Ali Breland, a writer for the progressive magazine Mother Jones, has published an investigative piece into a startup with connections to the far-right. This startup was funded in part by Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research. I think this is a significant case-study of EAs doing harm (even indavertently) and should be used by the Effective Altruist community to identify other similar but yet-unidentified harmful support for far-right causes, and to exercise greater care about where it donates money to.
The key points Breland raises are that:
Former employees of Praxis Society allege its CEO is “interested in fascist authors and occultism and has touted a book that argues Black people are intellectually inferior to whites”
The startup’s key product is a free-market Mediterranean city-state designed to appeal to anarcho-capitalists
Alameda Research invested alongside other cryptocurrency investors in Series A round funding, totalling $15 million. Other investors include Emergent Ventures, a Thiel-backed fund led by economist Tyler Cowen. EV is known to cofund the Charter Cities Institute which has similar stated aims.
A spate of other recent perceived connections between Effective Altruism and the far-right have been published in various outlets:
[Linkpost] A Peter Thiel-Linked Startup Is Courting New York Scenesters and Plotting a Libertarian Paradise
Link post
Ali Breland, a writer for the progressive magazine Mother Jones, has published an investigative piece into a startup with connections to the far-right. This startup was funded in part by Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research. I think this is a significant case-study of EAs doing harm (even indavertently) and should be used by the Effective Altruist community to identify other similar but yet-unidentified harmful support for far-right causes, and to exercise greater care about where it donates money to.
The key points Breland raises are that:
Former employees of Praxis Society allege its CEO is “interested in fascist authors and occultism and has touted a book that argues Black people are intellectually inferior to whites”
The startup’s key product is a free-market Mediterranean city-state designed to appeal to anarcho-capitalists
Alameda Research invested alongside other cryptocurrency investors in Series A round funding, totalling $15 million. Other investors include Emergent Ventures, a Thiel-backed fund led by economist Tyler Cowen. EV is known to cofund the Charter Cities Institute which has similar stated aims.
A spate of other recent perceived connections between Effective Altruism and the far-right have been published in various outlets:
Pronatalist.org which identifies and assosciates itself with the EA movement. Note, the Collins’s disavow racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, but were recently key speakers at a conference linked to the far right.
This orgnisation has been funded by Jaan Tallinn, cofounder of the Future of Life Institute and Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
Richard Hanania, a far-right blogger who has identified his Tech Right ideology as a new Silicon Valley-based conservative movement that, among other beliefs, embraces transhumanism and “longtermism.”
An initial grant offer (although never paid out) by the Future of Life Institute to a pro-nazi group.