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Comment by wging | Hacker News Reader

It makes a lot of sense given the nature of SBF’s charitable donations and the purported rationale(s) behind them. Kelsey Piper is pretty deeply associated with the EA movement, which is heavily interested in picking the right ways to deploy money to solve the world’s problems, and much of SBF’s charitable giving was too.

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> In 2018, Vox launched Future Perfect, with the goal of covering the most critical issues of the day through the lens of effective altruism. In this talk, Kelsey Piper discusses how the project worked out, her experience as a Vox staff writer, and her thoughts on the key challenges of EA-focused journalism.

I just commented in this thread about how this story magically keeps getting worse, and then it got worse...

Yeah when I saw it was Piper as the journalist, I was expecting to see a massive disclaimer/disclosure on the article. There still isn’t one.

My own disclosure: I have many mutual friends with Piper and participate in the local EA group and contribute to EA causes.

Piper's journalistic duty was to disclose her ties to EA much more fully in that piece, or recuse herself from writing it. I'm curious about the ties that she and other prominent Bay Area EAs have to SBF as well. Everyone is in a rush to distance themselves from they guy who bankrolled them.

And to be clear, Piper and Ellison go way way back. I think there is a very good chance that SBF did not know that that chat was on the record. So Piper may have failed to disclose in two directions, to both her source and her audience.

There's a disclosure that SBF actually gave Vox money as part of a journalism grant. This business of billionaires buying journalists outright by calling payments philanthropic grants is way out of control. It's bad enough when Gates does it.

A grant alone should not count as "buying journalists". They clearly aren't acting in his interests (as they shouldn't!).

It does seem like the (some now erstwhile) EA billionaires supposed that buying professional, high-tier take-havers/explanatory-journalists was going to be an effective way to mainline their ideology. SBF had his eye on Matt Yglesias, for example.

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