Effective Altruism Foundation

The Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF) is an organization in the Effective Altruism movement "whose values put a particular emphasis on trying to reduce the risks of future suffering," in the words of Open Philanthropy's grant page. It wrote communication guidelines with the Foundational Research Institute (FRI) in 2019 and received five Open Philanthropy grants between July 2019 and April 2022.¹

Open Philanthropy grants

Open Philanthropy's page for the July 2019 grant records 1,000,000 dollars over two years "to support some aspects of its research and general operations," filed under Effective Altruism Community Growth. The grant investigators were Nick Beckstead and Claire Zabel. The page states that the speculative and suffering-focused nature of EAF's work "means that it needs to be communicated about carefully, and could be counterproductive otherwise," that "we have felt ambivalent about EAF's work to date (despite feeling unambiguously positively about some of their projects)," and that "A major purpose of this grant is to encourage and support EAF and our other grantees in the space in taking approaches to longtermism with greater emphasis on shared objectives between different value systems."¹

Four later grant pages record 15,358 dollars in April 2020 (investigators Zachary Robinson and Alexander Berger), 375,000 dollars in October 2020 (investigator Robinson), 697,268 dollars in January 2022, and 200,000 dollars in April 2022. The first three are filed under Global Health and Development and describe research and advocacy on potential policy interventions in Europe in the field of development aid; the April 2022 grant is filed under Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness and describes work in the field of biosecurity.²

Guidelines for discussing astronomical stakes, 2019

"EAF's Guidelines for Discussing Astronomical Stakes (shared)" names as authors EAF and FRI (Jonas Vollmer, Stefan Torges, Lukas Gloor and David Althaus), gives "First written: March 2019; last updated: 10 September 2019," and asks readers to "ask Stefan" before sharing the document further. Its summary states that "we would like to avoid (inadvertently) contributing to strong forms of future pessimism because this could inspire unilateralist acts of aggression and violence." The document sets out four guidelines: minimize the risk of readers coming away contemplating causing extinction, be charitable and balanced, promote cooperation and compromise, and contextualize vivid descriptions of suffering. Under the first it states: "In general, we recommend writing about practical ways to reduce s-risk without mentioning how the future could be bad overall. We believe this will likely have similar positive results with fewer downsides because there are already many articles on theoretical questions." It states that EAF encourages readers to follow the guidelines "for all forms of public communication, including personal blogs, social media, essays, books, talks, meetups, and scholarly publications."³

Under the second guideline the document lists works a writer "could consider referencing," among them Beckstead's "On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future," Carl Shulman's "Moments of Bliss," and writings by Nick Bostrom, William MacAskill and Toby Ord. It states: "We do not ask you to lie or distort your views." and "Whenever there are conflicts between cooperation and honesty that you can't resolve, we would like you to side with honesty."³

The introduction states: "In response to us writing these guidelines, Nick Beckstead wrote guidelines for EAs focused on reducing existential risks to encourage other EA organizations (80k, CEA, CFAR, FHI, GPI, MIRI, and Open Phil) to communicate about the long-term future in a way that's more cooperative towards suffering-focused EAs." The organizations named are 80,000 Hours, the Centre for Effective Altruism, the Center for Applied Rationality, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Global Priorities Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and Open Philanthropy. Beckstead's document opens by saying "EAF has written its own set of guidelines intended for people writing about longtermism from a suffering-focused perspective."³⁴

Account by Simon Knutsson

Simon Knutsson, then a doctoral student at Stockholm University and affiliated with FRI, wrote on his website in October 2019 that on July 18, 2019 Torges, one of EAF's co-executive directors, shared with him the two documents as Google documents, with a message beneath the links: "We're excited about this coordinated effort. Even though it means that we will promote future pessimism and s-risks to a lesser extent, we think the discourse about these topics will still be improved due to other more widely-read texts taking our perspective into account more." The message went on to say that EAF had given input on 80,000 Hours content and on Ord's forthcoming book on existential risk, and that "Nick also invited a number of people to the research retreat that we hosted in May."⁵

Knutsson wrote: "Based on my conversation with Stefan, I understand the guidelines by EAF/FRI to be binding for those employed or funded by EAF/FRI, but they are also meant for independent researchers and university employees." He wrote: "I was told essentially that I could likely get funding in the future if I would follow the guidelines," and "Based on a conversation with a manager at EAF, I gather the grant might not have been made if EAF did not write their guidelines." He wrote that he did not endorse the guidelines, partly because he held a university position, and that on July 29, 2019 he proposed that his name be removed from the FRI website. He wrote that on July 26, 2019 Torges asked whether he had considered changing the title or abstract of a paper already accepted by a journal, an offer he declined.⁵

Knutsson put questions to EAF and Open Philanthropy in October and November 2019, including whether the grant was conditioned on EAF writing or distributing guidelines. He reports that Torges replied on November 4 and 7, 2019 without answering them and that Open Philanthropy's communications officer, Michael Levine, replied on November 5 and 8 that the organization had nothing to add beyond the grant page.⁶⁷

David Morris reports that Knutsson was shown the documents in June 2019, and that a second source, Magnus Vinding, also saw them.⁸