I think many people have learned to believe the reasoning step “If people believe bad things about my team I think are mistaken with the information I’ve given them, then I am responsible for not misinforming people, so I should take the information away, because it is irresponsible to cause people to have false beliefs”. I think many well-intentioned people will say something like this, and that this is probably because of two reasons (borrowing from The Gervais Principle):
(Comment not specific to the particulars of this issue but noted as a general policy:) I think that as a general rule, if you are hypothesizing reasons for why somebody might say a thing, you should always also include the hypothesis that “people say a thing because they actually believe in it”. This is especially so if you are hypothesizing bad reasons for why people might say it.
It’s very annoying when someone hypothesizes various psychological reasons for your behavior and beliefs but never even considers as a possibility the idea that maybe you might have good reasons to believe in it. Compare e.g. “rationalists seem to believe that superintelligence is imminent; I think this is probably because that lets them avoid taking responsibility about their current problems if AI will make those irrelevant anyway, or possibly because they come from religious backgrounds and can’t get over their subconscious longing for a god-like figure”.
I feel more responsibility to be the person holding/tracking the earnest hypothesis in a 1-1 context, or if I am the only one speaking; in larger group contexts I tend to mostly ask “Is there a hypothesis here that isn’t or likely won’t be tracked unless I speak up” and then I mostly focus on adding hypotheses to track (or adding evidence that nobody else is adding).
(Did Ben indicate he didn’t consider it? My guess is he considered it, but thinks it’s not that likely and doesn’t have amazingly interesting things to say on it.
I think having a norm of explicitly saying “I considered whether you were saying the truth but I don’t believe it” seems like an OK norm, but not obviously a great one. In this case Ben also responded to a comment of mine which already said this, and so I really don’t see a reason for repeating it.)
I gave my strongest hypothesis for why it looks to me that many many people believe it’s responsible to take down information that makes your org look bad. I don’t think alternative stories have negligible probability, nor does what I wrote imply that, though it is logically consistent with that.
There are many anti-informative behaviors that are widespread for which people do for poor reasons, like saying that their spouse is the best spouse in the world, or telling customers that their business is the best business in the industry, or saying exclusively glowing things about people in reference letters, that should obviously be explained by the incentives on the person to present themselves in the best light; at the same time, it is respectful to a person, while in dialogue with them, to keep a track of the version of them who is trying their best to have true beliefs and honestly inform others around them, in order to help them become that person (and notice the delta between their current behavior and what they hopefully aspire to).
Seeing orgs in the self-identified-EA space take down information that makes them look bad is (to me) not that dissimilar to the other things I listed.
I think it’s good to discuss norms about how appropriate it is to bring up cynical hypotheses about someone during a discussion in which they’re present. In this case I think raising this hypothesis was worthwhile it for the discussion, and I didn’t cut off any way for the person in question to continue to show themselves to be broadly acting in good faith, so I think it went fine. Li replied to Habryka, and left a thoughtful pair of comments retracting and apologizing, which reflected well on them in my eyes.
I don’t think alternative stories have negligible probability
Okay! Good clarification.
I think it’s good to discuss norms about how appropriate it is to bring up cynical hypotheses about someone during a discussion in which they’re present.
To clarify, my comment wasn’t specific to the case where the person is present. There are obvious reasons why the consideration should get extra weight when the person is present, but there’s also a reason to give it extra weight if none of the people discussed are present—namely that they won’t be able to correct any incorrect claims if they’re not around.
so I think it went fine
Agree.
(As I mentioned in the original comment, the point I made was not specific to the details of this case, but noted as a general policy. But yes, in this specific case it went fine.)
(Comment not specific to the particulars of this issue but noted as a general policy:) I think that as a general rule, if you are hypothesizing reasons for why somebody might say a thing, you should always also include the hypothesis that “people say a thing because they actually believe in it”. This is especially so if you are hypothesizing bad reasons for why people might say it.
It’s very annoying when someone hypothesizes various psychological reasons for your behavior and beliefs but never even considers as a possibility the idea that maybe you might have good reasons to believe in it. Compare e.g. “rationalists seem to believe that superintelligence is imminent; I think this is probably because that lets them avoid taking responsibility about their current problems if AI will make those irrelevant anyway, or possibly because they come from religious backgrounds and can’t get over their subconscious longing for a god-like figure”.
I feel more responsibility to be the person holding/tracking the earnest hypothesis in a 1-1 context, or if I am the only one speaking; in larger group contexts I tend to mostly ask “Is there a hypothesis here that isn’t or likely won’t be tracked unless I speak up” and then I mostly focus on adding hypotheses to track (or adding evidence that nobody else is adding).
(Did Ben indicate he didn’t consider it? My guess is he considered it, but thinks it’s not that likely and doesn’t have amazingly interesting things to say on it.
I think having a norm of explicitly saying “I considered whether you were saying the truth but I don’t believe it” seems like an OK norm, but not obviously a great one. In this case Ben also responded to a comment of mine which already said this, and so I really don’t see a reason for repeating it.)
(I read
as implying that the list of reasons is considered to exhaustive, such that any reasons besides those two have negligible probability.)
I gave my strongest hypothesis for why it looks to me that many many people believe it’s responsible to take down information that makes your org look bad. I don’t think alternative stories have negligible probability, nor does what I wrote imply that, though it is logically consistent with that.
There are many anti-informative behaviors that are widespread for which people do for poor reasons, like saying that their spouse is the best spouse in the world, or telling customers that their business is the best business in the industry, or saying exclusively glowing things about people in reference letters, that should obviously be explained by the incentives on the person to present themselves in the best light; at the same time, it is respectful to a person, while in dialogue with them, to keep a track of the version of them who is trying their best to have true beliefs and honestly inform others around them, in order to help them become that person (and notice the delta between their current behavior and what they hopefully aspire to).
Seeing orgs in the self-identified-EA space take down information that makes them look bad is (to me) not that dissimilar to the other things I listed.
I think it’s good to discuss norms about how appropriate it is to bring up cynical hypotheses about someone during a discussion in which they’re present. In this case I think raising this hypothesis was worthwhile it for the discussion, and I didn’t cut off any way for the person in question to continue to show themselves to be broadly acting in good faith, so I think it went fine. Li replied to Habryka, and left a thoughtful pair of comments retracting and apologizing, which reflected well on them in my eyes.
Okay! Good clarification.
To clarify, my comment wasn’t specific to the case where the person is present. There are obvious reasons why the consideration should get extra weight when the person is present, but there’s also a reason to give it extra weight if none of the people discussed are present—namely that they won’t be able to correct any incorrect claims if they’re not around.
Agree.
(As I mentioned in the original comment, the point I made was not specific to the details of this case, but noted as a general policy. But yes, in this specific case it went fine.)