But all else equal they’re a reason to prefer object-level questions to questions about intent, logical argument and empirical data to intuition, and private discussion to public discussion.
I agree with the first two items, but consider that the content of these private discussions, and whatever the conclusions that are being drawn from them, are probably only visible to the wider community in the form of the decisions being made at the highest levels. Therefore, how do you ensure that when these decisions are made, and the wider community is expected to support them, that there will not be disagreement or confusion? Especially since the reasoning behind them is probably highly complex.
Then this begs the question, what is the distribution of private / public discussion that is the most preferred? Certainly if all discussion was kept private, then the wider community (especially the EA community) would have no choice but to support decisions on faith alone. And at the other extreme, there is the high cost of writing and publishing documentation of reasoning, the risk of wide misunderstanding and confusion, and the difficulty associated with trying to retract or adjust statements that are no longer supported.
And if “private” discussion wasn’t constrained to just a small circle, but rather simply meant that you would have to communicate to each individual inquiry separately, than that may come at an even greater cost than that of simply publishing your thoughts openly, because it would require you to devote your attention and effort into multiple, possibly numerous individual discussions, that require modeling each person’s level of knowledge and understanding.
I essentially don’t think the answer is going to be as simple as “private” vs “public”, but I tend to err on the side of transparency, though this may reflect more of a value than a belief based on strong empirical data.
I agree with the first two items, but consider that the content of these private discussions, and whatever the conclusions that are being drawn from them, are probably only visible to the wider community in the form of the decisions being made at the highest levels. Therefore, how do you ensure that when these decisions are made, and the wider community is expected to support them, that there will not be disagreement or confusion? Especially since the reasoning behind them is probably highly complex.
Then this begs the question, what is the distribution of private / public discussion that is the most preferred? Certainly if all discussion was kept private, then the wider community (especially the EA community) would have no choice but to support decisions on faith alone. And at the other extreme, there is the high cost of writing and publishing documentation of reasoning, the risk of wide misunderstanding and confusion, and the difficulty associated with trying to retract or adjust statements that are no longer supported.
And if “private” discussion wasn’t constrained to just a small circle, but rather simply meant that you would have to communicate to each individual inquiry separately, than that may come at an even greater cost than that of simply publishing your thoughts openly, because it would require you to devote your attention and effort into multiple, possibly numerous individual discussions, that require modeling each person’s level of knowledge and understanding.
I essentially don’t think the answer is going to be as simple as “private” vs “public”, but I tend to err on the side of transparency, though this may reflect more of a value than a belief based on strong empirical data.