Whose transparency can we celebrate?

By leillustrations🔸 @ 2024-10-12T03:35 (+87)

Holly Elmore writes about the costs of criticism. One of the most salient things to me here is that criticism disincentivises transparency: people are 'punished' when they are transparent while equal transgressions by people who are not transparent 'go unpunished'.

I want to call out instances of transparency and celebrate them. Here are some instances that have stuck with me – thank you for your time spent writing these up and sharing them with the community:

Eli Nathan & the 2023 EAG teams, for "How much do EAGs cost and why?"
MathiasKB, for "Center for Effective Aid Policy has shut down"
Happier Lives Institute, for engaging with criticism in "Talking through depression: The cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy in LMICs, revised and expanded"
Givewell and Charity Entrepreneurship/AIM for publicising "moral weights" and similar key metrics/assumptions
Givewell top charities, but also AMREF, CARE, Living Goods, The Hunger Project, and Doctors Without Borders (from Givewell's special recognition list)
Manifold Markets, for public meeting notes, financial information, and more.

What have I missed from this list?

Rasool @ 2024-10-12T08:18 (+20)

GiveWell publish a lot of information from their board meetings, including previously full audio recordings

Nathan Young @ 2024-10-12T10:48 (+11)

Yudkowsky is very happy to answer difficult questions, more so than most public figures.

Nathan Young @ 2024-10-12T10:47 (+6)

The Lightcone team are generally very transparent, answering specific internal questions

Mo Putera @ 2024-12-12T04:41 (+2)

I'd add Maternal Health Initiative is Shutting Down by Ben Williamson and Sarah Eustis-Guthrie. Their Asterisk article Why we shut down is great too.

On an individual level I appreciate things like Scott Alexander's Mistakes list, pinned at the top of his blog, on "times I was fundamentally wrong about a major part of a post and someone was able to convince me of it". I'd appreciate it if more public intellectuals did this.

leillustrations🔸 @ 2024-12-12T02:06 (+1)

Adding ALLFED for their cost effectiveness analysis. I'd thought of this when writing the original post but couldn't find the discussion around transparency I remember it from, but I've now found it here.

yanni kyriacos @ 2024-10-19T22:11 (+1)

Remember: everything has opportunity costs. So before looking at transparent things and assuming they have a positive cost / benefit, consider the fact that to be transparent the person or org didn't do something else.

For e.g. I could list on my website that my major funder is LTFF but honestly that is not in my top 30 tasks.

Let's not justify things just because they feel good. Which is exactly the same trap EAs fall into about giving criticism!

mhendric🔸 @ 2024-10-20T09:20 (+8)

I don't find this convincing. It seems to me that updating that one line on your website should not take longer than e.g. writing this comment. Why would you think it has a significant tradeoff?

yanni kyriacos @ 2024-10-21T01:09 (+2)

There's probably 100 things that sit in the "not urgent space" when running a start up.

If you open yourself to those 100 things then you don't work on the most important.

If you haven't run / worked in a small startup I don't expect this to be intuitive.

leillustrations🔸 @ 2024-10-21T05:38 (+1)

I think we should celebrate doing things which are better than not doing that thing, even if we don't know what the counterfactual would have been. For example:

When a friend donates to charity, I show appreciation, not ask him how sure he is that it was the best possible use of his money
When my relative gets a good grade, I congratulate her - I don't start questioning if she really prioritised studying for the right subject
When a server is nice to me, I thank them - I don't ask them why they're talking to me instead of serving someone else

I appreciate that transparency might never be on the top of your to do list, and that might be the correct decision. But when an organisation is transparent, that's a public good - it helps me and the community make better decisions about how I want to do good, and I want them to know it helped me.

Public goods have this slightly annoying feature of being disincentivised, because they helps everyone, often at the cost of those providing the good. In an ideal world EAs would all do it anyway because we're perfect altruists, but we still respond to incentives like everyone else. This is why I don't think we need to go around asking eg. who has sent the best funding applications, even though that can often be more important than being transparent.

I'd love to talk about other important public goods that we should celebrate!