I wrote this up a couple days ago and haven’t gotten a chance to post it—sorry if this is repetitive with other comments made since then.
I admit my reasoning here my be unduly sketchy: I’m trying to act on the view that EA forum commenting should be mainly recreational. But I was fairly surprised to see my opinion on this FAQ differed sharply from the other comments I read. On the one hand, signing off on a grant to a Holocaust denialist doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or your foundation isn’t doing good work. On the other, it’s a serious lapse in judgment that deserves some sort of root-cause analysis and attempts to fix the problem, which I don’t see in the current FAQ, which I find to be an (understandably) one-sided PR document. That’s fine as far as it goes, but for me personally a good faith attempt to prove this was an isolated incident needs to go deeper and has to at the very least involve publicly posting the November correspondence rejecting the grant prior to the December media inquiry.
I admittedly don’t understand Swedish politics or culture and may be misunderstanding the nature of Nya Dagbladet’s political positioning or of the various documents disclosed. But as someone who’s run nonprofits for a while, every time I’ve received a letter like what Future of Life Institute provided Nya Dagbladet, I’ve received a donation. (Query if FLI has ever issued a letter like this without making a donation). I don’t know how much FLI has under management or how it makes grant decisions, but $100K is 1-2 years of someone’s salary, so foundations I’ve worked with have always been very careful not to send clear messages of grantmaking like that unless a final decision had been reached.
Picture this in an Open Philanthropy context. In my experience, one way Open Phil has provided grants is by making a recommendation to Silicon Valley Community Fund (SVCF), which then handles the logistics of making the grant (including due diligence). Imagine that Open Phil sent a recommendation to SVCF to make a $100,000 grant to Infowars (a far-right purveyor of mistruth) and then decided against providing the money after diligence. That would be alarming! On the one hand, good that the diligence process caught it, on the other, how the hell did they decide that an InfoWars grant would be a good idea?
By my read, the FLI/Nya Dagbladet case seems similar. The FAQ claims that Tegmark was not aware of the organization’s far-right sympathies, which seems either (a) a sign of a poor process at FLI or (b) untrue (given that Tegmark’s brother had written for Nya Dagbladet on multiple occasions and Tegmark had apparently appeared on a podcast featured on their website and hosted by the same brother). Either way, why is FLI making $100,000 grants (or telling grantees its making grants) to an outlet tied to Holocaust deniers?
My nonprofit 1Day Sooner has received funding from Jaan Talinn (a major funder of FLI), and we appreciate that funding and his overall generosity for good causes. And I do endorse the principle that charitable giving is praiseworthy and should be incentivized (i.e. a foundations’ decision-making doesn’t have to be perfect for it to be valuable and the default framing of attention towards charitable giving should be positive and not negative). I also respect Max Tegmark and find him to be a brilliant scientist. But I worry this could be a place where the discussion of the EA Forum involves tribal affinity politics around an effective altruist identity and is blinded via high trust to a more natural explanation that requires a deeper fix.
I basically feel the same confusion and dissatisfaction that Josh is expressing here. This is a very big mistake. It doesn’t feel to me like a misunderstanding that would be likely to happen in the normal course of business without several underlying things having gone quite wrong. I don’t feel like I understand how those things went wrong, and so I don’t feel sure they’ve been fixed.
I wrote this up a couple days ago and haven’t gotten a chance to post it—sorry if this is repetitive with other comments made since then.
I admit my reasoning here my be unduly sketchy: I’m trying to act on the view that EA forum commenting should be mainly recreational. But I was fairly surprised to see my opinion on this FAQ differed sharply from the other comments I read. On the one hand, signing off on a grant to a Holocaust denialist doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or your foundation isn’t doing good work. On the other, it’s a serious lapse in judgment that deserves some sort of root-cause analysis and attempts to fix the problem, which I don’t see in the current FAQ, which I find to be an (understandably) one-sided PR document. That’s fine as far as it goes, but for me personally a good faith attempt to prove this was an isolated incident needs to go deeper and has to at the very least involve publicly posting the November correspondence rejecting the grant prior to the December media inquiry.
I admittedly don’t understand Swedish politics or culture and may be misunderstanding the nature of Nya Dagbladet’s political positioning or of the various documents disclosed. But as someone who’s run nonprofits for a while, every time I’ve received a letter like what Future of Life Institute provided Nya Dagbladet, I’ve received a donation. (Query if FLI has ever issued a letter like this without making a donation). I don’t know how much FLI has under management or how it makes grant decisions, but $100K is 1-2 years of someone’s salary, so foundations I’ve worked with have always been very careful not to send clear messages of grantmaking like that unless a final decision had been reached.
Picture this in an Open Philanthropy context. In my experience, one way Open Phil has provided grants is by making a recommendation to Silicon Valley Community Fund (SVCF), which then handles the logistics of making the grant (including due diligence). Imagine that Open Phil sent a recommendation to SVCF to make a $100,000 grant to Infowars (a far-right purveyor of mistruth) and then decided against providing the money after diligence. That would be alarming! On the one hand, good that the diligence process caught it, on the other, how the hell did they decide that an InfoWars grant would be a good idea?
By my read, the FLI/Nya Dagbladet case seems similar. The FAQ claims that Tegmark was not aware of the organization’s far-right sympathies, which seems either (a) a sign of a poor process at FLI or (b) untrue (given that Tegmark’s brother had written for Nya Dagbladet on multiple occasions and Tegmark had apparently appeared on a podcast featured on their website and hosted by the same brother). Either way, why is FLI making $100,000 grants (or telling grantees its making grants) to an outlet tied to Holocaust deniers?
My nonprofit 1Day Sooner has received funding from Jaan Talinn (a major funder of FLI), and we appreciate that funding and his overall generosity for good causes. And I do endorse the principle that charitable giving is praiseworthy and should be incentivized (i.e. a foundations’ decision-making doesn’t have to be perfect for it to be valuable and the default framing of attention towards charitable giving should be positive and not negative). I also respect Max Tegmark and find him to be a brilliant scientist. But I worry this could be a place where the discussion of the EA Forum involves tribal affinity politics around an effective altruist identity and is blinded via high trust to a more natural explanation that requires a deeper fix.
I basically feel the same confusion and dissatisfaction that Josh is expressing here. This is a very big mistake. It doesn’t feel to me like a misunderstanding that would be likely to happen in the normal course of business without several underlying things having gone quite wrong. I don’t feel like I understand how those things went wrong, and so I don’t feel sure they’ve been fixed.