The key thing I’d want (and do encourage) from Benquo and Jessicata and others is to flag where the distillation seems to be missing important things or mischaracterizing things. (A key property of a good conversation-distillation is that all parties agree that it represents them well)
That said, in this case, I’m mostly just directly using everyone’s words as they originally said them. Distortions might come from my selection process – it so happened that me/Benquo/Jessica wrote comments that seemed like fairly comprehensive takes on our worldviews so hopefully that’s not an issue here.
But I could imagine it being an issue if/when I try to summarize the 8-hour-in-person conversation, which didn’t leave as much written record. (My plan is to write it up in google doc form and give everyone who participated in the conversation opportunity to comment on it before posting publicly)
Collusion
“Collusion” was something that Benquo had specifically mentioned as a concern.
(early on, I had sent him an email that was sort of weird, where I was doing a combination of “speaking privately” but also not really speaking any more frankly than I would have in public. I think it made sense at the time for me to do this because I didn’t have a clear sense of how much trust there was between us. But I think it made sense for that to be a red-flag for Benquo)
I agree that if you’re worried about Benquo/me colluding, there’s not a great way to assuage your concerns fully. But I’m hoping the general practice of doing public distillations that aim to be as clear/honest as possible is at least a step in the right direction.
(My first stab at an additional stepis to have common practices of signaling meta-trust, such as flagging places where some kind of collusion was at least plausibly suspicious. This is already fairly common in the form of declaring conflicts of interest. Although I have some alternate concerns about how that allocates attention that I’ll try to write up later)
The key thing I’d want (and do encourage) from Benquo and Jessicata and others is to flag where the distillation seems to be missing important things or mischaracterizing things. (A key property of a good conversation-distillation is that all parties agree that it represents them well)
That said, in this case, I’m mostly just directly using everyone’s words as they originally said them. Distortions might come from my selection process – it so happened that me/Benquo/Jessica wrote comments that seemed like fairly comprehensive takes on our worldviews so hopefully that’s not an issue here.
But I could imagine it being an issue if/when I try to summarize the 8-hour-in-person conversation, which didn’t leave as much written record. (My plan is to write it up in google doc form and give everyone who participated in the conversation opportunity to comment on it before posting publicly)
Collusion
“Collusion” was something that Benquo had specifically mentioned as a concern.
(early on, I had sent him an email that was sort of weird, where I was doing a combination of “speaking privately” but also not really speaking any more frankly than I would have in public. I think it made sense at the time for me to do this because I didn’t have a clear sense of how much trust there was between us. But I think it made sense for that to be a red-flag for Benquo)
I agree that if you’re worried about Benquo/me colluding, there’s not a great way to assuage your concerns fully. But I’m hoping the general practice of doing public distillations that aim to be as clear/honest as possible is at least a step in the right direction.
(My first stab at an additional step is to have common practices of signaling meta-trust, such as flagging places where some kind of collusion was at least plausibly suspicious. This is already fairly common in the form of declaring conflicts of interest. Although I have some alternate concerns about how that allocates attention that I’ll try to write up later)