Though I'm employed by Rethink Priorities, anything I write here is written purely on my own behalf.
Here's what I understand happened:
This doesn't seem like lying to me -- the only issue I see is that the vetting at stage (2) wasn't good enough, and this seems like something FLI will work on improving. FLI's telling SND it intended to issue a grant would only seem like lying, I think, if FLI actually suspected it would discover issues with SND later on, or otherwise suspected they wouldn't actually end up issuing the grant. But presumably the vast majority of grants pass due diligence just fine, and FLI wouldn't have communicated an intent to issue the grant in the first place if it thought it wouldn't actually go through with it.
Is that really the way you see an "intent to transfer the grant amount promptly"? Sanjay, tell me with a straight face that there is no attempt to mislead here.
This seems needlessly combative to me. One of the norms of this forum is to be kind, and I think this sounds unkind.
Note that the English page was created in January of this year. The stuff on the Swedish page about Nordiska motståndsrörelsen and vaccination scepticisim and pseudoscience was added on September 14, after FLI signed the letter of intent.
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.
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.
I wrote something about CICERO, Meta's new Diplomacy-playing AI. The summary:
The post is written in a personal capacity and doesn't necessarily reflect the views of my employer (Rethink Priorities).
I think that, yes, you did misunderstand rationality, though it's hard to tell for sure since you never define it. I'll use two commonly used definitions:
You write:
Our reliance on the scientific method and empirical evidence as the sole means of acquiring knowledge is problematic in its narrow, positivist approach, which ignores the invaluable insights that can be gleaned from our innate intuitive faculties. [...] I always thought I had to act rational and pay no attention (or less attention) to my own intuition as rationality suggests.
But rationality doesn't tell us that we should ignore intuition. Intuition is evidence, sometimes useful, sometimes not. Intuition can help us be rational if and to the extent that it helps us have accurate beliefs and/or make decisions that help us achieve our goals.
Effective altruists and rationalists do emphasise using evidence and reason, but that is not because those are inherently good, it's because they're instrumentally good -- because (we think) they help you have more true beliefs and make better decisions.
Thanks, that sounds quite bad.
commons plural noun [treated as singular] land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community
The reputation of effective altruism is a commons. Each effective altruist can benefit from and be harmed by it (it can support or impede one's efforts to help others), and each effective altruist is capable of improving and damaging it.
I don't know whether actions that may cause substantial harm to a commons should be decided upon collectively. I don't know whether a community can come up with rules and guidelines governing them. But I do think, at minimum, in the absence of rules and guidelines, that one should inform the community when planning a possibly-commons-harming action, so that the community can at least critique one's plan.
I think purchasing Wytham Abbey (which may have made sense, even factoring in the reputational effects -- I'm not sure) was a possibly-commons-harming action, and this sort of action should probably be announced before it’s carried out in future.
It's really interesting to see, in the thread on charity choice, EmbraceUnity describing their "Utility, Attainability, and Obscurity" framework (see also this blog post from 2008) four years before Holden Karnofsky wrote about the Importance, Tractability and Neglectedness framework. I guess this is a sign that, for some reason, many of the key pieces of EA just fell into place in different locations at around the same time.