Hey! Sorry for the silence, I was feeling a bit stressed by this whole thread, and so I wanted to step away and think about this before responding. I’ve decided to revert the dashboard back to its original state & have republished the stale data. I did some quick/light data checks but prioritised getting this out fast. For transparency: I’ve also added stronger context warnings and I took down the form to access our raw data in sheet form but intend to add it back once we’ve fixed the data. It’s still on our stack to Actually Fix this at some point but we’re still figuring out the timing on that.
On reflection, I think I probably made the wrong call here (although I still feel a bit sad / misunderstood but 🤷🏻♀️). It was a unilateral + lightly held call I made in the middle of my work day — like truly I spent 5 min deciding this & maybe another ~15 updating the thing / leaving a comment. I think if I had a better model for what people wanted from the data, I would have made a different call. I’ve updated on “huh, people really care about not deleting data from the internet!” — although I get that the reaction here might be especially strong because it’s about CEA (vs the general case). Sorry, I made a mistake.
Future facing thoughts: I generally hold myself to a higher standard for accuracy when putting data on the internet, but I also do value not bottlenecking people in investigating questions that feel important to me (e.g. qs about EA growth rates), so to be clear I’m prioritizing the latter goal right now. I still in general stand by, “what even is the point of my job if I don’t stand by the data I communicate to others?” :) I want people to be able to trust that the work they see me put out in the world has been red-teamed & critiqued before publication.
Although I’m sad this caused an unintended kerfuffle, it’s a positive update for me that “huh wow, people actually care a lot that this project is kept alive!”. This honestly wasn’t obvious to me — this is a low traffic website that I worked on a while ago, and don’t hear about much. Oli says somewhere that he’s seen it linked to “many other times” in the past year, but TBH no one has flagged that to me (I’ve been busy with other projects). I’m still glad that we made this thing in the first place and am glad people find the data interesting / valuable (for general CEA transparency reasons, as an input to these broader questions about EA, etc.). I’ll probably prioritize maintenance on this higher in the future.
Now that the data is back up I’m going to go back to ignoring this thread!
[musing] Actually another mistake here which I wish I just said in the first comment: I didn’t have a strong enough TAP for, if someone says a negative thing about your org (or something that could be interpreted negatively), you should have a high bar for not taking away data (meaning more broadly than numbers) that they were using to form that perception, even if you think the data is wrong for reasons they’re not tracking. You can like, try and clarify the misconception (ideally, given time & energy constraints etc.), and you can try harder to avoid putting wrong things out there, but don’t just take it away—it’s not on to reader to treat you charitably and it kind of doesn’t matter what your motives were.
I think I mostly agree with something like that / I do think people should hold orgs to high standards here. I didn’t pay enough attention to this and regret it. Sorry! (I’m back to ignoring this thread lol but just felt like sharing a reflection 🤷🏻♀️)
Thank you! I appreciate the quick oops here, and agree it was a mistake (but fixing it as quickly as you did I think basically made up for all the costs, and I greatly appreciate it).
Just to clarify, I don’t want to make a strong statement that it’s worth updating the data and maintaining the dashboard. By my lights it would be good enough to just have a static snapshot of it forever. The thing that seemed so costly to me was breaking old links and getting rid of data that you did think was correct.
Hey! Sorry for the silence, I was feeling a bit stressed by this whole thread, and so I wanted to step away and think about this before responding. I’ve decided to revert the dashboard back to its original state & have republished the stale data. I did some quick/light data checks but prioritised getting this out fast. For transparency: I’ve also added stronger context warnings and I took down the form to access our raw data in sheet form but intend to add it back once we’ve fixed the data. It’s still on our stack to Actually Fix this at some point but we’re still figuring out the timing on that.
On reflection, I think I probably made the wrong call here (although I still feel a bit sad / misunderstood but 🤷🏻♀️). It was a unilateral + lightly held call I made in the middle of my work day — like truly I spent 5 min deciding this & maybe another ~15 updating the thing / leaving a comment. I think if I had a better model for what people wanted from the data, I would have made a different call. I’ve updated on “huh, people really care about not deleting data from the internet!” — although I get that the reaction here might be especially strong because it’s about CEA (vs the general case). Sorry, I made a mistake.
Future facing thoughts: I generally hold myself to a higher standard for accuracy when putting data on the internet, but I also do value not bottlenecking people in investigating questions that feel important to me (e.g. qs about EA growth rates), so to be clear I’m prioritizing the latter goal right now. I still in general stand by, “what even is the point of my job if I don’t stand by the data I communicate to others?” :) I want people to be able to trust that the work they see me put out in the world has been red-teamed & critiqued before publication.
Although I’m sad this caused an unintended kerfuffle, it’s a positive update for me that “huh wow, people actually care a lot that this project is kept alive!”. This honestly wasn’t obvious to me — this is a low traffic website that I worked on a while ago, and don’t hear about much. Oli says somewhere that he’s seen it linked to “many other times” in the past year, but TBH no one has flagged that to me (I’ve been busy with other projects). I’m still glad that we made this thing in the first place and am glad people find the data interesting / valuable (for general CEA transparency reasons, as an input to these broader questions about EA, etc.). I’ll probably prioritize maintenance on this higher in the future.
Now that the data is back up I’m going to go back to ignoring this thread!
[musing] Actually another mistake here which I wish I just said in the first comment: I didn’t have a strong enough TAP for, if someone says a negative thing about your org (or something that could be interpreted negatively), you should have a high bar for not taking away data (meaning more broadly than numbers) that they were using to form that perception, even if you think the data is wrong for reasons they’re not tracking. You can like, try and clarify the misconception (ideally, given time & energy constraints etc.), and you can try harder to avoid putting wrong things out there, but don’t just take it away—it’s not on to reader to treat you charitably and it kind of doesn’t matter what your motives were.
I think I mostly agree with something like that / I do think people should hold orgs to high standards here. I didn’t pay enough attention to this and regret it. Sorry! (I’m back to ignoring this thread lol but just felt like sharing a reflection 🤷🏻♀️)
Thank you! I appreciate the quick oops here, and agree it was a mistake (but fixing it as quickly as you did I think basically made up for all the costs, and I greatly appreciate it).
Just to clarify, I don’t want to make a strong statement that it’s worth updating the data and maintaining the dashboard. By my lights it would be good enough to just have a static snapshot of it forever. The thing that seemed so costly to me was breaking old links and getting rid of data that you did think was correct.
Thanks again!