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: FLI refers to the Future of Life Institute (FLI) not the Future for Humanity Institute (FHI) which has caused some confusion below. Max Tegmark is President of the former, Nick Bostrom is Director of the latter. The two dramas today are not related, other than longtermist organisations needing better acronyms]
Some other things noted for further detail from the article:
I have no reason to dispute the claim of Nya Dagbladet to be a ‘pro-nazi’ site[1] (clarifying edit/correction in footnote) - users with a bigger knowledge of the Swedish media ecosphere might be able to clarify, but this claim seems to be trustworthy.
Expo claims that a promise from FLI for a grant is in a written application to the County Administration of Dalarna in Sweden with a signature by Tergmark, despite Tegmark initially denying the claim—they now have a picture of Tegmark sending a letter of intent, which unless forged, looks 100% genuine.
A response from Dentons (a US law-firm representing FLI) seems to confirm the decision to fund Nya Dagbladet had been made, but there is now no promise from FLI and not likely to be[2]. They have not responded to Expo since the initial email exchange. It is unclear why FLI decided to make the grant initially, and later change their minds.
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.
My understanding:
In August/September, FLI promised funding in a letter of intent for $100k to Nya Dagbladet so they could set up their foundation.
In October, the promise of funds seems to have been secure enough for the Dalarna County Administrative Board to register the foundation.
In December, Expo (presumably investigating the new Nya Dagbladet Foundation) follow the money back to FLI and question Tegmark
Tegmark initially denies having done so, but Expo have the signed letter. Eventually Dentons, a law firm, respond for FLI and deny that any funds had been released to Nya Dagbladet, and that this decision had been made before Expo got in contact with Tegmark/FLI. They have not responded since.
I cannot speak to any legal questions here, or liability that FLI might face, though I’m not sure why there would be.
There are, however, massive reputational issues at stake. The EA movement is under intense scrutiny right now, and this seems to be another case of a major actor a well-known actor in our movement doing something that has massively poor consequences for the public perception of EA unless they can explain why. Critically, Nya Dagbladet while small seems to be openly[3] far-right, supporting anti-vaccination sentiment and holocaust denial. I am struggling to charitably interpret how funding them would improve the future of humanity, or do the most good for the world right now.
I think it would be prudent for someone from FLI to explain what happened here.
If not, people both inside and outside the EA movement, be they supporters or critics, may correctly[4] be led to infer that a major organisation in a well-known organisation aligned with EA promised funds to an openly politically far-right organisation, knowing what they stand for. That is not what EA should stand for, and to the extent that it does, I would want no part in it.
Many seem to be taking the ‘pro-nazi’ as a crux. That was the characterisation Expo gave, and I went with their framing as default. Depending on your definition of ‘pro-nazi’ this might be false, Nya Dagbladet don’t seem to openly support the persecution of Jews or a white ethnostate openly that I could see—but it’d be very difficult for any publication to do so openly. In the Expo article, there’s a sidebar with two of the most damning pieces of content.
I would at least characterise them as far-right/populist reactionary/ethno-nationalist, which even if not as morally horrifying as openly ‘pro-nazi’, is something which I believe to be strongly antithetical to what EA is and should stand for. But I think I will elaborate on my thoughts on EA/politics in a future post, rather than here. In any case, I think the issue is why this grant was considered in the first place given the political affiliation of the recipients, rather than whether those political affiliations are less far-right than the Expo article implies.
[Edit: I think that this claim is false. No grant was ever confirmed, and the FAQ states that the ‘letter of intent’ was a specific request by Nya Dagbladet and not part of FLI’s usual grant-making process]
[Edit: I retract the use of ‘correctly’ here—I meant it to refer to a counterfactual case where the worst possible case was true, but I think it is probably more confusing than useful]
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 a sketchy grant to a random populist newspaper with bad moral values and bad epistemics! But “pro-nazi” seems like it might be an exaggeration on the part of Expo.
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.
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.
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 .)
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.
Do you have a source for this? I wasn’t able to find anything myself with a quick search.
One source is the Expo article itself:
The only connection that Expo has been able to establish between Max Tegmark and the extreme right-wing media platform Nya Dagbladet is in the form of Tegmark’s brother, the journalist Per Shapiro, who for the past few years has been a recurring writer for Nya Dagbladet. Shapiro also runs the conspiracy theory-promoting podcast Folkets radio, whose episodes are presented on Nya Dagbladet’s website under the heading “radio reports”. Max Tegmark has, himself, appeared on his brother’s podcast. Whether this connection is significant with regards to the promise of funding from Max Tegmark and the Future of Life Institute to Nya Dagbladet is one of the questions we have been trying to put to them, but neither Max Tegmark nor his brother Per Shapiro have commented.
Shapiro told Expo that he is happy to answer questions concerning his journalism, but that he does not want to answer questions concerning whether he has been involved in contacts between Nya Dagbladet and FLI.
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).
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
These are some of the incidents that article cites as being representative of Nya Dagbladet’s problems, are they as described?
On its website, Nya Dagbladet publishes right-wing extremist content such as the racist myth of an ongoing “population replacement”, Holocaust revisionism, claims that Muslims are attempting to conquer Europe, and conspiracy theories related to the covid-19 pandemic.
For several years, Nya Dagbladet has also had a pro-Russian orientation. In September, the platform published an article based on a fake report incorrectly said to have been produced by an American think tank. The article became notorious after it was shared by the Embassy of Russia in Sweden.
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.)
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.
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.
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 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.
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: FLI refers to the Future of Life Institute (FLI) not the Future for Humanity Institute (FHI) which has caused some confusion below. Max Tegmark is President of the former, Nick Bostrom is Director of the latter. The two dramas today are not related, other than longtermist organisations needing better acronyms]
Some other things noted for further detail from the article:
I have no reason to dispute the claim of Nya Dagbladet to be a ‘pro-nazi’ site[1] (clarifying edit/correction in footnote) - users with a bigger knowledge of the Swedish media ecosphere might be able to clarify, but this claim seems to be trustworthy.
Expo claims that a promise from FLI for a grant is in a written application to the County Administration of Dalarna in Sweden with a signature by Tergmark, despite Tegmark initially denying the claim—they now have a picture of Tegmark sending a letter of intent, which unless forged, looks 100% genuine.
A response from Dentons (a US law-firm representing FLI)
seems to confirm the decision to fundNya Dagbladethad been made, but there is now no promise from FLI and not likely to be[2]. They have not responded to Expo since the initial email exchange. It is unclear why FLI decided to make the grant initially, and later change their minds.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.
My understanding:
In August/September, FLI promised funding in a letter of intent for $100k to Nya Dagbladet so they could set up their foundation.
In October, the promise of funds seems to have been secure enough for the Dalarna County Administrative Board to register the foundation.
In December, Expo (presumably investigating the new Nya Dagbladet Foundation) follow the money back to FLI and question Tegmark
Tegmark initially denies having done so, but Expo have the signed letter. Eventually Dentons, a law firm, respond for FLI and deny that any funds had been released to Nya Dagbladet, and that this decision had been made before Expo got in contact with Tegmark/FLI. They have not responded since.
I cannot speak to any legal questions here, or liability that FLI might face, though I’m not sure why there would be.
There are, however, massive reputational issues at stake. The EA movement is under intense scrutiny right now, and this seems to be another case of
a major actora well-known actor in our movement doing something that has massively poor consequences for the public perception of EA unless they can explain why. Critically, Nya Dagbladet while small seems to beopenly[3] far-right, supporting anti-vaccination sentiment and holocaust denial. I am struggling to charitably interpret how funding them would improve the future of humanity, or do the most good for the world right now.I think it would be prudent for someone from FLI to explain what happened here.
If not, people both inside and outside the EA movement, be they supporters or critics, may
correctly[4] be led to infer thata major organisation ina well-known organisation aligned with EA promised funds to an openly politically far-right organisation, knowing what they stand for. That is not what EA should stand for, and to the extent that it does, I would want no part in it.Many seem to be taking the ‘pro-nazi’ as a crux. That was the characterisation Expo gave, and I went with their framing as default. Depending on your definition of ‘pro-nazi’ this might be false, Nya Dagbladet don’t seem to openly support the persecution of Jews or a white ethnostate openly that I could see—but it’d be very difficult for any publication to do so openly. In the Expo article, there’s a sidebar with two of the most damning pieces of content.
I would at least characterise them as far-right/populist reactionary/ethno-nationalist, which even if not as morally horrifying as openly ‘pro-nazi’, is something which I believe to be strongly antithetical to what EA is and should stand for. But I think I will elaborate on my thoughts on EA/politics in a future post, rather than here. In any case, I think the issue is why this grant was considered in the first place given the political affiliation of the recipients, rather than whether those political affiliations are less far-right than the Expo article implies.
[Edit: I think that this claim is false. No grant was ever confirmed, and the FAQ states that the ‘letter of intent’ was a specific request by Nya Dagbladet and not part of FLI’s usual grant-making process]
[Edit: I retract the use of ‘openly’ here, they seem to openly be populist right, but don’t make their far-rights leanings immediately obvious]
[Edit: I retract the use of ‘correctly’ here—I meant it to refer to a counterfactual case where the worst possible case was true, but I think it is probably more confusing than useful]
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.
I just realized that I had confused them with FHI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Done
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 a sketchy grant to a random populist newspaper with bad moral values and bad epistemics! But “pro-nazi” seems like it might be an exaggeration on the part of Expo.
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.
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.
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 .)
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).
Do you have a source for this? I wasn’t able to find anything myself with a quick search.
One source is the Expo article itself:
The claim from Expo is easily verified
Sorry is there anything in that link that suggests Per Shapiro and Tegmark are brothers?
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).
Thanks, this is pretty convincing to me.
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
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
Thanks!
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?
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.
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.
I think this is the podcast Tegmark appeared on with his brother, if you’re interested in telling us about it.
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.
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 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.
Is this sentence what you intended to type, JWS? I’m confused as to what letter Expo signed.
Expo possess the signed letter.