I agree that it would be better if 80k had the capacity to easily navigate this kind of thing. But given that they (like all of us) have fixed capacity, I think it still makes sense to complain about Linda making it harder for them to respond.
But whether an organization can easily respond is pretty orthogonal to whether they’ve done something wrong. Like, if 80k is indeed doing something that merits a boycott, then saying so seems appropriate. There might be some debate about whether this is warranted given the facts, or even whether the facts are right, but it seems misguided to me to make the strength of an objection proportional to someone’s capacity to respond rather than to the badness of the thing they did.
Agreed. It’s reasonable to ask others eg Linda to make this easier where possible. Eg, when discussion group behavior in response to a state of affairs, instead of making it “suggestion/command” part of speech, make it “conditional prediction” part of speech. A statement I could truthfully say:
”As a AI safety community member, I predict I and others will be uncomfortable with 80k if this is where things end up settling, because of disagreeing. I could be convinced otherwise, but it would take extraordinary evidence at this point. If my opinions stay the same and 80k’s also are unchanged, I expect this make me hesitant to link to and recommend 80k, and I would be unsurprised to find others behaving similarly.”
Behaving like that is very similar to what Linda said she intends, but seems to me to leave more room for aumann. I would suggest to 80k that they attempt to simply reinterpret what Linda as equivalent to this, if possible. Of course, it is in fact a slightly different thing than what she said.
Edit: very odd that this, but neither its parent or grandparent comment, got downvoted. What i said here feels like a pretty similar thing to what I said in the grandparent, and agrees with buck and with linda; it’s my attempt to show there’s a way to merge these perspectives. What about my comment diverges?
”As a AI safety community member, I predict I and others will be uncomfortable with 80k if this is where things end up settling, because of disagreeing. I could be convinced otherwise, but it would take extraordinary evidence at this point. If my opinions stay the same and 80k’s also are unchanged, I expect this make me hesitant to link to and recommend 80k, and I would be unsurprised to find others behaving similarly.”
But you did not say it (other than as a response to me). Why not?
I’d be happy for you to take the discussion with 80k and try to change their behaviour. This is not the first time I told them that if they list a job, a lot of people will both take it as an endorsement, and trut 80k that this is a good job to apply for.
As far as I can tell 80k is in complete denial on the large influence they have on many EAs, especially local EA community builders. They have a lot of trust, mainly for being around for so long. So when ever they screw up like this, it causes enormous harm. Also since EA have such a large growth rate (at any given time most EAs are new EAs), the community is bad at tracking when 80k does screw up, so they don’t even loose that much trust.
On my side, I’ve pretty much given up on them caring at all about what I have to say. Which is why I’m putting so litle effort into how I word things. I agree my comment could have been worded better (with more effort), and I have tried harder in the past. But I also have to say that I find the level of extreme politeness, lot’s of EA show towards high status orgs, to be very off-putting, so I never been able to imitate that style.
Again, if you can do better, please do so. I’m serious about this.
Someone (not me) had some success at getting 80k to listen, over at the EA forum version of this post. But more work is needed.
I agree that it would be better if 80k had the capacity to easily navigate this kind of thing. But given that they (like all of us) have fixed capacity, I think it still makes sense to complain about Linda making it harder for them to respond.
I also have limited capacity.
But whether an organization can easily respond is pretty orthogonal to whether they’ve done something wrong. Like, if 80k is indeed doing something that merits a boycott, then saying so seems appropriate. There might be some debate about whether this is warranted given the facts, or even whether the facts are right, but it seems misguided to me to make the strength of an objection proportional to someone’s capacity to respond rather than to the badness of the thing they did.
Agreed. It’s reasonable to ask others eg Linda to make this easier where possible. Eg, when discussion group behavior in response to a state of affairs, instead of making it “suggestion/command” part of speech, make it “conditional prediction” part of speech. A statement I could truthfully say:
”As a AI safety community member, I predict I and others will be uncomfortable with 80k if this is where things end up settling, because of disagreeing. I could be convinced otherwise, but it would take extraordinary evidence at this point. If my opinions stay the same and 80k’s also are unchanged, I expect this make me hesitant to link to and recommend 80k, and I would be unsurprised to find others behaving similarly.”
Behaving like that is very similar to what Linda said she intends, but seems to me to leave more room for aumann. I would suggest to 80k that they attempt to simply reinterpret what Linda as equivalent to this, if possible. Of course, it is in fact a slightly different thing than what she said.
Edit: very odd that this, but neither its parent or grandparent comment, got downvoted. What i said here feels like a pretty similar thing to what I said in the grandparent, and agrees with buck and with linda; it’s my attempt to show there’s a way to merge these perspectives. What about my comment diverges?
But you did not say it (other than as a response to me). Why not?
I’d be happy for you to take the discussion with 80k and try to change their behaviour. This is not the first time I told them that if they list a job, a lot of people will both take it as an endorsement, and trut 80k that this is a good job to apply for.
As far as I can tell 80k is in complete denial on the large influence they have on many EAs, especially local EA community builders. They have a lot of trust, mainly for being around for so long. So when ever they screw up like this, it causes enormous harm. Also since EA have such a large growth rate (at any given time most EAs are new EAs), the community is bad at tracking when 80k does screw up, so they don’t even loose that much trust.
On my side, I’ve pretty much given up on them caring at all about what I have to say. Which is why I’m putting so litle effort into how I word things. I agree my comment could have been worded better (with more effort), and I have tried harder in the past. But I also have to say that I find the level of extreme politeness, lot’s of EA show towards high status orgs, to be very off-putting, so I never been able to imitate that style.
Again, if you can do better, please do so. I’m serious about this.
Someone (not me) had some success at getting 80k to listen, over at the EA forum version of this post. But more work is needed.
(FWIW, I’m not the one who downvoted you)