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.
For what it’s worth, as someone who mentioned the possibility that Tegmark was “partway down some sort of far-right pipeline” elsewhere in this thread, I found the addition reassuring.
My personal best guess is now that FLI made an honest mistake, and we are reaching diminishing returns on litigating this further. My sense is that it is incredibly difficult to please everyone with this kind of statement. It doesn’t seem like any of the recent statements by major EA organizations or figures have been well-received overall. I think devoting a lot of energy to dissecting public statements does not achieve much & is bad for the community’s social capital, and we should be a bit more reluctant to publish dissections.
I think the “dissection” produced good results here—it seems to have triggered a helpful revision that acknowledges a failure to adequately vet earlier in the process, which is much more reassuring than other possibilities the original statement left open. It also includes a promise to improve processes to mitigate the risk of this happening again. I’m not 100 percent happy with the revised version, but it is much better.
Also, as far as “social capital,” comments from this forum are regularly reposted as evidence of what “EA thinks” of a given controversy. If an apology is insufficient and we are all silent, the inference that we think the apology sufficient will be drawn.
Also, as far as “social capital,” comments from this forum are regularly reposted as evidence of what “EA thinks” of a given controversy. If an apology is insufficient and we are all silent, the inference that we think the apology sufficient will be drawn.
Thankyou for linking that. I’m glad FLI has issued that statement, and it reassures me somewhat. I’d still like to hear more detail of FLI’s logic around this grant—why it was considered in the first place, what FLI’s pipeline for considering grants is, at what stage Nya Dagblade was rejected, and why. (Hopefully the ‘why’ part is obvious, but it would be good to understand what information they received that changed their minds, that they didn’t have in the first place).
It appears that a paragraph was added to the statement today:
For what it’s worth, as someone who mentioned the possibility that Tegmark was “partway down some sort of far-right pipeline” elsewhere in this thread, I found the addition reassuring.
My personal best guess is now that FLI made an honest mistake, and we are reaching diminishing returns on litigating this further. My sense is that it is incredibly difficult to please everyone with this kind of statement. It doesn’t seem like any of the recent statements by major EA organizations or figures have been well-received overall. I think devoting a lot of energy to dissecting public statements does not achieve much & is bad for the community’s social capital, and we should be a bit more reluctant to publish dissections.
Others are free to disagree, of course.
Thanks for pointing this out!
I think the “dissection” produced good results here—it seems to have triggered a helpful revision that acknowledges a failure to adequately vet earlier in the process, which is much more reassuring than other possibilities the original statement left open. It also includes a promise to improve processes to mitigate the risk of this happening again. I’m not 100 percent happy with the revised version, but it is much better.
Also, as far as “social capital,” comments from this forum are regularly reposted as evidence of what “EA thinks” of a given controversy. If an apology is insufficient and we are all silent, the inference that we think the apology sufficient will be drawn.
And arguably rightly, IMO.
Thankyou for linking that. I’m glad FLI has issued that statement, and it reassures me somewhat. I’d still like to hear more detail of FLI’s logic around this grant—why it was considered in the first place, what FLI’s pipeline for considering grants is, at what stage Nya Dagblade was rejected, and why. (Hopefully the ‘why’ part is obvious, but it would be good to understand what information they received that changed their minds, that they didn’t have in the first place).