Edit: I later discovered I explicitly warned Holly this messaging could be deceptive, which she understood, asked what could be done about it, but ended up not doing anything and leaving it as is.
5- I think the messaging around the protest is deceptive. I.e., it gives people a wrong impression of the world, in a way a part of the community assumed would be better suiting their goals. I think this is deontologically bad and we shouldn’t be even talking about consequences. This is a bad thing to do regardless of how likely and how badly it can backfire. If your calculations say that it’s alright, that the EV for deceiving people is positive, ignore this calculations and maybe read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t-justify-means-among-humans.
This is the sort of thing that led to the FTX collapse. This is the sort of decision-making procedure that predictably leads to bad consequences, no matter what our brains calculate.
And in this area, things like that backfiring (e.g., creating an impression among the general public, experts, media, or policymakers that the community isn’t fully candid) can be increasing the chance of a permanent end of life in the lightcone.
4- I’m also interested in mechanisms for early error-correction. This is what my post calls for. I don’t even mention the names of the protest organisers or their orgs, because I care about the community preventing deceptive messaging in the future.
It doesn’t have to be a community-wide mechanism or a central org that checks press-releases; it can be more field-focused orgs and people, it can be practices like fact-checking final versions of public comms and edits to them with outside people who are good at that stuff and have a different background (see comments from @Jason), it can be any of lots of things. I want the community to think about those things and discuss them. I’d be optimistic about people spending time to figure this out and suggesting to the community.
my impression is that the organisers have tried to correct the mistake to the extent that they believes they made a mistake, and anything else is going to be a matter of public debate. Again, this is how communities work
My impression is that an organiser agreed they haven’t propagated the update, as I suggest in the post, which led to a message that was misleading and this hasn’t been understood or addressed at all until I published the post. I’m not confident this is what happened, though, as looking at the messages now, it seems fairly likely that an organiser understood the impression the messaging would create and decided to keep it that way.
3- I don’t think it’s fair to, while no one of us spent a while thinking about potential mechanisms, suggest those that seem like they wouldn’t seem good/work. Current mechanisms are bad, as they don’t prevent deontologically dubious unilateral actions. I hope there can be better mechanisms.
I think the community as a whole acted deceptively. This seems really bad and the community should probably respond and improve. We don’t want to be the kind of community that misleads people when it suits our goals. I don’t think there’s been a reaction from the community where people tried to figure out how to address the problem. Instead, most of the comments are related to a protest organiser slowly realising what the issue people are talking about was.
2- I notice I’m confused and don’t really get your point. Like, yeah, in global health and development, deceptive messaging is obviously enough unlikely be beneficial for people to not do it and not have much reason to engage with another part of the community having issues around deceptive messaging, so this is not a post that seems relevant to all the community to the extent some parts of the community identify only with these parts and not with the whole. But this is not what you’re saying; and I’m failing to understand your point. If we’re discussing a cause area (x-risk) and deceptive messaging and potentially bad consequences of it, how are other cause area relevant here? I rarely go around shrimp welfare posts, saying that I don’t care about these deep sea shenanigans, and people should donate to MIRI instead.
1- I think better communication could’ve reduced the amount of public drama; but also there’s not a lot of it here, and I’m more concerned with the community not engaging enough with the problems raised in the post.
Thank you for linking the public tweets discussing deontology. If someone believes it’s OK to violate deontological norms if they calculate the consequences to be positive, I want them to directly say that. If someone decided deceptive messaging can be fine and was ok in this case, I want them to directly say that and not be deceptive towards the community as well. We’d then be able to have a discussion about cruxes in strategies and norms and not about what happened.
I’m more concerned with the community not engaging enough with the problems raised in the post.
Experience teaches that there are (at least) two types of postmortem analyses when something goes wrong: a type that is more focused on questions of blame, and one that is focused on root cause analysis / lessons learned / how to improve / etc. These types of inquiry struggle to coexist in the same conversation, because the former creates an adversarial tone regarding the persons against whom blame is being considered.
Now, that is not to say that blame-focused inquiries are bad, and the other type is better as a matter of course. But the title and tone of your post placed this discussion clearly in the blame-focused camp, and it’s hard for the non-blamey type of conservation to form out of such an environment.
I suspect most community members felt that the proffered evidence does not sufficiently make out a case of deception (i.e., intentional misrepresentation) and are thus disinclined to participate in discussion of downstream philosophical issues that only come into play if they reach a conclusion that deception was present (vs. making a mistake).
If you’re interested in learning more about the second type of analysis, I’d suggest reading more about just culture in fields like medicine and aviation.
To many community members, including protest participants, it’s pretty clear the messaging was deceptive.
A protest organiser is saying it was the curse of knowledge, but I sent them messages directly pointing out how people will see the messaging. As I mentioned elsewhere in the comments, I want to have a third party look at the messages exchanged between me and the protest organiser, if they agree.
Also, I expect many people to only skim through the post, and look at of the protest organiser’s initial engagement with it or a shortform post they made before I published the post; all of these make it seem like I’m saying the organiser intentionally made the mistake they then corrected:
“I ran a successful protest at [company] yesterday. Before the night was over, Mikhail Samin, who attended the protest, sent me a document to review that accused me of what sounds like a bait and switch and deceptive practices because I made an error in my original press release (which got copied as a description on other materials) and apparently didn’t address it to his satisfaction because I didn’t change the theme of the event more radically or cancel it.”
These post and comments have not been corrected to show that this is not what I’m talking about, when the protest organiser understood what misleading messaging the post talks about.
Edit: I later discovered I explicitly warned Holly this messaging could be deceptive, which she understood, asked what could be done about it, but ended up not doing anything and leaving it as is.
5- I think the messaging around the protest is deceptive. I.e., it gives people a wrong impression of the world, in a way a part of the community assumed would be better suiting their goals. I think this is deontologically bad and we shouldn’t be even talking about consequences. This is a bad thing to do regardless of how likely and how badly it can backfire. If your calculations say that it’s alright, that the EV for deceiving people is positive, ignore this calculations and maybe read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t-justify-means-among-humans.
This is the sort of thing that led to the FTX collapse. This is the sort of decision-making procedure that predictably leads to bad consequences, no matter what our brains calculate.
And in this area, things like that backfiring (e.g., creating an impression among the general public, experts, media, or policymakers that the community isn’t fully candid) can be increasing the chance of a permanent end of life in the lightcone.
4- I’m also interested in mechanisms for early error-correction. This is what my post calls for. I don’t even mention the names of the protest organisers or their orgs, because I care about the community preventing deceptive messaging in the future.
It doesn’t have to be a community-wide mechanism or a central org that checks press-releases; it can be more field-focused orgs and people, it can be practices like fact-checking final versions of public comms and edits to them with outside people who are good at that stuff and have a different background (see comments from @Jason), it can be any of lots of things. I want the community to think about those things and discuss them. I’d be optimistic about people spending time to figure this out and suggesting to the community.
My impression is that an organiser agreed they haven’t propagated the update, as I suggest in the post, which led to a message that was misleading and this hasn’t been understood or addressed at all until I published the post. I’m not confident this is what happened, though, as looking at the messages now, it seems fairly likely that an organiser understood the impression the messaging would create and decided to keep it that way.
3- I don’t think it’s fair to, while no one of us spent a while thinking about potential mechanisms, suggest those that seem like they wouldn’t seem good/work. Current mechanisms are bad, as they don’t prevent deontologically dubious unilateral actions. I hope there can be better mechanisms.
I think the community as a whole acted deceptively. This seems really bad and the community should probably respond and improve. We don’t want to be the kind of community that misleads people when it suits our goals. I don’t think there’s been a reaction from the community where people tried to figure out how to address the problem. Instead, most of the comments are related to a protest organiser slowly realising what the issue people are talking about was.
2- I notice I’m confused and don’t really get your point. Like, yeah, in global health and development, deceptive messaging is obviously enough unlikely be beneficial for people to not do it and not have much reason to engage with another part of the community having issues around deceptive messaging, so this is not a post that seems relevant to all the community to the extent some parts of the community identify only with these parts and not with the whole. But this is not what you’re saying; and I’m failing to understand your point. If we’re discussing a cause area (x-risk) and deceptive messaging and potentially bad consequences of it, how are other cause area relevant here? I rarely go around shrimp welfare posts, saying that I don’t care about these deep sea shenanigans, and people should donate to MIRI instead.
1- I think better communication could’ve reduced the amount of public drama; but also there’s not a lot of it here, and I’m more concerned with the community not engaging enough with the problems raised in the post.
Thank you for linking the public tweets discussing deontology. If someone believes it’s OK to violate deontological norms if they calculate the consequences to be positive, I want them to directly say that. If someone decided deceptive messaging can be fine and was ok in this case, I want them to directly say that and not be deceptive towards the community as well. We’d then be able to have a discussion about cruxes in strategies and norms and not about what happened.
Experience teaches that there are (at least) two types of postmortem analyses when something goes wrong: a type that is more focused on questions of blame, and one that is focused on root cause analysis / lessons learned / how to improve / etc. These types of inquiry struggle to coexist in the same conversation, because the former creates an adversarial tone regarding the persons against whom blame is being considered.
Now, that is not to say that blame-focused inquiries are bad, and the other type is better as a matter of course. But the title and tone of your post placed this discussion clearly in the blame-focused camp, and it’s hard for the non-blamey type of conservation to form out of such an environment.
I suspect most community members felt that the proffered evidence does not sufficiently make out a case of deception (i.e., intentional misrepresentation) and are thus disinclined to participate in discussion of downstream philosophical issues that only come into play if they reach a conclusion that deception was present (vs. making a mistake).
If you’re interested in learning more about the second type of analysis, I’d suggest reading more about just culture in fields like medicine and aviation.
To many community members, including protest participants, it’s pretty clear the messaging was deceptive.
A protest organiser is saying it was the curse of knowledge, but I sent them messages directly pointing out how people will see the messaging. As I mentioned elsewhere in the comments, I want to have a third party look at the messages exchanged between me and the protest organiser, if they agree.
Also, I expect many people to only skim through the post, and look at of the protest organiser’s initial engagement with it or a shortform post they made before I published the post; all of these make it seem like I’m saying the organiser intentionally made the mistake they then corrected: “I ran a successful protest at [company] yesterday. Before the night was over, Mikhail Samin, who attended the protest, sent me a document to review that accused me of what sounds like a bait and switch and deceptive practices because I made an error in my original press release (which got copied as a description on other materials) and apparently didn’t address it to his satisfaction because I didn’t change the theme of the event more radically or cancel it.”
These post and comments have not been corrected to show that this is not what I’m talking about, when the protest organiser understood what misleading messaging the post talks about.