I’m the moderator with final say on this matter, so I’ll lay out elements of my current thinking:
p.b. did a very reasonable and prosocial thing by taking notes and sharing them. It sounds like the confidentiality request was ambiguous on the topic of notes, and p.b.’s reasoning about it feels reasonable to me. I was compelled by it.
It is generally good and cooperative to respect requests for confidentiality. In this case, it seems one could have either interpreted Sam’s request as definitely including written notes, or been unsure about his request but preferred erring on the side of caution. I think those are also reasonable positions.
The situation/confidentiality request was ambiguous. On the one hand, a request was made. On the other, this was a talk given to a large number of people and the request wasn’t made particularly hard, e.g., not being made in advance, not being made in writing, etc.
LessWrong should have a high bar for removing any user’s content. The benefits of information being shared by default are large and excessive caution in cases of ambiguity would both increase cognitive overhead and frequently result in important information not reaching the people who would benefit a lot from it.
Sam’s preference on the matter is relevant. If he’s cool with the post, then no problem. If he prefers it to be removed, that factors into both what the mods and the author decide to do.
I feel sympathetic to the ACX organizers who hosted Sam who fear that a violation of confidentiality request is a disincentive for future speakers (Sam and others). More generally, because I value information being shared, I’m afraid of things that would reduce such as people not feeling comfortable speaking.
To the extent someone doesn’t want attention drawn to information, it can be better to not remove it once posted. And honoring Sam’s preferences at this point might actually mean leaving it up.
Last night, we pinged someone close to Sam about whether he’d prefer the post be taken down. They said that with high confidence they expect him to prefer that. If we hadn’t received this response, we would very likely have left the post up, since I don’t think preemptively taking it down based on an unclear confidentiality request would have been appropriate. We have also pinged Sam himself but haven’t heard back yet.
My current leaning is that if p.b. wants to leave it down, that’s definitely their prerogative. If Sam responds and wants us to keep it down and this seems like a reasonable request backed by compelling reasons, we’ll likely honor that. Correspondingly, if there aren’t compelling reasons, e.g., motivations driven by something deceptive, then we would encourage p.b. to republish it. In the absence of a clear response, we’ll leave the decision up to p.b. after sharing with them all the things we know.
He really appreciates us taking it down since he doesn’t usually talk in much detail about future plans.
He really enjoys engaging with this community and it’s nice to able to do this in an off-the-record-ish way.
That seems reasonable to me. If I had to guess, many people are very interested in Sam’s plans which makes them hard to talk about publicly (people reading too much into every little thing, misinterpreting things, etc, and he probably doesn’t want people reacting to misunderstandings, etc.). Given that, I think the content should stay down out of respect for Sam’s wishes.
Sam apparently said at the meetup that it was fine to share notes with friends, so I assume it’s fine to pass around private copies of p.b.‘s notes (and Gwern’s LW comments, etc.) in a Google Doc—manually adding each individual who wants to see it, rather than setting it to ‘anyone with the link can view’.
There’s also an ambiguity here about “how much can LWers discuss particular important questions or issues that are informed by stuff they learned from the meetup, or from p.b. and others’ notes?”.
I assume Sam’s views are now generally ‘in the water’ on LW, and that it would be pretty costly for the whole community to permanently self-censor about them in all non-private discussion.
(Both because the info is pretty important and discussion-worthy, and because keeping long-term secrets tends to be very cognitively taxing. And people weren’t warned in advance that they might have to permanently tag a bunch of complicated facts in their head as ‘secret’ and avoid mentioning them at all—either at the meetup, AFAICT, or before reading p.b.’s post.)
I think it makes more sense for the norm to be something like ‘don’t make a big public list of Things Sam Said At The Meetup’, ‘don’t go giving interviews to reporters about it’, and ‘don’t title your posts “Sam Altman thinks X” if your only evidence is from the meetup’, but for discussion of this stuff to otherwise be fair game going forward. (Maybe after a one-week moratorium or something, I dunno.)
+1 My model of this (was not at the meetup, but have been part of many discussions/announcements with varying levels of confidentiality) is that talking about issues or topics is just fine, but quotes or appeals to authority “Sam Altman said!” are discouraged. Anything Privileged and Confidential (legally non-discoverable) was already not part of the Q&A. Anything so tentative or sensitive that it shouldn’t be discussed at all will have been explicitly stated in the meeting as such (or omitted entirely).
The request for this to be off the record was explicit during the introduction to the talk, so I’m not sure why it’s ambiguous. And “off the record” has a pretty clear meaning—I certainly had the clear expectation that my question, and his answer, weren’t going to be published.
Edit: I do not recall the phrasing, but as I said below, I was under a distinct impression that the request for no recording and no transcript was at least indicative, and that asking him if you could share notes publicly would have been the right thing to do.
I definitely don’t remember the terms “off the record” being used.
And I think if the other participants of the meetup who commented on the post, had any memory of these terms being used, they would have mentioned it. Because, yes, that’s not very ambiguous and I don’t think there would have been much of a discussion then.
Whether this term was being used also feels pretty cruxy to me, so other people chiming in would be useful (ironically it would be useful to have a recording of the talk so we could figure out what confidentiality request was made :P).
I don’t have a very good (or even halfway decent) memory for phrases, so I have no idea, and since no-one else heard it, I assume it wasn’t said. Still, it seemed clear to me that the request was intended for the talk to be off the record, in the journalistic sense.
The phrase “no recording and no transcript,” which you seem to agree was said explicitly, seems to indicate that he didn’t want there to be a record of what he said. At that point, maybe you didn’t technically do anything he requested you not to do, but it seems like the responsible and decent thing would be to have asked Sam if he minded.
If the words “off the record” were used, that does feel stronger. I wasn’t there. My understanding was that “no recording and no transcript” was what was requested.
It may have been requested from the organizers and it may have been mentioned that there won’t be a recording, but as far as I remember it was not requested from the participants.
I don’t recall what phrase was used, but I thought that it was clear enough. If someone said that they agree to do a talk on the condition that there be no recording and no transcript, unlike every other talk in the series, it seems to take a really weird model of the situation to claim that you had no idea that they would not want people publicly posting notes. At the very least, it merits checking.
I think there’s a difference between “recording and transcript” and “some guy’s rough notes”. If the concern is journalist-quote-mining, the latter might be substantially less useful to a journalist while still be useful to people in the community.
I agree that checking would have been a good idea, but notes definitely feel they like they fall in ambiguous zone given what was said according to people’s reports.
I’m the moderator with final say on this matter, so I’ll lay out elements of my current thinking:
p.b. did a very reasonable and prosocial thing by taking notes and sharing them. It sounds like the confidentiality request was ambiguous on the topic of notes, and p.b.’s reasoning about it feels reasonable to me. I was compelled by it.
It is generally good and cooperative to respect requests for confidentiality. In this case, it seems one could have either interpreted Sam’s request as definitely including written notes, or been unsure about his request but preferred erring on the side of caution. I think those are also reasonable positions.
The situation/confidentiality request was ambiguous. On the one hand, a request was made. On the other, this was a talk given to a large number of people and the request wasn’t made particularly hard, e.g., not being made in advance, not being made in writing, etc.
LessWrong should have a high bar for removing any user’s content. The benefits of information being shared by default are large and excessive caution in cases of ambiguity would both increase cognitive overhead and frequently result in important information not reaching the people who would benefit a lot from it.
Sam’s preference on the matter is relevant. If he’s cool with the post, then no problem. If he prefers it to be removed, that factors into both what the mods and the author decide to do.
I feel sympathetic to the ACX organizers who hosted Sam who fear that a violation of confidentiality request is a disincentive for future speakers (Sam and others). More generally, because I value information being shared, I’m afraid of things that would reduce such as people not feeling comfortable speaking.
To the extent someone doesn’t want attention drawn to information, it can be better to not remove it once posted. And honoring Sam’s preferences at this point might actually mean leaving it up.
Last night, we pinged someone close to Sam about whether he’d prefer the post be taken down. They said that with high confidence they expect him to prefer that. If we hadn’t received this response, we would very likely have left the post up, since I don’t think preemptively taking it down based on an unclear confidentiality request would have been appropriate. We have also pinged Sam himself but haven’t heard back yet.
My current leaning is that if p.b. wants to leave it down, that’s definitely their prerogative. If Sam responds and wants us to keep it down and this seems like a reasonable request backed by compelling reasons, we’ll likely honor that. Correspondingly, if there aren’t compelling reasons, e.g., motivations driven by something deceptive, then we would encourage p.b. to republish it. In the absence of a clear response, we’ll leave the decision up to p.b. after sharing with them all the things we know.
Sam has replied to us:
He really appreciates us taking it down since he doesn’t usually talk in much detail about future plans.
He really enjoys engaging with this community and it’s nice to able to do this in an off-the-record-ish way.
That seems reasonable to me. If I had to guess, many people are very interested in Sam’s plans which makes them hard to talk about publicly (people reading too much into every little thing, misinterpreting things, etc, and he probably doesn’t want people reacting to misunderstandings, etc.). Given that, I think the content should stay down out of respect for Sam’s wishes.
Good to know!
Sam apparently said at the meetup that it was fine to share notes with friends, so I assume it’s fine to pass around private copies of p.b.‘s notes (and Gwern’s LW comments, etc.) in a Google Doc—manually adding each individual who wants to see it, rather than setting it to ‘anyone with the link can view’.
There’s also an ambiguity here about “how much can LWers discuss particular important questions or issues that are informed by stuff they learned from the meetup, or from p.b. and others’ notes?”.
I assume Sam’s views are now generally ‘in the water’ on LW, and that it would be pretty costly for the whole community to permanently self-censor about them in all non-private discussion.
(Both because the info is pretty important and discussion-worthy, and because keeping long-term secrets tends to be very cognitively taxing. And people weren’t warned in advance that they might have to permanently tag a bunch of complicated facts in their head as ‘secret’ and avoid mentioning them at all—either at the meetup, AFAICT, or before reading p.b.’s post.)
I think it makes more sense for the norm to be something like ‘don’t make a big public list of Things Sam Said At The Meetup’, ‘don’t go giving interviews to reporters about it’, and ‘don’t title your posts “Sam Altman thinks X” if your only evidence is from the meetup’, but for discussion of this stuff to otherwise be fair game going forward. (Maybe after a one-week moratorium or something, I dunno.)
+1
My model of this (was not at the meetup, but have been part of many discussions/announcements with varying levels of confidentiality) is that talking about issues or topics is just fine, but quotes or appeals to authority “Sam Altman said!” are discouraged. Anything Privileged and Confidential (legally non-discoverable) was already not part of the Q&A. Anything so tentative or sensitive that it shouldn’t be discussed at all will have been explicitly stated in the meeting as such (or omitted entirely).
(If others disagree, I’m probably easy to convince on this.)
The request for this to be off the record was explicit during the introduction to the talk, so I’m not sure why it’s ambiguous. And “off the record” has a pretty clear meaning—I certainly had the clear expectation that my question, and his answer, weren’t going to be published.
Edit: I do not recall the phrasing, but as I said below, I was under a distinct impression that the request for no recording and no transcript was at least indicative, and that asking him if you could share notes publicly would have been the right thing to do.
I definitely don’t remember the terms “off the record” being used.
And I think if the other participants of the meetup who commented on the post, had any memory of these terms being used, they would have mentioned it. Because, yes, that’s not very ambiguous and I don’t think there would have been much of a discussion then.
Whether this term was being used also feels pretty cruxy to me, so other people chiming in would be useful (ironically it would be useful to have a recording of the talk so we could figure out what confidentiality request was made :P).
I don’t have a very good (or even halfway decent) memory for phrases, so I have no idea, and since no-one else heard it, I assume it wasn’t said. Still, it seemed clear to me that the request was intended for the talk to be off the record, in the journalistic sense.
The phrase “no recording and no transcript,” which you seem to agree was said explicitly, seems to indicate that he didn’t want there to be a record of what he said. At that point, maybe you didn’t technically do anything he requested you not to do, but it seems like the responsible and decent thing would be to have asked Sam if he minded.
If the words “off the record” were used, that does feel stronger. I wasn’t there. My understanding was that “no recording and no transcript” was what was requested.
It may have been requested from the organizers and it may have been mentioned that there won’t be a recording, but as far as I remember it was not requested from the participants.
I don’t recall what phrase was used, but I thought that it was clear enough. If someone said that they agree to do a talk on the condition that there be no recording and no transcript, unlike every other talk in the series, it seems to take a really weird model of the situation to claim that you had no idea that they would not want people publicly posting notes. At the very least, it merits checking.
I think there’s a difference between “recording and transcript” and “some guy’s rough notes”. If the concern is journalist-quote-mining, the latter might be substantially less useful to a journalist while still be useful to people in the community.
I agree that checking would have been a good idea, but notes definitely feel they like they fall in ambiguous zone given what was said according to people’s reports.