Run Posts By Orgs

The discrepancy between this post's net karma here (171) and on LessWrong (19) is striking.

As many have noted, this recommendation will usually yield good results when the org responds cooperatively and bad results when the org responds defensively. It is an org’s responsibility to demonstrate that they will respond cooperatively, not a critic’s responsibility to assume. Defensive responses aren’t, like, rare.

To be more concrete, I personally would write to Givewell before posting a critique of their work because they have responded to past critiques with deep technical engagement, blog posts celebrating the critics, large cash prizes, etc. I would not write to CEA before posting a critique of their work because they have responded to exactly this situation by breaking a confidentiality request in order to better prepare an adversarial public response to the critic's upcoming post. People who aren’t familiar with deep EA lore won’t know all this stuff and shouldn’t be expected to take a leap of faith.

This does mean that posts with half-cocked accusations will get more attention than they deserve. This is certainly a problem! My own preferred solution to this would be to stop trusting unverifiable accusations from burner accounts. Any solution will face tradeoffs.

(For someone in OP’s situation, where he has extensive and long-time knowledge of many key EA figures, and further is protected from most retaliation because he’s married to Julia Wise, who is a very influential community leader, I do indeed think that running critical posts by EA orgs will often be the right decision.)

Just came across @Raemon saying something similar in 2017:

Running critical pieces by the people you're criticizing is necessary, if you want a good epistemic culture. (That said, waiting indefinitely for them to respond is not required. I think "wait a week" is probably a reasonable norm)

Reasons and considerations: [read more]

This seems mostly reasonable, but also seems like it has some unstated (rare!) exceptions that maybe seem too obvious to state, but that I think would be good to state anyway.

E.g. if you already have reason to believe an organization isn't engaging in good faith, or is inclined to take retribution, then giving them more time to plan that response doesn't necessarily make sense.

Maybe some other less extreme examples along the same lines.

I wouldn't be writing this comment if the language in the post hedged a bit more / left more room for exceptions, but reading a sentence like this makes me want to talk about exceptions:

When posting critical things publicly, however, unless it's very time-sensitive we should be letting orgs review a draft first.

within the community we're working towards the same goals: you're not trying to win a fight, you're trying to help us all get closer to the truth.

This is an aside, but it’s an important one:

Sometimes we're fighting! Very often it’s a fight over methods between people who share goals, e.g. fights about whether or not to emphasize unobjectional global health interventions and downplay the weird stuff in official communication. Occasionally it’s a good-faith fight between people with explicit value differences, e.g. fights about whether to serve meat at EA conferences. Sometimes it’s a boring old struggle for power, e.g. SBF’s response to the EAs who attempted to oust him from Alameda in ~2018.

Personally I think that some amount of fighting is critical for any healthy community. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you wish EA didn’t have any fighting. But acting as if this were descriptively true rather than aspirational is clearly incorrect.

In case it’s not obvious, the importance of previewing a critique also depends on the nature of the critique and the relative position of the critic and the critiqued. I think those possibly “Punching down” should be more generous and careful than those “punching up”. 

The same goes for the implications of the critique “if true”, whether it’s picking nits or questioning whether the organisation is causing net harm. 

That said, I think these considerations only make a difference between waiting one or two weeks for a response and sending one versus several emails to a couple of people if there’s no response the first time.