Thanks so much for the response! I really appreciate it.
I’m assuming your institution wants to follow an academic model, including teaching, mentorship, hierarchical student-teacher relationships, etc.
I think we have more of a standard manager-managee hierarchal relationship, with the normal corporate guardrails plus a few more. We also have explicit lines of reporting for abuse or other potential issues to people outside of the organization to minimize potential coverups.
Here are my general thoughts:
An open question is when you have a duty of care
I’m kind of confused. Surely organizations by default have a power dynamic over employees, and managers over reports, and abusing this is bad? Maybe I’m confused and you mean a stronger thing by “duty of care”
Seems straightforwardly true to me, though I think you’re maybe underestimating correlates of direct harm. (eg I expect in many of the cases cited, there’s things like megalomania, insufficient humility, insufficient willingness to listen to contrary evidence, caring more about charismatic personalities than object-level arguments, etc)
Speaking as someone in the subset of “women and minorities”, I’d be pretty concerned about any form of special treatments or affordances given because “women and minorities” are at higher risk, aside from really obvious ones like being moderately more careful about male supervisor/female supervisee.
In particular, this creates bad dynamics/incentive structures, like making it less likely to provide honest/critical feedback to “marginalized” groups, which is one of the things I was warned against in management training.
This seems correct. Also you want multiple trusted points of contact outside the organization, which I think both academia and rationality are failing at.
EA organizations often have Julia Wise, but she’s stretched too thin and thus have (arguably) made significant mistakes as a result, as pointed out in a different thread.
This seems right to me. I think “common sense” should be dereferenced a little for people coming from different cultures, but the company culture of the AngloAmerican elite seems not-crazy as a starting point.
I think it’s Very Bad to allow most forms of lawbreaking on “work time.” But I think you’re implying something much stronger than that, and (speaking as someone who think all recreational drugs are dumb and straightforwardly do not pass any cost-benefits analysis, and have consumed less than a bottle of wine in my entire life) I really don’t think it’s the job of a workplace to police employee’s time off, regardless of whether it’s doing recreational drugs or listening to pirated music.
maybe it’s different if jobs are in person?
But I once worked at a company which had in our code-of-contact that employees can’t drink in parties with other employees, and even though I had no inclination to drink, I still thought that was clearly too crazy/controlling
This seems right. Most companies have rules against managers dating subordinates, and I think for probably good reasons.
This sounds right, though “if you believe” is a probabilistic claim, and if I think the base rate is 5%, I’m not sure you think cutting communication should have at 15% (already ~3x elevated risk!) or 75% or 95%.
I think I agree? But I think your reasoning is shoddy here. “There’s no real correlation between excellence and being abusive” is a population claim, but obviously what people are evaluating is usually individuals.
“Among other things, if your org is aware of (1) through (6), abusers will go elsewhere” One thing I’m confused about is if an organization has credible Bayesian evidence (say 40% is the cutoff) that an employee abuses their reports, it may make sense for the organization to fire them, way before there’s enough evidence to convict in a court of law. But it’s unclear what you should do in the broader ecosystem.
In academia my impression is that professors often switch universities after charges of suspicion, which seems not ideal and not what I’d want to replicate.
This seems like the beginning of a very good discussion, but:
I want to be clear that I’m not a member of the LW community, and I don’t want to take up space here.
There are complex and interesting ideas in play on both sides that are hard to communicate in a back-and-forth, and are perhaps better saved for a structured long-form presentation.
To that end, I’ll suggest that if you like we chat offline. I’m in NYC, for example, and you’re welcome to get in touch via PM.
What I’m talking about is a system of moral duties and obligations connected to an explicitly academic mission. Academia is older than the corporation, and is a separate world. It’s very important not to confuse them, and I wish that corporations (and “research labs” associated with corporations) would state very clearly “we are in no way an academic institution”.
To be clear, my own organization is a nonprofit. We are not interested in making money, nor in doing other things of low moral value.
I currently think emulating the culture of normal companies is a better starting template than academia or other research nonprofits (many of whom have strong positions that they want to believe and research that oh-so-interestingly happen to justify their pre-existing beliefs), though of course different cultures have different poisons that are more or less salient to different people.
Thanks so much for the response! I really appreciate it.
I think we have more of a standard manager-managee hierarchal relationship, with the normal corporate guardrails plus a few more. We also have explicit lines of reporting for abuse or other potential issues to people outside of the organization to minimize potential coverups.
Here are my general thoughts:
I’m kind of confused. Surely organizations by default have a power dynamic over employees, and managers over reports, and abusing this is bad? Maybe I’m confused and you mean a stronger thing by “duty of care”
Seems straightforwardly true to me, though I think you’re maybe underestimating correlates of direct harm. (eg I expect in many of the cases cited, there’s things like megalomania, insufficient humility, insufficient willingness to listen to contrary evidence, caring more about charismatic personalities than object-level arguments, etc)
Speaking as someone in the subset of “women and minorities”, I’d be pretty concerned about any form of special treatments or affordances given because “women and minorities” are at higher risk, aside from really obvious ones like being moderately more careful about male supervisor/female supervisee.
In particular, this creates bad dynamics/incentive structures, like making it less likely to provide honest/critical feedback to “marginalized” groups, which is one of the things I was warned against in management training.
This seems correct. Also you want multiple trusted points of contact outside the organization, which I think both academia and rationality are failing at.
EA organizations often have Julia Wise, but she’s stretched too thin and thus have (arguably) made significant mistakes as a result, as pointed out in a different thread.
This seems right to me. I think “common sense” should be dereferenced a little for people coming from different cultures, but the company culture of the AngloAmerican elite seems not-crazy as a starting point.
I think it’s Very Bad to allow most forms of lawbreaking on “work time.” But I think you’re implying something much stronger than that, and (speaking as someone who think all recreational drugs are dumb and straightforwardly do not pass any cost-benefits analysis, and have consumed less than a bottle of wine in my entire life) I really don’t think it’s the job of a workplace to police employee’s time off, regardless of whether it’s doing recreational drugs or listening to pirated music.
maybe it’s different if jobs are in person?
But I once worked at a company which had in our code-of-contact that employees can’t drink in parties with other employees, and even though I had no inclination to drink, I still thought that was clearly too crazy/controlling
This seems right. Most companies have rules against managers dating subordinates, and I think for probably good reasons.
This sounds right, though “if you believe” is a probabilistic claim, and if I think the base rate is 5%, I’m not sure you think cutting communication should have at 15% (already ~3x elevated risk!) or 75% or 95%.
I think I agree? But I think your reasoning is shoddy here. “There’s no real correlation between excellence and being abusive” is a population claim, but obviously what people are evaluating is usually individuals.
“Among other things, if your org is aware of (1) through (6), abusers will go elsewhere” One thing I’m confused about is if an organization has credible Bayesian evidence (say 40% is the cutoff) that an employee abuses their reports, it may make sense for the organization to fire them, way before there’s enough evidence to convict in a court of law. But it’s unclear what you should do in the broader ecosystem.
In academia my impression is that professors often switch universities after charges of suspicion, which seems not ideal and not what I’d want to replicate.
This seems like the beginning of a very good discussion, but:
I want to be clear that I’m not a member of the LW community, and I don’t want to take up space here.
There are complex and interesting ideas in play on both sides that are hard to communicate in a back-and-forth, and are perhaps better saved for a structured long-form presentation.
To that end, I’ll suggest that if you like we chat offline. I’m in NYC, for example, and you’re welcome to get in touch via PM.
To be clear, my own organization is a nonprofit. We are not interested in making money, nor in doing other things of low moral value.
I currently think emulating the culture of normal companies is a better starting template than academia or other research nonprofits (many of whom have strong positions that they want to believe and research that oh-so-interestingly happen to justify their pre-existing beliefs), though of course different cultures have different poisons that are more or less salient to different people.
But yeah, let’s take this offline.