.

It appears that in Sweden the government subsidizes newspapers in the form of "press support." From reading the Wikipedia page on press support, which is mostly actually about Norway not Sweden, it seems like support does not really constitute a government endorsement, but rather is provided to a lot of different newspapers and is mostly to ensure a healthy press. It's possible this differs between Norway and Sweden though.

The $30,000 figure comes from the expo.se piece, which says:

Nya Dagbladet applied to the Swedish Press and Broadcasting Authority for public funding in 2020, but was turned down. The platform reacted angrily to the decision, and published a series of articles where specific officials at the agency were named and pictured. The publications caused distress among employees at the agency who felt menaced and pressured, as Dagens Nyheter reported at the time. The following year, Nya Dagbladet made another application for public funding; this time they were successful and received about $30,000 in various grants.

The article linked (archive here) Google translates the article as referring to the Norwegian press. I thought that was pretty weird, but from googling the Swedish (Myndigheten för press, radio och tv), I think the Google translate is wrong and it is indeed about the Swedish press (here is the website of the Swedish press agency). The expo.se piece might seem to imply that the government officials may have been intimidated into making the later grant, but I think that's a bit less clear if press support is supposed to be widely distributed to newspapers in any case.

Regardless, to me it does not seem like the reception of this grant really indicates that the organization is not pro-Nazi, and certainly it doesn't seem to imply endorsement of that claim from the Swedish government, at least as far as I can tell. A good understanding would require a better understanding of the Swedish press support system, which I neither I or presumably the vast majority of readers of this comment have.

For Max and anyone else who thinks they might not be neo-Nazis, I assure you that they are. As an example, here's a Google-translated quote from an article they published:

Jewish interest groups have been and still are the most driving force behind the transformation of Western societies into multicultural and multi-ethnic societies. It is a controversial but well-documented fact, not only in countries like the USA but also in Sweden . Through media influence and a strong position in the international banking system, they have enormous influence over culture and politics, and have largely undisturbed been able to reshape Western societies according to their own will in a number of different areas also beyond immigration policy, completely contrary to the interests of the indigenous peoples and rights.

*I took this from another discussion of the topic; I think JWS is the one who found it?

Thanks for sharing this. However it doesn't really answer the core question of why FLI ever thought this was okay. "We ultimately decided to reject it because of what our subsequent due diligence uncovered" — given that your brother is a writer there, did you not know beforehand that Nya Dagbladet publishes horrific, racist content? I find it hard to believe this was not known until the due diligence stage.

Although we were initially positive about the proposal and its prospects, we ultimately decided to reject it because of what our subsequent due diligence uncovered. We have given Nya Dagbladet and their affiliates zero funding and zero support of any kind, and will not fund them in the future. These final decisions were made by FLI’s leadership independently of any outside influence and well before any inquiry regarding the NDF proposal by members of the media.

On December 15, after we had informed NDF that their proposal was rejected, Expo.se contacted FLI with questions regarding the NDF proposal.

Is there and/or can you get independent verification of this? I understand the desire to not publicly reveal grantee/grantseeker details so I'm not necessarily saying you should make your emails to NDF public. However, it'd be helpful confirmation for an independent third party to verify that FLI did inform NDF of the rejection before the Expo.se inquiry, and/or some confirmation that the description of the FLI leadership decisions are roughly as you described them. 

This statement really doesn't answer most of the questions raised by the Expo report. Indeed, it spends about as much time criticizing Expo as providing specific factual information about FLI's questioned conduct.

The approval of this grant seems bizarre enough that justification beyond the bare characterization of a positive impression is needed here. What was the grant proposal about? How did funding it further FLI's mission? Why was it assessed positively?

What vetting of the grant proposal did FLI conduct before issuing the letter declaring that it had "approved a grant" to NDF? (I'm quoting from the September 7 letter published by Expo. FLI hasn't repudiated that letter as false or misleading at the time it was written, so I'm going to take it at face value.). It does not seem responsible that one would "approve[]" a six-figure grant without having some idea about who the proposed grantee was and their ability to carry out the purposes of the grant. Nor does it seem reasonable that FLI would determine that making a grant to a proposed foundation associated with a far-right, anti-science, Holocaust-denying media outlet was an effective way to get "research, outreach and other important work in furtherance of FLI’s mission" done. 

As far as the press statement's attempt to mainstream the people associated with NDF, Expo quoted from a Holocaust-denial editorial by the lead editor of the media outlet (chair of NDF) and exhortations by another ND editor to vote for a neo-Nazi political party (as characterized by the Anti-Defamation League). NDF's "board of directors consists of the senior editors of" ND, which means those editors stood by while ND published advocacy for a neo-Nazi political party. See also other comments on this thread.

Your brother told Expo that he did "not want to answer questions concerning whether he has been involved in contacts between Nya Dagbladet and FLI." Are you in a position to state whether (and if so, how) he was involved in any way with the grant, with NDF, or with any contact between the prospective grantees and FLI? If there was involvement, can you state whether you and your wife recused yourself from any consideration of the grant proposal due to an involvement of an immediate family member?

What information did FLI find -- and not know earlier -- that caused it to rescind the grant "approv[al]"? Why was this information not found earlier?

Do you want to comment on your response to Expo asserting that FLI had not "approved grants to any person or organization in Scandinavia"? Unless there is more context, that statement isn't consistent with the September 7 letter or the media statement above. Especially when combined with a statement suggesting that Expo had no reasonable factual basis for having such a belief: "Where did you get this incorrect information about Future of Life Institute?" 

Basically, I am finding it hard to find a way in which none of the following three following statements are true: (1) FLI approved a six-figure grant to NDF without looking to see what kind of work the proposed grantees did; (2) FLI was on notice of their extremist views and approved the grant anyway; or (3) FLI made a false or misleading statement about approving the grant when it knew or should have known that statement would be relied on by third parties. If FLI had not yet considered whether NDF was an appropriate grantee (but was planning to do so later), it was simply not appropriate to characterize this as an approved grant. (In contrast, I think it was OK that the letter did not list certain legally-required and technical preconditions.) One problem with issuing a vague response is that it leaves the reader to determine which of these three statements is true. I think all are problematic, but some more so than others.

The final paragraph of the statement is the most alarming. The statements that you will "continue to engage the broadest sample of humankind" and make "no apologies for engaging with many people across the immensely diverse political spectrum" have been made in the specific context of criticism for approving a grant to an organization whose board is significantly linked to Holocaust denial (and at the very least extremely tolerant of neo-Nazism). If you did not intend to include such organizations in your statements of non-apology and future intent, you really should say so and define the bounds of who FLI is willing to work with.

I'm curious as to what kind of potentially existentially relevant proposal the NDF would have submitted? What did they think they had to offer?

(registering a tentative guess: sha256sum ..52ca22c6cd32)

Hi Shakeel,

Thanks for this. I agree with your post and upvoted it.

However, I do also wonder if they are following what seems to be a common theme in EA crisis comms recently, which is to say as little as possible (presumably on the basis of legal advice). You wrote about this here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Et7oPMu6czhEd8ExW/why-you-re-not-hearing-as-much-from-ea-orgs-as-you-d-like

I agree with you that just about any comment or explanation from FLI would seem to help, and that passing the email exchange with Max over to Denton's seems to make the situation worse (slower responses, less full responses, bad optics etc.).

As an outsider (i.e. with no access to the legal advice or internal discussions at any of these orgs), I wonder how the legal risk is being weighed against the reputational risk in EA crisis comms at the moment. It seems like there is almost no communication coming out from EA orgs and leaders, which presumably is very legally safe but can have very damaging reputational consequences.

I expect you're constrained in what you can say in response to this but, candidly, I think it's important to note that CEA itself is choosing public silence, albeit about a different issue. Accordingly, I was surprised to see you posting (in a personal capacity) about another org needing to give a full explanation and you not understanding why they haven't, and especially in such strong terms. CEA's example probably influences a lot of other orgs within EA.

Is there something I am missing on this? Maybe that the FTX situation is sui generis?

Agree.

As a Swede who is somewhat familiar with the publication Expo, I would maybe put the risk of forgery of that document at <5%. They are specifically known for their digging journalism, and I would be very surprised if they screwed up something basic like that.

Also, wouldn't it be extremely strange behavior from FLI if that document actually was a forgery? Would be the go-to defense rather than what they are doing now.

This comment turned out to be entirely correct.

Option 1 is that a grant was approved pending due diligence, then pulled during the due diligence process. That would be mildly embarrassing, and would probably imply a grant evaluator somewhere didn't do their job

I think this would be a lot more than "mildly embarassing". It's an effective altruism organisation. They should not have had to wait for the "due diligence" phase to understand why donating a hundred grand to a far-right newspaper is not an effective cause. 

Either someone is approving grants (and telling the grantees they have funding) without so much as doing a cursory google search on the grantees, or someone knew it was a nazi newspaper and still thought it was a worthy effective cause. It really doesn't help the case that Tegmarcks brother apparently wrote stories for the newspaper in question, so he at least could be expected to know what it is. 

If the letter is genuine (and they have never denied that it is), then someone at FLI is either grossly incompetent or malicious. They need to address this ASAP. 

At the time of my writing this comment, the parent was at 25 karma and -31 agreement karma. 

Seeing as Jim was absolutely correct, I think that the people who dismissed them out of hand should reflect on what manner of reasoning led them to do so.

EDIT: posted this before I saw that Ic had already made the same point.

Edit: I missed Jason's phrase about soliciting donations from the public. I don't think that it matters personally, and I wasn't aware that OpenPhil isn't doing this, but it's at least not what Jason meant.

Oops:

The Open Philanthropy 501(c)(3) is governed by a Board of Directors currently consisting of Dustin Moskovitz (Chair), Cari Tuna, Divesh Makan, Holden Karnofsky, and Alexander Berger. Open Philanthropy LLC is governed by a Board of Managers currently consisting of Dustin Moskovitz, Cari Tuna, Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, and Alexander Berger.

Yes, that seems better.

Thanks, updated.

Some related markets (one being mine): 

Will Max Tegmark or FLI issue a statement (before Feb 14th) that the letter of intent (to the swedish right-wing media org) was fake?

Will FLI's grant approval to Nya DagBladet appear reprehensible on 31 March 2023.

As for point one, I suppose it might be that FLIs board would not allow the transaction. I don't know about FLIs governance but the org is presumably not supposed to be his personal wallet.