Meta discussion of how to have conversations / high quality discourse / why this is important
Evaluating OpenPhil and CEA as institutions, in a manner that’s aiming to be evenhanded and fair
Making claims and discussing OpenPhil and CEA that seem pretty indistinguishable from “punishing them and building public animosity towards them.”
Because of #3, I think it’s a lot harder to have credibility when doing #1 or #2. I think there is now enough history with #3 (perceived or actual, whatever your intent), that if you want to be able to do #1 or #2 you need to signal pretty hard that you’re not doing #3 anymore, and specifically take actions aiming to rebuild trust. (And if you were doing #3 by accident, this includes figuring out why your process was outputting something that looked like 3)
I have thoughts about “what to do to cause OpenPhil and CEA to change their behavior” which’ll be a response to tristanm’s comment.
Making claims and discussing OpenPhil and CEA that seem pretty indistinguishable from “punishing them and building public animosity towards them.”
Um, this notion that publicly criticizing organizations such as OpenPhil and CEA amounts to unhelpfully “punishing them and building public animosity towards them”, and thus is per se something to be avoided, is exactly one of the glaring issues “EA has a Lying Problem” (specifically, the subsection Criticizing EA orgs is harmful to the movement) was about. Have we learned nothing since then?
I think I’m mostly going to have to retreat to “this is a very important conversation that I would very much like to have over skype but I think online text is not a good medium for it.”
But we’ve had this conversation online, when EA Has A Lying Problem was first posted. Some worthwhile points were raised that are quite close to your position here, such as the point that unrealistic standards of idealism/virtue, honesty and prompt response to criticism (that is, unrealistic for broadly any real-world institution) could undermine the very real progress that EA orgs are hopefully making, compared to most charitable organizations. This is very much true, but the supposed implication that any and all internal critiques are per se harmful simply doesn’t follow!
I wasn’t saying any and all critiques are harmful—the specific thing I was saying was “these are three things I see you doing right now, and I don’t think you can do all of those within a short timespan.”
Independently, I also think some-but-not-all of the specific critiques you are making are harmful, but that wasn’t the point I was making at the time.
The reason I’d much prefer to have the conversation in person is because by now the entire conversation is emotionally charged (at least for me, and it looks like for you), in a way that is counterproductive. Speaking only for myself, I know that in an in person conversation where I can read facial expressions, I can a) more easily maintain empathy throughout the process, b) as soon as I hit a point where either we disagree, or where the conversation is getting heated, it’s a lot easier to see that, step back and say “okay let’s stop drop and doublecrux.” (And, hopefully, often realize that something was a simple misunderstanding rather than a disagreement)
Online, there are two options at any interval: write out a short point, or write out a long point. If I write out a short point, it won’t actually address all the things I’m trying to point at. If I write a long point, at least one thing will probably be disagreed with or misunderstood, which will derail the whole post.
A) I think this is probably a good thing to do when an online conversation is accumulating drama and controversy.
B) Even if it’s not, I very much want to test it out and find out if it works.
Sometimes a just and accurate evaluation shows that someone’s not as great as they said they were. I’m not trying to be evenhanded in the sense of never drawing any conclusions, and I don’t see the value in that.
Could you say more about which things you think I should be doing separately instead of together, and why?
Things I notice you doing:
Meta discussion of how to have conversations / high quality discourse / why this is important
Evaluating OpenPhil and CEA as institutions, in a manner that’s aiming to be evenhanded and fair
Making claims and discussing OpenPhil and CEA that seem pretty indistinguishable from “punishing them and building public animosity towards them.”
Because of #3, I think it’s a lot harder to have credibility when doing #1 or #2. I think there is now enough history with #3 (perceived or actual, whatever your intent), that if you want to be able to do #1 or #2 you need to signal pretty hard that you’re not doing #3 anymore, and specifically take actions aiming to rebuild trust. (And if you were doing #3 by accident, this includes figuring out why your process was outputting something that looked like 3)
I have thoughts about “what to do to cause OpenPhil and CEA to change their behavior” which’ll be a response to tristanm’s comment.
Um, this notion that publicly criticizing organizations such as OpenPhil and CEA amounts to unhelpfully “punishing them and building public animosity towards them”, and thus is per se something to be avoided, is exactly one of the glaring issues “EA has a Lying Problem” (specifically, the subsection Criticizing EA orgs is harmful to the movement) was about. Have we learned nothing since then?
I think I’m mostly going to have to retreat to “this is a very important conversation that I would very much like to have over skype but I think online text is not a good medium for it.”
But we’ve had this conversation online, when EA Has A Lying Problem was first posted. Some worthwhile points were raised that are quite close to your position here, such as the point that unrealistic standards of idealism/virtue, honesty and prompt response to criticism (that is, unrealistic for broadly any real-world institution) could undermine the very real progress that EA orgs are hopefully making, compared to most charitable organizations. This is very much true, but the supposed implication that any and all internal critiques are per se harmful simply doesn’t follow!
I wasn’t saying any and all critiques are harmful—the specific thing I was saying was “these are three things I see you doing right now, and I don’t think you can do all of those within a short timespan.”
Independently, I also think some-but-not-all of the specific critiques you are making are harmful, but that wasn’t the point I was making at the time.
The reason I’d much prefer to have the conversation in person is because by now the entire conversation is emotionally charged (at least for me, and it looks like for you), in a way that is counterproductive. Speaking only for myself, I know that in an in person conversation where I can read facial expressions, I can a) more easily maintain empathy throughout the process, b) as soon as I hit a point where either we disagree, or where the conversation is getting heated, it’s a lot easier to see that, step back and say “okay let’s stop drop and doublecrux.” (And, hopefully, often realize that something was a simple misunderstanding rather than a disagreement)
Online, there are two options at any interval: write out a short point, or write out a long point. If I write out a short point, it won’t actually address all the things I’m trying to point at. If I write a long point, at least one thing will probably be disagreed with or misunderstood, which will derail the whole post.
A) I think this is probably a good thing to do when an online conversation is accumulating drama and controversy.
B) Even if it’s not, I very much want to test it out and find out if it works.
Sometimes a just and accurate evaluation shows that someone’s not as great as they said they were. I’m not trying to be evenhanded in the sense of never drawing any conclusions, and I don’t see the value in that.