Should there be clearer disclosures of when individual staffers at EA-affiliated organizations are posting in a professional capacity?
By Evan_Gaensbauer @ 2022-01-26T00:35 (+4)
There is no problem with any individual who participates in EA discloses when they post or comment on the EA Forum that they are not speaking on behalf of their employer. Yet if the number of people from one organization making that disclosure keep increasing in a discussion, the value of those disclosures decreases. To take it to an absurd degree, the executive directors of EA-affiliated organizations would not be taken as seriously if they always disclosed they weren't speaking on behalf of their organization whenever they expressed an opinion.
The solution is not to distrust these disclosures. A solution needs to decrease the potential for the lines between professional and personal statements in EA to get blurred. One way is for those working professionally in EA to be explicit about when they are publishing or commenting on the EA Forum in a professional capacity. It isn't enough to take for granted a reader will click-through on a user profile to check who the author of a post works for, or only mention in passing which organization funded or produced the research.
It'd be easy and sufficient for everyone to put a line at the top or beginning of an EA Forum article in bold that it's being cross-posted from an organization's blog, or something like that. I'm sure there are organizations that already do so but it could be beneficial to be a more ubiquitous practice. Or am I missing something?
Charles He @ 2022-01-26T19:43 (+4)
There is no problem with any individual who participates in EA discloses when they post or comment on the EA Forum that they are not speaking on behalf of their employer. Yet if the number of people from one organization making that disclosure keep increasing in a discussion, the value of those disclosures decreases. To take it to an absurd degree, the executive directors of EA-affiliated organizations would not be taken as seriously if they always disclosed they weren't speaking on behalf of their organization whenever they expressed an opinion.
Maybe I'm really dumb, or have debilitating ADHD, but I found this post incredibly difficult to read.
This might be caused by the numerous clauses in each of the three sentences above, and that they contain something that looks like "double negatives".
But also I think there's something confusing about the underlying ideas too?
See:
To take it to an absurd degree, the executive directors of EA-affiliated organizations would not be taken as seriously if they always disclosed they weren't speaking on behalf of their organization whenever they expressed an opinion.
Translating this, I think this sentence above is saying (I had to read this 5 times to figure this out): "If EDs always disclosed they were speaking independently, they wouldn't be taken seriously."
But how does this relate to the rest of the question—isn't this observation counter to the idea of demanding clearer disclosures?
As a writer, I thought you would want to know, in case other people also share my limited reading comprehension abilities.