Kelsey Piper

{{Bronze}}[[File:Kelsey Piper.jpg|thumb|right|165px|Piper in 2019.]]{{LessWrong}}'''Kelsey Piper''' is a [[LessWrong]] rationalist and [[Effective altruism|Effective Altruist]] who became prominent as a journalist for ''[[Vox (website)|Vox]]''.<ref>"Kelsey Piper, Senior Writer" https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper</ref>  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.<ref>"Kelsey Piper, Teacher" https://web.archive.org/web/20210209205934/https://stanfordesp.org/teach/teachers/THINKStanford/bio.html</ref>  <ref>https://symsys.stanford.edu/about/span-dig-deep-solve-complex-problems</ref> From 2014 to 2016 she was on the board of a club named Stanford Effective Altruism with the future [[cryptocurrency]] fraudster Caroline Ellison.<ref>"Stanford Effective Altruism" https://web.archive.org/web/20160913060623/http://web.stanford.edu/group/ea/</ref><ref>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/ Note that Zabel was a member of Stanford EA by the oldest Internet Archive log in January 2016 and went on to work for an EA organization</ref><ref>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</ref><ref>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/</ref> Under her leadership, economist [[Robin Hanson]] and philosopher [[Peter Singer]] gave talks to the club, and rationalist blogger [[Scott Alexander]] attended a meeting.

== 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. {{quotebox|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.<ref>https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1884702831451754548#m backup at https://archive.ph/VRrqU</ref>}} [[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.<ref>https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/</ref>

== Pivot to journalism ==

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.<ref>https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/kelsey-piper-future-perfect-a-year-of-coverage</ref> In September 2018, she began writing for ''Future Perfect'', the new column funded by the grant.<ref>https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper/archives/41</ref> It quickly published a profile of EA founder William MacAskill<ref>https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/14/18088514/effective-altruism-poverty-philanthropy-william-macaskill</ref> and received donations from Effective Altruism organizations Animal Charity Evaluators and Sam Bankman-Fried's Building a Stronger Future.<ref>https://www.vox.com/2020/1/7/21020439/support-future-perfect</ref> Her first story was on whether Jeff Bezos was giving his money to the most effective causes, and she quickly walked through favourite 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.<ref>Piper has children and showed herself kissing her wife at https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1406002158034583553 (archived https://archive.ph/pTiaS). Rationalists often have complicated private lives and Piper does not share further details.</ref> 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:

{{quotebox|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'''.<ref>https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/kelsey-piper-future-perfect-a-year-of-coverage archive https://archive.ph/9PdaL</ref>}}

In 2022, the Effective Altruism organization Emergent Ventures launched the web magazine [[Asterisk Magazine|''Asterisk'']], for which Piper also wrote.<ref>https://asteriskmag.com/about</ref>

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.<ref>https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23365512/future-perfect-50-ajeya-cotra-senior-research-analyst-open-philanthropy</ref> (A colleague from Stanford Effective Altruism had become an Open Philanthropy staffer so there were many ways that the two could have been introduced).<ref>https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W8QdxiSfuHamDa8aJ/claire-zabel-open-philanthropy-project-update-on-biosecurity</ref><ref>https://web.archive.org/web/20170313165031/https://eahub.org/groups/stanford-effective-altruism</ref> Next year Kelsey Piper launched an intermittent Substack blog with Cotra at https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/.<ref>Planned Obsolescence is archived at https://archive.ph/6yQNT</ref>

== Involvement in the collapse of FTX ==

Meanwhile Caroline Ellison had entered into a business and sometimes sexual relationship with cryptocurrency fraudster and effective altruist [[Sam Bankman-Fried]].<ref>Tracy Wang, [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 "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</ref> Piper began to write a profile of her friend's boyfriend for ''Vox''. In November 2022, the fraud began to unravel and [[Sam Bankman-Fried|Bankman-Fried]] sent Piper some revealing texts. She published them, creating an international sensation.<ref>Gideon Lewis-Kraus, [https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-and-the-question-of-complicity Sam Bankman-Fried, Effective Altruism, and the Question of Complicity], ''The New Yorker'', December 1, 2022</ref><ref>Bevan Hurley and Ariana Baio, [https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-charged-b2244524.html Who is Sam Bankman-Fried?] ''Independent'' (UK), December 13, 2022</ref> She presented their relationship as a few months old and between a journalist and a source:

{{quotebox|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.<ref>Kelsey Piper, [https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself], ''Vox Future Perfect'', November 16, 2022</ref>}}

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).<ref>[https://www.vox.com/2020/1/7/21020439/support-future-perfect Support Future Perfect]. ''Vox'', [https://archive.is/VlrT5 Archived]</ref>

== Getting the band back together ==

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.<ref>https://www.manifest.is/ archived https://archive.ph/3xikg</ref>  Other special guests included kooks such as [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]], and people who love to tell the Internet about [[Race and intelligence|race and IQ]] such as [[Scott Alexander]]. While individual rationalists often sound moderate, the movement is a hotbed of [[crank magnetism]], apocalyptic thinking, and [[Biological determinism|belief that today's social hierarchies may be natural and inevitable]].

Piper does not endorse her friends' ideas about genetics or replacing the biosphere with a simulation, but she does not criticize them in public either. Someone who is intrigued by her writing and starts to explore Effective Altruism and Rationalism will encounter dangerous and hateful ideas as well as her unusual but moderate ideas, and is likely to adopt some of both.

== COVID-19 ==

Although rationalists pride themselves on being freethinkers, they have a recognizable and shifting party line. In February 2020 Piper took the view that [[COVID-19]] was a serious danger and passed on [[CDC]] recommendations to prepare to isolate at home and wear a mask if venturing out while sick.<ref>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</ref><ref>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</ref> (The World Health Organization declared a public health emergency on 30 January, and the president of the United States followed on 31 January, but not everyone responded immediately).<ref>"Special Series: The Coronavirus Crisis," ''NPR'' https://www.npr.org/series/812054919/the-coronavirus-crisis/archive?date=1-31-2020</ref> Containing this airborne virus required working with neighbors to improve indoor air quality and help people stay home when sick, and doing actual science and engineering to develop vaccines and air purifiers. None of those are rationalists' strengths, so as the pandemic dragged on, and infection control became associated with leftists, rationalists started to talk about other aspects of COVID.

In 2025 Piper became very interested in the controversial theory that [[COVID-19]] emerged from a lab experiment in China rather than spreading from wild animals to humans. As the [[Donald Trump|new administration]] shut down all kinds of aid programs in the USA and abroad, she decided to [[Balance fallacy|blame both sides]] in the manner of a ''New York Times'' editorial:

{{quotebox|I evaluate the people who cut off payments for ongoing contracts for PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), etc. through [[Technocracy#DOGE|DOGE]] the same way I evaluate the people who kept finding side routes to fund gain of function research on pandemic-potential coronaviruses after [[Obama]] imposed a freeze. ... the DOGE cuts directly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands, likely millions, of people, and the GOF research may well have.<ref>https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1950334708363235464#m archived at https://archive.ph/5Su26</ref>}}

This tweet is hard to understand without studying conspiracy theories about a proposal to experiment on bat coronaviruses called Project DEFUSE (the proposal was rejected).<ref>Daniel Engber and Adam Federman, [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/lab-leak-pandemic-origins-even-messier/620209/ "The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier,"] ''The Atlantic'', September 24, 2021 https://archive.ph/owVQ2 Most sources on this theory are much less mainstream than this web magazine.</ref> Even if we accept the premise that researchers created COVID and accidentally released it, the chain of cause and effect from "funding research" to "people dying" would be much more complicated than from "stopping treating sick people" to "people dying," and COVID killed tens of millions of people not "hundreds of thousands, likely millions."<ref>[https://archive.ph/FBibu "The pandemic's true death toll,"] ''The Economist'', June 10, 2024, archived at archive.ph on 2024 June 10</ref> However, Piper's friends such as Scott Alexander are fascinated by the lab leak hypothesis because if medical researchers could accidentally create and release a deadly plague, maybe computer science researchers could accidentally create and release unfriendly [[AI]].<ref>eg. Scott Alexander, [https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim "Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate,"] ''Astral Codex Ten'', March 28, 2024</ref> Piper is a [[nationalist]], so blaming COVID on foreigners makes her happier than talking about the US's own failures in dealing with the virus.<ref>https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1950334708363235464#m archived at https://archive.ph/5Su26 "America is the best country, but I try to avoid the overheated framings of this fact."</ref>

== A new argument ==

After the collapse of FTX, ''Future Perfect'''s main sponsor was the Effective Altruist BEMC foundation, founded by a onetime colleague of Ellison.<ref>[https://www.vox.com/2020/1/7/21020439/support-future-perfect "Support Future Perfect,"] ''Vox'' https://archive.ph/5Eien</ref> BEMC funded Future Perfect up to 2025, but as the year went on ''Future Perfect'' did not announce any more sponsors.<ref>https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/854281986/</ref> As advertising revenues fall, news organizations look for alternative sources of income, but relying on a single patron left ''Future Perfect'' in a precarious situation (albeit one shared by many news organizations).<ref>''Vox'' lists advertising, subscriptions, and grants as its three main sources of revenue: [https://www.vox.com/pages/funding "How we make money,"] ''Vox'' archived https://archive.ph/rG2Rm</ref><ref>eg. [[Jeff Bezos]] chips in to keep ''[[The Washington Post]]'' running despite losing up to $100 million/year, and ''[[The Epoch Times]]'' seems to take donations from [[Falun Gong]] members. Public news organizations like the ''BBC'' are at the mercy of taxpayers.</ref>

In August 2025 Piper left her job at ''Vox'' to help found a Substack newsletter called ''The Argument'' with [[Matthew Yglesias]] and several other commentators.<ref>Max Tani, [https://www.semafor.com/article/08/17/2025/with-the-argument-the-left-gets-a-new-publication "Exclusive / The left gets a new publication,"] ''Semafor'', August 18, 2025</ref> Her new employer was part-owned by Open Philanthropy and received a grant from an organization founded by [[libertarian]] economist Tyler Cowen.  Whether her colleagues could be described as "a group of left-leaning writers and journalists" is a matter of judgement. She wrote a retrospective on her time at ''Vox'' where she praised [[George Bush]]'s global aid programs, gently criticized the [[Trump]] administration for cutting them, and said that she planned to continue contributing to ''Vox'' when her new job permitted.<ref>Kelsey Piper, [https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/421925/future-perfect-retrospective-leaving-journalism-impact "In seven years, here’s what I got right and what I missed,"] ''Vox Future Perfect'', August 1, 2025 archived https://archive.ph/9axy0</ref>

In an interview hosted by ''LessWrong'', she said that "I was quite upset about Trump being the president. I think most of his policies will be quite bad for various stuff that I care about" and that "the woke right is speedrunning a lot of stuff that I thought was specific to the illiberal left until I saw it on the right."<ref>Zack M. Davis, [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaGaNhXhFEtXkfyud/interview-with-kelsey-piper-on-self-censorship-and-the-vibe "Interview with Kelsey Piper on Self-Censorship and the Vibe Shift,"] ''LessWrong'', August 7, 2025</ref> Many of her examples of this "vibe shift" were from [[Twitter]], and video game metaphors like "speedrunning" or "NPC" are popular with people who spend time on social media. She regretted not having posted some things which she believed were true because she might face "mild social disapproval" and commented on splits within the [[Democratic Party]]: 

{{quotebox|I think that the Democratic Party has two factions; they disagree on a ton of important stuff. I think that the [[neoliberals]] are right on nearly all of those disagreements, and the [[progressives]] are wrong on nearly all of the disagreements.<ref>Zack M. Davis, [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaGaNhXhFEtXkfyud/interview-with-kelsey-piper-on-self-censorship-and-the-vibe "Interview with Kelsey Piper on Self-Censorship and the Vibe Shift,"] ''LessWrong'', August 7, 2025</ref>}}

At about the same time that Piper left, ''Vox'' put most of ''Future Perfect'' behind a paywall. This suggests that it was not a lucrative source of ad revenue. Circa October 2025, after an earlier version of this article was posted, ''Future Perfect'' updated their funding page to list the latest donations from BEMC and an undated donation from Builders Vision (a relatively normal foundation that lets a heir to the [[Walmart|Walton family fortune]] feel good about himself).<ref>[https://www.vox.com/2020/1/7/21020439/support-future-perfect Support Future Perfect], ''Vox'', 3 November 2025 https://archive.is/C6uIn</ref><ref>[https://www.buildersinitiative.org/ Builders Initiative] website</ref> Its not clear who will fund the site from 2026 onward.

== On the bright side ==

The ideas and people in LessWrong and Effective Altruism often go wrong in [[MetaMed|hilarious, tragic ways]], but not always. Piper is indignant about the use of junk forensic science by courts in the United States, <ref>https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1770556344648823230 archived https://archive.ph/ItJrR</ref><ref>Michał Sikorski, [https://philarchive.org/rec/SIKIFS "Is Forensic Science in Crisis?"] ''Synthese'' vol. 200 nr. 3 pages 1-34 (2022)</ref> and has warned the Internet that "[[Nick Land|accelerationism]] never works".<ref>https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1884817690050875497#m archived at https://archive.ph/W1dIS</ref>

==References==
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[[Category:California]]
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[[Category:Rationalism]]

Categories: California, Effective altruists, Futurism, Journalism, Longtermism, Living people, Rationalism