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elephantower23
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Minor meta-question: what is the 2 axis voting supposed to represent here? People feel this was a good contribution to the discussion but disagree with the claim that Per Shapiro was never paid by Nya Dagbladet?  I would've expected the opposite -- the factual claim is probably true but not very relevant.

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See in context
by Jens Nordmark
1 min read 103

132

CommunityFuture of Life Institute
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Edit January 19: FLI has made a substantive statement about this issue:

https://futureoflife.org/rejection_statement/

 

This seems concerning. It is claimed that the Future of Life Institute, run by MIT professor Max Tegmark, offered but did not pay out a grant to a Swedish far-right foundation. The character of this foundation and its associates is well-known in Sweden. Expo is an old and respected watchdog organization specialized on neo-nazism and related movements.

https://expo.se/2023/01/elon-musk-funded-nonprofit-run-mit-professor-offered-finance-swedish-pro-nazi-group

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JWS ๐Ÿ”ธ185
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Update:

FLI have released a full statement on their website here, and there is an FAQ post on that statement where discussion has mostly moved to on the Forum. I will respond to these updates there, and otherwise leave this post as-is (for now).

However, it looks like an 'ignorance-based' defence is the correct interpretation of what happened here. I don't regret this post - I still think it was important, and got valuable information out there. I also think that emotional responses should not be seen as 'wrong'. Nevertheless, I do have some updating to do, and I thank all commenters in the thread below.

I have also made some retractions, with explanations in the footnotes

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Epistemic Status: Unclear, but without much reason to dispute the factual case presented by Expo. As I wrote this comment, an ignorance-based defence seemed less and less convincing, and consequently my anger rose. I apologise if this means the post is of a lower tone than the forum is used to. I will also happily correct or retract this post partially or fully if better evidence is provided.

[Clarity Edit:... (read more)

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Will Bradshaw88
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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.

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timunderwood19
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I just realized that I had confused them with FHI.

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Will Bradshaw27
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On that note, I just realised nobody has actually written the full name of the organization anywhere on this page!

For anyone who's confused or unsure: we're talking about the Future of Life Institute.

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JWS ๐Ÿ”ธ19
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Thanks Will, Jason, tim.

I've added an edit to the top of my comment to clarify we're talking about FLI, not FHI (cause X - better EA acronyms). I've also tweaked the language around FLI being a "major actor" in the EA space, though I feel there are arguments on the other side, given:

  • Tegmark being on a recent 80k podcast
  • The FLI is advertised on the 80k job board
  • I remember seeing an FLI booth at EAG 2022 London
  • There is an FLI topic on the EA Forum Wiki, which notes funding they received from OpenPhil

one could perhaps be forgiven for viewing them as closely involved in the EA movement directly, though I see they're probably more independent with some highly aligned goals. 

I also want to say, if people from FLI are reading this, I don't want to be read as attacking any of you directly though I can accept I might be read that way. Emotions are running high on the forum right now, incuding my own, and I would welcome your thoughts either as a reply in this post or as a private message.

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Will Bradshaw24
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Yeah, to be clear I also don't think EA can just say "nothing to do with us" here, there's clearly enough overlap and cross-pollination to be relevant. I just think this is significantly different from if this happened with, say, CEA or OpenPhil.

I think something like your modified language is about right.

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Jason
I would be helpful for OP to write out something like "Future of Life Institute, run by MIT professor Max Tegmark" in the original post.
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Jens Nordmark
Done
Jackson Wagner48
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Just perusing the front page of Nya Dagbladet, it looks like their business's main bank account has been cut off (perhaps similar to how Visa or Paypal will routinely freeze the accounts of grey-area or politically unpalatable businesses here in the US), and now they are scrambling to try and get funds where they can:

It's possible that this is the context in which Tegmark made the (very poor) decision to attempt to rush a 100K grant to a "foundation" set up in equal haste by Nya Dagbladet.  Which would come off less as "funding a neo-nazi foundation to pursue shadowy neo-nazi projects" and more as nepotistic misuse of FLI's funds to keep the newspaper Nya Dagbladet afloat, perhaps as a way of helping out Tegmark's brother?

I would also note that, as Erich_Grunewald describes in his comments, the paper clearly does come across as populist / right-wing, but seems only a bit more sensationalized and extreme than something like the Washington Examiner or NY Post, and less so than things like Breitbart, the Drudge Report, Infowars, etc.  It definitely does not come across as the homepage of a neo-Nazi organization:

Still seems like an extremely dubious use of FLI's funds to make... (read more)

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mvolz73
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It is not uncommon, and I will even say usual, that Nazi sympathisers are at least somewhat subtle about it.

This is not particularly subtle. Here's their section on the Holocaust: https://nyadagbladet.se/tag/forintelsen/

Here's an editorial written for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Their central claim is that the way to prevent antisemitism it to stop "lying" about how many Jews were killed. https://nyadagbladet.se/ledare/sa-forebygger-vi-den-verkliga-antisemitismen/

This is very classic Holocaust denialism. I don't think it's unreasonable to call a website that actively promotes ethnonationalism and Holocaust denialism "pro-Nazi", unless you think that the literal words "pro-Nazi" must appear somewhere in order to qualify.

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Jason17
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I don't know about Sweden, but it takes a lot more than being "a bit more sensationalized and extreme than something like the Washington Examiner or NY Post" to get your access to banking cut off in most liberal democracies. The content they posted with an imminent threat of a banking cutoff may not be representative of their historic content.

The FLI activity started several months before the alleged bank freeze. For the "grant" to be motivated by the bank threat, one would need to conclude that ND knew of the risk of freezing yet couldn't get a bank account anywhere . . . yet somehow they are still able to take donations via PayPal. Seems less likely they are on some sort of global or even national blacklist given that datum. So basically I don't believe their assertion of a banking blacklist against them in the first place.

If I had to guess, they were probably financially failing because they were too toxic for ad networks or for other reasons.

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Jackson Wagner11
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It seems like the paper's dispute with their bank has been going on for a while before the recent drama, perhaps long enough to make the timelines match up. But yes, it's confusing to me why they couldn't just switch to another bank. Definitely possible that they are basically just out of money and their bank is trying to cut them off, but the paper is hyping this up as political persecution in order to buy time / gain some negotiating advantage. (Of course, regardless of what the actual story turns out to be, there is seemingly zero reason for FLI money to be involved in this BS .)

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JP Addison๐Ÿ”ธ35
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This comment is a community service.

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Erich_Grunewald ๐Ÿ”ธ20
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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.

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Will Bradshaw
One source is the Expo article itself:
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JoshuaBlake
The claim from Expo is easily verified
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Linch
Sorry is there anything in that link that suggests Per Shapiro and Tegmark are brothers? 
JWS ๐Ÿ”ธ18
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I believe Joshua was talking about the claim that Per Shapiro was a contributing writer for Nya Dagbladet.

There's no direct evidence in the Expo article as far as I could tell for the fraternal link, but there's definitely external evidence. For example, here's a tweet from Max himself, linking to  Per's podcast and calling him 'my brother Per' (subject to accuracy of Google Translate).

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Linch
Thanks, this is pretty convincing to me.
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Marzhin
Brother is used as a term of affection in a fair few languages (including Swedish), so I wouldn't just trust a tweet.  The Swedish wikipedia article on Per, however, confirms more definitively that they are brothers: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Shapiro
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Jeroen Willems๐Ÿ”ธ
He's confirmed it himself now too: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5vFmMXWsh6PaYjqab/linkpost-fli-alleged-to-have-offered-funding-to-far-right?commentId=4o9Ev4GeeA67rAHJG
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Erich_Grunewald ๐Ÿ”ธ
Thanks!
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mako yass
Good to know what the typical spread is like. These are some of the incidents that article cites as being representative of Nya Dagbladet's problems, are they as described?
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Erich_Grunewald ๐Ÿ”ธ
I'm not an authority here, but from scanning the front page yesterday and today I see quite a lot of anti-vax/covid-19 conspiracy sentiment, some pro-Russian/anti-Ukraine sentiment, some anti-immigration/anti-globalism sentiment, and I didn't see anything suggestive of Holocaust denial, neo-Nazism or replacement theory but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. (There was one article critical of the Israeli government but I don't think that counts as anti-Semitic.) There's also a lot of culture war and freedom of speech stuff. There was a 9/11 truther article on the front page though it's 6 years old. (I didn't read any opinion pieces.) As a counterpoint, there's one mostly sane article about the invasion of the Brazilian Congress (except for referring to the Capitol Hill attack as happening under "mysterious circumstances", which sounds pretty conspiratorial). There are also a bunch of articles that seem basically harmless, like this one about 165K chicken being killed due to risk of salmonella.
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Jens Nordmark
Machine translation usually works pretty well between Swedish and English in my experience. They are quite similar, both germanic languages. There are a bunch of op-eds claiming that the last US election was stolen, a news story about "Ukraine refuses to accept the Russian offer of ceasefire", one about "Serbian army goes on high alert due to increased aggression from Kosovo" (context: Serbia is a russian ally with a similar history of losing control of areas with other ethnic groups they previously subjugated). An Op-ed titled "The image of slavery needs nuance". An editorial titled "Why civilians are not the targets of  russian shelling". The sane articles do not stand out on their own but the selection of topics is quite narrowly focused on those subjects that conspiracist like to read about such as electronic surveillance and covid policy.
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Aptdell
I think this is the podcast Tegmark appeared on with his brother, if you're interested in telling us about it.
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Henri Thunberg ๐Ÿ”ธ
Listened to it while doing other stuff so might not be 100 % accurate. To my understanding Tegmark appears for 10 minutes, doing a normal AI-risk spiel. I think the angle relevant to the podcast is the risk of concentration of power in the hands of a few. So some accusations of big tech capturing AI conferences etc. There's a small segue talking about covid where Tegmark states he felt it was such an infected discussion that he couldn't talk about it openly in some work environments for fear of repercussions.
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Jason
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...
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Jens Nordmark
This scenario crossed my mind as well. Seems weird how Tegmark appears to have expected this to not attract attention, regardless of intent to carry out the transaction. This story is almost as weird as it's bad.
1[anonymous]
Is this sentence what you intended to type,  JWS? I'm confused as to what letter Expo signed.
Will Bradshaw12
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Expo possess the signed letter.

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Tegmark156
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(Jan 16 text added at the end)

Here's an official statement from FLI on rejecting the Nya Dagbladet Foundation grant proposal: 

For those of you unfamiliar with the  Future of Life Institute (FLI), we are a nonprofit charitable organization that works to reduce global catastrophic and existential risks facing humanity, particularly those from nuclear war and future advanced artificial intelligence.  These risks are growing.  Last year, FLI received scores of grant applications from across the globe for the millions of dollars in funding we distributed to support research, outreach and other important work in furtherance of FLIโ€™s mission. One of these grant proposals came from the Nya Dagbladet Foundation (NDF, not to be confused with the eponymous newspaper) for a media project directly related to FLI's goals.  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 de... (read more)

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titotal66
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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? 
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PabloAMC ๐Ÿ”ธ
With respect to the last question I think it is perhaps a bit unfair. I think they have clearly stated they unconditionally condemn racism, and I have a strong prior that they mean it. Why wouldnโ€™t they, after all?
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Guy Raveh
Tegmark wrongly alluded that the newspaper does not have and advocate the pro-Nazi views that they have been demonstrated to.
David M62
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This statement doesnโ€™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?

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Guy Raveh57
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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?

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Jens Nordmark44
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In that one they also recommend voting for the Nordic Resistance Movement (Nordiska Motstรฅndsrรถrelsen), which is an explicitly national socialist party. They have a website in english, but I won't link from here. Instead I recommend the wikipedia article that describes pretty well how charming they are. Apparently there is an ongoing effort in the US to classify them as terrorists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Resistance_Movement

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TW12357
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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 public

... (read more)
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Jens Nordmark52
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The Swedish press support is for quite obvious reasons designed to be politically impartial, which means that one can't draw conclusions about a publications ideology from the fact that it receives press support. This is an issue that is sometimes debated in Sweden because blatantly antidemocratic media may be entitled to the money.

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JoshuaBlake
Thank you, my prior was it would be something along this line but it needed someone to check
Shakeel Hashim54
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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" โ€” 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.

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Tegmark26
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My brother never worked there.  He published some articles there, but they've never paid him anything. 

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harfe39
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This reply is disappointingly short and again does not address the core question raised by Shakeel.

  • The letter of intent states that the grant was approved. Why doesn't FLI do more due diligence before approving a grant? Since you havent stated the opposite, I assume that the latter is genuine (that would be nice to clarify, too). Is that a usual process? How often, by percentage, does it happen that you approve a grant and then later reject it?
  • Has anyone at FLI looked at the swedish wikipedia page of the org?
  • If you see the wikipedia page now, do you think, as a first guess, it would be ok to give $100k to such an organization?
  • Where you aware of Nya Dagbladet before?
  • Were you aware that Nya Dagbladet publishes horrific, racist content, or do you disagree with the characterization that they publish horrific, racist content?
  • what kind of media project was it that you initially wanted to fund?
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elephantower23
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Minor meta-question: what is the 2 axis voting supposed to represent here? People feel this was a good contribution to the discussion but disagree with the claim that Per Shapiro was never paid by Nya Dagbladet?  I would've expected the opposite -- the factual claim is probably true but not very relevant.

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Jeff Kaufman ๐Ÿ”ธ30
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"I would normally angrily downvote you, but I do want to indicate support for you continuing to engage here and think it is good for other people to be able to see your response so I will vote up and disagree"

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elephantower18
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How does that address Shakeel's concern? I would've thought someone submitting articles to a far-right website would know it's a far-right website regardless of payment. 

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DanielFilan21
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It doesn't seem that hard to believe that someone could see a far-right website and not notice that they occasionally publish crazy anti-semitic content (e.g. if I look at their front page, many of the articles seem kooky to me, but none seem racist). To be honest, given that the last name Shapiro seems to mostly be used by people with Jewish ancestry, I'd be kind of surprised if his brother knew about that content before submitting (altho I suppose anything is possible).

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elephantower
 Overall I think any reasonable person should have an intuition that the site is dodgy after skimming a few articles, and the Nazi articles are just irrefutable proof if you want to question that initial impression.   > To be honest, given that the last name Shapiro seems to mostly be used by people with Jewish ancestry, I'd be kind of surprised if his brother knew about that content before submitting I'd guess Shapiro knows he has some strange bedfellows but cares more about pushing anti-vax and right-wing populist view points than avoiding Nazis (unclear if he knows about that specific editorial ofc) 
DanielFilan11
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Overall I think any reasonable person should have an intuition that the site is dodgy after skimming a few articles

Eh I agree tbh but there's a gap between "dodgy" and "horrific[ally] racist", which was "Shakeel's concern" that you mentioned.

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Jens Nordmark
I do suspect neither knew initially about the explicit support for a bona fide nazi terror org (NRM), I only found it out in an article JWS dug up. Pretty clear it's a pro-Russian site though.
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Chris Leong
I would expect Tegmark to know more about the paper if his brother had worked there than if his brother had published some articles there (especially if his brother had published in a bunch of other places as well). However, it may also be that his brother has only published to that one site.
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mako yass
But would he describe the paper that way to his brother, who he knows is left-center? He'd likely want to tell Max that it isn't an extreme paper, and if he were a right-winger, he'd likely believe it. It's also possible that Max wasn't cognisant that his brother had published in that paper and so they may have not thought to talk about it, from what I can tell, Per has worked for a lot of more prominent publications than that.
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AltForHonesty
Not being paid for it doesn't make it okay. They still promote holocaust revisionism, vaccine denialism, and the white replacement conspiracy theory. One could make the argument that it actually makes it worse: he believed in the cause so much he was willing to work for free. (I'm personally agnostic as to whether it makes it worse or not, but again, it doesn't make it okay) The fact that this reply has positive karma and positive agreement karma is baffling.
Linch46
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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 FLIโ€™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. 

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Jason33
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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 othe... (read more)

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mako yass12
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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)

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jimrandomh
(Fyi a hash of only 12 hex digits (48 bits) is not long enough to prevent retroactively composing a message that matches the hash-fragment, if the message is long enough that you can find 48 bits of irrelevant entropy in it.)
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mako yass
(Well I declare that the message is very short. What would 48bits of entropy, in grammatically and semantically correct text, look like? Edit: I guess, if I could assume I could think of 4 synonyms for every word in the paragraph, the paragraph would only have to be a bit over 24 words long for me to be able to find something. Fortunately, it's only 11 words long.)
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jimrandomh
Suppose there's a spot in a sentence where either of two synonyms would be effectively the same. That's 1 bit of available entropy. Then a spot where either a period or a comma would both work; that's another bit of entropy.  If you compose a message and annotate it with 48 two-way branches like this, using a notation like spintax, then you can programmatically create 2^48 effectively-identical messages. Then if you check the hash of each, you have good odds of finding one which matches the 48-bit hash fragment.
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David M
Not totally sure, but IIRC characters like 'a' or 'z' are about 8 bits each, depending how the text is encoded. So 48 bits would give you 6 characters.
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mako yass
I guess if we you saw a lot of noise in the prediction, random misspellings, tortured grammar, you'd reject.
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David M
Is there a reason you canโ€™t post the full hash
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mako yass
not really, just didn't want to draw too much attention to it.
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DC
Shakeel Hashim79
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The following is my personal opinion, not CEA's.

If this is true it's absolutely horrifying.  FLI needs to give a full explanation of what exactly happened here and I don't understand why they haven't. If FLI did knowingly agree to give money to a neo-Nazi group, thatโ€™s despicable.  I don't think people who would do something like that ought to have any place in this community.

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Jack Lewars37
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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 ... (read more)

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9
Jason
I think it very likely that FLI would have made a statement here if there were an innocent or merely negligent explanation (e.g., the document is a forgery, or they got duped somehow into believing the grantee was related to FLI's stated charitable purposes and not pro-Nazi). So, unless there is a satisfactory explanation forthcoming, the stonewalling strongly points to a more sinister one. On the other hand, U.S. state charity regulators and the Internal Revenue Service's exempt-organizations staff are badly underfunded. Supporting neo-Nazis is constitutionally protected in the U.S. and poses no discernable legal risk. Using charitable resources to promote ends unrelated to the charity is, however, not protected. By making a case much easier to prove with minimal investigation, a written confession would significantly increase the odds of action against the organization and/or personal action against those responsible. In particular, the allegations here if true would support an inference that FLI used charitable resources to further the interests of a family member of the president and treasurer. As far as PR strategy, do you think FLI could even survive a confession in anything close to its current form? I think the first rule of running a charity is not to embarass your megadonors by bringing them into public scorn by associating them in any way with neo-Nazis. FLI could have felt that this could blow over and remain mostly limited to a foreign publication, while an admission to supporting this organization would be a death knell for FLI.  I'm not attempting to justify their PR decisions as correct, of course. There are higher moral priorities than protecting one's organization. But the PR decisions don't seem irrational on their face if the main/only priority is protecting FLI.
Jeff Kaufman ๐Ÿ”ธ46
16
0

I think it very likely that FLI would have made a statement here if there were an innocent or merely negligent explanation

I think this sort of reasoning is helpful and generally underutilized. But one thing to keep in mind is that organizations can take weirdly long times to make even super obvious public statements relative to the value of getting clarification public, mostly for silly internal reasons.

(Ex: not clear who needs to approve, someone who would normally look at it is traveling, someone misses that this is urgent, ...)

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1
Jason
Good point. Bureaucratic inertia just doesn't seem likely at all in this case. A decision was made to send a response -- that sounds vaguely threatening/intimidating to my ears -- through FLI's lawyer within days.
Tegmark86
6
0

Jeff is right: I just returned from my mom's memorial service, which delayed the just-posted FLI statement.

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Shakeel Hashim55
20
1

I'm very sorry for your loss and apologise for jumping to conclusions about why there wasn't an immediate statement.

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Linch23
12
0

My sincere sympathies for your loss. 

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-2
Shakeel Hashim
Hi Jack โ€” reasonable question! When I wrote this post I just didn't see what the legal problems might be for FLI. With FTX, there are a ton of complications, most notably with regards to bankruptcy/clawbacks, and the fact that actual crimes were (seemingly) committed. This FLI situation, on face value, didn't seem to have any similar complications โ€” it seemed that something deeply immoral was done, but nothing more than that. Jason's comment has made me realise there might be something else going on here, though;  if that is the case then that would make the silence make more sense. I do still think it's very weird that FLI hasn't condemned Nya Dagbladet though โ€” CEA did, after all, make it very clear very quickly what our stance on SBF was.
6[anonymous]
Please don't do this. I think it's very unfair to act like there are clear standards in a gray area where those standards are just enough to cover your own ass. The example I often think of is an adult brother and sister keeping in touch with their parents, where the brother decides the standard is to call them daily and does so, the sister decides the standard is to call them weekly and does so, and then the brother chastises the sister for not doing enough. (And perhaps it's easier for the brother to call daily, and perhaps the sister knows their parents find it annoying how often the brother calls, and perhaps the sister is doing other nice things for their parents etc.) I feel a bit bad about singling you out because I think other orgs do this too (CE being a recent example), but I guess I'd come to expect more from CEA as I generally consider them to be one of the more professional EA orgs. I'm thankful that I haven't seen any more comments from you like this one or the one above in recent months, but I thought someone should say something about this comment too.
5
Jack Lewars
Thanks for responding Shakeel.
0
Daniel_Eth
Agree.
jimrandomh53
16
22

Yeah, no, this story is not overall plausible and I would bet at better than 50-50 odds that there's a major misrepresentation here regarding what happened. 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, but it wouldn't be the scandal that this purports to be. Option 2 is that the letter of intent is an outright forgery.

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Henri Thunberg ๐Ÿ”ธ38
16
2

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.

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lc10
6
1

This comment turned out to be entirely correct.

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Habryka [Deactivated]21
11
1

Yep, seems right. I guess I am glad the comment itself didn't get downvoted, but all the people who disagree-voted it sure should do some updating.

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8
titotal
  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. 
5
Lumpyproletariat
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.
Jason28
21
7

Governance pro tip: Husband and wife should not have two seats on a five-member board of any org that solicits donations from the public. Even if you disclose it on your 990, as FLI did.

Even worse, it appears to be the president and treasurer!

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Guy Raveh
Will Bradshaw21
6
0

Thanks for flagging this! I agree it looks quite concerning, on several fronts.

Minor nit: I read the title as saying that FLI has claimed to have offered funding to a far-right org, whereas in fact what has happened is that someone else has claimed that FLI has done this. I think replacing "claimed" with "alleged" or similar in the title would help with this.

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Jens Nordmark
Yes, that seems better.
Pablo20
5
0

You may want to update the post with a link to FLI's statement.

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4
Jens Nordmark
Thanks, updated.
3
Pablo
Thanks!
temporalis8
5
2

Someone should make a prediction market on how true the core claim (that FLI offered a grant to a pro-nazi publication) will turn out to be.

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6
ElliotJDavies
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.
Two riders were approaching1
17
11

With a little generosity/trust in Expo's article and reading between the lines, itโ€™s good to flag the squalid character of Tegmarkโ€™s choices:

  1. It seems hard not to guess that (>50%?) Tegmark rescinded his offer to the fascists, because Expo reached out and discovered it. 
  2. With more certainty, Tegmark probably distributed $100K in funds solely because of his brother and family, this is terrible for all sorts of reasons, and undermines and is dangerous for the longtermist funding environment and EA overall.
  3. The squalid, low integrity interactions, where
... (read more)
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-5
Jens Nordmark
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