I agree that we shouldn’t pretend to be particularly good at self-criticim. I don’t think we are. We are good at updating numbers, but I have giving criticism to orgs that’s not been acted on for years before someone saying it was a great idea. Honestly I’d have preferred if they just told me they didn’t want criticism than saying they did then ignoring it.
I’ll add that EAs seem particularly bad at steelmanning criticisms.
(eg—if a criticism doesn’t explicitly frame ideas on a spectrum and discuss trade offs, the comments tend to view the ideas as black and white and reject the criticisms because they don’t like the other extreme of the spectrum)
The only other communities I know well are socialist + centre left political communities, who I think are worse than EA at engaging with criticism.
So I’d say EA is better than all communities that I know of at engaging with criticism, and is still pretty bad at it.
In terms of actionable suggestions, I’d say tone police a bit less, make sure you’re not making isolated demands for rigour, and make sure you’re steelmanning criticisms as you read, particularly via asking whether you’d sympathise with a weaker version of the claim, and via the reversal test.
Sorry yes, essentially “EAs are bad, but so are most communities.” But importantly we shouldn’t just settle for being bad, if we want to approximately do the most good possible, we should aim to be approximately perfect at things, not just better than others.
It’s a shame that you feel you weren’t listened to.
However, in general I think we should be wary of concluding that the criticism was “ignored” just because people didn’t immediately do what you suggested.
If you ask for criticism, you’ll probably get dozens of bits of criticism. It’s not possible to act on all of the criticism, especially since some of this criticism is opposed to each other. Furthermore, it often takes time to process the criticism. For example, someone criticises you because they think the world is like X and you think the world is like Y. You think your model of the world is like Y, so you continue on that path, but over time you start to realise that the evidence is pointing more to the world being like X and eventually you update to that model. But maybe it would have taken longer if you hadn’t received that feedback earlier that someone thought the world did look like X and what to do if it did.
I think criticism is really complicated and multifaceted, and we have yet to develop nuanced takes on how it works and how to best use it. (I’ve been doing some thinking here).
I know that orgs do take some criticism/feedback very seriously (some get a lot of this!), and also get annoyed or ignore a lot of other criticism. (There’s a lot of bad stuff, and it’s hard to tell what has truth behind it).
One big challenge is that it’s pretty hard to do things. Like, it’s easy to suggest, “This org should do this neat project”, but orgs are often very limited in what things they could do at all, let alone what unusual things or things they aren’t already thinking about and good at they could do.
I agree that we shouldn’t pretend to be particularly good at self-criticim. I don’t think we are. We are good at updating numbers, but I have giving criticism to orgs that’s not been acted on for years before someone saying it was a great idea. Honestly I’d have preferred if they just told me they didn’t want criticism than saying they did then ignoring it.
I think EA is better than most movements at self criticism and engaging with criticism.
I think many EAs mistake this for meaning that EA is “good” at engaging with criticism.
I think EA is still very bad at engaging with criticism, but other movements are just worse.
I’ll add that EAs seem particularly bad at steelmanning criticisms.
(eg—if a criticism doesn’t explicitly frame ideas on a spectrum and discuss trade offs, the comments tend to view the ideas as black and white and reject the criticisms because they don’t like the other extreme of the spectrum)
By chance, can you suggest any communities that you think do a good job here?
I’m curious who we could learn from.
Or is it like, “EAs are bad, but so are most communities.” (This is my current guess at what I believe)
Good question.
The only other communities I know well are socialist + centre left political communities, who I think are worse than EA at engaging with criticism.
So I’d say EA is better than all communities that I know of at engaging with criticism, and is still pretty bad at it.
In terms of actionable suggestions, I’d say tone police a bit less, make sure you’re not making isolated demands for rigour, and make sure you’re steelmanning criticisms as you read, particularly via asking whether you’d sympathise with a weaker version of the claim, and via the reversal test.
Sorry yes, essentially “EAs are bad, but so are most communities.” But importantly we shouldn’t just settle for being bad, if we want to approximately do the most good possible, we should aim to be approximately perfect at things, not just better than others.
Thanks! I definitely agree that improvement would be really great.
If others reading this have suggestions of other community examples, that would also be appreciated!
It’s a shame that you feel you weren’t listened to.
However, in general I think we should be wary of concluding that the criticism was “ignored” just because people didn’t immediately do what you suggested.
If you ask for criticism, you’ll probably get dozens of bits of criticism. It’s not possible to act on all of the criticism, especially since some of this criticism is opposed to each other. Furthermore, it often takes time to process the criticism. For example, someone criticises you because they think the world is like X and you think the world is like Y. You think your model of the world is like Y, so you continue on that path, but over time you start to realise that the evidence is pointing more to the world being like X and eventually you update to that model. But maybe it would have taken longer if you hadn’t received that feedback earlier that someone thought the world did look like X and what to do if it did.
I think criticism is really complicated and multifaceted, and we have yet to develop nuanced takes on how it works and how to best use it. (I’ve been doing some thinking here).
I know that orgs do take some criticism/feedback very seriously (some get a lot of this!), and also get annoyed or ignore a lot of other criticism. (There’s a lot of bad stuff, and it’s hard to tell what has truth behind it).
One big challenge is that it’s pretty hard to do things. Like, it’s easy to suggest, “This org should do this neat project”, but orgs are often very limited in what things they could do at all, let alone what unusual things or things they aren’t already thinking about and good at they could do.
There’s definitely more learning to do here.