[libel discussion] … CEA is in a bad position to take on legal risk.
...
My current impression is that many people in the EA ecosystem feel a false sense of safety from the existence of CEA Community Health, hoping that it will pursue justice for them, when (to a first approximation) it will not. While I respect many people on the team and consider some of them friends, my current sense is that the world would probably be better if the CEA Community Health team was disbanded and it was transparent that there is little-to-no institutional protection from bullies in the EA ecosystem, and more people do not get burned by assuming or hoping that it will play that role.
There was a recent post about how depending on the country you live, working in animal advocacy could be your comparative advantage as an EA. I wonder what country has creating a competitor to CEA Community Health as a comparative advantage?
Is community health UK or USA based? UK has laws that make winning libel cases easy (at least historically, I think there’s been some movement), but USA has very strong protecting for speech. I doubt there’s many countries that would be much better than USA, unless the comparative advantage is a non-functional legal system. Perhaps a state with stronger anti-SLAP laws could work though?
It seems that a major problem of a competitor to CEA Community Health is that it’s harder for someone outside of the US to have the connection to get the necessary information.
The Wikileaks strategy against defamation suits was to have the spokesperson of the organization be a digital nomad, so there’s no address to which you can easily serve papers for lawsuits.
Otherwise, maybe Scandinavian countries or some Eastern European ones could have a good combination of low legal costs of lawsuits and strong free speech laws.
Maybe you can do all the money movement for the org in crypto and have no clear country to which the org belongs.
It seems that a major problem of a competitor to CEA Community Health is that it’s harder for someone outside of the US to have the connection to get the necessary information.
My assumption was that Community Health work can be done remotely. Indeed, I suspect the current Community Health team works remotely?
Living in a convenient time zone (or having a weird sleep schedule) could be important.
Lack of connections could be a good thing if it helps objectivity. (Recalling the controversy over the connection between Owen C-B and Julia Wise)
I assume most people will volunteer information if someone contacts them and says “we are concerned about your behavior and we are thinking of writing a post about it, but we want to hear from you first”.
I imagine the best way to gain the community’s trust would be to produce detailed writeups like the one Ben produced. Once the new org has gained trust from producing good writeups, perhaps they can manage a list of people who they suggest to ban from conferences etc.
Maybe you can do all the money movement for the org in crypto and have no clear country to which the org belongs.
Also having minimal assets seems potentially good, so the incentive for a lawsuit is low.
(Side note: It seems fairly likely to me that the current Community Health team actually does a lot of great work and we just don’t hear about it.)
Another thought regarding building trust for a new org. (This is a bit of a tangent.)
In a different subthread, Chris Leong said “there’s information I would have shared with Ben, but not community health.”
Community health work involves both making factual judgments about what occurred, and also value judgments about what constitutes a misdeed or what constitutes an appropriate punishment.
Insofar as people mistrust CEA Community Health, my guess would be that it’s because of disagreements re: the value judgments that CEA Community Health has made. That’s hard to avoid, because value judgments will often be controversial.
If I was to start an org competing with CEA Community Health, I think I would make it a priority to firewall factual judgments from value judgments. Focus first on gaining a reputation for making accurate factual judgments, then if you do make value judgments, keep them separate from the factual judgments. (E.g. “Our opinion is that...” or “Our random polling procedure suggests the median EA thinks that...” or even “If you have X values, you are likely to feel Y about this situation” for various different values of X.)
I’d like to see more of an analysis of where we are now with what people want from CH, what they think it does, and what it actually does, and to what extent and why gaps exist between these things, before we go too deep into what alternative structures could exist. Currently I don’t feel like we really understand the problem well enough to solve it.
There was a recent post about how depending on the country you live, working in animal advocacy could be your comparative advantage as an EA. I wonder what country has creating a competitor to CEA Community Health as a comparative advantage?
Is community health UK or USA based? UK has laws that make winning libel cases easy (at least historically, I think there’s been some movement), but USA has very strong protecting for speech. I doubt there’s many countries that would be much better than USA, unless the comparative advantage is a non-functional legal system. Perhaps a state with stronger anti-SLAP laws could work though?
It seems that a major problem of a competitor to CEA Community Health is that it’s harder for someone outside of the US to have the connection to get the necessary information.
The Wikileaks strategy against defamation suits was to have the spokesperson of the organization be a digital nomad, so there’s no address to which you can easily serve papers for lawsuits.
Otherwise, maybe Scandinavian countries or some Eastern European ones could have a good combination of low legal costs of lawsuits and strong free speech laws.
Maybe you can do all the money movement for the org in crypto and have no clear country to which the org belongs.
My assumption was that Community Health work can be done remotely. Indeed, I suspect the current Community Health team works remotely?
Living in a convenient time zone (or having a weird sleep schedule) could be important.
Lack of connections could be a good thing if it helps objectivity. (Recalling the controversy over the connection between Owen C-B and Julia Wise)
I assume most people will volunteer information if someone contacts them and says “we are concerned about your behavior and we are thinking of writing a post about it, but we want to hear from you first”.
I imagine the best way to gain the community’s trust would be to produce detailed writeups like the one Ben produced. Once the new org has gained trust from producing good writeups, perhaps they can manage a list of people who they suggest to ban from conferences etc.
Also having minimal assets seems potentially good, so the incentive for a lawsuit is low.
(Side note: It seems fairly likely to me that the current Community Health team actually does a lot of great work and we just don’t hear about it.)
Another thought regarding building trust for a new org. (This is a bit of a tangent.)
In a different subthread, Chris Leong said “there’s information I would have shared with Ben, but not community health.”
Community health work involves both making factual judgments about what occurred, and also value judgments about what constitutes a misdeed or what constitutes an appropriate punishment.
Insofar as people mistrust CEA Community Health, my guess would be that it’s because of disagreements re: the value judgments that CEA Community Health has made. That’s hard to avoid, because value judgments will often be controversial.
If I was to start an org competing with CEA Community Health, I think I would make it a priority to firewall factual judgments from value judgments. Focus first on gaining a reputation for making accurate factual judgments, then if you do make value judgments, keep them separate from the factual judgments. (E.g. “Our opinion is that...” or “Our random polling procedure suggests the median EA thinks that...” or even “If you have X values, you are likely to feel Y about this situation” for various different values of X.)
I’d like to see more of an analysis of where we are now with what people want from CH, what they think it does, and what it actually does, and to what extent and why gaps exist between these things, before we go too deep into what alternative structures could exist. Currently I don’t feel like we really understand the problem well enough to solve it.