From Effort News, September 2, i.e. before the Coxon resignation tweet heard round the world:
AI Doomers are Funding Circular Potemkin Articles
The fight for control of the AI narrative has reached egregious new heights. An Effort investigation uncovered Potemkin articles, in which claims are fabricated, corroborated, and published as journalism by members of an insular donor ecosystem. To understand how this works, follow us through this Guardian article. Of its 6 participants — including the journalist and publisher — 6/6 are paid for by three megadonors.
- The publisher
The Guardian
$3,000,000+
The reporter
Aisha Down
$60K–$110K
Quoted 'Expert'
Malcolm Murray
$129,376 + $47.1M to affiliated institutions
Quoted 'Expert'
Henry Papadatos
$620,000
The subject
Daniel Kokotajlo
$2,851,166
Quoted 'Expert'
Andrea Castagna
$30,000 + 2 undisclosed grants
Coefficient Giving pays the salary of the journalist through the Tarbell Fellowship. It pays the publisher, the Guardian, more than $3M. AI 2027, the subject of the article, was given $400K from Coefficient, in addition to $2M from SFF. The three other pseudo-experts quoted in the article are all paid by SFF, Coefficient, or Effective Ventures Foundation.1
The Guardian does not disclose that it is funded by Coefficient or that the journalist is entirely paid for by Tarbell. In a fundraising statement attached to the article, the Guardian proclaims its “fierce independence.”
Down declares her fellow Coefficient funding recipients “experts” without justification. She proclaims Kokotajlo “a leading artificial intelligence expert” without any specific record or achievement. Kokotajlo and the other authors of AI 2027 and AI 2040 already admitted their predictions were off by years, if not decades.
All six belong to a circular ecosystem known as “AI Safety,” united around the belief that AI will end the human race.2 What Down promotes as ‘expertise’ is not merely unrigorous or exaggerated — it is a work of cultlike fiction which openly promotes their vision of the AI apocalypse. This belief underwrites millions spent annually on promoting a firehose of anti-AI narratives with the goal of banning AI outright — the price of preventing the apocalypse.
This ecosystem is bankrolled by three megadonors — Dustin Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy, Sam Bankman-Fried’s Center for Effective Altruism (CEA), and Jaan Tallinn’s Survival and Flourishing Fund. The media arm of this empire has over $40 million in donations and includes paid journalists, influencers, and religious groups....
....MUCH MORE
We last visited Effort News on September 20 for his take on Irregular, the company that allowed the various breaches of containment, including the attack on Hugging Face.
My takeaway was that either Irregular doesn't know what they're doing or more likely that they know exactly what they're doing.
Regarding Effective Altruism, most of our links were related to Sam Bankman-Fried:
November 2022 - How Media Aided and Abetted The Rise of FTX and Bankman-Fried
November 2022 -FTX/Bankman-Fried: When Outlets As Disparate As The Spectator and Vanity Fair Call For A Media Reckoning You Know Something's Up
November 2022 - Prudent Bet Sizing And The Best Quote About FTX, Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison (to date)
Setting aside the whole stealing your client's money thing, which has been covered by other commenters, one of the lessons of the FTX/Alameda Trading blowup is maximizing your gains while minimizing the risk of gamblers ruin.
First up, some of the armchair psychoanalysis based off of FTX investor Sequoia Capital's fluffer piece "Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex—And Maybe You Should Too"....
From Time Magazine, March 15, 2023:
Exclusive: Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed
September 2023 - "Brace For Impact: The Trouble With The Non Profit Newsroom"
The question that Michael Lewis has not answered re: FTX and Alameda is: At what point did he know it was a multi-billion dollar scam?
Did he know while he, Caroline and Bankman-Fried were hanging out, but decided to turn a blind eye to the fraud for the sake of his book and the inevitable movie?
Or did he find out what was going on literally under his nose (if some of the drug stories are to be believed) only along with everyone else in November 2022, which rather diminishes his street cred as a financial insider? Talk about having to thread the needle in your narrative.
Still a good wordsmith though....
Finally, I wish the EA peeps hadn't co-opted Ida Tarbell, we are sort of fond of the old gal.
February 2024's "Information Asymmetry: Ida M. Tarbell Presents An Investment Opportunity"
Ms Tarbell was one of the original muckrakers. More on them after the jump....
Has a few of our earlier links.
Some of our posts on the Muckrakers:
Media: Where Are The Muckrakers? The Rise and Fall of McClure's Magazine
As noted back in 2016:
Over the years, simply because the blog is composed of things that caught my eye rather than some grand plan, we've from time to time mentioned some of the early 20th century journalists who got appended the term muck-rakers but when I did a quick search of the blog I was surprised how many we'd named, although usually just in passing.Some links below.
And from Allegheny College, a swell repository of all things Ida Tarbell:
“The Explosions of Our Fine Idealistic Undertakings”....
This piece is a bit later, McClure's July 1905 via the Tarbell Collection at Allegheny College....
....As to Mr. Rockefeller's origin it is typically American. He sprang from one of those migrating families which, coming to this country in the seventeenth century, has moved westward with each generation seeking a betterment of condition. He and his brothers were the first great product of a restless family searching a firm footing on new soil. The first word heard of the Rockefeller family in Richford, Tioga County, New York, where John D. Rockefeller was born, was in the early 1830's when his grandfather, Godfrey Rockefeller, moved to that community from Mud Creek, Massachusetts. There are still alive in Tioga County many men and women who remember Godfrey Rockefeller. It is not a pleasant description they give of him — a shiftless tippler, stunted in stature and mean in spirit, but held to a certain decency by a wife of such strong intellect and determined character that she impressed herself unforgettably on the community.....
In 2011 we visited Ida Tarbell in "Ida M. Tarbell: 'John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study'" in part because I wanted a searchable link to the Tarbell collection
at Allegheny college and partly because she described John D.'s
grandfather, Godfrey as "a shiftless tippler, stunted in stature and
mean in spirit".
In February 2016's "Oil Tankers and Interest Rates and Scallywags and Time"
one of the Rockefeller minions, Thomas Lawson, got a mention, not for
his exposé of his copper dealings with Standard Oil honcho Henry
Huttleston Rogers, Frenzied Finance, but because of the ship for which Lawson was namesake.
Staying in 2016, it was Ida's buddy Lincoln Steffens in "Goldman Sachs: Death Of Capitalism Averted, Time For Working Schlubs to Partaay!", again not for the work he was most famous for, in Steffens' case his Shame of the Cities (St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh et al) but because of his famously wrong statement about Soviet Russia in a letter dated April 3, 1919: “I have seen the future and it works.”.
It didn't.
In 2015 there was Jacob Riis because I was reminded of one of the photographs from "How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York":
Jacob Riis Lives! "San Francisco Housing Bubble Goes Subterranean: $500/Month To Live In A Crawlspace"
And along the way Theodore Dreiser got a major link (possibly one of the best business novels ever) in "Switzerland Begins Two-Year Trial of Driverless Buses (plus money, art, glory and sex)"
So yes, more than wary reader might have anticipated and I've probably forgotten a couple.
Circling back to Ida, here's an online version of History of the Standard Oil Company.
Although there are quite a few critiques you can raise about her book it
was pretty important and was one of the factors that led to the breakup
of Standard Oil in the Supreme Court decision "Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States" seven years later. So Mr Rockefeller probably considered the book important.
It ranks #5 on NYU's Journalism school's list of the 100 best works of 20th-century American journalism. (via the NYT)
Seriously, who among the Effective Altruist minions is going to craft a thumbnail description better than Ida on J.D. Rockefeller's grandfather:
"a shiftless tippler, stunted in stature and mean in spirit"
