Criticism is sanctified in EA, but, like any intervention, criticism needs to pay rent

Criticism of who? If anything EAs have been far too trusting of their actual leaders. Conversely they have been far too critical of people like Holly. Its not a simple matter of some parameter being too high.

Holden is married to Dario Amodei's sister. Dario is a founder of Anthropic. Holden was a major driver of EA AI policy.

Dustin is a literal billionaire who, along with his wife, has control over almost all EA institutions. Being critical of Dustin, while at all relying on EA funding or support, is certainly brave. Open Phil is known to be quite capricious. If anything the EA comunity was far too trusting of its leaders and funders. Dustin has tons of ties, including financial, to the AI industry. 

These serious conflicts explain a lot of why EA took such a strange approach to AI policy. 

However criticizing random EAs who are trying to do a good job is completely demotivating. There needs to be some sense of proportionality. I remember being asked about the potential downsides of my project when I applied to future fund. There were concerns about what, to me, seemed extremely unlikely outcomes. It is very funny looking back given that FTX was, at that time, running a gigantic fraud. Criticism of the locally powerful is undersupplied. Criticism of random people is very oversupplied. 

I'm sympathetic, but to make the counterpoint: EA needs some way to protect against bullshit. 

Scientists gatekeep publication behind peer review. Wikipedia requires that every claim be backed up with a source. Journalists employ fact checkers. None of these are in any way perfect (and are often deeply flawed), but the point is that theoretically, at least one qualified person with expertise in the subject has checked over what has been written for errors. 

In contrast, how does EA ensure that the claims made here are actually accurate? Well, we first hope that people are honest and get everything right initially, but of course that can never ensure anything. The main mechanism relied upon is that some random reader will bother to read an article closely enough to spot errors in it, and then write a criticism calling the error out in the comments, or write up their own post calling out said error. Of course this is sometimes acrimonious. But if we don't put up the criticism, the BS claims will cement themselves, and start influencing actual real world decisions that affect millions of dollars and peoples lives. 

If we stop "sanctifying" criticism, then what exactly is stopping BS from taking over the entire movement (if it hasn't already)? I've certainly seen actually good criticism dismissed as bad criticism because the author misunderstood their critique, or differed in assumptions. If you're going to rely on criticism as the imperfect hammer to root out bullshit nails, you kinda have to give it a special place. 

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 @ 2024-10-11T18:57 (+151)

I don't see how asking for higher standards for criticism makes EA defenseless against "bullshit."

I actually would argue the opposite: if we keep encouraging and incentivizing any kind of criticism, and tolerate needlessly acrimonious personal attacks, we end up in an environment where nobody proposes anything besides the status quo, and the status quo becomes increasingly less transparent.

Three recent examples that come to mind:

• User @Omega stopped writing their criticism of AI Safety organizations partly because of how the criticism of their criticism assumed bad faith
• @Happier Lives Institute stopped writing their criticism of/alternatives to GiveWell in part because some criticism they got was largely personal attacks
• @Dustin Moskovitz claims that they^[1] write less on this forum because of attacks from EAs. He also wrote the attitude in EA communities is "give an inch, fight a mile". So I'll choose to be less legible instead.

I think Holly_Elmore herself is another example: she used to write posts like "We are in triage every second of every day", which I think are very useful to make EA less "bullshit", but now mostly doesn't post on this forum, partly because of the bad quality costly criticism she receives.

---

I largely agree with the last section of this comment from Aaron Gertler written one year ago:

The Forum has a hard balance to strike:

• I think the average comment is just a bit less argumentative / critical than would be ideal.
• I think the average critical comment is less kind than would be ideal.
• I want criticism to be kind, but I also want it to exist, and pushing people to be kinder might also reduce the overall quantity of criticism. I'm not sure what the best realistic outcome is.

I personally fear that the current discussion environment on this forum errs too much in the "unkind criticism" direction, and I see at least two large downsides:

• It encourages some form of "enlightened immobilism", where anyone proposing doing anything differently from the status quo gets instantly shut down.
• It strongly discourages transparency from most projects, especially (but not exclusively) less established or more speculative ones.

I used to think that accepting callousness was required to have technical excellence, e.g. reading how people like famous software engineer Linus Torvalds used to communicate. After seeing many extremely competent people communicate criticism in a professional and constructive manner, I have completely changed my mind. Torvalds also apologised and changed communication style years ago.

 

I believe that a culture of more constructive and higher-quality criticism would encourage more discussion overall, not less, especially from experienced professionals who have different perspectives from mainline EA thinking.

 

See also this paragraph from the Charity Entrepreneurship handbook:

 

Writing as myself, not as a moderator

1. ^{^}

   I'm not sure if he meant Good Ventures, Open Philanthropy, or some other group

Ebenezer Dukakis @ 2024-10-12T18:11 (+3)

It encourages some form of "enlightened immobilism", where anyone proposing doing anything differently from the status quo gets instantly shut down.

I think telling people to critique less is a suboptimal solution for this. At least in theory, it's more ideal for people to be willing to do things despite getting critiques.

Someone can write a critique for anything. Instead of checking if there's a critique, you could check "does a neutral party think this critique is stronger than average for a random EA project" or something like that. (If the project is weaker than average in light of the critique, that suggests resources should perhaps be reallocated.)

Downside risk is everywhere, and its mere existence shouldn't be sufficient to cause inaction.

Richard Y Chappell🔸 @ 2024-10-11T18:40 (+17)

I think it's important to exercise judgment here. Many (e.g. political) communities reflexively dismiss criticism, in ways that are epistemically irresponsible and lead them into pathology. It's important to be more open-minded than that, and to have a general stance of being open to the possibility that one is wrong.

But there's also a very real risk (sometimes realized, IMO, on this forum) of people going too far in the opposite direction and reflexively accept criticism as apt or reasonable when it plainly isn't. (This can take the form of downvoting or pushback against those of us who explain why a criticism is bad/unreasonable.) Sometimes people enact a sort of performative open-mindedness which calls on them to welcome anti-EA criticism and reject criticism of that criticism more or less independently of the actual content or its merits. I find that very annoying.

(An example: when I first shared my 'Why Not Effective Altruism?' draft, the feedback here seemed extremely negative and discouraging -- some even accused me of bad faith! -- because people didn't like that I was criticizing the critics of EA. Now that it's published, many seem to appreciate the paper and agree that it's helpful. shrug.)

My sense is that this problem isn't as bad now as in early 2023 when EA was going through a ridiculous self-flagellation phase.

Pablo @ 2024-10-12T00:56 (+21)

What you call performative open-mindedness (I have been internally referring to it as epistemic virtue signaling) is a very real and important phenomenon, and one I wish people wrote about more and were more aware of.

MichaelDickens @ 2024-10-25T21:09 (+4)

I'm not sure if this is the same phenomenon, or a different phenomenon that uses the same word, but I see calls for "open-mindedness" in the woo community. When expressing my disbelief in ghosts/astrology/ESP/etc., I'm told I "need to be more open-minded".

Richard Y Chappell🔸 @ 2024-10-13T19:16 (+4)

Maybe I spoke too soon: it "seems unfair" to characterize Wenar's WIRED article as "discouraging life-saving aid"? (A comment that is immediately met with two agree votes!) The pathology lives on.

GroundhogStrat @ 2024-10-11T18:10 (+15)

I read your post as saying we need some level of criticism, and I agree. I understand what the OP is saying as a reaction to the current temperature in these online communities like EA, and arguing right now we have too much criticism and not enough doing. Which is because criticism is much cheaper than doing.

If you wanted to effectively take the other side, you’d need to quantify the current level of criticism and its chilling effect and argue for turning the dial up or down.

Which of course is very hard, that’s why criticizing is so much easier than doing.

an observation I've had recently across a few examples* is that

• criticizers acquire more social capital than doers (or celebraters of the doers)
• criticizers tend to not pay attention to their social capital relative to the thing they are criticizing - criticizers with social status can easily shut down small or new doers, less so for established doers
• criticizers gain enough social capital that they themselves become above (meaningful) criticism*

I get the idea that all arguments should be taken on their merits in a place like this, but in practice, it's not that hard to imagine that a community that excessively rewards criticism becomes (ironically) prone to groupthink as a failure mode

*I've been sitting on this thought for a year or so but I don't want to further name the examples because the criticizers I would criticize have more social capital than me and it could easily be bad for me to do so lol

I think there’s a lot of truth to this; the part about sanctifying criticism and critical gadflies especially resonated with me. I think it is rational to ~ignore a fair bit of criticism, especially online criticism, though this is easier said than done.

Two pieces of advice I encountered recently that I’m trying to implement more in my life (both a bit trite, but perhaps helpful as heuristics):

1. don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from
2. when you write/post/say something, have a panel of people in mind whose opinions you most care about/who you are speaking to; do not try to appease/appeal to/convince everyone

This is a bit of a sidenote, but while it's true that "LWers" (on average) have a different threshold for how valuable criticism needs to be to justify its costs, it's not true that "we" treat it as a deontic good.  Observe, as evidence, the many hundreds of hours that various community members (including admins) have spent arguing with users like Said about whether their style of engagement and criticism was either effective at achieving its stated aims, or even worth the cost if it was^[1].  "We" may have different thresholds, but "we" do not think that all criticism is necessarily good or worth the attentional cost.

The appropriate threshold is an empirical question whose answer will vary based on social context, people, optimization targets, etc.

Object-level, I probably agree that EA spends too much of its attention on bad criticism, but I also think it doesn't allocate enough attention to good criticism, and this isn't exactly the kind of thing that "nets out".  It's more of a failure of taste/caring about the right things, which is hard to fix by adjusting the "quantity" dial.

1. ^{^}

   He has even been subjected to moderation action more than once, so the earlier claim re: gadflies doesn't stand up either.

Another point I would add is that excessive internal criticism within the EA community could also hurt community-building efforts.

Sometimes it's easy for us to forget that EA's core principles of cause prioritization and the moral responsibility to maximize positive impact can be jarring at first encounter (think about the first time you read Singer's drowning child essay).

When someone first reads the very strong arguments in favor of EA, they often look for a "way out" so that they can go back to the comfortable status quo of eating factory-farmed meat and only caring about their pet projects (instead of effective giving). If the EA community presents itself as overly critical of its own core principles, it might lead more people to overlook the compelling theoretical basis that makes up the foundation of EA, and use these critiques as an "out" to vindicate themselves from having to engage with EA any further.

I think if you experience EA primarily through the forum, you can end up feeling like "wow, EA has a lot of criticism in it, it should have more doing". But there's a strong selection effect: most of the doing is not on the forum, but most of the criticism is. The forum is an appropriate venue for criticism, and usually isn't an appropriate venue for doing.

I'd probably go so far as to say that if I'm writing down a list of the key, essential purposes that the Forum serves, criticism is going to be one of them, probably like... one of the top four, alongside news, socialising, and the pretty small amount of "doing" that can be done through text conversation with other people.

From the other end, if you have a piece of criticism, and you ask "what kind of venue or environment would be ideal for this?" then I think the Forum is not only a place for criticism but usually the place for it, because of the breadth of audience and the shared infrastructure of norms, moderation, and archival / organization (e.g. tags).

So, there's a lot of criticism here, and a lot of the best posts here are criticism. This just seems fine to me, and not an indication that something's wrong. The EA forum is just a part of what the EA community is, and it's naturally always going to be the most criticism-heavy part.

(this point is different enough I decided to make a separate comment for it)

I feel like when people talk about criticism on the Forum, they often point to how it can be very emotionally difficult for the person being criticised, and then I feel like they stop and say "this means there's something wrong with how we do criticism, and we should change it until it's not like this".

I think this is overly optimistic. I find it highly implausible that there's some way we could be, some tone we could set, that would make criticism not hurt. It hurts to be wrong, and it hurts more to hear this from other people, and it hurts more if you're hearing it unexpectedly. These pains are dramatically worsened by hostility or insensitivity or other markers of bad criticism, but even if you do everything you're supposed to in tone and delivery, the truth is going to hurt, and sometimes it's going to hurt a lot.

So, even perfect criticism hurts. Moreover, it's highly implausible that we can aspire to perfect criticism, or a particularly great approximation to it. Anywhere on the forum, people get misread, people fail to make their point clearly, people have tricky and complex ideas that take a lot of digesting to make sense. In criticism, all of that happens in an emotionally volatile environment. It takes a lot of discipline to stay friendly in that context, and I don't think the fact that it sometimes doesn't happen is a uniquely EA failure. No-one anywhere has criticism that stays clean and charitable all the time. If you're thinking "how are we going to ensure that bad ideas don't absorb attention and funding and other resources that could have gone to good ideas", I really struggle to imagine a system that always avoids arguments and hostility, and I think the EA forum honestly does better than the peers I can think of.

We're all here to do things we think are important and high-stakes, involving the suffering of those we care about. It's going to be emotionally fraught. People who write critical comments should try hard to do so in a way that minimises the harm they cause. IMO there should also be more said on the Forum about how people can receive criticism in a way that minimises harm (primarily to them, but perhaps also to others). I do think that "sometimes just ignore the criticism" is good advice, actually. But I don't think we should aspire to "people aren't upset by what is said on the Forum", or "posting about your project on the Forum doesn't make you anxious". Reduce these things as much as possible, but be realistic about how much is possible.

No desire to close down ideas for how to make things better. Please do continue to think and talk about whether criticism on the Forum could be done better. But I want better indicators of disease than "people are hurt when other people tell them they don't like their work".

I’m going to leave the most excruciatingly annoying comment, but in doing so, prove my point: it is possible to take positive and negative feedback without it affecting you much, if at all.

If you view yourself as unconditionally lovable (as I do myself), then one of two things happen:

1. someone gives me a compliment, I absorb it like “duh, I know I’m extremely lovable”

2. someone gives me criticism, I’m like “yeah that’s a point, also I’m extremely lovable”

I think the reason it can feel painful is because what our minds hear during public criticism from an evo psych perspective is;

‘this community hates me’ → ‘I might get kicked out of this community’ → ‘When I get kicked out of community I die’

And I think self love / esteem is a buttress for fear of death.

The reason this is an annoying comment is because I’m not pointing at a problem the community has (which could also be true!), but suggesting the information an individual receives passes through an interpretative matrix in their minds before landing as “harmful”, and that need not be the case.

As the Buddhists like to say: the reality we experience is the one our minds construct.

This can be an extremely hard path, but is transformational if successful.

Shantideva: "You can't cover the whole world with leather to make it smooth, but you can wear sandals."

Shunryu Suzuki: “Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement.”

Scott Alexander has a fun take on criticism within the EA which is worth reading https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism

I largely agree with this post, and think this is a big problem in general. There's also a lot of adverse selection that can't be called out because it's too petty and/or would require revealing private information. In a reasonable fraction of cases where I know the details, the loudest critics of a person or project is someone who has a pretty substantial negative-COI that isn't being disclosed, like that the project fired them or defunded them or the person used to date them and broke up with them or something. As with positive COIs, there's a problem where being closely involved with something both gives you more information you could use to form a valid criticism (or make a good hire or grant) that others might miss and is correlated with factors that could bias your judgment. 

But with hiring and grantmaking there are generally internal processes for flagging these, whereas when people are making random public criticisms, there generally isn't such a process