The “Mark Fuentes” Article Is Libelous: An Investigation Into Two Years of Harassment, Threats, and Defamation

A Report on How the Effective Altruist Community Targets Critics with Lies, Harassment, Defamatory Accusations, and Threats of Violence.

Feb 16, 2023

tl;dr

The “Mark Fuentes” article makes a number of demonstrably false—and hence libelous—claims about me. As I show, it cites people with known, easy-to-find histories of racism, sexism, and online trolling in falsely claiming that I once harassed someone and made a single racially insensitive comment (which I absolutely did not). In violation of established academic norms, it cites various unpublished articles of mine that I had temporarily posted online for comments from colleagues and then later took down and chose not to publish. It presents these articles as if they are my final thoughts on the matter, which they were not; standard academic practice is to never cite unpublished work without the author’s explicit permission. The “Mark Fuentes” article is deeply dishonest, was written in bad-faith, and aims to hurt my reputation by spreading lies about me.

A very large amount of evidence unambiguously points to a particular, well-known Effective Altruist as the person behind the “Mark Fuentes” article. An earlier draft of this article, written under a different pseudonym (“Claressa Meals”), was posted online by someone who sent me threats and was repeatedly reported for harassment on Twitter; this earlier draft reproduced pixel-for-pixel identical screenshots initially posted on the EA Forum by the very same Effective Altruist referenced above. I also know, for a fact, that this same EA has harassed (a) not just one of my editors, but that editor’s boss, and even their boss’s boss, as well as (b) a former colleague of mine who works at a leading existential risk institute that I once visited for several months in 2019. They have also made numerous demonstrably false claims about me, such as that I sent them unwanted messages on Facebook after they had stopped responding, which is provably untrue.

The article below offers a detailed and meticulous examination of the evidence. “Mark Fuentes” is part of a coordinated campaign of harassment, defamation, and threats aimed at taking down one of the leading critics of Effective Altruism.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

In November 2022, a few months after I began publishing a series of critiques targeting Effective Altruism (EA) and longtermism (a main focus of EA), someone with the pseudonymous name “Mark Fuentes” posted an article on Substack that manipulates and rearranges screenshots of interactions I’ve had with people going back six or seven years, while leaving out crucial context and contradictory facts to present a heavily edited portrayal of me that does not, in any way, correspond to reality.

The “Mark Fuentes” article is libelous. “Mark Fuentes” claims to be a lawyer, yet I find it hard to believe that a lawyer would be so reckless in writing personally and professionally harmful things about someone (me) that are so dishonest. He also contradicts and undermines some of the central theses of his own article by citing, as if reliable sources, people like Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian. “Mark Fuentes” says that he cares about “bad online behavior,” yet these three individuals have an extensive, easy-to-find history of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and trollish behavior. See this footnote for a list of examples.1 If he really cared about bad behavior, then surely he wouldn’t have cited any of these individuals as reliable sources in making his “case” against me. (“Mark Fuentes” himself has harassed me and others on Twitter, as we will discuss more below.)

“Mark Fuentes” also claims that I have misrepresented EAs and longtermists such as Olle Häggström, Nick Beckstead, and Andreas Mogensen. I very strongly disagree with this claim—not only are my articles chock-full of citations, links, quotes, and block quotes, but reputable scholars have echoed, in peer-reviewed publications, the very same criticisms that I have made of EA and longtermism.

He also cites several unpublished manuscripts of mine without permission. I posted these papers online for comments from colleagues, and then I chose not to publish them in peer-reviewed journals. It is a well-established norm in academia that one should not quote unpublished drafts without explicit permission from the author. Yet “Mark Fuentes” violates this norm in quoting these articles as if they are my final thoughts on the matter.

Finally, “Mark Fuentes” claims to have a merely casual connection to EA, yet his article demonstrates an extensive knowledge of the EA and longtermist worldviews, the history of EA, ethical theories such as consequentialism and utilitarianism, as well as my own work on existential risks and activism going back nearly a decade.

I will address the libelous content of the “Mark Fuentes” article in a separate Substack piece, though I am not sure that this is necessary given that it has been obvious to many readers of the “Mark Fuentes” article that it is dishonest, manipulative, and motivated by some kind of ax to grind with me.

The present article focuses on a different issue: the origins of the “Mark Fuentes” article. Where did the content of his article come from? Is it plausible that “Mark Fuentes” is who he claims to be? He writes, for example, that he is a public defender in New York who enjoys “archery, photography, and Dixieland jazz” in his “spare time.” He claims to have attended Aaron Swartz’s memorial service in 2013, and has “never got very involved with” EA, “due to a combination of introversion and the sense that I hadn’t much to offer,” though he has “donated a small fraction of [his] income to the Against Malaria Foundation for the last nine years.” He writes that “I have never contacted Torres or posted anything about Torres other than in this Substack or my Twitter account,” and says on Twitter that “I bear Torres personally no ill will.” The backstory of “Mark Fuentes” is quite elaborate, and it is worth recalling here that people who lie pathologically often include far more details than are necessary, because they believe that the more details they provide, the more believable their story will become. See this footnote for more.2

My goal in this investigative piece is not to make any specific accusations or to draw any definitive conclusions. Rather, I aim to lay out the facts, as best I know them, supported by hyperlinks and screenshots. Readers can decide for themselves about what’s going on.

If you’d like an overview of the article, you might begin with the “Brief Summary” (section 16) and “Timeline” (section 17). However, I recommend reading the other sections carefully, as these provide a large amount of evidence for my claims in sections 16 and 17. Every single claim that I make in this article is backed up by verifiable evidence—hyperlinks and screenshots. I have fact-checked this article (no joke) probably about 30 times, and had others look over it as well (on the explicit condition of strict confidentiality). To my knowledge, there is not a single factually false statement in what follows. See for yourself by clicking on the links that I provide.

Libel is serious. And the “Mark Fuentes” article is libelous. At least now, with this article, people will have a chance to look at the broader circumstances of harassment and threats that I have received since 2022 and, based on the known facts, come to their own conclusion about what’s going on.

2. Who Is “Claressa Meals”?

Let’s begin with this:

On October 15, 2022, going by “Claressa Meals” published an article on Medium that is very similar to the “Mark Fuentes” article. It was titled “Emile Torres’ harassment.” “Claressa Meals” vigorously promoted “her” Medium article via her Twitter account, which included “Wanna stop abuse” as its bio:

The “Claressa Meals” Twitter account no longer exists. I do not know whether “she” deleted “her” account or it was banned by Twitter, since—ironically—numerous Twitter users reported “her” for harassing them and me. As I recall, “she” also sent me several threats of physical violence. One example of “her” being reported for harassment is below:

Image showing that Amber King reported "Claressa Meals" for harassment.

The “Mark Fuentes” article includes screenshots of some of the very same things that “Claressa Meals” included in “her” article.3 Where did the “Claressa Meals” and “Mark Fuentes” screenshots come from? The very first place they were posted online—and, to my knowledge, the only place they were ever posted on the Internet—was the EA Forum.

These screenshots can be traced back to exactly three accounts: an anonymous user called Throwaway86, another anonymous user called Throwaway151, and a prominent EA-longtermist named John Halstead. Who are the first two people? You will have a chance to decide by the end of this article. Halstead is a prominent EA who has worked for Hilary Greaves, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill. He is currently a researcher at the Centre for the Governance of AI, based in Oxford.

These are some of the main sources for the “Claressa Meals” article, which is very similar to the “Mark Fuentes” article. (See for yourself here and here.)

3. Throwaway86, An Important Source for “Mark Fuentes”

Before discussing the significance of “Claressa Meals” in more detail, let’s take a little detour back to 2021, when Throwaway86 posted a single screenshot on the EA Forum of something that Helen Pluckrose said about me in early 2018. Along with the screenshot, Throwaway86 also wrote this:

I’m writing this from a throwaway account because the last time I criticized Torres in another forum two years ago, under my real name, he started harassing me. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be an isolated incident, as I found when discussing this episode with other people who had also crossed him in public

First, note that this was the only time that Throwaway86 posted on the EA Forum. Their account was created entirely to say something about me. It was then abandoned. We will see that this is a common MO for the various anonymous or pseudonymous accounts that have harassed, defamed, and even threatened me with violence.

Second, the words “other people” in Throwaway86’s comment is a reference to Pluckrose, whose (false) claims about me appear in the screenshot that Throwaway86 shared, and which are also prominently featured in the “Mark Fuentes” article. We will examine this screenshot in section 9, and discover that it is a very important piece of evidence for understanding the origins of “Mark Fuentes.”

In the EA Forum post from 2021 by Throwaway86, which shared the above-mentioned screenshot, Throwaway86 says that “the last time I criticized Torres in another forum two years ago, under my real name, he started harassing me.” As it happens, two years earlier, in 2019, I had a falling out with John Halstead over a critique of Steven Pinker that I published in Salon. This article of mine was published on January 26, 2019.4 Importantly, I did not have a falling out with anyone else in the EA community during the first half of 2019. Indeed, the very same year that Throwaway86 made their comment above, Halstead said the following on the EA Forum:

Because I made the mistake of once criticising him, he spent much of the last two years calling me a white supremacist, even though the piece of mine he cited did not even avow belief in long-termism.

Notice the words “the last two years.” That is consistent with my falling out with him in 2019—and consistent with what Throwaway86 says.

In 2022, Halstead confirms that our falling out had to do with my 2019 article about Pinker, writing:

My relationship with Torres started after I criticised something he wrote about Steven Pinker on Facebook - my critique was about 3 sentences. My critique was supported by others in the community, including Will MacAskill. I think this was the start of Torres becoming disenchanted with EA.

So, there is only one person who fits the description given by Throwaway86, namely, that they are (a) someone who once criticized me, (b) this criticism occurred in “another forum” (Facebook, not the EA Forum), (c) it was “two years ago,” meaning 2019, and (d) it happened while they were using their “real name.” That person is John Halstead, because (a) he criticized me about my Pinker article, (b) this happened on Facebook (another forum), (c) this occurred in 2019, and (d) Halstead was using his real name.

As section 9 will show, these facts will be very important in our investigation into the origins of “Mark Fuentes.”

4. Throwaway151, Another Important Source for “Mark Fuentes”

Throwaway86’s comment was posted on December 17, 2021.

Nine months later, in September of 2022, a different account called Throwaway151 was created on the EA Forum. Throwaway151’s only contribution to the EA Forum was posting an article that made inaccurate and misleading claims about a collaboration that I once had with Carla Cremer and Luke Kemp. They posted this on September 13, 2022.

Throwaway151 was upset that Cremer had harshly criticized the EA community in an EA Forum post about the process of writing her article with Kemp titled “Democratising Risk,” which I had initially contributed to. Throwaway151 writes:

In their post on ‘Democratising Risk’, Zoe Cremer and Luke Kemp argued that they faced threats of censorship and defunding if they published their critique of EA. Cremer has subsequently spoken to journalists about this ordeal. However, they did not disclose that Emile P. Torres (formerly Phil) was a co-author on the article, as Torres recently disclosed on Twitter. … It was extremely deceptive of Cremer and Kemp not to disclose this information, because this, rather than the content of what they wrote, may have contributed to the (alleged) reception to their article. (Bold added.)

We do not need to get into the details about this. Suffice it to say that Throwaway151 has their story wrong. They mistakenly claim that Cremer and Kemp had withheld, to the EA community, information that they actually coauthored the article with me, which was not the case.

Roughly two weeks earlier, on August 27, 2022, John Halstead made a similar complaint. He writes to someone on the EA Forum, who he believes is Cremer: “I think some of the criticism of your paper with Kemp was due to it being co-authored with Phil Torres [my old name].” This is precisely what Throwaway151 is alleging: Cremer and Kemp failed to disclose that their paper was actually cowritten by me (which it wasn’t). To my knowledge, no one else in the EA community has made this accusation other than Throwaway151 and Halstead—I cannot find a single other example on the EA Forum (with one exception, a suspicious account called “Matis,” which we will discuss in section 15 below).

Incidentally, the person who Halstead was responding to, A.C.Skraeling, was not Cremer. Halstead falsely accused Cremer of having a “sockpuppet” account, and was subsequently admonished by the EA Forum moderators for this. As Lizka, the forum moderator says, “We have reached out to John Halstead to ask that he refrain from [accusing anonymous or pseudonymous Forum accounts of being someone in particular] and that he refrain from commenting more on these threads.” This is not the only time that the EA Forum moderators have given Halstead a warning for comments relating to me. (A.C.Skraeling responds to Halstead here.)

So, both Throwaway151 and John Halstead complain that Cremer and Kemp failed to disclose the fact that I was a coauthor on their “Democratising Risk” paper—which is not true. As it happens, this exact same claim is repeated by “Mark Fuentes” in his subsequent article. Here is what “Mark Fuentes” writes, echoing Throwaway151 and John Halstead:

In December 2021, Carla Zoe Cremer, a Research Scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute, and Luke Kemp, a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, released a paper entitled “Democratising Risk: In Search of a Methodology to Study Existential Risk.”
The following year, Torres made the startling revelation that the paper had been written by three people: Cremer, Kemp… and Torres. Indeed, Torres indicated that they (Torres) were the first author. Torres also noted that, when the paper was near completion (“penultimate draft”), Torres was “removed [f]orcibly” after Cremer and Kemp “were instructed that Torres could not be part of the collaboration.” (Bold added.)

“Mark Fuentes” goes on to say more about this, but I won’t reproduce what he says here. Incidentally, the account above is accurate, to the best of my recollection, and is also consistent with Cremer’s memory of the situation.5 Again, we needn’t get into the details here, as that is not our aim with the present article.

The point is that Halstead made this accusation on August 27, 2022, Throwaway151 then repeated this on September 13, 2022, after which “Mark Fuentes” included the very same claim in his article published on November 8, 2022.

5. Throwaway151 and John Halstead

Interestingly, public records show that someone with the name “John Halstead” has created two EA Forum accounts in the past. I have searched, and cannot find any evidence that there are two “John Halsteads” in the EA community. There is the primary “John G. Halstead” account, which was deleted shortly before the “Mark Fuentes” article appeared on the EA Forum earlier this year (more on this below)—that is, sometime between December 12, 2023 and January 6, 2024.

Then, there is a second “John Halstead” account that was created at 6:20 am EDT on September 10, 2022, which is 11:20 am UK time.6 Exactly 3 minutes later, at 6:23 am EDT on September 10, 2022, Throwaway151 created their account. Why? To repeat the very same claims made roughly two weeks earlier by Halstead himself about my collaboration with Cremer and Kemp. See for yourself:

This second account of Halstead’s was then immediately abandoned. It never posted anything on the EA Forum. What do you think is going on here? Why would Halstead create a second EA Forum account 3 minutes before Throwaway151 created their account to repeat the very claims that Halstead had just recently made? Is this just a coincidence?

6. “Claressa Meals” and John Halstead

There are two additional reasons that Throwaway151’s EA Forum post is very important. Here is the first reason: on September 15, 2022, two days after posting their EA Forum article, Throwaway151 then posted screenshots of me dating back to early 2018 under this very EA Forum article. Within a few hours, John Halstead also posted a screenshot of me directly under Throwaway151’s screenshot. Halstead wrote to Throwaway151, who created their account 3 minutes after Halstead had created a second account: “Given that people are sharing evidence on Torres, I thought I would chime in.”

Every single one of these screenshots that Throwaway151 and John Halstead shared ended up in the “Claressa Meals” article. There are several points to make about this:

First, on September 15, 2022, Throwaway151 permanently deleted their EA Forum post and, along with it, all of the screenshots that Throwaway151 and John Halstead had shared. (See this for confirmation.) These screenshots were then nowhere on the Internet—I have checked this using reverse image search engines. In fact, Throwaway151 deleted their EA Forum article on September 15 almost immediately after “Mark Fuentes” took his own screenshots of this very post. See below for further discussion of this strange coincidence.
Second, “Claressa Meals” presents all of the same screenshots from Throwaway151 in almost exactly the same order that Throwaway151 presented them. You can confirm this here (Throwaway151) and here (“Claressa Meals”).
Third, “Claressa Meals” didn’t just include similar screenshots to those shared by Throwaway151: they are identical screenshots, pixel for pixel. (Again, check the links above.) Hence, it seems that “Claressa Meals” must have had direct access to the post by Throwaway151 that was only online for 3 days, or “Claressa Meals” is Throwaway151.
Fourth, and perhaps most peculiar, “Claressa Meals” made the decision to redact “her” screenshots (from both Throwaway151 and John Halstead) in exactly the same idiosyncratic way that Halstead had redacted the screenshot that he shared: using gray rectangles with thin black borders. But: why did these two people redact these screenshots in exactly the same way? Why redact these names—such as “Michael Shermer” and “Peter Boghossian”—in the first place? Why did John Halstead and “Clarissa Meals” both redact the same names in the same way? The only difference between the screenshot that John Halstead posted and the pixel-for-pixel identical screenshot that “Claressa Meals” posted is that in the “Claressa Meals” version, Halstead’s name is also redacted. Why would that be? The fact that these redactions look identical, and were done at all, suggests that the same person modified the same screenshot files using the same image editing software with the same image editing settings. Don’t take my word for it—see for yourself below: the screenshot from Halstead is on the left; the screenshot from “Claressa Meals” is on the right. See any differences? Notice that both screenshots were taken 1 week (indicated as “1w”) after I originally posted them. Both were “edited” by me. And both had no “likes” at the time the screenshot was taken. Zoom in, if you’d like. These are identical.7

Even more, you can see below and on her original post here that “Claressa Meals” then proceeded to redact all of Throwaway151’s screenshots in exactly the same way that Halstead had redacted his screenshot: using gray rectangles with thin black borders. “She” redacts the very same names as Halstead—such as “Michael Shermer” and “Peter Boghossian”—with the very same boxes:

Collage of screenshots from the “Claressa Meals” article, in which “she” redacts the same names in the same way—gray rectangles with thin black borders—as John Halstead. You can find these here.

Why did “Claressa Meals” redact names like “Michael Shermer” and “Peter Boghossian” just like Halstead? “She” gives us a clue when “she” writes that I have made “rape and pedophilia allegations involving innocent parties” (italics added). So, “she” believes that the people I was referring to are “innocent parties.”

John Halstead says something rather similar in an EA Forum post from 2021, where he accuses me of “casually throwing around rape allegations about celebrities on facebook.” He is then warned by the EA Forum moderators for his comments about me, and responds by saying: “There is a reason I didn’t share the screenshot of the paedophilia/rape accusations, which is that I thought it would be totally unfair to the people accused” (italics added).

I’m pretty surprised and disappointed by this warning. I made 3 claims about ways that Phil has interacted with me. 1. I didn’t share the facebook messages because I thought it would be a breach of privacy to share a private message thread without Phil’s permission, and I don’t want to talk to him, so I can’t get his permission. 2. I also don’t especially want to link to the piece calling me a racist, which anyone familiar with Phil’s output would already know about, in any case. 3. There is a reason I didn’t share the screenshot of the paedophilia/rape accusations, which is that I thought it would be totally unfair to the people accused. This is why I called them celebrities rather vaguely. As you say, I have shown all of these claims to be true in private in any case. This feels a lot like punishing someone for having the guts to call out a vindictive individual in the grip of a lifelong persecution complex. As illustrated by the upvotes on my comments, lots of people agree with me, but didn’t want to say anything, for whatever reason. If you were going to offer any sanction for anyone, I would have thought it would be the people at CSER, such as Simon Beard and Luke Kemp, who have kept collaborating with him and endorsing his work for the last few years, despite knowing about the behaviour that you have just banned him for. — Note that John Halstead’s name now appears as “anonymous” because he deleted his account late last year or early this year. **As proof, compare this link with this link**.

Some remarks about these statements from “Claressa Meals” and John Halstead:

The pedophile and rape accusations are referencing Jeffrey Epstein and Michael Shermer, respectively. Epstein is a convicted sex offender and a pedophile, and Michael Shermer is a rapist. Those are the “innocent parties” that “Claressa Meals” is referring to. I came to believe that Shermer is a rapist after befriending his rape victim and discovering that he has a long history of sexually assaulting and harassing women. So, obviously, I stand by those remarks, and am alarmed to know that “Claressa Meals” doesn’t think Epstein was a pedophile (he’s an “innocent party”), while Halstead thinks it’s “unfair” to refer to Epstein as a “pedophile” and Shermer as a “rapist.” I guess we just have differing opinions about the matter.
Halstead, in his second point (included at the bottom of the screenshot above), says that I once called him “a racist.” This is untrue: I have never once called him “a racist.” Halstead is lying. Indeed, I have never called anyone in the EA/longtermist community “a racist,” “a white supremacist,” “a Nazi,” or anything of the sort—all of which Halstead has claimed. Halstead has been spreading these falsehoods since ~2019, along with the lie that I “harassed” and “defamed” him (also discussed more below). In fact, these claims from Halstead constitute defamation.

7. “Claressa Meals” Deletes “Her” Article Exactly When “Mark Fuentes” Publishes His

After publishing “her” article, “Claressa Meals” tried very hard to get people to pay attention to it. “She” tweeted “her” article hundreds of times in late October, mostly in response to tweets from colleagues of mine or anyone who would mention my name on Twitter. Some of these tweets from “Claressa Meals”—who once again included “Wanna stop abuse” in “her” Twitter bio—were reported for harassment, and my recollection is that she sent me numerous threats. I cannot double check my memory because her Twitter account no longer exists. My guess is that Twitter banned it, but I do not know for sure. Here is the example that I shared above:

Incidentally, I received other threats of physical violence around the very same time that “Claressa Meals” appeared out of nowhere. Here are some examples of threats that I received on October 11 and 12, 2022, just three and four days before “Claressa Meals” published “her” article reproducing screenshots from Throwaway151 and John Halstead:

Only three weeks after “Claressa Meals” posted “her” article, “Mark Fuentes” then published his. At the very same time that “Mark Fuentes” published his article, “Claressa Meals” deleted her article from Medium. I believe that her article was removed either the same day or the day before “Mark Fuentes” published his article. The link to “her” article now leads to a 410 message that says: “The author deleted this Medium story.”

What a coincidence: “Claressa Meals” removes “her” article. “Mark Fuentes” publishes his.

Furthermore, looking at the publicly available page source data for these articles shows that “Claressa Meals” created “her” article the very same day that it was published, on October 15, 2022, which is plausible because “she” basically just copy-pasted what Throwaway151 and John Halstead had previously shared on the EA Forum. See for yourself:

You can confirm this here: view-source:https://web.archive.org/web/20221015223150/https://medium.com/@claressameals/phil-torres-harassment-1aa62d5c6edf

The “page source” for “Mark Fuentes” indicates that his Substack account was created on October 20, 2022—just five days after “Claressa Meals” published her article, and less than 3 weeks before he published his article on Substack. In fact, this was the same day he created his Twitter account, too. I will present this data below.

So, “Mark Fuentes” created his account days after the “Claressa Meals” article. The “Claressa Meals” article was then deleted at the exact same time that “Mark Fuentes” published his article, on November 8, 2022. The “Mark Fuentes” article makes the exact same claims that “Claressa Meals,” John Halstead, and Throwaway151 had previously made (and, to my knowledge, no one else in the EA community other than Halstead had previously made). For example:

“Claressa Meals” says that I have engaged in “stalking” and “harassment.” “Mark Fuentes” writes that I have engaged in “stalking and harassment.” Halstead repeatedly says that I have persistently “harassed” him. Throwaway151 claims that “many people in the community had accused [me] of harassment.”
“Claressa Meals” says that I once engaged in “racist abuse.” “Mark Fuentes” writes that I “made racist comments about at least one person.” Halstead says that I called him “a racist.” Throwaway151 claims that I have “called many people in the community … racists.”8
And so on.

None of this is true, by the way. If anything, the reality of the situation is that I have been on the receiving end of harassment and defamation from the EA community for at least two years. (See the “Timeline” of section 17.)

Even more, the “Mark Fuentes” article includes some of the very same screenshots found in the “Claressa Meals” article, though sometimes of higher quality. Unlike “Claressa Meals,” though, “Mark Fuentes” un-redacts names like “Peter Boghossian,” because in his iteration of the article, he wants to attack and “discredit” me by naming these people as innocent victims of an out-of-control social justice warrior (i.e., me).

The “Claressa Meals” article never caught on—no one paid attention. Her aggressive, cyberbully tactics did not gain any followers. “Mark Fuentes,” in contrast, portrays himself as a kind and caring person who just wants to do the right thing.

8. Throwaway151 and “Mark Fuentes”

This brings us to the second reason that the September 13-15, 2022, EA Forum post by Throwaway151 is important. Recall once again that Throwaway151 created their EA Forum account literally 3 minutes after John Halstead created a second EA Forum account.

Under the Throwaway151 post that made false claims about my collaboration with Cremer and Kemp, I also posted a few comments using my own pseudonym (not unlike the “Mark Fuentes” pseudonym, because I, too, am afraid of being harassed by people). In his article, “Mark Fuentes” includes two screenshots of these comments that I made. His screenshots indicate that they were taken exactly 2 minutes and 5 minutes after I posted them. See for yourself here and here.

What does that imply? It implies that “Mark Fuentes” must have been right there, on the EA Forum in mid-September with both Throwaway151 and John Halstead, following the conversation in realtime. How else could he have taken these screenshots, which have only ever been posted online once: in the “Mark Fuentes” article?

Even more, the comments that I left under Throwaway151’s post were made on September 15—the very day that Throwaway151 deleted their post. In fact, Throwaway151 deleted their post immediately after “Mark Fuentes” took his screenshots. This is evidenced by the fact that my comments were not saved on the Internet Archive (see for yourself). The Archive saved 3 days of discussion, but not my pseudonymous comments. Why? Because those comments were made right before Throwaway151 deleted their post.

“Mark Fuentes” himself was thus following the conversation in realtime, alongside Throwaway151 and John Halstead, and then right after he took his screenshots, the Throwaway151 post was removed by the author. What another very odd coincidence!

9. Throwaway86 and “Mark Fuentes”

But there’s more. “Mark Fuentes” also includes in his article the same screenshot that Throwaway86 included in their EA Forum comment from December 17, 2021. Recall that Throwaway86 said they had a falling out with me two years earlier, in 2019, the same year that I had a falling out with John Halstead and no one else in the EA community. A few important points about this:

The screenshot that “Mark Fuentes” and Throwaway86 both post is identical pixel for pixel. It is not two screenshots of the same thing. It is the exact same image. You can see these screenshots below: the screenshot from Throwaway86 is on the left, and the screenshot from “Mark Fuentes” is on the right. You can also access these images here (Throwaway86) and here (“Mark Fuentes”). See any differences at all? Look at how Helen Pluckrose’s image is cropped at the top left. Notice how many “likes” and “retweets” she has. Zoom in, if you’d like: these screenshots are identical down to the pixel.9

Furthermore, it turns out that Throwaway151 wasn’t the only one who deleted their contributions to the EA Forum: so did Throwaway86. In fact, the Internet Archive indicates that Throwaway86 deleted their EA Forum comment, and along with it their screenshot, sometime between March 7, 2022 and April 26, 2022 (see for yourself). This was 7 months before “Mark Fuentes” appeared out of nowhere. Hence, for 7 whole months, this exact screenshot was nowhere on the Internet. Sometime in the summer of 2022, I used a reverse image search website to try and locate it, and I couldn’t. The only place this screenshot ever appeared was on the EA Forum, and Throwaway86 deleted it at least by the end of April 2022.
So, how the heck did “Mark Fuentes” find that exact screenshot? You cannot find it on Google. You cannot find it on the EA Forum. And you cannot find it on the Wayback Machine unless you have the exact URL—which I did, as I had saved the URL back in early 2022.

10. “Mark Fuentes” and Two Threatening Emails

As the “Timeline” of section 17 shows, “Mark Fuentes” appeared out of nowhere, Tweeted obsessively about me, published a 32-page-long article, and then vanished from the Internet. His article contains some of the same screenshots included in the “Claressa Meals” article (who got “her” screenshots from EA Forum posts from John Halstead and Throwaway151, who created their accounts 3 minutes apart), as well as the pixel-for-pixel identical screenshot from Throwaway86, who says they had a falling out with me in 2019.

“Mark Fuentes” claims to have only a casual connection to EA, and he suggests that he only recently came across me. Yet his article displays a very impressive knowledge of the EA worldview, the longtermist philosophy, consequentialism and utilitarianism, the history of EA, and my own work and activism going back to late 2017 and early 201810—including exchanges I had with people in 2018 that can no longer be found on Facebook or Twitter, only on archive websites. Hmm.

Starting on November 7, 2022, “Mark Fuentes” starts tweeting obsessively about me. Of the 138 tweets and retweets from his account between November 8 and November 25, 2022, a total of 123 were about me. Only 15 were unrelated to me and my critiques of EA. That’s an average of 7.2 tweets per day about me over the course of weeks, though most of these tweets came in sudden bursts. See below for the sort of obsessive tweets and tweet threads that “Mark Fuentes” posted—I am reminded here of how “Claressa Meals” obsessively tweeted hundreds of times about me in an attempt to get people to pay attention to her article. In this video, note that all of these tweets are about me:

Although he posted his article on November 8, 2022, publicly available page source data indicates that “Mark Fuentes” created his Twitter and Substack accounts on October 30, 2022. He created his Substack account just 22 minutes after creating his Twitter account. You can see the page source data for his Twitter account here:

You can confirm this here: view-source:https://web.archive.org/web/20221124230521/https://twitter.com/Mark__Fuentes

The page source data for the “Mark Fuentes” Substack account is here:

You can confirm this here: view-source:https://markfuentes1.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile

Just 1.5 hours later, on the very same day, I received a threatening email from an untraceable, anonymous email account (Gurreillamail.com).11 It threatens to dox me with personal information that I had previously shared on Facebook, but which would be (very) inappropriate to share without my explicit permission. You can see this below:

The previous day, I received yet another threatening email from an untraceable, anonymous account (also Gurreillamail.com) that called me a “psycho” and claimed that I have spread lies about people. You can see this below:

I have received only four threatening emails over the past two years. Of these four emails, one was sent on October 19, 2022, and the other on October 20, 2022—just 1.5 hours after “Mark Fuentes” created both his Twitter and Substack accounts.

Is this just another improbable coincidence?

(See the “Timeline” of section 17 for more examples, as this is not an isolated case. See also this footnote.12)

11. Other Threats and Harassment that I Have Received

“Claressa Meals” created her Twitter and Medium accounts on October 15. “Mark Fuentes” created his accounts five days later. Around the very same time, a flurry of other anonymous or pseudonymous online accounts were mysteriously created—many of which harassed me and my colleagues (often being reported for harassment), and some of which sent me threats of physical violence.

Consider, for example, @HowardRock8. He posted literally hundreds and hundreds of tweets about me beginning in November 2022, one month after creating his account in mid-October, when both “Claressa Meals” and “Mark Fuentes” created their accounts. Notably, @HowardRock8 also retweeted people like Helen Pluckrose (here) and Michael Shermer (here). See the video below:

As this video shows, nearly all of @HowardRock8’s tweets shared the article by “Mark Fuentes,” in response to people who had posted favorably about my articles criticizing EA and longtermism. @HowardRock8 has been as relentless as “Claressa Meals” and “Mark Fuentes.”

Other suspicious anonymous accounts include @GmaPole (which uses my personal website URL in their profile description), @BascottChris, @Sally_Soul_SM, @numinoustalgia, @xriskologist, and @gorz_andre. These are just a few of the accounts that popped up in the aftermath of publishing critiques of EA (all of them appeared in September, October, November, or December 2022, tweeted false accusations or inappropriate things about me—one doxxed my ex-wife under a thread I posted about coming out as nonbinary—and then most were then promptly abandoned. They popped into existence to discuss me and then disappeared—the exact same MO). A few examples are below.

**Mid-to-late September**: @gorz_andre, @BascottChris, @numinoustalgia (who tweeted threads almost identical to those tweeted by @Mark__Fuentes and @HowardRock8). **Mid-October**: @GmaPole, @HowardRock8, **@ClaressaMeals**, **@Mark__Fuentes**, and @Sally_Soul_SM (the last of whom created an account just days after @ClaressaMeals). **Early December**: @xriskologist. **Compare these to the dates that the EA Forum accounts** for Throwaway151, Matis (discussed below), and “John Halstead” (second account) were created: all in mid-September. AgainstOnlineHarassment (discussed below) was then created in November. See the “Timeline” of section 17 for details.

As with the “Claressa Meals” account, many of these were also accused of and/or reported for harassment and cyberbullying. For example, the exchange below is specifically in response to @BascottChris harassing me and some online acquaintances:

Once again, it was also around this very time that I received multiple anonymous emails threatening to dox me, inappropriately mentioning my abusive ex-wife (repeating something that @Sally_Soul_SM had said on Twitter in doxxing my ex-wife), calling me a “psycho,” and ominously telling me to “get psychiatric assistance before it’s too late, buddy.”

In fact, one of these emails was sent the very same day—November 23, 2022—that John Halstead posted an EA Forum article specifically about me, in which he is very upset about an article I wrote critiquing something he’d coauthored with Willian MacAskill. (This article of mine was published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and we will return to it below). Incidentally, “Mark Fuentes” also tweeted a bunch about this very same article of mine. Here is the November 23, 2022 email that I received:

12. “Mark Fuentes” Returns!

I obviously suspected that “Mark Fuentes” was behind at least some of the harassment that I had received. To prove that he is not lying about his identity and his connections to EA, and to confirm that he is probably not behind the threats and harassment that I have received (some of which really alarmed me), I made him the following offer via Substack, which I had also made on Twitter:

Right after I sent this offer to “Mark Fuentes,” in early December 2022, he vanished. For 17 months, he was nowhere to be found. However, anonymous accounts like @HowardRock8 continued to share his article obsessively, as the video above shows.

Then, just as suddenly as he disappeared, “Mark Fuentes” reappeared on May 1, 2024, to comment under an EA Forum post by an account called “anonymous-for-obvious-reasons.” The “anonymous-for-obvious-reasons” account was created (a) only one day before “Mark Fuentes” created his own EA Forum account, and (b) for the sole purpose of sharing the “Mark Fuentes” article in full.

In other words, “anonymous-for-obvious-reasons” created their EA Forum account on April 30, 2024, and then published the “Mark Fuentes” article on the EA Forum on May 1, 2024. “Mark Fuentes” created his EA Forum account on May 1 and began to comment under his own article that very same day. What do you think is going on here?

Incidentally, sometime between December 12, 2023 and January 6, 2024, John Halstead deleted his primary EA Forum account, which makes it difficult to search for previous posts and comments of his, though I will present some relevant links and screenshots below.

Recall once again that “Claressa Meals” deleted “her” Medium article exactly when “Mark Fuentes” posted his article on Substack, and that Throwaway151 created their account exactly 3 minutes after Halstead created a second EA Forum account. There are a whole lot of odd coincidences involving the timing of accounts being created and deleted in relation to the “Mark Fuentes” article.

In response to the “anonymous-for-obvious-reasons” EA Forum post and the comments from “Mark Fuentes” defending his claims and identity, some EAs expressed skepticism. For example, Owen Cotton-Barratt writes that “at this point I think it’s correct to assume that ‘Mark Fuentes’ … is misrepresenting their identity, and in particular likely has some substantial history of involvement with the EA community, and perhaps history of beef with Torres.”

When I first read this article I assumed it was written in good faith (and found it quite helpful). However, at this point I think it’s correct to assume that “Mark Fuentes” (an admitted pseudonym which has only been used to write about Torres) is misrepresenting their identity, and in particular likely has some substantial history of involvement with the EA community, and perhaps history of beef with Torres, rather than having come to this topic as a disinterested party. This view is based on: Torres’s claims about patterns they’ve seen in criticism (part 3 of this; evidence I take as suggestive but by no means conclusive) Mark refusing to consider any steps to verify their identity, and instead inviting people to disregard the content in the section called “my story” Some impressions I can’t fully unpack about the tone and focus of Mark’s comments on this post (and their private message to me) seeming better explained by them not having been a disinterested party than by them having been one A view that we’re not supposed to give fully anonymous accounts the benefit of the doubt: … in order not to be open to abuse by people claiming whatever identity most supports their points; … because they’re not putting their reputation on the line; … because the costs are smaller if they are incorrectly smeared (it doesn’t attach to any real person’s reputation). With that assumption, I feel kind of upset. I’m not a fan of Torres, but I think grossly misrepresenting authorship is unacceptable, and it’s all the more important to call it out when it’s coming from someone I might otherwise find myself on the same side of an argument as. And while I expect that much of the content of the post is still valid, it’s harder to take at face value now that I more suspect that the examples have been adversarially selected.

Cotton-Barratt then asked “Mark Fuentes” if he would be willing to privately confirm his identity. Several EAs, including Nathan Young and someone named “Linch” offered to confidentially confirm that “Mark Fuentes” isn’t lying about who he claims to be. Unsurprisingly, “Mark Fuentes” rejected this suggestion, which I had previously made to him. He writes: “No, I am not comfortable disclosing my identity to a trusted party because I want to minimize the chances that Torres succeeds in doxxing me, and any disclosure involves risks.”13

But this doesn’t make any sense coming from a lawyer, which “Mark Fuentes" claims to be. As someone—an actual lawyer named “Jason”—posted on the EA Forum in response to “Mark Fuentes”:

I'd add that Mark's rationale -- "disclosure always carries some risk" -- seems underspecified. I'm sure Mark, as a lawyer, can cobble together an NDA that sharply limits the verifier(s), and requires them to clear any reference to his name or identifying info from their computer after verification. Probably we'd be looking at flashing an ID, and providing a bar number / state of licensure. That would probably be enough, since AFAIK no major EA works as a public defender in NY.

13. An Ax to Grind?

When I originally started writing this article in the fall of 2022, I did not know who might be behind the “Mark Fuentes,” “Claressa Meals,” or Throwaway151 accounts. I had no idea, and did not suspect anyone in particular.

Since the summer of 2022, when I began to publish a series of critiques targeting EA, I knew that many EAs had come to dislike me. I asked around about who might have an ax to grind with me—including within the EA community, as some EAs were still friendly with me—and I was alarmed by what I heard. I had hardly thought about Halstead after our falling out in 2019; I have almost never mentioned him in my articles; and I have rarely mentioned his name on Twitter (most of the times that I have mentioned him on Twitter were simply to correct false, defamatory claims from Halstead that others were repeating). But his name kept being mentioned.

In October of 2022, I asked a prominent member of the EA/longtermist community about “Mark Fuentes.” Halstead’s name popped up, and this is what that person said about him:

I believe that John is a very hateful person, one of the few people who I have engaged with in EA etc who does bad stuff because he wants to rather than because he has convinced himself that it's actually good.

This obviously caught my eye.

Around the same time, I was also told by a fairly prominent member of the EA/longtermist community that Halstead had persistently “harassed” someone at CSER, at which I once had a “visiting scholar” position, thus causing the person on the receiving end of this harassment “a world of hurt.” The words “harassed” and “world of hurt” are not my own—they are the words of this person with direct knowledge of the incident. (I would be happy to corroborate this off-the-record with interested parties.) I found that very alarming.

Furthermore, sometime in late 2022—I am being intentionally vague about the date, though it was very close to when “Mark Fuentes” published his article—Halstead himself “bombarded” an editor of mine with complaints about an article that I wrote. “Bombarded” is not my word—it is the word my editor used. In fact, Halstead didn’t just send a torrent of emails to my editor, but to my editor’s boss and my editor’s boss’s boss, causing them to become “increasingly rankled.”14 This is documented in emails that I would be willing to share off-the-record with journalists or colleagues, to verify these claims.

On November 23, 2022, Halstead then shared a letter that he had sent to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He shared this letter on the EA Forum, in which he complains that my Bulletin article was inaccurate. (My editor disagreed, although there were two minor corrections made to the article: one was the fault of the editor, and the other was my fault. These were minor.) My Bulletin article specifically criticized parts of William MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future that Halstead had “essentially coauthored,” according to the book’s Acknowledgment section.

Tldr: This is a letter I wrote to the Climate Contributing Editor of the Bulletin Atomic Scientists, Dawn Stover, about Emile Torres' latest piece criticising EA. In short: In advance of the publication of the article, Ms Stover reached out to us to check on what Torres calls their most "disturbing" claim viz. that Will MacAskill lied about getting advice from five climate experts. We showed them that this was false. The Bulletin published the claim anyway, and then tweeted it. In my opinion, this is outrageous, so I have asked them to issue a correction and an apology. Update: The Bulletin has declined to correct the piece or issue an apology. They say that the editor's note provides 'balance' for the reader. They haven't explained how their false tweet remains acceptable. By these standards, media outlets don't have to correct false claims in articles, they just have to include editor's notes contradicting the false claims. There are apparently no constraints on what media outlets are permitted to tweet.

On December 3, 2022, I received a random Twitter DM from someone I did not know, have never interacted with, and didn’t follow. This is the first message that they sent me, out of the blue15:

I just saw a talk given by John Halstead about "Climate Change & Longtermism". You are living rent free in his brain, it seems, because he cursed your name and seemed genuinely bothered when [someoone asked] him in Q&A what he thinks you and eg Mann are missing re agriculture. 😄

Based on this and other messages, it seems that Halstead clearly has a problem with me. He has repeatedly lied about me and expressed outrage at things that I’ve written about EA and longtermism. He falsely claims that I have called him “a racist.” He claims that I have characterized “various long-termists as white supremacists on the flimsiest grounds imaginable.” He claims that I have a history of “calling [him] and others nazis.” None of this is true. In fact, it’s defamation. Here are some examples.

From March 8, 2021:

Note again that John Halstead’s name now appears as “anonymous” because he deleted his account late last year or early this year. **As proof, compare this link with this link**. This applies to the screenshots below, as well.

From March 9, 2021:

From May 12, 2021:

From September 15, 2022:

My whole experience with Torres has been surreal - for one small piece of criticism, he went after me for years. I know he has done the same to others: some people he has gone after have needed counselling, and I think people should take that into account when they interact with Torres.

From September 15, 2022:

From this point on, he published several now infamous pieces suggesting that I and others in EA support white supremacy. He also sent me numerous messages on Facebook after I had stopped responding. In this Facebook post, Torres inexplicably namechecks me while he is accusing some people of being rapists/paedophiles (their names are redacted)

From October 26, 2022:

With respect to the September 15, 2022 claim that “he also sent me numerous messages on Facebook after I had stopped responding,” this is also provably false. Between February 2019 and July of 2019, Halstead and I exchanged a total of ~29 private messages, 11 of which were from him and 18 of which were from me. The last message that we ever exchanged came from him, not me, and he sent it after I wrote: “Go away, John. Your behavior has sounded all sorts of alarm bells for me.”16 I would be happy to verify this with anyone interested, in private.

14. Comparing Claims From John Halstead, Throwaway151, and “Mark Fuentes”

Already knowing that Throwaway86 provides identifying information that matches only one person in the EA community, I decided to look more closely at things that Throwaway151, “Mark Fuentes,” and John Halstead have said. I found many striking similarities.

For example, compare the above comments from Halstead to what Throwaway151 writes in his September 13-15, 2022, EA Forum post—recalling once again that this Throwaway151 account was created literally 3 minutes after Halstead created a second EA Forum account.

From September 13, 2022:

From September 15, 2022:

Do you think the 'emotional' reaction to Torres in the community could be due to the fact that he has called a lot of people in the community white supremacists and eugenicists over the last two years? I ask again: how would you feel if that had been you? You don't seem to mind because Torres has attacked others and not you, and he happens to share your political ideology; I think this is shameful. You say it is annoying to be placed in boxes with people you might disagree with. You started collaborating with Torres well after he had started defaming other people in the community. Do you regret ever collaborating with Torres? Are you still collaborating with him?

From September 15, 2022:

These comments all look very similar. There are several points to make about them:

It is, once again, false that “many people in the community had accused [me] of harassment.” I cannot think of a single person other than Halstead who has made this claim.17
Both Throwaway151 and John Halstead mention “the last two years” in their comments—the exact same phrase. I cannot find anyone else on the EA Forum who complains about things I’ve said over “the last two years.”
Both say that I’ve been calling people in the community “white supremacists” or “Nazis,” which is false.
Both accuse me of defaming people in the EA/longtermist community, which is false.
And both specifically reference my collaborations with people at CSER: Halstead complains about me collaborating with “people at CSER, such as Simon Beard and Luke Kemp,” in his words. Meanwhile, Throwaway151 specifically calls out Luke Kemp, who worked at CSER, and the last screenshot posted above is specifically responding to Carla Cremer, who at the time was at CSER. Throwaway151 thus writes to Cremer: “I think this is shameful. … You started collaborating with Torres well after he had started defaming other people in the community. Do you regret ever collaborating with Torres? Are you still collaborating with him?” Why were both Throwaway151 and John Halstead so flustered about my links to CSER?

Now compare these claims from Throwaway151 and John Halstead with some claims that “Mark Fuentes” makes. In his article, “Mark Fuentes” mentions “white supremacist” four times, while also bringing up “eugenics.” For example:

And:

And18:

Torres has summarized this passage as “claim[ing that] we should actually care more about people in rich countries than in poor countries”; as noting that “‘giving to the rich’ is the obvious conclusion”; and as “literally arguing that, given the longtermist framework, we should value the lives of people in rich countries more than the lives of people in poor countries.” And Torres has, based on these summaries, drawn the conclusion that Beckstead’s views are “overtly white-supremacist”3 and in “the spirit of eugenics.”

And:

Revealingly, in another version of this article, Torres calls Beckstead’s views “unambiguously white-supremacist.” — Note that the screenshots above specifically cite an unpublished academic paper of mine, which I chose to never publish. **It was a rough draft that I had posted online in early 2021, and subsequently removed.** So, **how in the heck did “Mark Fuentes” find it if he wasn’t closely following the EA/longtermist community—and my work—****back in 2021?** Furthermore, note that “Mark Fuentes” is quoting from a *rough draft of an article that I chose not to publish*, because I was still working through the ideas at the time. **The only reason I posted this rough draft online was to get feedback from colleagues—****I never gave anyone permission to quote it as if it were a final, published paper**. It is a well established norm in academia that **unpublished drafts should not be quoted without explicit permission from the author**.

There are other notable parallels, too. For example, both John Halstead and “Mark Fuentes” make the very same claims about the reasons that I have become critical of EA—namely, that I have a “vendetta” against certain people and have felt “rejection” from the community (another blatant falsehood; see this footnote for discussion19).

For example, Halstead writes:

I think some of the criticism of your paper with Kemp was due to it being co-authored with Phil Torres, who has harassed and defamed many people (including me) because he thinks they have frustrated his career aims

And:

It is very generous to characterise Torres' post as insightful and thought provoking. He characterises various long-termists as white supremacists on the flimsiest grounds imaginable. This is a very serious accusation and one that he very obviously throws around due to his own personal vendettas against certain people. e.g. despite many of his former colleagues at CSER also being long-termists he doesn't call them nazis because he doesn't believe they have slighted him. Because I made the mistake of once criticising him, he spent much of the last two years calling me a white supremacist, even though the piece of mine he cited did not even avow belief in long-termism.

And:

To my knowledge, John Halstead is the only one in the EA/longtermist community who has repeatedly made this claim—or has made this claim at all. I cannot find a single example of someone else making this claim.20

Yet one finds the exact same (inaccurate) speculation about my state of mind and inner motivations in the “Mark Fuentes” article, which states:

(It is beyond the scope of this article to examine Torres's violent "sign reversals" in their assessment of people and communities. But it is striking by how often these shifts in opinion appear, upon closer inspection, to be triggered by Torres experiencing a feeling of rejection, such as being denied a job, not being invited to a podcast, or having a book collaboration terminated. Torres’s subsequent “realization” that these people and communities, once held in such high esteem, were in fact profoundly evil or dangerous routinely comes after those personal setbacks, as a post hoc rationalization. A future article may explore these incidents, which shed so much light into Torres’s character and motives, in much greater detail.) — Notice here that “Mark Fuentes” mentions “having a book collaboration terminated.” What is he referring to? SJ Beard wrote an afterword to my most recent book *Human Extinction*, but retracted it for EA-community-related issues because of, as I understand it, how “radioactive” my name had become, as a critic of EA. **How could “Mark Fuentes” have possibly known this?**

As it happens—and perhaps this will be unsurprising at this point—“Claressa Meals” makes almost the exact same claim in her Medium article—the same Medium article that “she” deleted exactly when “Mark Fuentes” published his. “She” writes:

Look familiar?

15. Similar Statements from Other Anonymous Accounts

As it happens, there are additional similarities between some of the anonymous online accounts and EA Forum accounts that have spread defamatory claims about me. Consider the case of AgainstOnlineHarassment. On November 22, 2022, one day before John Halstead published his EA Forum article about me, someone created this AgainstOnlineHarassment account and then four minutes later shared the “Mark Fuentes” article (via the highlighted word “evidence”):

A key difference is that there is strong evidence that Émile P. Torres is an intellectually dishonest critic. By contrast, when a typical EA Forum user draws a distinction between e.g. "bigoted" and "bigot", there is no reason to suppose they are exploiting the difference to make toxic insinuations about other people. (Posted under an anonymous account because I don't want Torres to harass me, as he has done previously when I posted under my real name.)

AgainstOnlineHarassment says that they are anonymous because they “don’t want Torres to harass me, as he has done previously when I posted under my real name.” Recall that this is very similar to what Throwaway86 said back in 2021:

Of note is that in late November 2022, virtually no one in the EA community knew about the “Mark Fuentes” article. So, how did AgainstOnlineHarassment, who says that I previously harassed them when they posted under their real name, know about “Mark Fuentes”? This is the only time that AgainstOnlineHarassment ever posted on the EA Forum: the account was created to share a defamatory article about me, by “Mark Fuentes,” and was then promptly abandoned.

Or consider a Twitter account called @numinoustalgia, which tweeted for the first time on September 17, 2022. Pretty much the only thing they’ve tweeted about is me, making the exact same claims as “Claressa Meals,” “Mark Fuentes,” and the others mentioned above, often using very similar language. On October 25, the same day that John Halstead claimed on the EA Forum that I’ve accused EA/longtermists of having “endorse[d] white supremacist ideology and eugenics,” @numinoustalgia obsessively tweeted about me 25 times in one day, making claims about “eugenics” and saying that I have a history of “harassing and even stalking [my] intellectual opponents.” (Coincidence?) The account adds that:

Look familiar?

Or consider two additional EA Forum accounts called “Matis” and “Throwaway11. Taking these in order:

The Matis account was created on September 13, 2022, the very same day that Throwaway151 posted their EA Forum article making inaccurate claims about my collaboration with Cremer and Kemp. Matis then proceeded to comment directly under Throwaway151, along with Halstead, writing at one point that “there’s also the question of online harassment. People I trust say that Torres has …,” beyond which the comment cannot be read because it is not saved on the Wayback Machine (bold added). He also writes that I have “insinuat[ed] that various longtermists hold white supremacist views” (bold added). Again, look familiar?

The only other time that Matis ever commented on the EA Forum was under a post by John Halstead—the above-mentioned post about my article in the Bulletin. Matis was there to agree with Halstead. Coincidentally, on November 7, 2022—one day before publishing his article—“Mark Fuentes” tweeted a screenshot of a comment from “Matis” posted under the then-deleted Throwaway151 EA Forum post.

“Mark Fuentes” then included this screenshot in his article—again, a screenshot from an EA Forum article that was online for only 3 days, but which he must have been following in realtime, because he took screenshots of things I’d written only 2 and 5 minutes after I wrote them, immediately before Throwaway151 suddenly deleted their article.

Now consider Throwaway11, which was created on the EA Forum on December 18, 2022. The only time this account ever posted was to share the “Mark Fuentes” article—which, even at this point, almost no one in the EA community knew about, or was talking about, or was sharing, to the best of my knowledge. Again, they bring up “harassment”:

throwaway11 63 karma Joined Dec 2022 Message Comments 1 You Don’t Have to Call Yourself an Effective Altruist or Fraternize With Effective Altruists or Support Longtermism, Just Please, for the Love of God, Help the Global Poor throwaway11 1y 64 The problem many people have with Torres is not just "difference of opinion about longtermism", but a history of lying and harassment. Therefore, it is important to consider that donating to an effective charity does not excuse or condone unethical behaviour.

These are just a few examples that I could adduce. All exhibit the same MO: they appear out of nowhere, tweet obsessively about me and/or share the “Claressa Meals” or “Mark Fuentes” articles, and are then promptly abandoned. What do you think is going on here?21

One last example before we move on. In June 26, 2023, I received an untraceable, anonymous email (Anonymousemail.me) that explicitly references a murder-suicide and tells me that they hope something less extreme is necessary for me to change my ways. I have included a screenshot of the email in this footnote,22 in which I note that this was the final straw for me: I went to the police to report this threat. The author makes the same claims as above, writing to me that “I’m obviously kind of scared you’ll figure out who I am and start harrassing me.”

What is up with all of these claims about “harassment”? Claims that have, ironically, often come from accounts that have relentlessly harassed me and, in some cases, threatened me with physical violence? Again, you decide.

UPDATE: Shortly after publishing this article, on June 18, 2024, an anonymous user going by “Secarctangent” on Wikipedia edited my Wikipedia entry to include an “Allegations of Harassment” section. It quotes a Guardian article that cites the “Mark Fuentes” article. I believe this is in retaliation for me having published this article.

16. Brief Summary of Key Findings

The present article is the result of 2 years of investigative digging. Let’s review some key parts of this investigation:

The “Claressa Meals” article used all of the same screenshots that Throwaway151 and John Halstead posted the previous month in 2022. “She” modified all of these screenshots, including Throwaway151’s screenshots, in exactly the same way that Halstead modified his screenshot: using gray rectangles with thin black borders. “She” also redacted John Halstead’s name.

John Halstead created a second EA Forum account the very same day that Throwaway151 created their account—literally 3 minutes apart—though Halstead subsequently abandoned this account. He then proceeded to comment under Throwaway151’s post about me, using his primary EA Forum account, where both shared screenshots of me from years earlier. Throwaway151’s post repeated the very same accusation that Halstead, and no one else in the EA community, had made roughly two weeks earlier about my collaboration with Cremer and Kemp.

When “Mark Fuentes” published his article, “Claressa Meals” immediately deleted “her” article. “Claressa Meals” tried very hard to get EAs to pay attention to “her” hit piece, but her aggressive approach and cyberbully tactics failed. In contrast, the “Mark Fuentes” article has a much gentler, kinder approach.

Looking at the “page source” data reveals that “Mark Fuentes” created his Twitter and Substack accounts just five days after “Claressa Meals” created “her” Medium account and published “her” article, which consisted of screenshots from Throwaway151 and John Halstead. Page source information and email timestamps indicate that “Mark Fuentes” created these accounts the very same day that I received an untraceable, anonymous email threatening to dox me (1.5 hours apart), which came just one day after I received another untraceable, anonymous email calling me a “psycho.” Those were two of only four threatening emails that I have ever received. Coincidence?

“Mark Fuentes” uses some of the same screenshots that “Claressa Meals” used, which came from Throwaway151. He also includes screenshots that he himself took of Throwaway151’s EA Forum article, which was only on the Internet for 3 days. These screenshots indicate that they were taken 2 and 5 minutes after I originally posted them, meaning that “Mark Fuentes” must have been there, on the EA Forum in September 2022, with both Throwaway151 and John Halstead, following the discussion in realtime. Throwaway151 deleted their EA Forum article almost immediately (the very same day) after “Mark Fuentes” took his screenshots. Coincidence?

The “Mark Fuentes” article is the only webpage on the Internet where the screenshots that he took of that Throwaway151 discussion have ever appeared. “Mark Fuentes” says that he only recently came across me, but is this plausible?

Furthermore, not only was “Mark Fuentes” present with Throwaway151 and Halstead for the 3 days that EA Forum post was on the Internet, but he included a pixel-for-pixel identical screenshot from Throwaway86’s comment back in 2021. Throwaway86 had deleted this comment and screenshot from the Internet at least by April 2022, 7 months before “Mark Fuentes” was on the scene. So, how in the heck did “Mark Fuentes,” with his merely casual connections to EA, get this exact screenshot? Throwaway86 indicates that they had a falling out with me in 2019, the same year that I had a falling out with John Halstead and no one else in the EA community.

“Mark Fuentes” makes the same false accusations that Throwaway151, “Claressa Meals,” and John Halstead have made. They falsely claim that I have “harassed” and “defamed” people, that I have called people “racists” and “white supremacists,” and that Cremer, Kemp, and I lied about our collaboration. Furthermore, Halstead has specifically admonished people at CSER for working with me, and once “harassed” someone at CSER because of this, causing that person a “world of hurt”—those are not my words, but the words of someone with direct knowledge of the situation.

Similarly, Throwaway151 specifically singles-out my affiliation with CSER, and “Mark Fuentes” goes out of his way to tag people at CSER and the official CSER Twitter account itself in tweets of his. (I will not link to these, as I do not want such people to suffer any more harassment. You can find examples for yourself on his Twitter account—or in the video I presented above.) “Mark Fuentes” also tags my employers, presumably in an effort to get me fired.

The “Mark Fuentes” article is full of hyperlinks, and includes 49 citations in the bibliography. Yet he doesn’t once cite Throwaway86, Throwaway151, or “Claressa Meals.” Nor does he ever once mention John Halstead, even when tweeting the very same complaints about my Bulletin article that Halstead makes on the EA Forum. Fuentes tweets 138 times over a few weeks; 123 of these tweets are specifically about me. He is obsessed.

What I know about Halstead is that he has a history of having “harassed” someone at CSER because of me. Again, “harassed” is not my word. He has at least twice been admonished on the EA Forum by the moderators for comments about me; some members of the EA Forum have accused him of having “acted badly.” A random person who attended one of Halstead’s talks on climate change told me in December 2022 that I live “rent free in his brain” because “he cursed your name and seemed genuinely bothered when” someone asked him about me. For more than a week in late 2022, Halstead “bombarded” (again, not my word) my editor, my editor’s boss, and my editor’s boss’ boss over an article that I wrote about EA. Furthermore, Halstead has repeatedly lied about me: he lied about me having send him messages via Facebook after he stopped responding, and he lied about me having called him “a racist” and a “white supremacist.” When I asked a prominent EA/longtermist about Halstead in late 2022, this person told me that “John is a very hateful person, one of the few people who I have engaged with in EA etc who does bad stuff because he wants to rather than because he has convinced himself that it's actually good.”

We also know that Halstead deleted his primary EA Forum account shortly before the “Mark Fuentes” article was posted on the EA Forum, thus making it difficult to search for Halstead’s previous comments about me.

Let me put this summary of findings in a different way:

Throwaway86: Says they had a falling out with me in 2019. There is only one person in the EA community who I had a falling out with in 2019: John Halstead. Throwaway86 then shares a screenshot on the EA Forum that they later delete at least by April 2022.

Throwaway151: Creates their EA Forum account 3 minutes after John Halstead creates a second EA Forum account. (Halstead then abandons this second account.) Throwaway151 proceeds to post the exact same accusation that Halstead (and no one else in the EA community) had made about me on the EA Forum roughly two weeks earlier. Halstead joins in, commenting under Throwaway151’s own comments. Both share screenshots of me that were taken years earlier. Throwaway151 then deletes their EA Forum post—and all these screenshots—just 3 days later, almost immediately after “Mark Fuentes” took his own screenshots of the Throwaway151 post.

“Claressa Meals”: Posts pixel-for-pixel identical copies of the screenshots shared by Throwaway151 and John Halstead. In fact, “she” posts all of these screenshots, in nearly the exact same order that Throwaway151 presented them. “She” also modifies the screenshots from Throwaway151 in exactly the same idiosyncratic way that Halstead had modified his own screenshot (gray rectangles with thin black borders, as if using the same image editing software with the same image editing settings). “She” is reported for harassing people on Twitter, despite having “Wanna stop abuse” in her Twitter profile. “She” then deletes “her” Medium article exactly when “Mark Fuentes” publishes his article that makes the very same claims.

“Mark Fuentes”: Appears out of nowhere. He exhibits an extensive knowledge of EA, longtermism, philosophy, and my work and activism over the past many years. He includes many of the same screenshots as “Claressa Meals” (though of a higher quality), and makes identical complaints that Throwaway151 and John Halstead previously made, e.g., about my collaboration with Cremer and Kemp. He also included his own screenshots of the conversation that unfolded under Throwaway151’s EA Forum post. Those screenshots indicate that “Mark Fuentes” was right there with Throwaway151 and Halstead, following this conversation in realtime. Almost immediately after taking his screenshots (indeed, the very same day), Throwaway151 deletes their EA Forum post. Furthermore, publicly available page source data indicates that “Mark Fuentes” created both his Twitter and Substack accounts the very same day that I received an email threatening to dox me. That email came 1.5 hours after “Mark Fuentes” created these accounts. The previous day, I had received another threatening email, meaning that two of the four threatening emails that I have ever received came on the same day, or the day before, “Mark Fuentes” appeared online.

I’m sure this is all just one big improbable coincidence. You decide.

17. Timeline of Harassment, Threats, Etc. From the EA Community

January 26, 2019: I publish a critique of Steven Pinker in Salon.

First half of 2019: I have a falling out with John Halstead over the above-mentioned Salon article. Halstead was upset that I published this article without William MacAskill’s permission.

July 23, 2019: John Halstead and I share our last private message. The last message was sent by him, not by me—something that he would later lie about.

March 8, 2021: John Halstead writes on the EA Forum that because he “made the mistake” of once criticizing me (the incident involving Steven Pinker), I have spent “much of the last two years calling [him] a white supremacist” (that is false). He complains that I have characterized “various long-termists as white supremacists on the flimsiest grounds imaginable,” and that I am making these claims due to “personal vendettas against certain people” (that is also false).

May 12, 2021: The EA Forum moderators admonish John Halstead for comments about me. In Halstead’s response, posted on this date (May 12), he claims that I once called him “a racist” (that is false), and then writes that I am “a vindictive individual in the grip of a lifelong persecution complex” (that is also false).

October 19, 2021: I publish my first critique of longtermism, though I do not say much about longtermism for about another year (see below).

December 17, 2021: Throwaway86 posts a screenshot on the EA Forum (a pixel-for-pixel identical copy would later be used by “Mark Fuentes”). In Throwaway86’s comment, they indicate that they had a falling out with me two years prior, in 2019. That fits one, and only one, person in the EA community: John Halstead. This was the only time that Throwaway86 posted on the EA Forum.

March 7, 2022: Sometime between this date (March 7, 2022) and April 26, 2022, Throwaway86 deletes their EA Forum comment and, along with it, their screenshot. Their screenshot is no longer anywhere on the Internet—that is, until “Mark Fuentes” included it in his article. The Throwaway86 account was then abandoned.

August 20, 2022: I publish the first of a series of articles that criticizes the EA movement, in Salon. This series was triggered by the release of William MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future, parts of which were “essentially coauthored” by John Halstead.

August 27, 2022: John Halstead falsely accuses someone of using a sockpuppet account on the EA Forum—he accuses them of being Carla Cremer. He also makes false claims about a collaboration that I once had with Cremer and Luke Kemp. Halstead is then given a warning by the EA Forum moderators—one of several times that the EA Forum moderators have admonished him in discussions about me, as suggested earlier.

September 10, 2022: I publish another lengthy critique of EA in Salon. Coincidentally, on the very same day:

September 10, 2022: At 6:20 am EDT, John Halstead creates a second EA Forum account.

September 10, 2022: At 6:23 am EDT—exactly 3 minutes later—Throwaway151 creates an EA Forum account.

September 11, 2022: An anonymous Twitter account called @BascottChris is created. It then immediately tweets complaints that I have called people “eugenicists” and “white supremacists.” This account also brings up false claims made against me by Helen Pluckrose—the exact same claims that “Mark Fuentes” would repeat in his Substack article. @BascottChris also mentions Michael Shermer in his diatribes against me—the same person whose name both John Halstead and “Claressa Meals” redacted in their pixel-for-pixel identical screenshots. By September 14, 2022, the @BascottChris account is abandoned.

September 13, 2022: Throwaway151 posts, on the EA Forum, the same false claims about my collaboration that John Halstead had complained about on the EA Forum roughly two weeks earlier.

September 13, 2022: An anonymous EA Forum account called “Matis” is created. Matis immediately proceeds—that very same day—to comment under Throwaway151’s EA Forum post. Matis does not like me. (The only other time that Matis ever comments on the EA Forum was November 24, 2022, under an article written by John Halstead; see below.)

September 15, 2022: Throwaway151 posts multiple screenshots of things that I had written in early 2018. He posts these under the EA Forum article that he published 2 days earlier. All of the screenshots concern Helen Pluckrose’s close associate, Peter Boghossian.

September 15, 2022: Shortly after Throwaway151 posts his screenshots, John Halstead posts his own screenshot directly under Throwaway151’s screenshots. Halstead explicitly states in this post that he had a falling out with me after criticizing something that I had written “about Steven Pinker.” Halstead also claims that I sent him numerous Facebook messages after he had stopped responding. This is a lie—one of many that Halstead has spread about me.

September 15, 2022: “Mark Fuentes” takes screenshots of comments that I left under Throwaway151’s post. These screenshots indicate that “Mark Fuentes” took them only 2 and 5 minutes after I had posted them. In other words, “Mark Fuentes” must have been there on the EA Forum, with Throwaway151 and John Halstead, following the discussion in realtime.

September 15, 2022: Throwaway151 deletes their EA Forum post almost immediately after “Mark Fuentes” had taken screenshots of comments that I had left. All of the screenshots that Throwaway151 and John Halstead shared are then no longer anywhere on the Internet (though “Claressa Meals” would subsequently repost pixel-for-pixel identical screenshots). The Throwaway151 account is then abandoned.

September 17, 2022: An anonymous Twitter account called @gorz_andre expresses anger about my critiques of EA and accuses me of having once written a “racist” book (my 2017 book on existential risks, published when I was still an EA-longtermist, titled Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing). The very same day:

September 17, 2022: An anonymous Twitter account called @numinoustalgia tweets for the very first time (see “October 25” below for more).

September 23, 2022: @gorz_andre accuses me of platforming “ableism” and “eugenics.” (Around this time, I had begun to accuse the EA community of these very things, though my claims were backed up by considerable evidence.)

October 11, 2022: I receive a Twitter DM from an anonymous “test” account saying, “Better be careful or an EA superhero will break your kneecaps.”

October 12, 2022: An anonymous Twitter account called @GmaPole is created. Later that same day, they tweet at me: “Better be careful or an EA superhero will break your kneecaps.”23

October 15, 2022: I am nearly certain that this is when “Claressa Meals” created “her” Twitter account. Also, that same day:

October 15, 2022: “Claressa Meals” writes and publishes “her” Medium article. It includes all the very same screenshots—that is, the exact same images, down to the pixel—shared in September 2022 by Throwaway151 and John Halstead on the EA Forum. Recall that this Throwaway151 article was only online for 3 days. “Claressa Meals” also edits “her” screenshots in exactly the same way as Halstead: same names, same method, as if done by the same person using the very same image editing software with the very same image editing software settings. “She” also edits out Halstead’s name—that’s the only difference between “her” screenshot and the pixel-for-pixel identical screenshot that Halstead had previously shared.

October 16, 2022: “Claressa Meals” is reported for harassment on Twitter. This was one of many times “she” had been reported for harassing me and friends. “She” also, around this time, sent me threats of violence. I cannot recall, but “her” account might have been suspended or deleted on October 16, too. The very same day that “Claressa Meals” disappears (coincidence?):

October 16, 2022: An anonymous Twitter account called @HowardRock8 is created. This account would eventually post literally hundreds and hundreds of tweets about me, nearly all of which share the “Mark Fuentes” article under any tweet that mentioned my name or critiques of EA.

October 19, 2022: An anonymous Twitter account called @Sally_Soul_SM is created. That same day, the account maliciously doxxes my ex-wife on Twitter under a thread I posted about coming out as nonbinary. The very same day:

October 19, 2022: Someone using an untraceable, anonymous email address (Guerrillamail.com) sends me an email in which they call me a “psycho.” The next day:

October 20, 2022: Someone using an untraceable, anonymous email address (also Guerrillamail.com) threatens to dox me (with personal information that I had previously shared on Facebook, though spreading this personal information without my permission would be completely inappropriate). They end the email with “HAHAHAHAHA.” The very same day:

October 20, 2022: Publicly available page source data indicates that “Mark Fuentes” creates his Twitter account and, 22 minutes later, creates his Substack account.

October 20, 2022: Purely by coincidence, this same day Halstead’s name was brought up in a conversation that I had with a prominent member of the EA/longtermist community. This community member told me: “I believe that John is a very hateful person, one of the few people who I have engaged with in EA etc who does bad stuff because he wants to rather than because he has convinced himself that it’s actually good.” I am rather shocked by this.

October 23, 2022: The @gorz_andre Twitter account tweets about me for the last time. The account is then abandoned.

October 25, 2022: @GmaPole responds to a tweet of mine with, “I wish you remained unborn.”

October 25, 2022: @numinoustalgia tweets 25 times about me (in one day), claiming that I have “defended eugenicist policies” and that I have a history of “harassing and even stalking [my] intellectual opponents.” This is an attempt to show that I am a hypocrite (I’m not). The account adds that they are anonymous because “Torres has a habit of harassing smaller, less visible accounts who critique them.” (Look familiar?) In making these claims, they obsessively tag numerous colleagues of mine—something that “Mark Fuentes” also does on Twitter, in addition to tagging my employers.

October 26, 2022: @numinoustalgia tweets about me once again. Their account is then abandoned. The very same day:

October 26, 2022: John Halstead complains on the EA Forum that I’ve said that leading EAs/longtermists “endorse white supremacist ideology and eugenics.”

November 7, 2022: “Mark Fuentes” tweets 31 times about me, repeatedly tagging various people who work at CSER, the Twitter account for CSER, and some former colleagues of mine.

November 8, 2022: “Mark Fuentes” publishes his libelous article on Substack. It includes some of the very same screenshots in the “Claressa Meals” article, as well as the pixel-for-pixel identical screenshot that Throwaway86 shared back in 2021, which Throwaway86 removed from the Internet between March 7 and April 26, 2022. (Recall that Throwaway86 said they had a falling out with me in 2019—the year that I had a falling out with John Halstead and no one else in the EA community.)

The “Mark Fuentes” article makes all of the same claims that Throwaway86, Throwaway151, “Claressa Meals,” John Halstead, and many of the anonymous Twitter accounts (some of which also sent me threats of physical violence) had previously made, often using the very same language.

November 7 or 8, 2022: “Claressa Meals” removes “her” Medium article about me—essentially a rough draft of the “Mark Fuentes” article. “Mark Fuentes” publishes his article. “Claressa Meals” deletes “hers.” What a coincidence!

November 8 to November 25, 2022: “Mark Fuentes” tweets a total of 138 times (on my count), with 123 of these explicitly being about me. Only 15 tweets were unrelated to my work. That amounts to an average of 7.2 tweets per day spreading lies about me to undermine my criticisms of EA, though most of these tweets were sent in bursts (e.g., 10-20 at a time).

Around this time, someone with direct knowledge of the matter informs me that Halstead has persistently “harassed” someone at CSER with whom I worked, causing the victim of this harassment a “world of hurt.” Those are not my words—they are the words of this person with whom I spoke.

November 20, 2022: I publish another lengthy critique of EA/longtermism in Salon.

November 21, 2020: “Mark Fuentes” tweets 17 times about me, claiming that I have “harassed” people and behaved badly, and complaining about my collaboration with Cremer and Kemp.

November 22, 2022: I publish my Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article in which I criticize sections of William MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future that John Halstead “essentially coauthored.” That very same day:

November 22, 2022: An anonymous account on the EA Forum called “AgainstOnlineHarassment” is created. Three minutes after being created, it posts a link to the “Mark Fuentes” article while saying that they are using “an anonymous account because I don’t want Torres to harass me, as he has done previously when I posted under my real name.” (That is almost identical to what Throwaway86 had previously said, in their 2021 EA Forum comment saying that they had a falling out with me in 2019.) This is noteworthy because virtually no one in the EA community knew about “Mark Fuentes” in late November.

November 22, 2022: “Mark Fuentes” tweets 12 times about me and retweets several others, mostly complaining about my Bulletin article. The very next day:

November 23, 2022: John Halstead posts an EA Forum article specifically about my Bulletin article, which criticizes sections of MacAskill’s book. In other words, “Mark Fuentes” complains about my Bulletin article, and the next day Halstead does the same. The very same day:

November 23, 2022: “Mark Fuentes” tweets at least 15 times about me, mostly about my Bulletin article. This is the last time that “Mark Fuentes” tweets anything to his “Posts” page (though there is one last tweet burst in early December; see below). This very same day:

November 23, 2022: I receive an untraceable, anonymous email with the threatening remark, “Get psychiatric assistance before it’s too late, buddy.”

November 23, 2022: Because he is all over my Twitter feed, I ask “Mark Fuentes” to verify his identity, to make sure that he’s not the person who has been harassing me and sending me threats of physical violence and threats of doxxing. I repeat this on Twitter the following day, but receive no reply.

November 24, 2022: The anonymous account called “Matis” (which commented under Throwaway151’s EA Forum post) comments under the EA Forum post by John Halstead about my Bulletin article. Matis supports Halstead’s complaints that my critique was unfair. (It wasn’t.) The Matis account is then abandoned. That very same day:

November 24, 2022: @HowardRock8 tweets for the first time. To be clear, this account was created in October 2022—almost exactly when the “Mark Fuentes” and “Claressa Meals” Twitter accounts were created—but it did not tweet until one day after John Halstead’s EA Forum post about me, which is also the same day that Matis posted about me for the last time.

In his very first tweet, @HowardRock8 shares a link to the “Mark Fuentes” article under a tweet about my Bulletin article. What a coincidence!

From November 24, 2022 to April 2, 2023, @HowardRock8 tweets literally hundreds and hundreds of times, where nearly all of these tweets share the “Mark Fuentes” article under anyone who mentions my name or critiques of EA on Twitter. See the video above.

Around this time, in late November or early December (I am being intentionally vague about the exact date), an editor of mine reports to me that they, their boss, and their boss’ boss have all been “bombarded” with emails from John Halstead for over a week. “Bombarded” is not my word, but my editor’s word.

Early December, 2022: “Mark Fuentes” completely vanishes from Twitter for the next 17 months. To be clear about this: the last “Mark Fuentes” tweet on his “Posts” page was November 23, 2022. However, after momentarily going silent, he then posts a flurry of six tweets about me on December 9, 2022, in response to someone in the EA community who described my approach to critiquing EA/longtermism as “admirable.” That clearly upset “Mark Fuentes.”

Early December, 2022: An anonymous account on Twitter called “@xriskologist” (my handle is “@xriskology”) is created. This account tweets about me obsessively for a short time. Their profile refers to me as “Evíle P. Trolles,” and describes me as: “Wannabe intellectual. Former professor [at CSER, the very same institute that Halstead, Throwaway151, and “Mark Fuentes” singled-out]. They/Them.” They go on to make the exact same claims about “white supremacy” that Halstead has frequently complained about. Shortly after, it appears that this account was abandoned.

December 3, 2022: I receive an unsolicited DM from someone I do not know, have never spoken with, and do not follow on social media. They say: “I just saw a talk given by John Halstead about ‘Climate Change & Longtermism’. You are living rent free in his brain, it seems, because he cursed your name and seemed genuinely bothered when [someone asked] him in Q&A what he thinks you and eg [Michael] Mann are missing re agriculture.”

December 5, 2022: I publish another critique of EA in Truthdig.

December 18, 2022: An EA Forum account called Throwaway11 is created. This same day, it comments about me and shares a link to the “Mark Fuentes” article. That is the only time Throwaway11 ever contributed anything to the EA Forum. The account is then abandoned.

April 2, 2023: After obsessively tweeting about me and harassing my colleagues on Twitter since November 24, 2022, @HowardRock8 tweets about me for the last time (sharing the “Mark Fuentes” article, of course). His account is then promptly abandoned, just like many other accounts were abandoned after spreading lies about me including Throwaway86, @BascottChris, Throwaway151, @gorz_andre, @numinoustalgia, Matis, @xriskologist, and Throwaway11. Again, same MO.

Things quiet down at this point, until June 2023. Why? I think mainly because of the collapse of FTX and the racist email scandal involving Nick Bostrom. These events resulted in a large number of people harshly criticizing EA/longtermism. Suddenly, it wasn’t just me—a lone voice—shouting that these ideologies are flawed and dangerous. These scandals took the spotlight off of my work.

June 15, 2023: I publish my Truthdig article critiquing the “TESCREAL bundle” of ideologies, where “EAL” in the acronym stands for “Effective Altruism and longtermism.”

June 23, 2023: Someone posts a fake Craigslist ad with my email, resulting in a deluge of spam emails in my inbox over the next few days. They posted this with the location of Brooklyn, one of the highest density regions in the United States. (See this footnote for details.24) Just 2 days later:

June 25, 2023: I receive an untraceable, anonymous email (Anonymousemail.me) from someone who references a murder-suicide and tells me that they hope something less extreme is necessary for me to change my ways. The author says that I “have been the biggest source of stress in [their] life for some time now.” It also makes the exact same claim as Throwaway86 (who had a falling out with me in 2019), AgainstOnlineHarassment, @numinoustalgia, and various other accounts, namely, that they are writing anonymously because “I’m obviously kind of scared you’ll figure out who I am and start harrassing me.” I report this email to the police in Germany, where I was living at the time, along with some of the other threats that I have received from the EA community.

Things quiet down again, for almost a year.

April 30, 2024: “anonymous-for-obvious-reasons” creates an EA Forum account.

May 1, 2024: “anonymous-for-obvious reasons” publishes the “Mark Fuentes” article on the EA Forum.

May 1, 2024: “Mark Fuentes” creates an EA Forum account and immediately—that same day—starts to comment under his article. After disappearing for 17 months, and having only a tenuous connection to the EA movement, how did he know that his article had been posted?

May 2, 2024: “Mark Fuentes” refuses to confirm that he is not lying about his identity, in response to a comment and personal communications with Owen Cotton-Barratt.

June 18, 2024: An anonymous user going by “Secarctangent” edits my Wikipedia page to inclue an “Allegations of Harassment” section. This links to a Guardian article about me that cites that “Mark Fuentes” article. I believe this was in retaliation for me having published this article.

18. I Have Genuinely Tried to Avoid Publishing This Article

I have made a number of good-faith attempts to rectify this situation—to stop the harassment, impersonations, threats, and defamatory claims from people hiding behind anonymous and pseudonymous accounts.

In November 2022, I met online with a representative for the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) and, in confidence, shared details about the EA harassment campaign against me (there is even more than what I discuss above). Note that I contacted CEA before I knew that it had a history of violating promises of confidentiality. If I had known that, I wouldn’t have contacted them.

In our discussion, the CEA representative told me that they would try to address the problem, but that they probably couldn’t do much to help me. My interpretation of their response was that they were unwilling to address the harassment and threats. That was how I understood our meeting and subsequent email exchanges.

At one point, I noted that there are two main possibilities here: (1) there are one or maybe two “bad apples” behind all of the Twitter accounts that have threatened me, the ominous emails from anonymous people (one of which referenced murder), the Throwaway accounts on the EA Forum, the “Claressa Meals” article, and the “Mark Fuentes” article, in which case the EA community can dismiss this as unacceptable behavior from one (or perhaps two) individuals. Or (2) EA has a broader community-wide problem with members being willing to lie, deceive, impersonate, create fake accounts, threaten, and harass critics.

For the EA movement, (1) is preferable to (2), and I personally believe that (1) is the case, which lets the movement off the hook a bit—that is, if only the EA community had taken steps to stop this individual (or these individuals) from harassing, threatening, and spreading lies about me.

When some individuals in the EA community have nothing of substance to say, they will resort to ad hominem attacks and lies in an attempt to “discredit” their critics. In my opinion, this reflects very poorly on the community more generally, and bolsters the case that I and others have made that EA is a cult.

(Even people within the EA community say they are afraid to criticize the movement out of fear that they might be ostracized, denied funding, excluded from EA spaces, or perhaps even become the target of online harassment and libelous hit-pieces by other EAs hiding behind anonymous, pseudonymous, “sockpuppet” accounts.)

The present article aims to do one thing only: lay out the facts, as best I understand them, complete with screenshots and hyperlinks. I suspect that for most attentive readers, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.

My own view is that “Mark Fuentes” is guilty of everything that he accuses me of: harassment, defamation, lying, misrepresenting people, holding grudges and vendettas, and using fake “sockpuppet” accounts to deceive and manipulate people—including other EAs. But this is just my personal opinion based on a careful consideration of the totality of available evidence.

19. Giving “Mark Fuentes,” “Claressa Meals,” and John Halstead an Opportunity To Respond

I will end with this: “Mark Fuentes” consistently twists my words, takes remarks out of context, ignores contradictory evidence, and presents a grossly distorted picture that does not, in any way, correspond to reality. His article is libelous.

In contrast, none of the screenshots above have been taken out of context—click on the links to see for yourself. I have not misquoted “Mark Fuentes,” Throwaway86, Throwaway151, “Claressa Meals,” or John Halstead. I have not misrepresented anything that they have said about me. Again, see for yourself. Nor have I published this anonymously, concealing or lying about my identity. Why? Because my intentions are not malicious. This is the culmination of a 2-year-long investigation into the harassment, threats, and defamation that I have been on the receiving end of, some of which has significantly affected my personal and professional life.

Furthermore, “Mark Fuentes” and “Claressa Meals” published their articles without sending me a prior draft to fact-check. Before publishing this article, I sent offers to “Mark Fuentes,” “Claressa Meals,” and John Halstead to look over it—to set the record straight, dispute the facts, provide disconfirming evidence, and so on. It was very important to me that they have every opportunity to respond to this before it I publish it, precisely because my intentions are not malicious: I want to get the facts right, that’s it.

Neither “Mark Fuentes” nor “Claressa Meals” responded to my messages. Halstead responded and said that he would look over a draft. So, I sent him an earlier draft of this article, after he explicitly agreed to keep it confidential.25 In response, he claimed that my “article” is “false,” but when I asked him to give a single example of a false statement in the article, he declined. I repeated my offer—because I want this article to be impeccably sourced—but I received the same (non-)reply.

To the best of my knowledge, every truth-evaluable sentence in this article is true. I have fact-checked it probably 30 times, and all claims are supported by hyperlinks and/or screenshots for people to verify for themselves. With respect to the very few claims that aren’t supported by hyperlinks, readers are welcome to ask me in private for verification (e.g., about DMs and emails that I have received). My email is philosophytorres@gmail.com.

I have shown moral and intellectual integrity in writing this. I have done everything I possibly can over the past two years to ensure the accuracy and completeness of this article, and I am publishing this under my real name—rather than hiding behind some anonymous, pseudonymous, “sockpuppet” account. In contrast, “Mark Fuentes” makes libelous claims about me using a pseudonym, thus enabling him to evade legal and moral responsibility for his actions.

When will “Mark Fuentes” show some moral and intellectual integrity, too? Will he come forward and prove to some trusted party that he’s a public defender in New York who attended Aaron Swartz’s funeral and donates a bit of his income to the Against Malaria Foundation? And hence, that he’s not someone in the EA community with a long-time ax to grind with me? Will he do something to confirm his claim that “I bear Torres personally no ill will”?

If there is an explanation for all the coincidences outlined above that I am currently unable to see, I would of course be happy to update, modify, or entirely withdraw this report accordingly. I want to know the truth about all the harassment and threats that I’ve received from anonymous or pseudonymous EA-linked people since I began publishing a series of critques in the summer of 2022.

The problems with lies is they start to pile up, one on top of another, until it's hard to find yoiour way out from under the heap.The problems with lies is they start to pile up, one on top of another, until it's hard to find your way out from under the heap.

“Mark Fuentes” insists that he “stands up to bad online behavior.” But this claim is directly undermined by the fact that he cites James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose to support his libelous claims about me. Since “Mark Fuentes” considers these people to be reliable sources for his libelous accusations, let’s take a closer look at who these “reliable sources” are:

Lindsay is a Trump supporter who’s a collaborator with Michael O’Fallon, a Christian nationalist and Covid conspiracist. Lindsay has on many occasions called women “bitches” on social media (those are all individual links), hurled “your mom” insults at people who disagree with him, argued that antisemitism is caused by woke Jews, spread Covid conspiracy theories, and claimed in 2020 that people should vote for Trump because Joe Biden is a neo-Marxist. He hates Black Lives Matter, and he popularized the term “okay groomer” along with the conspiracy theory that LGBTQ+ people like myself are “grooming” children. Ouch.

Here is a random selection of literally hundreds of examples from James Lindsay—a very close, long-time collaborator with Boghossian and Pluckrose. What do you think of “Mark Fuentes” including a screenshot of this guy in his article about me, as part of his ridiculous argument that I have “harassed” Pluckrose?

“Mark Fuentes,” who wants to stand up to bad online behavior, cites James Lindsay in his hit piece against me. If “Mark Fuentes” really cared about bad online behavior, he should be writing articles about James Lindsay! I mean, James Lindsay even has his own Southern Poverty Law Center entry for his name.

This is the guy that Boghossian and Pluckrose pal around with.

Now consider Peter Boghossian, who would routinely call me a “snowflake” and “SJW” (social justice warrior) as our friendship began to dissolve in the mid-to-late 2010s. I stopped talking to Boghossian over our differing views about racism, sexism, trans people, and so on. The final straw for me was when I was chatting on the phone with him and he interrupted me to ogle at the legs of an undergraduate woman at Portland State University, where Boghossian was a faculty member. I kid you not. I was utterly shocked. That was the last time we ever spoke, because I never wanted to talk to him again.

Boghossian has defended Nazis, is a vigorous supporter of the authoritarian regime of Viktor Orbán, is a “longtime collaborator” of the white supremacist and antisemite Stefan Molyneux, has questioned why gay people should be “proud,” and has appeared on Epoch Times, a media company associated with the Falun Gong movement that’s “fueling the far-right in Europe” and has spread COVID conspiracy theories.

Boghossian explicitly rejects the historically accurate claim that “slavery … was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an … American institution, created by and for the benefit of the elites.” He doesn’t believe that systemic racism exists, and he once asked on social media if slavery was actually a good thing for Black Americans, because it enabled them to escape the poverty of Africa.

Boghossian is obsessed with taking down “wokeism,” because he believes it’s a dire threat to “Western civilization”—a term often used in this context by white nationalists to refer to white people and “white culture.” It’s a dog whistle. In an interview with the rightwing pundit Dave Rubin, he says:

I’m done playing. … I am waging full-scale ideological warfare against the enemies of Western Civilization. … We must broker absolutely zero tolerance with this ideology, and the only way forward at this point is full-scale ideological war, and I will take no prisoners, … . I seek the complete eradication and extirpation of the [woke] ideology from every facet of life.

That looks a lot like fascism to me.

Around 2018 (as I recall), a woman contacted me to say that she had been sexually assaulted by Boghossian. I spoke to her on numerous occasions, and wrote an article that I planned to submit to Salon for publication. But before that happened, I vaguely referenced her allegations on Twitter—the reaction from Boghossian fans was so hostile, aggressive, and angry that she wrote me to say: “Please withdraw your article. Do not publish it.” The whole situation was tragic, and I feel so incredibly badly for her. Obviously, I withdrew the article, which we had been working on for weeks.

This is the guy—Boghossian—who I was criticizing on social media in 2017 and 2018. Can you blame me? “Mark Fuentes,” “Claressa Meals,” and Throwaway151 all take my comments completely out of context, and my guess is that they did that intentionally to maximize the harm they might cause to my reputation. That is libel.

Here is a random selection of the sorts of things that Boghossian tweets:

This is, incidentally, the very issue that caused our friendship to fall apart.

So, again, if “Mark Fuentes” cared about bad behavior, then why not write an article about Peter Boghossian? Indeed, why mention Boghossian as if he’s the good guy in his hit-piece article about me? It’s laughable.

As for Helen Pluckrose, she’s been a close collaborator and friend of Lindsay and Boghossian for many years. She acquired a reputation in the 2010s for being an online troll, and with Lindsay and Boghossian she perpetrated an unscientific and unethical “hoax” against certain “woke” fields of study. This involved intentionally deceiving dozens of academic editors while submitting fabricated data to multiple academic journals. This Pluckrose’s biggest claim to fame. Again, “Mark Fuentes” cites her as a reliable source. Laughable.

You know that “multi-syllabic unpronounceable names” means, of course. She’s citing People of Color scholars.

In 2020, Pluckrose and Lindsay coauthored the factually impaired book Cynical Theories, which misrepresents “woke” scholarship and is partly responsible for triggering the moral panic surrounding “critical race theory,” or CRT. This has, of course, become hugely influential among the far-right in the US.

I could go on, but won’t. You get the point. “Mark Fuentes” thus undermines his own claim to care about bad behavior by citing people whose behavior over the past decade has been egregiously terrible. If he really cared about “bad online behavior,” he wouldn’t be using these people to make his libelous case against me. Lolz.

Here is part of the “Mark Fuentes” backstory (below). Does any of this seem plausible to you? Note that, as a WebMD article states, one sign that someone is lying is that they provide “unverifiable details. They may add details to make their lies seem more realistic. Studies show that pathological liars tend to include details that can’t be verified.” None of the claims below have been—or perhaps could be—verified, in part because “Mark Fuentes” refuses to verify them, even to trustworthy EAs (see section 12). Another sign is that they give “overly dramatic or long stories. Lies are more likely to be dramatic and long. If someone often has anecdotes about overly dramatic or intense situations, they may be lying.”

The “Mark Fuentes” backstory fits both of these descriptions—he even includes an anecdote about attending Aaron Swartz’s funeral. Take a look for yourself and draw your own conclusions:

I first heard about EA upon attending Aaron Swartz’s memorial in January 2013. One of the speakers at that event was Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell, a charity evaluator for which Aaron had volunteered. Karnofsky described Aaron as someone who “believed in trying to maximize the good he accomplished with each minute he had.” I resonated with that phrase, and in conversation with some friends after the memorial, I learned that Aaron’s approach, and GiveWell’s, were examples of what was, at the time, a new movement called “effective altruism.” Despite my sympathy for EA, I never got very involved with it, due to a combination of introversion and the sense that I hadn't much to offer. I have donated a small fraction of my income to the Against Malaria Foundation for the last nine years, but I have never taken the Giving What We Can pledge, participated in a local EA group, or volunteered or worked for an EA organization. I decided to write this article after a friend forwarded me one of Torres’s critical pieces on longtermism. I knew enough about this movement –– which emerged out of EA –– to quickly identify some falsehoods and misrepresentations in Torres’s polemic. So I was surprised to find, when I checked the comments on Twitter, that no one else was pointing out these errors. A few weeks later, I discovered that this was just one of a growing number of articles by Torres that attacked these ideas and their proponents. Since I also noticed several factual inaccuracies in these other publications, I got curious and decided to look into Torres’s writings more closely.

Among the screenshots from “Claressa Meals” that “Mark Fuentes” didn’t include in his article, he nonetheless tweeted them—indicating that he, like “Claressa Meals,” was aware of them. They were on exactly the same page. For example, see this and this.

This Salon article, by the way, made no mention of EA. It’s not clear why I needed William MacAskill’s permission to publish it.

For the record: Cremer, Kemp, and I had written what I considered to be a penultimate draft of an article. We then disbanded the collaboration, and I published my contribution to our article as a “mini-book” and then a solo piece in Aeon on October 19, 2021 (the latter was based on the former, and hence I removed the mini-book before publishing the Aeon article). Cremer and Kemp then completely rewrote their contribution, after which they sent it around to others in the EA/longtermist community for comments. Their experience with that was deeply disheartening, as Cremer describes here.

Halstead is based in the UK.

What’s the context of my comments here? In brief, this was a response to Steven Pinker, which “Claressa Meals” and John Halstead conveniently cropped out of the screenshot. It was posted after Pinker was shown to have connections with Jeffrey Epstein. Pinker once flew on Epstein’s plane, dubbed the “Lolita Express.” That is why I mention the environmental impact. This is also why I reference “pedophiles”—Epstein was a pedophile who owned a private jet. The rapist reference is to Michael Shermer, who has a long history of sexual harassment, assault, and rape. Despite these accusations from multiple women, Pinker continued to support Shermer. I had previously corresponded with Pinker for several years, and was outraged, as one should be, that Pinker kept supporting Shermer. I had also been friends with Shermer before I became aware of these accusations. I changed my mind about him after befriending Shermer’s rape victim, who I believed. I tagged John Halstead in this comment by accident, and told him it was a “mistake” in the very few personal messages, via Facebook Messenger, that we ever exchanged (see below). Despite admitting to Halstead that it was an accident and then immediately correcting the error, he never let this go. This was, I believe, the only time that I ever interacted with Halstead on a public forum.

Of note is that members of the EA community have accused not only John Halstead of “acting badly” when discussing me, but some of these anonymous accounts, too. Throwaway151 provides an example: under an angry post from Throwaway151 that was responding to Carla Cremer and which shares a screenshot of me, someome named “LB” wrote:

LB is exactly right. There are other examples, but I will not discuss them here. Suffice it to say that this exemplifies some of the push-back that people like Halstead, Throwaway151, “Mark Fuentes,” etc. have received.

I should like to add that everything that Pluckrose says here is false. In fact, she posted this after I complained on Twitter that she was harassing me. She’s like the bully who tells the teacher that a kid they just beat up had actually punched them. I never sent Pluckrose any emails (I cannot find a single email in my inbox or sent folder), no one ever sought a “restraining order” against me (what the actual hell?), I was never “blocked all over the place” (most right-wing or right-leaning New Atheists I still got along with, despite our disagreements), and Pluckrose and I exchanged very few private messages (which were generally civil; I can prove this to anyone interested). Also, as a footnote above explains, the people she’s referring to are folks like James Lindsay, a Trump supporter who calls women “bitches” on social media, has spread conspiracy theories about LGBTQ+ people like me “grooming” children, and popularized the term “okay groomer.” Pluckrose became known in the late 2010s for being an Internet troll who would accuse people of exactly what she was doing, and repeating exactly the complaints that people leveled at her (e.g., I mentioned that I spoke to my therapist about her online behavior, and shortly after mentioning this, she claimed that she had to seek counseling because of me). She was very good at trolling. Her biggest claim to fame is intentionally deceiving dozens of academic editors and submitting fabricated data to academic journals as part of a “hoax” against “woke” scholarship. Of course, “Mark Fuentes” doesn’t mention any of this. Again, see footnote 2 for discussion.

For example, consider that “Mark Fuentes” writes: “Put differently, Beckstead is making an empirical claim about the long-run consequences of different actions, rather than a normative claim about the intrinsic value of different lives.”

Is that something a public defender would write, or someone with a background in philosophy? There are many other examples like this in the “Mark Fuentes” article. He obviously knows an awful lot about philosophy, the history of EA, and the EA and longtermist worldviews for a public defender with a merely casual connection to EA.

The reason this is less than 2 hours later is that the time of 19:42 would be Coordinate Universal Time (UTC), and the time of 23:19 (or 11:19) would have been Central European Time (CET), which in October is 2 hours ahead of UTC. Hence, 23:19 CET is 21:19 UTC. The difference between 21:19 and 19:42 is roughly 1.5 hours.

On the EA Forum, “Mark Fuentes” writes that if my claims that he’s behind the harassment, stalking, and threats of physical violence “were true, and Torres knew this to be the case, they would be in a position to share this evidence publicly. But they haven’t done so, because they do not have this evidence.” Here is evidence. More evidence is provided in subsequent sections. It doesn’t take much—or any—squinting to see what’s going on here.

Interestingly, one person on the EA Forum criticizes “Mark Fuentes” as follows: “you seem to be a pseudonymous/throwaway account person who has only ever discussed this one topic” (italics added). Throwaway account, indeed! This comment is more veridical than the author may have realized.

To be clear, my editor did not use this exact word, but a very close synonym starting with the same letter. I would be happy to share the email that my editor sent me with journalists or colleagues, in confidence, to corroborate my claims. The same goes for “increasingly rankled”—the actual phrase used was identical in meaning. Please ask me for confirmation.

When I asked for clarification, this person said that Halstead did not literally curse my name (it was, after all, an academic talk). He just became very agitated and angry that my name was even mentioned—to such an extent that someone felt it necessary to get in touch with me about it. Note also, with respect to this screenshot, that (a) “Mann” is a reference to Michael Mann, who I quoted in my Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article criticizing William MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future. Michael Mann agreed with my criticisms. (b) I have redacted some information here for the purposes of privacy: I do not want the person who asked the question to become the target of harassment. Journalists and colleagues are welcome to ask for the original message, in confidence, to verify its authenticity.

To be clear, after this “go away” comment, I quickly responded (within 20 minutes) to a few specific claims that Halstead had earlier made. It was after me telling him to go away and then responding to his claims that he replied, about 20 minutes after my last message. That was it. Halstead is thus blatantly lying when he claims that I sent him “numerous messages on Facebook after [he] had stopped responding” (italics added).

Am I wrong? If so, please send me examples at philosophytorres@gmail.com.

Here is the full context of my remarks and argument, which “Mark Fuentes” conveniently keeps from his readers: I was responding to Nick Beckstead’s claim that, from a longtermist perspective, we should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over saving the lives of people in poor countries, other things being equal. After quoting Beckstead’s passage in full, I write:

This is overtly white-supremacist. It advocates a Eurocentric “give to the rich” policy based on the idea that huge numbers of currently non-existent, possibly never-existent people could clutter our future light cone, thus maximizing the total amount of impersonal intrinsic value that we could create in the long run. Indeed, Beckstead (with two co-authors) wrote in an EA article the same year as his dissertation …

This is quoted from an unpublished draft of an academic article that I wrote, and which I never submitted for publication because I did not think the article was good enough—I was still working through the ideas. Of course, “Mark Fuentes” never mentions that. It is a violation of academic norms to quote unpublished articles without the author’s explicit permission.

Contrary to what John Halstead and “Mark Fuentes” say, I have never felt rejected by the EA community. Consider that:

I was a visiting scholar, by invitation, for several months in 2019 at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. I was personally invited to give a talk at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) in 2017, during which I shared an office with Anders Sandberg for several days; FHI paid for my housing during this time. I was invited by Dylan Matthews at Vox to visit their offices because of my work (and I had coffee with Dylan to chat about my work on existential risks). I also had a personal meeting over coffee, in Washington DC, with Jason Matheny, who I knew from EA and x-risk conferences. In 2017, I attended an invitation-only workshop, lasting two months (though I stayed for only 4 or 5 weeks), in Gothenburg, Sweden, which was also attended by notable figures like Olle Häggström, Robin Hanson, Kaj Sotala, Stuart Armstrong, Seth Baum, and Anders Sandberg, among others. I have coauthored papers with people from the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and so on, and I am listed as the sixth most prolific contributor to the existential risk literature.

Halstead and “Mark Fuentes” are simply wrong when they say that I feel slighted by the community—which, for the record, I believe was quite good to me, an independent scholar at the time. I left the community because I came to believe that the EA/longtermist (which I would now call the “TESCREAL”) ideologies are toxic, very dangerous, and built on flawed philosophical foundations.

The same goes for New Atheism. I receive blurbs for my books from some of the biggest names in the community (e.g., Victor Stenger, Michael Shermer, Tom Flynn, Herb Silverman, John Loftus, Sean Carroll, Alex Rosenberg, Robyn Blumner, and Peter Boghossian, among others), published in leading atheist magazines like Shermer’s Skeptic and Free Inquiry, was invited to talk at numerous free-thought groups, hung out with David Silverman and Herb Silverman (no relation), and had a book review up on the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. I left the New Atheist movement for moral reasons—because of the homophobic, transphobic, racist, and sexist things that leading members of the community said and did. Halstead and “Mark Fuentes” are just lying.

Can you? If so, I’ll edit this paragraph.

Note that one way for a claim to look plausible is if multiple people agree with it. Hence, if one creates multiple anonymous or pseudonymous accounts, which then agree with some claim about, e.g., harassment, that claim will start to look more plausible to people who are unaware that these anonymous or pseudonymous accounts were created by the same person making the claim.

Here is this email:

This same EA elsewhere wrote “Dam u ugly ash😭😭” under a picture I posted of myself, where “ash” probably means “as hell,” and “I wish you remained unborn 😭😭🙏🙏” under a tweet of mine talking about unborn future generations.

On June 23, 2023, just 2 days before receiving the email above, someone posted a Craigslist ad in New York City (Brooklyn) for “three wise monkeys” that included my email address, and also checked the box saying “it's ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests.” (Note that the images included in this Craigslist ad were taken from a Thailand-based shop that sells on eBay—these images are not original to whoever posted this ad, but are lower-quality screenshots of the originals. See for yourself, here.)

This ad resulted in me receiving a flood of emails from people asking to buy these “three wise monkeys.” Since I didn’t have access to the post, I was unable to remove my email address from it. Read the rather odd Craigslist ad below or on Archive.org here. Again, is this just a coincidence? Is it a joke? Was it intended to harass me? Why are there so many timing and content coincidences with respect to all the threats, harassment, and defamatory statements directed at me since 2022?

The website on which I posted this article included the instructions: “This is a rough draft that is subject to change. Do not share, download, copy, reproduce, or save this document in any form or format (e.g., on the Internet Archive). Thank you.” These were also repeated at the top of the article.

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