Kelsey Piper

Kelsey Piper is a LessWrong rationalist and Effective Altruist who works as a journalist for Vox and writes for the magazine Asterisk.https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper 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.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
== Response to the James Damore Controversy ==
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. 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.https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
== Pivot to Journalism ==
In September 2018, Piper began writing for Future Perfect, a section of the web magazine Vox.https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper/archives/41 It quickly published a profile of William MacAskillhttps://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/14/18088514/effective-altruism-poverty-philanthropy-william-macaskill and received donations from Effective Altruism organizations Animal Charity Evaluators and Sam Bankman-Fried's Building a Stronger Future.https://www.vox.com/2020/1/7/21020439/support-future-perfect 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.https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1406002158034583553 Positioning herself as a journalist rather than a blogger lets her reach readers who are less online.
In 2022, the Effective Altruism organization Emergent Ventures launched the web magazine Asterisk, for which Piper also wrote.https://asteriskmag.com/about
== Involvement in the Collapse of FTX ==
In November 2022, cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was texting with her and said some revealing things. She published them, creating an international sensation. She presented their relationship as a few months old and between a journalist and a source:
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).https://www.vox.com/2020/1/7/21020439/support-future-perfect 
== Getting the Band Back Together ==
In June 2024, Piper was a special guest at Manifest, an event in Berkeley sponsored by Lightcone, another Effective Altruism organization which had also received donations from Bankman-Fried before his arrest.https://www.manifest.is/https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong#Lighthaven Other special guests included many kooks with RationalWiki entries 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 frequently mean well and have leftish views, 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 ==
RationalWiki readers know that 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.https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/6/21121303/coronavirus-wuhan-panic-pandemic-outbreakhttps://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/28/21156128/coronavirus-prepare-outbreak-covid19-health She has warned the Internet that "accelerationism never works" so she speaks against some ideas that RationalWiki disapproves of!https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1884817690050875497#m
Category:Futurism
Category:Journalism
Category:Longtermism
Category:Living people
Category:Rationalism
==References==