Via notsohip on LJ: The co-founder of GiveWell, a new charity-evaluating organization, tries to astroturf MetaFilter. I haven't gotten through all the comments, but my favorite so far is where he tries to buy them off:

holden00: I don't have a lot of money. I am not from the Cristal set. I spent 3 years at a hedge fund and gave enough to charity that I wanted to know more about what I was doing. So I can't offer a lot of money, but I can offer a donation to Metafilter from my pocket. I'm not offering this in return for your ceasing your criticism, I'm offering it to make up for abusing the rules. Would that be appropriate? Would anything else?

By the Grace of God: What would be appropriate is a public admission of what you did and a link to this thread on your blog. That would be better (for YOUR business, which is an analyst and trades on accountability) than if the NYT reporter [who wrote a puff piece on GiveWell] gets to it first.

And then the MeFi commenters start emailing the NYT reporter. Brought to his knees, Holden apologizes on the GiveWell blog, where the dogpile continues.


ETA from nam_jai: Effective January 3, 2008, Holden Karnofsky has been removed from his position as Executive Director of GiveWell and from his position as Board Secretary (entry date: January 6).