(Note: this was cross-posted to EA Forum here; I’ve corrected a couple of minor typos, and swapping out ‘EA Forum’ for ‘LessWrong’ where appropriate)
A note on EA LessWrong posts as (amateur) investigative journalism:
When passions are running high, it can be helpful to take a step back and assess what’s going on here a little more objectively.
There are all different kinds of EA Forum LessWrong posts that we evaluate using different criteria. Some posts announce new funding opportunities; we evaluate these in terms of brevity, clarity, relevance, and useful links for applicants. Some posts introduce a new potential EA cause area; we evaluate them in terms of whether they make a good empirical case for the cause area being large-scope, neglected, and tractable. Some posts raise a theoretical issues in moral philosophy; we evaluate those in terms of technical philosophical criteria such as logical coherence.
This post by Ben Pace is very unusual, in that it’s basically investigative journalism, reporting the alleged problems with one particular organization and two of its leaders. The author doesn’t explicitly frame it this way, but in his discussion of how many people he talked to, how much time he spent working on it, and how important he believes the alleged problems are, it’s clearly a sort of investigative journalism.
So, let’s assess the post by the usual standards of investigative journalism. I don’t offer any answers to the questions below, but I’d like to raise some issues that might help us evaluate how good the post is, if taken seriously as a work of investigative journalism.
Does the author have any training, experience, or accountability as an investigative journalist, so they can avoid the most common pitfalls, in terms of journalist ethics, due diligence, appropriate degrees of skepticism about what sources say, etc?
Did the author have any appropriate oversight, in terms of an editor ensuring that they were fair and balanced, or a fact-checking team that reached out independently to verify empirical claims, quotes, and background context? Did they ‘run it by legal’, in terms of checking for potential libel issues?
Does the author have any personal relationship to any of their key sources? Any personal or professional conflicts of interest? Any personal agenda? Was their payment of money to anonymous sources appropriate and ethical?
Were the anonymous sources credible? Did they have any personal or professional incentives to make false allegations? Are they mentally healthy, stable, and responsible? Does the author have significant experience judging the relative merits of contradictory claims by different sources with different degrees of credibility and conflicts of interest?
Did the author give the key targets of their negative coverage sufficient time and opportunity to respond to their allegations, and were their responses fully incorporated into the resulting piece, such that the overall content and tone of the coverage was fair and balanced?
Does the piece offer a coherent narrative that’s clearly organized according to a timeline of events, interactions, claims, counter-claims, and outcomes? Does the piece show ‘scope-sensitivity’ in accurately judging the relative badness of different actions by different people and organizations, in terms of which things are actually trivial, which may have been unethical but not illegal, and which would be prosecutable in a court of law?
Does the piece conform to accepted journalist standards in terms of truth, balance, open-mindedness, context-sensitivity, newsworthiness, credibility of sources, and avoidance of libel? (Or is it a biased article that presupposed its negative conclusions, aka a ‘hit piece’, ‘takedown’, or ‘hatchet job’).
Would this post meet the standards of investigative journalism that’s typically published in mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Economist?
I don’t know the answers to some of these, although I have personal hunches about others. But that’s not what’s important here.
What’s important is that if we publish amateur investigative journalism in EA Forum LessWrong, especially when there are very high stakes for the reputations of individuals and organizations, we should try to adhere, as closely as possible, to the standards of professional investigative journalism. Why? Because professional journalists have learned, from centuries of copious, bitter, hard-won experience, that it’s very hard to maintain good epistemic standards when writing these kinds of pieces, it’s very tempting to buy into the narratives of certain sources and informants, it’s very hard to course-correct when contradictory information comes to light, and it’s very important to be professionally accountable for truth and balance.
(Note: this was cross-posted to EA Forum here; I’ve corrected a couple of minor typos, and swapping out ‘EA Forum’ for ‘LessWrong’ where appropriate)
A note on
EALessWrong posts as (amateur) investigative journalism:When passions are running high, it can be helpful to take a step back and assess what’s going on here a little more objectively.
There are all different kinds of
EA ForumLessWrong posts that we evaluate using different criteria. Some posts announce new funding opportunities; we evaluate these in terms of brevity, clarity, relevance, and useful links for applicants. Some posts introduce a new potential EA cause area; we evaluate them in terms of whether they make a good empirical case for the cause area being large-scope, neglected, and tractable. Some posts raise a theoretical issues in moral philosophy; we evaluate those in terms of technical philosophical criteria such as logical coherence.This post by Ben Pace is very unusual, in that it’s basically investigative journalism, reporting the alleged problems with one particular organization and two of its leaders. The author doesn’t explicitly frame it this way, but in his discussion of how many people he talked to, how much time he spent working on it, and how important he believes the alleged problems are, it’s clearly a sort of investigative journalism.
So, let’s assess the post by the usual standards of investigative journalism. I don’t offer any answers to the questions below, but I’d like to raise some issues that might help us evaluate how good the post is, if taken seriously as a work of investigative journalism.
Does the author have any training, experience, or accountability as an investigative journalist, so they can avoid the most common pitfalls, in terms of journalist ethics, due diligence, appropriate degrees of skepticism about what sources say, etc?
Did the author have any appropriate oversight, in terms of an editor ensuring that they were fair and balanced, or a fact-checking team that reached out independently to verify empirical claims, quotes, and background context? Did they ‘run it by legal’, in terms of checking for potential libel issues?
Does the author have any personal relationship to any of their key sources? Any personal or professional conflicts of interest? Any personal agenda? Was their payment of money to anonymous sources appropriate and ethical?
Were the anonymous sources credible? Did they have any personal or professional incentives to make false allegations? Are they mentally healthy, stable, and responsible? Does the author have significant experience judging the relative merits of contradictory claims by different sources with different degrees of credibility and conflicts of interest?
Did the author give the key targets of their negative coverage sufficient time and opportunity to respond to their allegations, and were their responses fully incorporated into the resulting piece, such that the overall content and tone of the coverage was fair and balanced?
Does the piece offer a coherent narrative that’s clearly organized according to a timeline of events, interactions, claims, counter-claims, and outcomes? Does the piece show ‘scope-sensitivity’ in accurately judging the relative badness of different actions by different people and organizations, in terms of which things are actually trivial, which may have been unethical but not illegal, and which would be prosecutable in a court of law?
Does the piece conform to accepted journalist standards in terms of truth, balance, open-mindedness, context-sensitivity, newsworthiness, credibility of sources, and avoidance of libel? (Or is it a biased article that presupposed its negative conclusions, aka a ‘hit piece’, ‘takedown’, or ‘hatchet job’).
Would this post meet the standards of investigative journalism that’s typically published in mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Economist?
I don’t know the answers to some of these, although I have personal hunches about others. But that’s not what’s important here.
What’s important is that if we publish amateur investigative journalism in
EA ForumLessWrong, especially when there are very high stakes for the reputations of individuals and organizations, we should try to adhere, as closely as possible, to the standards of professional investigative journalism. Why? Because professional journalists have learned, from centuries of copious, bitter, hard-won experience, that it’s very hard to maintain good epistemic standards when writing these kinds of pieces, it’s very tempting to buy into the narratives of certain sources and informants, it’s very hard to course-correct when contradictory information comes to light, and it’s very important to be professionally accountable for truth and balance.