(I recently joined CEA as Head of EA Funds. Responding from my own perspective, rather than the Meta Fund’s.)
As you said, it’s hard to publish critiques of organizations or the work of particular people without harming someone’s reputation or otherwise posing a risk to the careers of the people involved.
I also agree with you that it’s useful to find ways to talk about risks and reservations.
One potential solution is to talk about the issues in an anonymized, aggregate manner. I have been thinking about whether we could publish sufficiently anonymized examples of risks and reservations to give the community some examples of things we don’t fund – we expect this will make it easier to understand why we reject some applicants. And I’ve given a talk about downside risks and 80,000 Hours have published an article about them.
+1. A major factor is also that writing tastefully and responsibly about the things we are concerned about with an organisation would probably more than double or triple the size of all our write-ups. I’d expect the amount of time it took us to carefully think through those write-ups would be much higher than for the main writeup and we would be more likely to make mistakes which resulted in impact destruction.
Where a concern is necessarily part of the narrative for the decision or it feels like it’s very important and can easily be shared with confidence, I think we have. But generally it’s not necessary for the argument, and we stick to the default policy.
I really appreciate your recognition of this—really positive!
“it’s hard to publish critiques of organizations or the work of particular people without harming someone’s reputation or otherwise posing a risk to the careers of the people involved. I also agree with you that it’s useful to find ways to talk about risks and reservations. One potential solution is to talk about the issues in an anonymized, aggregate manner.”
(I recently joined CEA as Head of EA Funds. Responding from my own perspective, rather than the Meta Fund’s.)
As you said, it’s hard to publish critiques of organizations or the work of particular people without harming someone’s reputation or otherwise posing a risk to the careers of the people involved.
I also agree with you that it’s useful to find ways to talk about risks and reservations.
One potential solution is to talk about the issues in an anonymized, aggregate manner. I have been thinking about whether we could publish sufficiently anonymized examples of risks and reservations to give the community some examples of things we don’t fund – we expect this will make it easier to understand why we reject some applicants. And I’ve given a talk about downside risks and 80,000 Hours have published an article about them.
+1. A major factor is also that writing tastefully and responsibly about the things we are concerned about with an organisation would probably more than double or triple the size of all our write-ups. I’d expect the amount of time it took us to carefully think through those write-ups would be much higher than for the main writeup and we would be more likely to make mistakes which resulted in impact destruction.
Where a concern is necessarily part of the narrative for the decision or it feels like it’s very important and can easily be shared with confidence, I think we have. But generally it’s not necessary for the argument, and we stick to the default policy.
I really appreciate your recognition of this—really positive!
“it’s hard to publish critiques of organizations or the work of particular people without harming someone’s reputation or otherwise posing a risk to the careers of the people involved. I also agree with you that it’s useful to find ways to talk about risks and reservations. One potential solution is to talk about the issues in an anonymized, aggregate manner.”
Anonymized, aggregate thoughts sound like the perfect solution, and thanks for the pointers!
Update: The current LTFF AMA elaborates on common reasons for rejecting applications to some degree.