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From Vox
Why the protests in Iran are so hard to understand -
A picture obtained by AFP outside Iran on September 21, 2022, shows Iranian demonstrators taking to the streets of Tehran during a protest for Mahsa Amini, days after she died in police custody. | AFP via Getty Images
Censorship, trolls, and bots: The information war distorting Iran’s protests.
Protesters in Iran have been resisting the government there for over two months, in response to the death of the young woman Mahsa Amini in police custody. Since September, more than 18,000 Iranians have been arrested, among them at least 70 journalists. Close to 500 protesters have been killed.
But at times, it’s been difficult for news outlets and newsmakers to convey the complete picture of the emerging protest movement and its aftershocks.
Last weekend, US newspapers sent news alerts about Iran abolishing its so-called morality police, the authority that had arrested Amini in September. But that wasn’t the full story, and US outlets quickly reframed what was initially a definitive news article. Iran’s state media said comments from Iran’s attorney general had been misinterpreted. It was more of a sign of the stress that the regime is under, perhaps, than a policy change.
This comes after a false report circulated in mid-November that Iran would execute 15,000 of the protesters. It was later debunked, but not until after it became a meme shared by influential posters. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even tweeted it out.
And though not as extreme, the New Yorker’s first article on the protests in late September said that exiled activist Masih Alinejad was leading the protests. She has indeed come under attack from Iranian intelligence agents, but many observers disputed the idea that the New York-based Voice of America journalist played a key role. “Today, few of the young people on the streets of Iran’s cities and towns are saying Alinejad’s name,” Brandeis professor Naghmeh Sohrabi wrote in a letter to the magazine.
Why is this such a difficult set of political developments to make sense of?
In a severely restricted country with limited press freedoms, the information environment is poor and prone to exploitation. The protests defying the government are horizontal and leaderless, with Iranians agitating not for reforms but for fundamental change. These arestrengths in many ways, but also structural conditions that can impair a clear presentation of what’s happening in Iran.
And then there are the groups deliberately trying to shape (or misshape) the story. As protesters in Iran counter a brutal regime, online battles are unfolding among the diaspora. More sinisterly, Iranian American journalists have seen a wave of online attacks that look like a coordinated influence campaign, and Iranian government–linked hackers have baited journalists and experts.
Internet researchers say the inorganic online activity around these protests is unprecedented.
“I’ve not seen something of this scale before,” Marc Owen Jones, a professor and author of Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East, told me. Some 330 million tweets on the Mahsa Amini hashtag in Persian were sent — in one month, he said. “By way of comparison, #BlackLivesMatter over eight years got about 83 million. And since February, the word #Ukraine has been mentioned 240 million times,” he added. It renders the hashtag useless for news consumers looking for real-time analysis of what’s happening.
Despite all those bots and troll armies, powerful videos of anti-government resistance continue to reach our feeds. The focus needs to remain on accountability for the Iranian protesters who have died and their impetus for protesting in the first place.
The information flow from a highly restricted Iran
With a lack of press freedom in Iran, knowledge of the country is hampered. Getting it out of the country is even harder.
The Western press was on the scene during the 2009 protests, but just a handful of foreign news agencies continue to work on the ground. “There is no reform movement left but they’re still a reformist press,” Barbara Slavin, a former journalist who researches Iran at the Atlantic Council, told me. “We have, still, some very brave Iranian journalists, like the ones who wrote that Mahsa Amini was killed in police custody, and immediately found themselves in jail for reporting that.”
Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images
An anti-social networking banner in Tehran Grand Bazaar, December 3, 2022.
Reporters Without Borders has described Iran as “one of the world’s ten worst countries for press freedom.” The government closely monitors social media and cracks down on reporters posting updates on the protests. “What is new is the amount of violence that they are using while they are arresting journalists,” researcher Yeganeh Rezaian told Nieman Reports.
None of this is helped by the fact the US does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, which means there is no American embassy and no diplomats in the country.
By extension, the Iranian government can be difficult for the US government to understand. There is often talk of hardliners and reformists within the Iranian government, and the outsized role played by the aging Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader. Many US analysts on the far-right side of the spectrum talk about the mullahs and the ayatollahs, language that gets batted around by the likes of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, which further obscures how politics really works in the country.
Though the religious authority of Khamenei is important, it’s also worth noting that Iran holds elections. Turnout was low and many political rivals were disqualified in the flawed 2021 election that brought current President Ebrahim Raisi to power. But over the past several decades the Iranian system has brought to the fore conservative and liberal presidents, and governments with complicated and changing political agendas.
The protesters throughout Iran pose a major challenge to Iran’s entrenched leadership, but the survival of the government is not at stake. “We’re not seeing the regime perceive this as an imminent threat to their stability,” the US’s top spy chief, director of national intelligence Avril Haines, said recently. “We see them doing a lot in the information space to try to manage it, as we’ve seen, obviously, Iran’s efforts to influence our own politics and policymaking.” A senior Israeli intelligence analyst concurred that the government will “manage to survive these protests.”
As Iranian authorities continue to arrest journalists, especially women journalists, further battles unfold in the information space.
The online war over the Iran protests, explained
On October 18, Iranian American journalist Negar Mortazavi was scheduled to speak at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, but the in-person panel was canceled and moved online after an anonymous bomb threat. Author Reza Aslan’s event two days later in Seattle was similarly postponed due to “credible threats of disruption.” And a sophisticated scamming campaign targeting Middle East experts and journalists has been thoroughly documented by Human Rights Watch, which says the hackers are backed by the Iranian government.
An Iranian American friend recently decided to publish an article for a US magazine under a pseudonym because of the hot conflicts among the Iranian diaspora. But those fights don’t just stay on social media — “They’re going to get someone killed,” the friend told me.
There are many fault lines at play among the Iranian diaspora, and many disparate groups who have fled the country since the 1979 Islamic revolution with conflicting political interests being surfaced at this moment. There is the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq, an exiled resistance group that has immense influence among US policymakers despite the US having labeled it for years as a terrorist entity, which has a major online presence. There are those who support Iran’s ousted former monarchy.
In this confusing space, it’s easy for malign actors to enter online conversations, disguise their identities, and harass others. Those antagonistic perspectives, sometimes from inauthentic accounts, then get amplified by real people among Iranian diaspora communities across the world. The result is cruel.
Experts, journalists, and nonprofits that have advocated for the Iranian nuclear deal have especially come under attack, as have those who criticize the intensive US-led sanctions that have detrimental effects to many Iranians. (President Joe Biden’s effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal, which had already been on hold, has been further frozen in response to the protests.)
Mortazavi has been an active voice publishing a nuanced analysis of all of the above. She hosts the popular Iran Podcast, but hasn’t produced an episode since the protests began because she has been worn down from the attacks she has received on Twitter and on Instagram. “If they can’t get us de-platformed, they want to threaten us so we self-censor,” she told me. It “counts as a good day,” she said, when she’s only called a sexual slur by online trolls but is not physically threatened. “It’s a way to make Iranians live in fear.”
In September, she was receiving more than 50,000 mentions a day on Twitter, many of them targeted harassment. There was even a concerted campaign online to say that she had made up the bomb threat at University of Chicago that cancelled her talk.
Mortazavi is among the journalists and researchers, mostly women, it might be noted, who have produced rigorous reporting on Iran are under attack. New York Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi “has faced months of vile threads and attacks online,” according to the paper, as well as protests outside her office, and she has since stopped tweeting. “Others targeted include activist and writer Hoda Katebi, academic Azadeh Moaveni, Human Rights Watch researcher Tara Sepehri Far and virtually anyone working for or associated with the National Iranian American Council,” the site Middle East Eye reported.
In 2020, Mortazavi and journalist Murtaza Hussain wrote in the Intercept about a US State Department–funded Iran Disinformation Project that deployed an aggressive Twitter feed to attack journalists and activists. She sees parallels from that period to what’s going on today. “My gut feeling is that some of those people are the trolls,” she told me. “I think it’s an operation.”
Marc Owen Jones, the scholar of disinformation in the Middle East, notes that about 20 to 30 percent of all tweets with the Mahsa Amini hashtag are being sent by accounts created in a 10-day period — a sign that they could be bots or bogus accounts.
Within that is plenty of commentary that is written by real people with social media accounts, but then is boosted by a lot of fake accounts. “Those fake accounts give people a sense of permissibility, that it’s okay to attack others, part of like a bandwagon approach,” Jones explained. “The scale of this operation, the motivation for it, the sustained nature of it, suggests that there is some high level of expertise going on, or an ability to circumvent Twitter’s policies.”
It’s not clear yet whether this apparently concerted effort to bully and threaten journalists like Mortzavi and others is state-sponsored, but it has some hallmarks of coordination. “There could well be all sorts of different actors messing about in here,” says digital propaganda expert Emma Briant. “It has huge consequences in the real world” — especially in shaping how people outside of Iran see the country and its protests.
The biggest missed opportunity of the lame-duck Congress so far -
A wind turbine is seen in Illinois, on October 15, 2022. | Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Why Congress’s failure to pass permitting reform could come back to haunt Democrats — and the climate.
The current Democratic trifecta is coming to a close, and Republicans will be taking back power in the House this January. The lame-duck Congress looks to be productive, but one item that has been dropped from its to-do list may come back to haunt Democrats.
Permitting reform — a push by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to change the way big infrastructure projects that involve federal dollars are approved — was a notably divisive proposal that supporters had hoped would pass in the lame duck. But after progressives who opposed the bill, along with top Republicans, united to torpedo it, Democrats decided to pull the proposal out of a must-pass defense bill, essentially killing it. It was a personal loss for Manchin but a potentially bigger one for a key Democratic priority: building out a clean energy infrastructure, and fast.
Federal permitting reform’s defeat takes place in the shadow of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), perhaps this Congress’s signature achievement. Passed in August, the IRA is the largest clean energy investment in American history. On paper, the bill will help cut American emissions by 40 percent from 2005 levels by the end of the decade, through a suite of tax provisions such as credits for people getting solar panels, incentives for electric vehicles, and federal loans to help construct clean energy sources.
But as it stands, the IRA will be hard-pressed to accomplish its stated goals — and that’s thanks primarily to a 50-year-old law called the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the “Magna Carta’’ of federal environmental laws.
Signed into law on New Year’s Day 1970, NEPA mandates that all federal agencies consider environmental factors in their decision-making and involve the communities where projects are taking place. The act covers not only public infrastructure projects but any project that requires a permit from the federal government or receives federal funding.
But while NEPA has served a valuable purpose over the decades, it is in tension with the objective of building out a clean-energy infrastructure. Now, in the face of the climate crisis, a broad coalitionacross the political spectrum is questioning whether it is time to reform the law.
Manchin’s proposal would speed up infrastructure projects by streamlining NEPA by capping the page length of environmental review reports and setting a maximum time of two years for review. If the federal government takes too long to approve a project, project applicants could take the federal government to court to make them hurry up. The bill would expedite approvals for electrical transmission, ensuring that clean energy can get from where it is produced to where it is needed. Controversially, the bill would also approve the near-complete Mountain Valley Pipeline, a natural gas system from his state of West Virginia.
But many thought that even with this controversial trade-off, Manchin’s bill was worthwhile. Permitting reform received support from both congressionalleadership and President Biden, but it faced opposition from progressives and Republicans. “We’ve got to take a stand now and have the courage to say no to the fossil fuel industry,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) announced as part of his opposition to the proposal, echoing the sentiments of 72 progressive House Democrats who wrote a letter to House leadership voicing similar concerns. In their view, a looser review process would open the door to more fossil fuel projects.
Those critics won. And while the passage of the IRA remains a real victory, whether and how that legislative win becomes a reality on the ground has become much more complicated as a result.
The history of environmental review, briefly explained
Before NEPA, the federal government hardly considered environmental concerns when undertaking projects. The interstate system was built in the 1950s, tearing through urban areas with little regard to historical communities, and ultimately surrendered cities to cars. Oil refineries emitting carcinogens were constructed next to residential neighborhoods. Thousands of disruptive dams were erected across the country with little thought, and many of them now serve no purpose as flood control or electricity generation.
Congress believed that robust federal standards for pollution and enshrining community involvement in federally funded projects could fix these and other problems. So, NEPA, along with other environmental laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, was passed.
The flurry of legislation worked. All major categories of air pollution have fallen since 1970. US waterways became cleaner. NEPA empowered local residents to oppose freeway projects intersecting their urban neighborhoods.
But as NEPA and other environmental laws succeeded, a new problem entered public consciousness: climate change. In 1988, a watershed Senate hearing on global warming catapulted the issue to the top of the environmental priority list. Quickly, a political consensus formed on the need for the U.S. to transition away from fossil fuels and to build clean energy, such as wind, solar, nuclear, and hydroelectric, quickly and cheaply.
That consensus then ran smack into this era’s polarized politics. Decades since it first identified climate change as a problem, the US finally passed comprehensive legislation that could actually do something about the problem at a large enough scale.
But that is only if NEPA allows it.
How NEPA became an obstacle to clean energy
When the Cape Wind project wanted to build the first offshore wind farm in America off the coast of Cape Cod, opponents ranging from liberal stalwart Sen. Edward Kennedy (MA) to a Koch brother joined forces to stop it. Successive lawsuits challenged nearly every aspect of the project. Cape Wind won virtually every case, but after 16 years and $100 million, the project collapsed after additional lawsuits caused it to miss a construction deadline. The critics’ strategy was simple: “delay, delay, delay.” And it worked.
Cape Wind’s case is not unique. The Wall Street Journal reports that, on average, it “can take four to six years” for wind power projects to make their way through the permitting process. Congestion pricing in Manhattan, a plan that would incentivize cleaner transportation and discourage driving in NYC, has been put on pause while an environmental review is conducted. “I can’t fix that NEPA became a tool for attacking pro-environmental initiatives,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority chief Janno Lieber told Ezra Klein. In the 1990s, nearly 100,000 acres of the Six Rivers National Forest in California burned down while a plan to stop the wildfires went through the review process.
This story plays out time and time again with green projects. While some may be automatically exempt from environmental review, or just require an environmental assessment that takes only several months to complete, any project deemed to have a “significant” impact on the environment will trigger an “environmental impact statement” — a process that is much more onerous and lengthy than an environmental assessment.
On average, an environmental impact statement takes 4.5 years to produce and clocks in at more than 600 pages. At the conclusion of the process, projects are given a set of mitigation measures they are compelled to abide by, which can drastically warp a project from its original design and dramatically drive up costs.
Looming over this entire process are also the courts. If someone — particularly an interest group — doesn’t believe the federal government is thinking carefully about the environmental impact of an aspect of its project, or simply doesn’t want that project in its backyard, they can sue to force the government to reconsider it as part of the environmental review. This can delay the already lengthy environmental review process even further.
NEPA also emphasizes community involvement. This sounds great in concept, but in practice, it can be horribly undemocratic. The nature of community involvement narrows down who is able to participate to those with a lot of free time, like retirees and wealthy homeowners, leading to unrepresentative groups claiming to speak for the rest of the community to block progressive projects. As Jerusalem Demsas writes in the Atlantic, the community-input system “is fundamentally flawed: It’s biased toward the status quo and privileges a small group of residents who for reasons that range from the sympathetic to the selfish don’t want to allow projects that are broadly useful.”
The effects of this ostensibly environmental process on green projects can be stark. Currently, the US has just 42 megawatts of operational offshore wind power. A whopping 18,581 megawatts of offshore wind power is tied up in environmental review. A new expansion of Seattle’s light rail network was approved by voters in 2016, but not a single track has been laid. Environmental review for the project has been ongoing since 2019 and is not expected to be done until 2023. The draft environmental impact statement itself is 8,000 pages long.
To be sure, many aspects of environmental review exist for a very good reason. The urban freeways cutting through our cities is testament to the societal cost when we don’t think through potentially significant infrastructure projects. So too does it make sense that the public has the right to tell the government that they might be wrong. Abolishing NEPA altogether would be a mistake.
The issue, rather, is that through NEPA’s lens, all projects are viewed as potentially having a negative impact on the environment. But clean energy projects have a positive impact because they cut greenhouse gas emissions. And the process that NEPA created has no way of recognizing or factoring in such environmental gains.
Sen. Manchin’s proposal wouldn’t have resolved all the kinks of the permitting process, but it would have smoothed many of them out. Under Manchin’s bill, the “delay, delay, delay” strategy would no longer be effective. Litigation and community input would still be permitted, but couldn’t stretch out a project timeline indefinitely — all still while preserving the original intent of NEPA and other environmental protections.
Now what?
Following permitting reform’s exclusion from the National Defense Authorization Act, Manchin did release a newly revised version, but its outlook in the lame-duck Congress appears dim. House Republicans may revisit the issue next Congress, though it will be on their own terms, and they will likely pursue far more aggressive changes to the federal permitting process than what Manchin sought.
Changes could happen elsewhere. The IRA did include provisions to help expedite federal permitting. Some $350 million was allocated for the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, whose job it is to make the federal permitting process more efficient.
Sixteen states also have so-called “Little NEPAs” on the books that have similarly drawn controversy. These state laws have been used in the past to block UC Berkeley from expanding enrollment and roll back Minneapolis’s plan to upzone residential parts of the city. “Little NEPA” reform would go a long way, piece by piece, to accomplishing at the state level what couldn’t be done at the federal level.
But the failure of federal permitting reform underscores a real reluctance to match talk with action. Republicans have long called for permitting reform, only to oppose it when the opportunity for political payback beckoned. Progressives in Congress have long been the loudest voices for fighting climate change. But the intensity of their rhetoric isn’t coupled with policy moves that could put the US on a faster track to a clean energy future.
Commentators have taken notice of how America has lost its ability to build. Climate change demands that we solve this problem. The only way out is up, by building a lot of wind turbines, a lot of nuclear power plants, a lot of electrical transmission lines, and more. But currently, we can’t do any of that cheaply or quickly. Permitting reform may sound like a wonky technocratic fix, but it is actually a large piece of the puzzle to fixing these problems. The end of the fossil fuel economy is on the horizon. How quickly we get there is a policy choice.
Colin Mortimer is the director of the Center for New Liberalism at the Progressive Policy Institute. He can be reached via email at colin@cnliberalism.org and on Twitter at @colinmort.
How effective altruism let Sam Bankman-Fried happen -
Amanda Northrop/Vox
Profound philosophical errors enabled the FTX collapse.
I have a lot of reasons to be furious at Sam Bankman-Fried. His extreme mismanagement of FTX (which his successor John J. Ray III, who previously helped clean up the Enron debacle, described as the worst he’s ever seen) led to the sudden collapse of a $32 billion financial company. He lost at least $1 billion in client funds after surreptitiously transferring it to a hedge fund he also owned, potentially in an effort to make up for huge losses there. His historic management failures pulled the rug out from under his users, his staff, and the many charities he promised to fund. He hurt many, many, many people.
But for me, the most disturbing aspect of the Bankman-Fried saga, the one that kept me up at night, is how much of myself I see in him.
Like me, Bankman-Fried (“SBF” to aficionados) grew up in a college town surrounded by left-leaning intellectuals, including both of his parents. So did his business partner and Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, the child of MIT professors. Like me, they were both drawn to utilitarian philosophy at a young age. Like me, they seemed fascinated by what their privileged position on this planet would enable them to do to help others, and embraced the effective altruism movement as a result. And the choices they made because of this latter deliberation would prove disastrous.
It took me a while to think through what happened. I thought Bankman-Fried was going to commit billions toward tremendously beneficial causes, a development I chronicled in a long piece earlier this year on how EA was coping with its sudden influx of billions. The revelation that his empire was a house of cards was shattering, and for weeks I was too angry, bitter, and deeply depressed to say much of anything about it (much to the impatience of my editor).
There’s still plenty we don’t know, but based on what we do know, I don’t think the problem was earning to give, or billionaire money, or longtermism per se. But the problem does lie in the culture of effective altruism. SBF was an inexperienced 25-year-old hedge fund founder who wound up, unsurprisingly, hurting millions of people due to his profound failures of judgment when that hedge fund grew into something enormous — failures that can be laid in part at the feet of EA.
For as much good as I see in that movement, it’s also become apparent that it is deeply immature and myopic, in a way that enabled Bankman-Fried and Ellison, and that it desperately needs to grow up. That means emulating the kinds of practices that more mature philanthropic institutions and movements have used for centuries, and becoming much more risk-averse. EA needs much stronger guardrails to prevent another figure like Bankman-Fried from emerging — and to prevent its tenets from becoming little more than justifications for malfeasance.
Despite everything that’s happened, this isn’t a time to give up on effective altruism. EA has quite literally saved lives, and its critique of mainstream philanthropy and politics is still compelling. But it needs to change itself to keep changing the world for the better.
How crypto bucks swept up EA — and us?
First, a disclosure: This August, Future Perfect — the section of Vox you’re currently reading — was awarded a $200,000 grant from Bankman-Fried’s family foundation. The grant was for a reporting project in 2023, which is now on pause. (I should be clear that, under the terms of the grant from SBF’s foundation, Future Perfect has ownership of its content and retains editorial independence, as is standard practice for all of our grants.)
We’re currently having internal discussions about the future of the grant, mainly around the core question: What’s the best way to do good with it? It’s more complicated than just giving it back, not least because it’s hard to be sure where the money will go — will it go toward making victims whole, for instance?
Obviously, knowing what we know now, I wish we hadn’t taken the money. It proved the worst of both worlds: It didn’t actually help our reporting at all, and it put our reputation at risk.
But the honest answer to whether I regret taking the money knowing what we knew then, the answer is no. Journalism, as an industry, is struggling badly. Employment in US newsrooms fell by 26 percent from 2008 to 2020, and this fall has seen another end-of-year wave in media layoffs. Digital advertising has not made up for the collapse of print ads and subscriptions, and digital subscription models have proven hit or miss. Vox is no different from other news organizations in our need to find sources of revenue. Based on what we knew at the time, there was also little reason to believe Bankman-Fried’s money was ill-gotten.
(This is also as good a place as any to clear the air about Future Perfect’s mission. We have always described Future Perfect as “inspired by” effective altruism — meaning that it’s not part of the movement but informed by its underlying philosophy. I’m an EA, but my editor is not; indeed, the majority of our staff aren’t EAs at all. What unites us is the mission of using EA as a lens, prizing importance, tractability, and neglectedness, to cover the world — something that leads to a set of coverage priorities and ideas that we believe are woefully underrepresented in the media.)
In the aftermath of the FTX crash, a common criticism I’ve gotten via email and Twitter is that I, and other EAs, should have known this guy was sketchy. And in some sense, the sense in which crypto as a whole is a kind of royal scam without much of a use case beyond paying for drugs, we all knew he was. I said as much on this website.
But while I think crypto is stupid, millions apparently disagreed, and wanted places to trade it, which is why the stated business activities of Alameda and FTX made sense as things that would be immensely profitable in a normal, legal sense. Certain aspects of FTX’s operations did seem a bit noxious, particularly as its advertising and publicity campaigns ramped up. “I’m in on crypto because I want to make the biggest global impact for good,” read an ad FTX placed in magazines like the New Yorker and Vogue, featuring photos of Bankman-Fried (other ads in the same campaign featured model Gisele Bündchen, one of many celebrities who endorsed the platform). As I said in August, “buying up Super Bowl ads and Vogue spreads with Gisele Bündchen to encourage ordinary people to put their money into this pile of mathematically complex garbage is … actually morally questionable.”
I stand by that. I also stand by the idea that what the money was meant to do matters. In the case of the Bankman-Fried foundations, it was for funding coverage and political action around improving the long-term trajectory of humanity. It seemed like a worthwhile topic before FTX’s collapse — and it still is.
The problem isn’t longtermism …
Ah, yes: the long-term trajectory of humanity, the trillions upon trillions of beings who could one day exist, dependent on our actions today. It’s an impossible concept to express without sounding unbelievably pretentious, but it’s become a growing focus of effective altruism in recent years.
Many of the movement’s leaders, most notably Oxford moral philosopher Will MacAskill, have embraced an argument that because so many more humans and other intelligent beings could live in the future than live today, the most important thing for altruistic people to do in the present is to promote the welfare of those unborn beings, by ensuring that future comes to be by preventing existential risks — and that such a future is as good as possible.
But the theoretical debate obscures what funding “longtermist” causes means in practice. One of the biggest shortcomings of MacAskill’s book, in my view, is that it failed to lay out what “making the future go as well as possible” involves in practice and policy. The most specific it got was in advocating measures to prevent human extinction or a catastrophic collapse in human society.
Unless you are a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, you’ll probably agree that human extinction is indeed bad. And you don’t need to rely on the moral math of longtermism at all to think so.
If one goes through the “longtermist” causes funded by Bankman-Fried’s now-defunct charitable enterprises and by the Open Philanthropy Project (the EA-aligned charitable group funded by billionaires Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz), the money is overwhelmingly dedicated to efforts to prevent specific threats that could theoretically kill billions of humans. Before the collapse of FTX, Bankman-Fried put millions into scientists, companies, and nonprofits working on pandemic and bioterror prevention and risks from artificial intelligence.
It’s fair and necessary to dispute the empirical assumptions behind those investments. But the core theory that we are in an unprecedented age of existential risk and that humans must responsibly regulate technologies that are powerful enough to destroy ourselves is very reasonable. While critics often charge that longtermism takes away resources from more pressing present problems like climate change, the reality is that pandemic prevention is, bafflingly, underfunded, explicitly compared to climate change and especially compared to the seriousness of the threat, and longtermists were trying to do something about it.
That might be comforting, but it’s mistaken. Longtermism seems weird not because of its critics but because of its proponents: it’s expressed mainly by philosophers, and there are strong incentives in academic philosophy to carry out thought experiments to increasingly bizarre (and thus more interesting) conclusions.
This means that longtermism as a concept has been defined not by run-of-the-mill stuff like donating to nuclear nonproliferation groups, but by the philosophical writings of figures like Nick Bostrom, MacAskill, Greaves, and Nick Beckstead, figures who have risen to prominence in part because of their willingness to expound on extreme ideas.
These are all smart people, but they are philosophers, which means their entire job is to test out theories and frameworks for understanding the world, and try to sort through what those theories and frameworks imply. There are professional incentives to defend surprising or counterintuitive positions, to poke at widely held pieties and components of “common sense morality,” and to develop thought experiments that are memorable and powerful (and because of that, pretty weird).
This isn’t a knock on philosophy; it’s what I studied in college and a field from which I have learned a tremendous amount. It’s good for society to have a space for people to test out strange and surprising concepts. But whatever the boundary-pushing concepts being explored, it’s important not to mistake that exploration for practical decision-making.
When Bostrom writes a philosophy article for a philosophy journal arguing that total utilitarians (who think one should maximize the total sum of happiness in the world) should prioritize colonizing the galaxy, that should not, and cannot, be read as a real policy proposal, not least because “colonizing the galaxy” probably is not even a thing humans can do in the next thousand years. The value in that paper is exploring the implications of a particular philosophical system, one that very well might be badly wrong. It sounds science fictional because it is, in fact, science fiction, in the ways that thought experiments in philosophy are often science fiction.
The dominance of academic philosophers in EA, and those philosophers’ increasing attempts to apply these kinds of thought experiments to real life — aided and abetted by the sudden burst of billions into EA, due in large part to figures like Bankman-Fried — has eroded the boundary between this kind of philosophizing and real-world decision-making. Poets, as Percy Shelley wrote, may be the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but EA made the mistake of trying to turn philosophers into the actual legislators of the future. A good start would be more clearly stating that funding priorities, for now, are less “longtermist” in this galaxy-brained Bostrom sense and more about fighting specific existential risks — which is exactly what EA funders are doing in most cases. The philosophers can trod the cosmos, but the funders and advocates should be tethered closer to Earth.
The problem isn’t billionaires’ billions …
Second only to complaints about longtermism in the corpus of anti-effective altruist writing are complaints that EA is inherently plutocratic. Effective altruism began with the group Giving What We Can, which asked members (including me) to promise to give 10 percent of their income to effective charities for the rest of our lives.
This, to critics, equates “doing good” with “giving money to charity.” The problem only grew when the donor base was no longer individuals making five or six figures and donating 10 percent, but literal billionaires. Not only that, but those billionaires (including Bankman-Fried but also Tuna and Moskovitz) became increasingly interested in investing in political change through advocacy and campaigns.
Longtermist goals, even less cosmic ones like preventing pandemics, require political action. You can’t stop the next Covid or prevent the rise of the robots with all the donated anti-malaria bednets in the world. You need policy. But is that not anti-democratic, to allow a few rich people to try to influence the whole political system with their fortunes?
It’s definitely anti-democratic, but not unlike democracy itself, it’s also the best of a few rotten options. The fact of the matter is that, in the United States in the 21st century, the alternative to a politics that largely relies on benevolent billionaires and millionaires is not a surge in working-class power. The alternative is a total victory for the status quo.
Suppose you live in the US and would like to change something about the way our society is organized. This is your first mistake: You want change. The US political system is organized in such a way as to produce enormous status quo bias. But maybe you’re lucky and the change you want is in the interest of a powerful corporate lobby, like easing the rules around oil drilling. Then corporations who would benefit might give you money — and quite a lot of it — to lobby for it.
What if you want to pass a law that doesn’t help any major corporate constituency? Which is, y’know, most good ideas for laws? Then your options are very limited. You can try to start a major membership association like the AARP, where small contributions from members of the groups fund the bulk of their activities. This is much easier said than done. Groups like this have been on the decline for decades, and major new membership groups like Indivisible tend to get most of their money from sources other than their members.
What sources, then? There’s unions — or perhaps more accurately, there were unions. In 1983, 20.1 percent of American workers were in a union. In 2021, the number was 10.3 percent. A measly 6.1 percent of private sector workers were unionized. The share just keeps falling and falling, and while some smart people have ideas to reverse it, those ideas require government actions that would probably require plenty of lobbying to reach fruition, and who exactly is going to fund that? Unions can barely keep themselves afloat, much less fund extensive advocacy outside their core functions. The Economic Policy Institute, long the most influential union-aligned think tank in the US, took only 14 percent of its funding from unions in 2021.
So the answer to “who funds you” if you are doing advocacy or lobbying and do not work for a major corporation is usually “foundations.” And by “foundations,” I mean “millionaires and billionaires.” There’s no small irony in the fact that causes from expanded social safety net programs to increased access to health insurance to higher taxes on rich people are primarily funded these days by rich people and their estates.
It’s one of history’s strangest twists that Henry Ford, possibly the second most influential antisemite of the 20th century, wound up endowing a foundation that funded the creation of progressive groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. But it happened, and it happens much more than you’d think. US history is littered with progressive social movements that depended on wealthy benefactors: Abolitionists depended on donors like Gerrit Smith, the richest man in New York who bankrolled the Liberty and Republican parties as well as John Brown’s uprising in Harpers Ferry; Brown v. Board of Education was the result of a decades-long strategy of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a fund created due to the intervention of the Garland Fund, a philanthropy bankrolled by an heir of a senior executive of what’s now Citibank.
Is this arrangement ideal? Of course not. Scholar Megan Ming Francis has recently argued that even the Garland Fund provides an example of wealthy donors perverting the goals of social movements. She contends it pushed the NAACP away from a strategy focused on fighting lynching toward one focused on school desegregation. That won Brown, but it also undercut goals that were, at the time, more important to Black activists.
These are important limitations to keep in mind. At the same time, would I have preferred the Garland Fund not invest in Black liberation at all? Of course not.
This, essentially, is why I find the use of SBF to reject billionaire philanthropy in general unpersuasive. It is completely intellectually consistent to decide that accepting funding from wealthy, potentially corrupt sources is unacceptable, and that it is okay, as would inevitably follow, if this kind of unilateral disarmament materially hurts the causes you care about. It’s intellectually consistent, but it means accepting defeat on everything from higher taxes on the rich to civil rights to pandemic prevention.
… it’s the porous boundaries between the billionaires and their giving
There’s a fundamental difference between Bankman-Fried’s charitable efforts and august ones like the Rockefeller and Ford foundations: these philanthropies are, fundamentally, professional. They’re well-staffed, normally run institutions. They have HR departments and comms teams and accountants and all the other stuff you have when you’re a grown-up running a grown-up organization.
There are disadvantages to being normal (groupthink, excessive conformity) but profound advantages, too. All these normal practices emerged for a reason: They were added to institutions over time to solve problems that reliably come up when you don’t have them.
The Bankman-Fried empire was not normal in any way. For one thing, it had already sprawled into a bevy of different institutions in the very short time it existed. The most public-facing group was the FTX Future Fund, but there was also Building a Stronger Future, a funder sometimes described as a “family foundation” for the Bankman-Frieds. (That’s the one that awarded the grant to Future Perfect.) There was also Guarding Against Pandemics, a lobbying group run by Gabe Bankman-Fried and funded by Sam.
The deeper problem, behind these operational hiccups, is that in lieu of a clear, hierarchical decision-making structure for deciding where Bankman-Fried’s fortune went, there was nothing separating charitable decision-making from Bankman-Fried individually as a person. I never met SBF in person or talked to him one on one — but on a couple occasions, members of his charity or political networks pitched me ideas and CC’d Sam. This is not, I promise you, how most foundations operate.
Bankman-Fried’s operations were deeply incestuous, in a way that has had profoundly negative consequences for the causes that he professed to care about. If Bankman-Fried had given his fortune to an outside foundation with which he and his family had limited involvement, his downfall would not have tainted, say, pandemic prevention groups doing valuable work. But because he put so little distance between himself and the causes he supported, dozensofworthwhileorganizations with no involvement in his crimes find themselves not only deprived of funding but with serious reputational damage.
The good news for EAs is that Open Philanthropy, the remaining major EA-aligned funding group, is a much more normal organization. Its form of professionalization is something for the rest of the movement to emulate.
The problem is utilitarianism free from any guardrails …
Sam Bankman-Fried is a hardcore, pure, uncut Benthamite utilitarian. His mother, Barbara Fried, is an influential philosopher known for her arguments that consequentialist moral theories like utilitarianism that focus on the actual results of individual actions are better suited for the difficult real-world trade-offs one faces in a complex society. Her son apparently took that insight very, very seriously.
Effective altruists aren’t all utilitarians, but the core idea of EA — that you should attempt to act in such a way to promote the greatest human and animal happiness and flourishing achievable — is shot through with consequentialist reasoning. The whole project of trying to do the most good you can implies maximizing, and maximizing of “the good,” and that is the literal definition of consequentialism.
It’s not hard to see the problem here: If you’re intent on maximizing the good, you better know what the good is — and that isn’t easy. “EA is about maximizing a property of the world that we’re conceptually confused about, can’t reliably define or measure, and have massive disagreements about even within EA,” Holden Karnofsky, the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy and a leading figure in the development of effective altruism, wrote in September. “By default, that seems like a recipe for trouble.”
Indeed it was. It looks increasingly likely that Sam Bankman-Fried appears to have engaged in extreme misconduct precisely because he believed in utilitarianism and effective altruism, and that his mostly EA-affiliated colleagues at FTX and Alameda Research went along with the plan for the same reasons.
When he was an undergrad at MIT, Bankman-Fried was reportedly planning to work on animal welfare issues until a pivotal conversation with Will MacAskill, who told him that because of his mathematical prowess, he might be able to do more good by working as a “quant” in the finance sector and donating his healthy earnings to effective charities than he ever could giving out flyers promoting veganism.
This idea, known as “earning to give,” was one of the first distinctive contributions of effective altruism as a movement, specifically of the group 80,000 Hours, and I think taking a high-earning job with the explicit aim of donating the money still makes a lot of sense for most big-money options.
But what SBF did was not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from classic “earn to give.” You can make seven figures a year as a trader in a hedge fund, but unless you manage the whole fund, you probably won’t become a billionaire. Bankman-Fried very much wanted to be a billionaire — so he could have more resources to devote to EA giving, if we take him at his word — and to do that, he set up whole new corporations that never would’ve existed without him. Those corporations then engaged in incredibly risky business practices that never would’ve occurred if he and his team hadn’t entered the field. He was not one-for-one replacing another finance bro who would have used the earnings on sushi and strippers rather than altruistic causes. He was building a whole new financial world, with consequences that would be much grander in scale.
And in building this world, he acted like a vulgar utilitarian. Philosophers like to talk about “biting the bullet”: accepting an unsavory implication of a theory you’ve adopted, and arguing that this implication really isn’t that bad. Every moral theory has bullets to bite; Kant, who believed morality was less about good consequences than about treating humans as ends in themselves, famously argued that it is never acceptable to lie. That leads to freshman seminar-level questions about whether it’s okay to lie to the Gestapo about the Jewish family you’re hiding in your attic. Biting the bullet in this case — being true to your ethics — means the family dies.
Utilitarianism has ugly implications, too. Would you kill one healthy person to redistribute their organs to multiple people who need them to live? The reality is that if a conclusion is ugly enough, the correct approach isn’t to bite the bullet, but to think about how a more reasonable conclusion could comply with your moral theory. In the real world, we should never harvest hearts and lungs from healthy, unconsenting adults, because a world where hospitals would do that is a world where no one ever goes to the hospital. If the conclusions are ugly enough, you should just junk the theory, or temper it. Maybe the right theory isn’t utilitarianism, but utilitarianism with a side constraint forbidding ever actively killing people. That theory has problems, too (what about self-defense? a defensive war like Ukraine’s?), but thinking through these problems is what moral philosophers spend all day doing. It’s a full-time job because it’s really hard.
… and a utilitarianism full of hubris …
Bankman-Fried’s error was an extreme hubris that led him to bite bullets he never should have bitten. He famously told economist Tyler Cowen in a podcast interview that if faced with a game where “51 percent [of the time], you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears,” he’d keep playing the game continually.
This is known as the St. Petersburg paradox, and it’s a confounding problem in probability theory, because it’s true that playing the game creates more happy human lives in expectation (that is, adjusting for probabilities) than not playing. But if you keep playing, you’ll almost certainly wipe out humankind. It’s an example of where normal rules of rationality seem to break down.
But Bankman-Fried was not interested in playing by the normal rules of rationality. Cowen notes that if Bankman-Fried kept this up, he’d almost certainly wipe out the Earth eventually. Bankman-Fried replied, “Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.”
These are fun dorm room arguments. They should not guide the decision-making of an actual financial company, yet there is some evidence they did. An as-yet-unconfirmed account of an Alameda all-hands meeting describes CEO Caroline Ellison explaining to staff that she and Bankman-Fried faced a choice in early summer 2022: either to let Alameda default after some catastrophic losses, or to raid consumer funds at FTX to bolster Alameda. As the researcher David Dalrymple has noted, this was basically her and Bankman-Fried making a “double or nothing” coin flip: By taking this step, they reasoned they could either save Alameda and FTX or lose both (as wound up happening), rather than keep just FTX, as in a scenario where the consumer funds were not raided.
This is not, I should say, the first time a consequentialist movement has made this kind of error. While Karl Marx denied having any moral views at all (he was a “scientific” socialist, not a moralist), manyMarxscholars have described his outlook as essentially consequentialist, imploring followers to act in ways that further the long-run revolution. More importantly, Marx’s most talented followers understood him in this way. Leon Trotsky defined Marxist ethics as the belief that “the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.” In service of this end, all sorts of means (“if necessary, by an armed rising: if required, by terrorism,” as he wrote in an earlier book) are justified.
Trotsky, like Bankman-Fried, was wrong. He was wrong in using a consequentialist moral theory in which he deeply believed to justify all manner of actions — actions that in turn corrupted the project he had joined beyond measure. By winning power through terror, with a secret police and the crushing of dissenting factions, he helped create a state that operated similarly and would eventually murder him.
Bankman-Fried, luckily, has yet to kill anyone. But he’s done a huge amount of harm, due to a similar sense that he was entitled to engage in grand consequentialist moral reasoning when he knew there was a high probability that many other people could get hurt.
… but the utilitarian spirit of effective altruism still matters
Since the FTX empire collapsed, there’s been an open season of criticism on effective altruism, as well there should be. EAs messed up. To some degree, we’ve got to just take the shots, update our priors, and keep going.
The only criticism that really gets under my skin is this: that the basic premises of EA are trite, or universally held. As Freddie deBoer, the raconteur and essayist, put it: “the correct ideas of EA are great, but some of them are so obvious that they shouldn’t be ascribed to the movement at all, while the interesting, provocative ideas are fucking insane and bad.”
This impression is largely the fault of EA’s public messaging. The philosophy-based contrarian culture means participants are incentivized to produce “fucking insane and bad” ideas, which in turn become what many commentators latch to when trying to grasp what’s distinctive about EA. Meanwhile, the definition the Centre for Effective Altruism uses (“a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice”) really does seem kind of trite in isolation. Isn’t that what everyone’s doing?
You don’t need to be an effective altruist to look at these donations and wonder what the hell the donors were thinking. But EA gives you the best framework I know with which to do so, one that can help you sift through the detritus and decide what moral quandaries deserve our attention. Its answers won’t always be right, and they will always be contestable. But even asking the questions EA asks — how many people does this affect? Is it at least millions if not billions? Is this a life-or-death matter? A wealth or destitution matter? How far can a dollar actually go in solving this problem? — is to take many steps beyond where most of our moral discourse goes.
One of the most fundamentally decent people I’ve met through EA is an ex-lawyer named Josh Morrison. After donating his kidney to a stranger, Morrison left his firm to start a group promoting live organ donation. We met at an EA Global conference in 2015, and he proceeded to walk me through my own kidney donation process, taking a huge amount of time to help someone he barely knew. These days he runs a group that advocates for challenge trials, in which altruistic volunteers are willingly infected with diseases so that vaccines and treatments can be tested more quickly and effectively.
Years later, we were getting lunch when he gave me, for no occasion other than he felt like it, a gift: a copy of Hilary Mantel’s historical novel A Place of Greater Safety, which tells the story of French revolutionaries Camille Desmoulins, Georges Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre. All of them began as youthful, idealistic opponents of the French monarchy, and all would be guillotined before the age of 37. Robespierre and Desmoulins were school chums, but the former still ordered the latter’s execution.
It reminded Josh a bit of the fervent 20- and 30-something idealists of EA. “I hope this book doesn’t turn out to be about us,” he told me. Even then, I could tell he was only half-joking.
Bankman-Fried has more than a whiff of this crew about him (probably Danton; he lacks Robespierre’s extreme humorlessness). But if EA has just been through its Terror, there’s a silver lining. The Jacobins were wrong about many things, but they were right about democracy. They were right about liberty. They were right about the evils of the ancien regime, and right to demand something better. The France of today looks much more like that of their vision than that of their enemies.
That doesn’t retroactively justify their actions. But it does justify the actions of the thousands of French men and women who learned from their example and worked, in peace, for two centuries to build a still-imperfect republic. They didn’t give up the faith because their ideological ancestors went too far.
EAs can help the world by keeping the faith, too. Last year, GiveWell, one of the early and still one of the best EA institutions, directed over $518 million toward its top global health and development charities. It chose those charities because they had a high probability of saving lives or making lives dramatically better through higher earnings or lessened illness. By the group’s metrics, the donations it drove to four specific groups (the Against Malaria Foundation, Malaria Consortium, New Incentives, and Helen Keller International) saved 57,000 lives in 2021. The group’s recommendations to them from 2009 to present have saved some 159,000 lives. That’s about as many people as live in Alexandria, Virginia, or Charleston, South Carolina.
GiveWell, should be proud of that. As someone who’s donated tens of thousands of dollars to GiveWell top charities over the years, I’m personally very proud of that. EA, done well, lets people put their financial privilege to good use, to literally save lives, and in the process give our own lives meaning. That’s something worth fighting for.
From The Hindu: Sports
Champagne Smile, Portofino Bay, Mad Love and Scaramanga show out -
Pak vs Eng, 2nd Test | Saud Shakeel’s dismissal cost Pakistan the match, says Babar Azam - Replays could not confirm if Ollie Pope took a clean catch to dismiss Saud Shakeel, who was batting on 94 when he gloved a Mark Wood delivery down the leg side and was eventually adjudged out by the third umpire
Hyderbad Strikers defend TPL title - Conny Perrin at her fluent best as Strikers beat Mumbai Leon Army in the summit clash
Rahane, Ishant likely to lose central contracts, Surya, Shubman set for promotion - A review of Indian team's performance in the T20 World Cup and Bangladesh One-Dayers is not part of the agenda but if chairperson deems necessary, non-listed items can be considered for discussion.
Jos Buttler clinches ICC Men's Player of the Month award for November 2022 - England's skipper Buttler once again underlined his reputation as one of the most fearsome batters in world cricket last month.
From The Hindu: National News
Five NDRF teams deployed in areas affected by Cyclone Mandous in Andhra Pradesh - One team has been kept on standby in Visakhapatnam, says Commandant Zahid Khan
Parliament passes Bill to promote non-fossil energy sources and carbon credit trading - Replying to a debate on the Bill, Minister of New and Renewable Energy R.K. Singh said the Bill is environment-friendly and will allow carbon trading in the country
Union Minister says no complaint received from States on unfairness in sharing revenues - Mos Finance in reply in Parliament gives details of releases under devolution schemes for five years
Police foil AIYF, DYFI protest, take activists into custody - The protesters staged dharna demanding increase in age limit for police constable recruitment
Unaccounted money seized at Kozhikode railway station - Case handed over to Income Tax department
From BBC: Europe
EU corruption charges ‘very very worrisome’, says foreign policy chief - Watchdogs say it could be one of the biggest corruption scandals in European Parliament history.
Ukraine war: Odesa port reopens after energy network hit - The Black Sea port of Odesa has resumed operations after Russian strikes against the city on Saturday.
Italy shooting: Three women shot dead in Rome cafe - A friend of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is among three women killed in Sunday’s attack.
Ukraine war: The Russians locked up for refusing to fight - Russian troops have reportedly been locked up for refusing to fight in the invasion of Ukraine.
Serbian leader holds security talks over Kosovo unrest - Longstanding tensions between Kosovo’s authorities and its Serb minority have risen again.
From Ars Technica
Here’s why NASA’s Artemis I mission is so rare, and so remarkable - “It is the beginning of the new beginning.” - link
The weekend’s best deals: A bunch of Apple devices, Surface, Xbox, Meta Quest, and more - Dealmaster also has buy-two-get-one-free books, 4K TVs, and a slew of smart home devices. - link
Aliens-inspired Returnal is coming to PC, and you should probably play it - Housemarque’s challenging masterwork is really a PC game at heart. - link
Amid pathetic uptake, FDA green lights confusing COVID vaccine update for kids - Some kids can get boosters, some can get an updated series, some get nothing. - link
Musk brings back Twitter Blue with new features to prevent impersonation - Reuters reviewed an email to advertisers saying Twitter Blue is back Friday. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
I saw two guys having a fight on the train. So, being a bouncer, I dealt with the situation accordingly. -
Two men grow up together as friends. After college, one moves to Ohio, and the other moves to Colorado. They agree to meet every 10 years in Florida to play some golf and catch up with each other.
At age 35 they meet, finish their round of golf, and head for lunch.
One asks, “Where do you want to go?”
The other replies, “Hooters.”
“Why Hooters?”
“They have waitresses with beautiful bosoms, tight shorts, and pretty legs.”
“Sounds great.”
At age 45, they meet and play some golf once again.
“Where would you like to go for lunch?”
“Hooters.”
“Again, Why?”
“They have ice cold beer, large televisions, and side action on the sports.”
“Okay.”
At 55, they meet and play yet again. “So where do you want to go for lunch?”
“Hooters.”
“Why?”
“The food is pretty decent, and there’s lots of parking spots.”
“Alright.”
At age 65, they meet again.
After a round of golf, one says, “Where should we go for lunch?”
“Hooters.”
“Why?”
“Wings are only half price, and the food isn’t very spicy.”
“Good choice.”
At 75, they meet once again.
“Where should we head for lunch?”
“Hooters.”
“Why?”
“They have lots of handicap parking spaces, as well as senior discounts.”
“Alright.”
At age 85 they meet and play again. “Where should we go for lunch?”
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Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images
