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Kelsey Piper
Carefully, correctly LessWrong |
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Singularity blues |
Kelsey Piper is a LessWrong rationalist and Effective Altruist who works as a journalist for Vox and writes for the magazine Asterisk.[1] She became involved in the movement via the THINK: The High Impact Network, a student group at Stanford where she was majoring in Symbolic Systems, an interdisciplinary field focused on computation and cognition.[2] [3] From 2014 to 2016 she was on the board of a club named Stanford Effective Altruism with the future cryptocurrency fraudster Caroline Ellison.[4][5][6][7]
Response to the James Damore controversy[edit]
In 2017, as a recent graduate and employee for the hiring agency Triplebyte, she advocated that they should let James Damore create a profile on their site in the face of people who wanted to blacklist him.
I said that we were not in the business of deciding who had good politics, that we shared this country with many people who profoundly disagreed with each other, that companies could assess for themselves if he worked respectfully with female engineers, and that we should put him on the site and let them decide. We did. ... James Damore was egregiously wronged.[8]
Scott Alexander listed her on his blogroll and blogged about how excess healthcare bureaucracy prevented her getting medication so she could altruize more effectively, so she was part of the Bay Area LessWrong subculture at that time.[9]
Pivot to journalism[edit]
At an Effective Altruism conference in San Francisco in 2018, Piper met some journalists from the web magazine Vox who had received a grant to do reporting on issues of long-term, global concern rather than people and events in the United States.[10] In September 2018, she began writing for Future Perfect, the new column funded by the grant.[11] It quickly published a profile of William MacAskill[12] and received donations from Effective Altruism organizations Animal Charity Evaluators and Sam Bankman-Fried's Building a Stronger Future.[13] Her first story was on whether Jeff Bezos was giving his money to the most effective causes, and she quickly walked through favorite EA topics such as animal suffering, fighting malaria, nuclear war (a form of existential risk), direct cash transfers to the poor of the Third World, self-driving cars (artificial intelligence), and early childhood education (intelligence, G, and IQ and their malleability and connection to race and genetics). The style and content is similar to other writing in this space, although Piper is a queer woman born in the 1990s and many other movement leaders are straight men born in the 1970s or 1980s.[14] Positioning herself as a journalist rather than a blogger lets her reach readers who are less online. Piper acknowledged that covering EA as an Effective Altruist could put her in an ethical bind:
One of the great things about Vox as a venue for Future Perfect is that Vox is taken pretty seriously by policymakers. Barack Obama has recommended some of our articles. Senators often share articles that we write about their policies, and about policy issues that they find pressing. So it's a great way to get EA ideas into the national conversation ... while EAs are a huge part of our audience and we take the perspectives of the EA community on what we're doing really seriously, we're also reaching way beyond the EA community. That's both really powerful and, honestly, a little bit scary, because it means that a lot of people's only knowledge of EA perspectives and topics might be coming from Vox's Future Perfect.[15]
In 2022, the Effective Altruism organization Emergent Ventures launched the web magazine Asterisk, for which Piper also wrote.[16]
Also in 2022, Future Perfect published a sympathetic profile of Ajeya Cotra, who speculates about AI and existential risk at the EA organization Open Philanthropy.[17] Next year Kelsey Piper launched an intermittent Substack blog with Cotra at https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/.[18]
Involvement in the collapse of FTX[edit]
Meanwhile Caroline Ellison had entered into a business and sometimes sexual relationship with cryptocurrency fraudster and effective altruist Sam Bankman-Fried.[19] Piper began to write a profile of her friend's boyfriend for Vox. In November 2022, the fraud began to unravel and Bankman-Fried sent Piper some revealing texts. She published them, creating an international sensation. She presented their relationship as a few months old and between a journalist and a source:
I’d spoken to Bankman-Fried via Zoom earlier in the summer when I was working on a profile of him, so I reached out to him via DM on November 13, after news broke that his cryptocurrency exchange had collapsed, with billions in customer deposits apparently gone. I didn’t expect him to respond — typically, people under investigation by both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice don’t return requests for comment.[20]
But since she was a fellow EA funded by money he controlled, Bankman-Fried may have thought he was confiding in a member of his movement. While this situation was no doubt painful, it let her launch her career with EA funds and connections, then boost it with a scoop which let her distance the rest of EA from Bankman-Fried's fraud (Future Perfect promised to stop spending Bankman-Fried's money and return the remainder to his victims when they could be identified).[21]
Getting the band back together[edit]
In June 2024, Piper and Cotra were special guests at Manifest, an event in Berkeley sponsored by Lightcone, another Effective Altruism organization which had also received donations from Bankman-Fried before his arrest.[22] Other special guests included many kooks such as Richard Hanania and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and people who love to tell the Internet about race and IQ such as Scott Alexander, Jonathan Anomaly, and Razib Khan. While individual rationalists often sound moderate, the movement is a hotbed of crank magnetism, apocalyptic thinking, and belief that today's social hierarchies may be natural and inevitable.
On the bright side[edit]
The ideas and people in LessWrong and Effective Altruism often go wrong in hilarious, tragic ways, but not always. In February 2020 Piper took the view that COVID was a serious danger and passed on CDC recommendations to prepare to isolate at home and wear a mask if venturing out while sick.[23][24] She is indignant about the use of junk forensic science by courts in the United States, [25][26] and has warned the Internet that "accelerationism never works".[27]
References[edit]
- ↑ "Kelsey Piper, Senior Writer" https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper
- ↑ "Kelsey Piper, Teacher" https://web.archive.org/web/20210209205934/https://stanfordesp.org/teach/teachers/THINKStanford/bio.html
- ↑ https://symsys.stanford.edu/about/span-dig-deep-solve-complex-problems
- ↑ "Stanford Effective Altruism" https://web.archive.org/web/20160913060623/http://web.stanford.edu/group/ea/
- ↑ Claire Zabel, "A different take on giving back," The Stanford Daily, 5 February 2015 https://stanforddaily.com/2015/02/05/a-different-take-on-giving-back/
- ↑ Bridget Read, "Was Caroline Ellison a Main Character or the Fall Girl?" New York Magazine Intelligencer, 19 November 2022 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/caroline-ellison-alameda-ftx.html
- ↑ David Jeans et al., "Meet Caroline Ellison, The ‘Fake Charity Nerd Girl’ Behind The FTX Collapse," Forbes, 18 November 2022 https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2022/11/18/queen-caroline-the-risk-loving-29-year-old-embroiled-in-the-ftx-collapse/
- ↑ https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1884702831451754548#m backup at https://archive.is/VRrqU
- ↑ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
- ↑ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/kelsey-piper-future-perfect-a-year-of-coverage
- ↑ https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper/archives/41
- ↑ https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/14/18088514/effective-altruism-poverty-philanthropy-william-macaskill
- ↑ https://www.vox.com/2020/1/7/21020439/support-future-perfect
- ↑ Piper announced her wedding at https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1406002158034583553
- ↑ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/kelsey-piper-future-perfect-a-year-of-coverage archive https://archive.is/9PdaL
- ↑ https://asteriskmag.com/about
- ↑ https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23365512/future-perfect-50-ajeya-cotra-senior-research-analyst-open-philanthropy
- ↑ Planned Obsolescence is archived at https://archive.is/6yQNT
- ↑ Tracy Wang, "Bankman-Fried’s Cabal of Roommates in the Bahamas Ran His Crypto Empire – and Dated. Other Employees Have Lots of Questions," Coindesk, last updated 16 August 2023 https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/10/bankman-frieds-cabal-of-roommates-in-the-bahamas-ran-his-crypto-empire-and-dated-other-employees-have-lots-of-questions
- ↑ https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy
- ↑ https://www.vox.com/2020/1/7/21020439/support-future-perfect
- ↑ https://www.manifest.is/ archived https://archive.is/3xikg
- ↑ Kelsey Piper, "Don’t scold people for worrying about the coronavirus," Vox Future Perfect, 6 February 2020 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/6/21121303/coronavirus-wuhan-panic-pandemic-outbreak
- ↑ Kelsey Piper, "It’s not overreacting to prepare for coronavirus. Here’s how." Vox Future Perfect, last updated 13 March 2020 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/28/21156128/coronavirus-prepare-outbreak-covid19-health
- ↑ https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1770556344648823230 archived https://archive.is/ItJrR
- ↑ Michał Sikorski, "Is Forensic Science in Crisis?" Synthese vol. 200 nr. 3 pages 1-34 (2022) https://philarchive.org/rec/SIKIFS
- ↑ https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1884817690050875497#m