[exo-pla-net]

Seems the incompetent and curiously hostile Philosophy Faculty at Oxford killed FHI.

> While FHI had achieved significant academic and policy impact, the final years were affected by a gradual suffocation by Faculty bureaucracy. The flexible, fast-moving approach of the institute did not function well with the rigid rules and slow decision-making of the surrounding organization. (One of our administrators developed a joke measurement unit, “the Oxford”. 1 Oxford is the amount of work it takes to read and write 308 emails. This is the actual administrative effort it took for FHI to have a small grant disbursed into its account within the Philosophy Faculty so that we could start using it - after both the funder and the University had already approved the grant.) Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. Unfortunately, this led to the eventual loss of lead researchers and especially the promising and diverse cohort of junior researchers, who have gone on to great things in the years since. While building an impressive alumni network and ecosystem of new nonprofits, these departures severely reduced the Institute. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy announced that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.

[polygamous_bat]

Surely it was Oxford, the institute older than most nations, being incompetent, and nothing to do with the easy money tap called Sam Bankman Fraud being thrown in jail. Oxford just seems like a easy scapegoat as they can’t just say “our biggest donor is in jail for the foreseeable future and we have no money left because we used it to buy a mansion [0]”

[0] https://twitter.com/paulmainwood/status/1600433194691502081

[sgift]

You obviously missed this part: > This is the actual administrative effort it took for FHI to have a small grant disbursed into its account within the Philosophy Faculty so that we could start using it - after both the funder and the University had already approved the grant.

They make quite a clear difference between Oxford (i.e. the University) and the faculty.

[arduanika]

Everybody who disagrees with me is incompetent.

[karma_pharmer]

They froze the institute "starting in 2020", three years before anybody suspected SBF was anything other than the Great Tech Messiah.

FTX didn't even get its initial funding until the last months of 2019.

I mean sure, FTX might be a stain on FHI's reputation now, but it certainly can't have been the initial cause of these actions by Oxford. The dates just don't work.

[levocardia]

Center for Effective Altruism is different from FHI

[arduanika]

Sure, and Beria is different from Marx.

Nobody in this entire movement wants to take responsibility for what anybody else does, and it's honestly exhausting. They have this dense belief that once a thinker releases his ideas into the water, he bears no responsibility for the crimes and excesses they inspire.

[arduanika]

Ugh. Looking back at this comment of mine, I wish I could delete/retract. It's misdirected in the context of the thread, and an overreaction at best. GP was only talking about certain budgeting decisions, so it makes total sense to distinguish between the orgs here. Oxford did not buy the mansion.

Sorry.

[setgree]

I think that either the link has changed or that the statement has changed, because the statement I'm reading is very different from your quote "in both content and deliverance" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UGtlUMMkOU))

[exo-pla-net]

The quote is from their "Final Report, which is the first link in the submitted article.

[johngossman]

“It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints—“ red tape” was the word its supporters used—which have hitherto hampered research in this country.”

— That Hideous Strength: by C. S. Lewis (1943)

The book literally starts with a competition between Oxford and a fictional university about who gets to host a “trans-humanist” research organization.

[goodcanadian]

Curious use of the word faculty . . . I would say the problem is the administration and bureaucracy and not the faculty (which usually refers to the academic staff). I guess they mean the word in the sense of the administrative unit of the university. Regardless, this is not a problem confined to Oxford; it seems to have proliferated throughout academia in the last couple of decades. The sheer amount of utter bullshit is mind boggling; I figure about 1 in 10 people actually do useful work while the other 9 conspire to make that person's life more difficult. Of course, industry is hardly any better . . .

[hollerith]

Why not assume that the OP knows the definition of the word "faculty" and that when the OP writes, "suffocation by Faculty bureaucracy", he meant suffocation by academic staff?

[goodcanadian]

1. I was responding more to the commenter than to the quote.

2. That is, in fact, what I assume.

3. That was really tangential to my point, so I probably should have just left it out.