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 FLI’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 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. We responded the same day that FLI had decided not to fund the project now or at any later time.
On January 13 Expo.se nonetheless ran their piece with a clickbait title combining “Musk” and “pro-nazi”. Among other issues we have with their article, we consider this headline reference to “Musk” to be unfair and misleading. He is only one of many prominent members of the worldwide science and tech communities to have supported the Future of Life Institute over the years, and plays no role in our grantmaking decisions. We also point out that the claim by Expo.se that NDF is “pro-Nazi” [the lede in the article] 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. This is exactly $30,000 more than the zero dollars FLI granted to them.
The Future of Life Institute makes no apologies for engaging with many people across the immensely diverse political spectrum, because our mission is so important that it needs broad support from all sectors of society. We will continue to engage the broadest sample of humankind, whether or not we are criticized by anyone who questions our motives, or who may have their own agendas. And in this effort, the Future of Life Institute stands and will always stand emphatically against racism, bigotry, bias, injustice and discrimination at all times and in all forms. They are antithetical to our mission to safeguard the future of life and to advance human flourishing.
Added Jan 16: Just to be absolutely unambiguous: FLI finds Nazi, neo-Nazi or pro-Nazi groups or ideologies despicable and would never knowingly support them. In case FLI’s past work, its website and the lifetime work, writing, and talks by FLI leadership left any doubt about that, we included this final sentence in our statement above just to be 100% clear: “the Future of Life Institute stands and will always stand emphatically against racism, bigotry, bias, injustice and discrimination at all times and in all forms. They are antithetical to our mission to safeguard the future of life and to advance human flourishing.” In terms of Nya Dagbladet, further investigation of them has only further validated our November decision to reject their proposal, and we regret that we did not understand their organization and history better sooner, so as to reject them earlier in the process. We will be improving our processes to reduce the risk of anything like this ever happening again.
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?
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 wouldn’t they, after all?
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.
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?
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?
In that one they also recommend voting for the Nordic Resistance Movement (Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen), 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
“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”
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.
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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
(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.)
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.
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.
Edit: I’ve decided to retract this as not conveying the nuances of my views, in particular:
This comment was really poorly and hastily worded.
I currently endorse the specific questions people are asking of Tegmark; I particularly like harfe’s.
I don’t support and respect Max’s actions regardless of how bad they were. That was a miscommunication on my part. To use an absurd hypothetical, if he murdered someone, I would unequivocally condemn that.
Insofar as Max’s actions have been good, I offer support, and insofar as they’ve been harmful, I wish he’d apologize and make amends. There is a longer comment below in the chain that lays out more of my thoughts, in response to a comment responding to this one. I wrote it a couple hours ago. The edit on this comment supersedes that comment. I would really like it if people don’t nitpick the particulars of it.
I basically agree with the comment responding to this one, by David Mears.
Nazis are bad.
I retract my involvement in this discussion.
My previous comment:
“However questionable your actions may have been, which I know little enough about right now to understand the true situation and its intricacies as a bystander, I really respect you’re not caving under pressure from the inquisition.”
Calling this an ‘inquisition’ is hyperbolic. What I see is a small number of people expressing critical views and feelings, and seeking answers from FLI. I would far prefer a world in which people feel entitled to do that, than one where it’s discouraged. When I imagine the alternative, I imagine a world in which we automatically assume good intent on the part of any authority figure alleged to have done something bad, or one in which people are too polite or timid to speak out, etc.
It seems as if you find outrage in response to misdeeds more offensive than the misdeeds themselves, because you offer support without conditionalising on how bad the misdeeds are (“however questionable” they are).
In fact, there is a point beyond which the badness of believing one is in the right vastly overshadows anything respectable about sticking to one’s convictions. When someone has done something clearly bad, let’s say corruption, and doesn’t agree one has done anything wrong, the lack of apology, while technically virtuous, deserves far less praise than the disagreement deserves censure. So my position is “depending on how bad the actions were, FLI should apologise or not apologise, and we should criticise or punish them in proportion to how bad they were”.
To be clear, from what it looks like this newspaper (that I have not looked at) looks like it has platformed what looks like neo-Nazi views. If Max knew that and held an intention to fund it before deciding against, I find that stupid and harmful that he would even consider it. Neo-Nazism is bad.
because you offer support without conditionalising on how bad the misdeeds are (“however questionable” they are).
I think I may be giving a wrong impression here. I don’t offer unconditional support for someone who’s, say, funneling millions of dollars to neo-Nazis. Max clearly has not done that, and given the evidence at hand, I support him standing up for himself. That means I am conditioning on having some sense of the evidence, which contradicts my wording. I meant to hedge my words by saying something to the effect of, ‘well I’m offering this support even though I don’t know very much of the specifics, so don’t like judge me if this turns out to be really horrible’. But this is a bit cowardly given that, well, my support is somewhat conditional on having read some about this and seeing his comment, and reflects some anticipation that he has a good chance (50%?) of having not been really in the wrong. That said, yes I think something wrong or really wrong may have happened here, and don’t want to be construed as not allowing for that reality.
This is a technicality, but “seeking answers” is describable as inquisitiveness and inquisitional, so I stand by my wording, in that I think it both technically true and carries the vibe I want it to convey, even if it’s actually justified on people’s part to ask those questions. I meant it to have that double-meaning. Given the karma amounts going on, I don’t consider the connotative usage at all hyperbolic, and I’m not including social media discourse that almost certainly exists but which I have not seen.
noun 1. a period of prolonged and intensive questioning or investigation.
I think people’s questioning is very valid in this circumstance. I also think Max has a right to stand up for himself if he believes he hasn’t done wrong. The fact that he didn’t pay out money after investigating seems pretty important to me. But I don’t know what that process was with the paperwork and some letter I forget the exact name of, because I am unvirtuously not looking at the actual empirical details very closely. I think Max will provide more details of his intentions, and questioning is a process that will help with that. The fact that his brother was involved strikes me as a conflict-of-interest that should provide pause, though I also know there are many conflicts-of-interest in EA-land. I would guess that it would be pretty hard for someone investigating the newspaper to not catch some whiff that it was problematic early on, if they hadn’t heard of the newspaper already (I don’t know how well-known it is there). That determines whether a “positive initial impression” on his part would make sense or not, as that’s the only wrong thing I have seen so far based on what he said, an initial mistake in doing due diligence fast enough. I think a crux we maybe have here is that I’m basically taking him at his word on that, and assuming he doesn’t have like corrupt ties or fascist leanings, which for all I know could be false. My best guess is that the latter is not the case (I hear something about him being center-left?) and that leaves the problem of maybe his brother came pleading to him to save this newspaper and that they would do some longtermist programming in exchange for saving it, I don’t know!
It seems as if you find outrage in response to misdeeds more offensive than the misdeeds themselves
If FLI loses hundreds of thousands in funding, or more, for what turns out to have been a mistake in due diligence, that would indeed be a sad consequence to me. Though I agree that it’s more important to question institutions if they are acting out of integrity than what the results are (see more below).
“depending on how bad the actions were, FLI should apologise or not apologise, and we should criticise or punish them in proportion to how bad they were”
I agree. I think it’s not obvious to me yet that they have besides fucking up on due diligence speed. Again, I will hedge by saying I am not combing carefully over the evidence like others are.
“I would far prefer a world in which people feel entitled to do that, than one where it’s discouraged. When I imagine the alternative, I imagine a world in which we automatically assume good intent on the part of any authority figure alleged to have done something bad, or one in which people are too polite or timid to speak out, etc.”
Given what happened with SBF, and the extent to which this type of questioning might have uncovered that sooner, I simply have to agree, even if the results make me uncomfortable. It is extremely important we do more of this (in a sustainable way?).
Edit 1: I really like harfe’s questions for Max, and I should also add my original comment was not referring to any specific comments that were made in response to Max’s top-level comment, since mine was the first response afaik, though I think I was anticipating him receiving a ton of skepticism, and wanted to express support for what looks like someone in a really hard place right now who likely had mostly good intentions going into this.
(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 FLI’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 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. We responded the same day that FLI had decided not to fund the project now or at any later time.
On January 13 Expo.se nonetheless ran their piece with a clickbait title combining “Musk” and “pro-nazi”. Among other issues we have with their article, we consider this headline reference to “Musk” to be unfair and misleading. He is only one of many prominent members of the worldwide science and tech communities to have supported the Future of Life Institute over the years, and plays no role in our grantmaking decisions. We also point out that the claim by Expo.se that NDF is “pro-Nazi” [the lede in the article] 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. This is exactly $30,000 more than the zero dollars FLI granted to them.
The Future of Life Institute makes no apologies for engaging with many people across the immensely diverse political spectrum, because our mission is so important that it needs broad support from all sectors of society. We will continue to engage the broadest sample of humankind, whether or not we are criticized by anyone who questions our motives, or who may have their own agendas. And in this effort, the Future of Life Institute stands and will always stand emphatically against racism, bigotry, bias, injustice and discrimination at all times and in all forms. They are antithetical to our mission to safeguard the future of life and to advance human flourishing.
Added Jan 16: Just to be absolutely unambiguous: FLI finds Nazi, neo-Nazi or pro-Nazi groups or ideologies despicable and would never knowingly support them. In case FLI’s past work, its website and the lifetime work, writing, and talks by FLI leadership left any doubt about that, we included this final sentence in our statement above just to be 100% clear: “the Future of Life Institute stands and will always stand emphatically against racism, bigotry, bias, injustice and discrimination at all times and in all forms. They are antithetical to our mission to safeguard the future of life and to advance human flourishing.” In terms of Nya Dagbladet, further investigation of them has only further validated our November decision to reject their proposal, and we regret that we did not understand their organization and history better sooner, so as to reject them earlier in the process. We will be improving our processes to reduce the risk of anything like this ever happening again.
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?
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 wouldn’t they, after all?
Tegmark wrongly alluded that the newspaper does not have and advocate the pro-Nazi views that they have been demonstrated to.
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.
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?
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?
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:
*I took this from another discussion of the topic; I think JWS is the one who found it?
In that one they also recommend voting for the Nordic Resistance Movement (Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen), 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
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:
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.
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.
Thank you, my prior was it would be something along this line but it needed someone to check
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.
My brother never worked there. He published some articles there, but they’ve never paid him anything.
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?
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.
“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”
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.
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).
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)
Eh I agree tbh but there’s a gap between “dodgy” and “horrific[ally] racist”, which was “Shakeel’s concern” that you mentioned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
(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.)
(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.)
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.
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.
I guess if we you saw a lot of noise in the prediction, random misspellings, tortured grammar, you’d reject.
Is there a reason you can’t post the full hash
not really, just didn’t want to draw too much attention to it.
Edit: I’ve decided to retract this as not conveying the nuances of my views, in particular:
This comment was really poorly and hastily worded.
I currently endorse the specific questions people are asking of Tegmark; I particularly like harfe’s.
I don’t support and respect Max’s actions regardless of how bad they were. That was a miscommunication on my part. To use an absurd hypothetical, if he murdered someone, I would unequivocally condemn that.
Insofar as Max’s actions have been good, I offer support, and insofar as they’ve been harmful, I wish he’d apologize and make amends. There is a longer comment below in the chain that lays out more of my thoughts, in response to a comment responding to this one. I wrote it a couple hours ago. The edit on this comment supersedes that comment. I would really like it if people don’t nitpick the particulars of it.
I basically agree with the comment responding to this one, by David Mears.
Nazis are bad.
I retract my involvement in this discussion.
My previous comment:
“However questionable your actions may have been, which I know little enough about right now to understand the true situation and its intricacies as a bystander, I really respect you’re not caving under pressure from the inquisition.”
Calling this an ‘inquisition’ is hyperbolic. What I see is a small number of people expressing critical views and feelings, and seeking answers from FLI. I would far prefer a world in which people feel entitled to do that, than one where it’s discouraged. When I imagine the alternative, I imagine a world in which we automatically assume good intent on the part of any authority figure alleged to have done something bad, or one in which people are too polite or timid to speak out, etc.
It seems as if you find outrage in response to misdeeds more offensive than the misdeeds themselves, because you offer support without conditionalising on how bad the misdeeds are (“however questionable” they are).
In fact, there is a point beyond which the badness of believing one is in the right vastly overshadows anything respectable about sticking to one’s convictions. When someone has done something clearly bad, let’s say corruption, and doesn’t agree one has done anything wrong, the lack of apology, while technically virtuous, deserves far less praise than the disagreement deserves censure. So my position is “depending on how bad the actions were, FLI should apologise or not apologise, and we should criticise or punish them in proportion to how bad they were”.
To be clear, from what it looks like this newspaper (that I have not looked at) looks like it has platformed what looks like neo-Nazi views. If Max knew that and held an intention to fund it before deciding against, I find that stupid and harmful that he would even consider it. Neo-Nazism is bad.
I think I may be giving a wrong impression here. I don’t offer unconditional support for someone who’s, say, funneling millions of dollars to neo-Nazis. Max clearly has not done that, and given the evidence at hand, I support him standing up for himself. That means I am conditioning on having some sense of the evidence, which contradicts my wording. I meant to hedge my words by saying something to the effect of, ‘well I’m offering this support even though I don’t know very much of the specifics, so don’t like judge me if this turns out to be really horrible’. But this is a bit cowardly given that, well, my support is somewhat conditional on having read some about this and seeing his comment, and reflects some anticipation that he has a good chance (50%?) of having not been really in the wrong. That said, yes I think something wrong or really wrong may have happened here, and don’t want to be construed as not allowing for that reality.
This is a technicality, but “seeking answers” is describable as inquisitiveness and inquisitional, so I stand by my wording, in that I think it both technically true and carries the vibe I want it to convey, even if it’s actually justified on people’s part to ask those questions. I meant it to have that double-meaning. Given the karma amounts going on, I don’t consider the connotative usage at all hyperbolic, and I’m not including social media discourse that almost certainly exists but which I have not seen.
I think people’s questioning is very valid in this circumstance. I also think Max has a right to stand up for himself if he believes he hasn’t done wrong. The fact that he didn’t pay out money after investigating seems pretty important to me. But I don’t know what that process was with the paperwork and some letter I forget the exact name of, because I am unvirtuously not looking at the actual empirical details very closely. I think Max will provide more details of his intentions, and questioning is a process that will help with that. The fact that his brother was involved strikes me as a conflict-of-interest that should provide pause, though I also know there are many conflicts-of-interest in EA-land. I would guess that it would be pretty hard for someone investigating the newspaper to not catch some whiff that it was problematic early on, if they hadn’t heard of the newspaper already (I don’t know how well-known it is there). That determines whether a “positive initial impression” on his part would make sense or not, as that’s the only wrong thing I have seen so far based on what he said, an initial mistake in doing due diligence fast enough. I think a crux we maybe have here is that I’m basically taking him at his word on that, and assuming he doesn’t have like corrupt ties or fascist leanings, which for all I know could be false. My best guess is that the latter is not the case (I hear something about him being center-left?) and that leaves the problem of maybe his brother came pleading to him to save this newspaper and that they would do some longtermist programming in exchange for saving it, I don’t know!
If FLI loses hundreds of thousands in funding, or more, for what turns out to have been a mistake in due diligence, that would indeed be a sad consequence to me. Though I agree that it’s more important to question institutions if they are acting out of integrity than what the results are (see more below).
I agree. I think it’s not obvious to me yet that they have besides fucking up on due diligence speed. Again, I will hedge by saying I am not combing carefully over the evidence like others are.
Given what happened with SBF, and the extent to which this type of questioning might have uncovered that sooner, I simply have to agree, even if the results make me uncomfortable. It is extremely important we do more of this (in a sustainable way?).
Edit 1: I really like harfe’s questions for Max, and I should also add my original comment was not referring to any specific comments that were made in response to Max’s top-level comment, since mine was the first response afaik, though I think I was anticipating him receiving a ton of skepticism, and wanted to express support for what looks like someone in a really hard place right now who likely had mostly good intentions going into this.