Your question reads a bit like you disapprove of the author posting it without doing this. I agree that people criticizing an org should strongly consider contacting the org before their public criticism. But I think there are reasons to not contact an org before, besides urgency, e.g. lacking time, or predicting that private communication will not be productive enough to spend the little time we have at our disposal. So I currently think we should approve if people bring up the energy to voice honest concerns even if they don’t completely follow the ideal playbook. What do you, or others think?
But I think there are reasons to not contact an org before, besides urgency, e.g. lacking time, or predicting that private communication will not be productive enough to spend the little time we have at our disposal. So I currently think we should approve if people bring up the energy to voice honest concerns even if they don’t completely follow the ideal playbook. What do you, or others think?
I agree with the spirit of “I currently think we should approve if people bring up the energy to voice honest concerns even if they don’t completely follow the ideal playbook”.
However, at first glance I don’t find the specific “reasons to not contact an org before” that you state convincing:
“Lacking time”—I think there are ways that require minimal time commitment. For instance, committing to not (or not substantially) revise the post based on an org’s response. I struggle to imagine a situation where someone is able to spend several hours writing a post but then absolutely can’t find the 10 minutes required to send an email to the org the post is about.
“Predicting that private communication will not be productive enough to spend the little time we have at our disposal”—I think this misunderstands one key reason for running a post about an org/person by that org/person before publishing. In my view, the key reason for this norm is not that private communication can be better but to improve a public conversation that’s going to happen anyway by delaying it a bit so each involved party can ‘prepare’ for it.
Basically, I think in many cases the “ideal” process would be:
<author> runs post by <org> saying “fyi I’m going to publish this by <date>. I’m giving you a heads up b/c I think this is good practice and allows you to think about if/how to reply. If there are clear misunderstandings or factual mistakes in my post, let me know and I might be able to correct them. However, I’d prefer substantive discussion to take place publicly.”
<org> deliberates internally if/how to reply publicly, and sends minor suggestions for corrections to <author>.
<author> posts, potentially after correcting some clear mistakes/misunderstandings (I expect this usually takes 5-30 minutes if the post was well done).
<org> posts their reply shortly after <author>’s post (if they want to post one).
Concretely, as a “public spectator” in such cases it tends to be quite useful to “hear both sides”. If I see something by just one side, then unless I see a reason for urgency, my reaction will tend to be “OK I guess I’ll wait engaging with this until I can hear both sides”.
That makes a lot of sense to me, especially the points about how little time this might take and that there is not conflict with prefering the discussion to be public. Thanks!
I might be a little bit less worried about the time delay of the response. I’d be surprised if fewer than say 80% of the people who would say they find this very concerning won’t end up also reading the response from ACE. I’d be more worried if this would be a case where most people would just form a quick negative association and won’t follow up later when this all turns out to be more or less benign.
I’d be surprised if fewer than say 80% of the people who would say they find this very concerning won’t end up also reading the response from ACE. I’d be more worried if this would be a case where most people would just form a quick negative association and won’t follow up later when this all turns out to be more or less benign.
Yeah, I agree with this. I don’t think the time delay is that big of a deal by itself, more like something that might be slightly annoying / slightly time-costly to a medium number of people.
I might be a little bit less worried about the time delay of the response. I’d be surprised if fewer than say 80% of the people who would say they find this very concerning won’t end up also reading the response from ACE.
FWIW, depending on the definition of ‘very concerning’, I wouldn’t find this surprising. I think people often read things, vaguely update, know that there’s another side of the story that they don’t know, have the thing they read become a lot less salient, happen to not see the follow-up because they don’t check the forum much, and end up having an updated opinion (e.g. about ACE in this case) much later without really remembering why.
(e.g. I find myself very often saying things like “oh, there was this EA post that vaguely said X and maybe you should be concerned about Y because of this, although I don’t know how exactly this ended in the end” when others talk about some X-or-Y-related topic, esp. when the post is a bit older. My model of others is that they then don’t go check, but some of them go on to say “Oh, I think there’s a post that vaguely says X, and maybe you be concerned about Y because of this, but I didn’t read it, so don’t take me too seriously” etc. and this post sounds like something this could happen with.)
Maybe I’m just particularly epistemically unvirtuous and underestimate others. Maybe for the people who don’t end up looking it up but just having this knowingly-shifty-somewhat-update the information just isn’t very decision-relevant and it doesn’t matter much. But I generally think information that I got with lots of epistemic disclaimers and that have lots of disclaimers in my head do influence me quite a bit and writing this makes me think I should just stop saying dubious things.
In general, I am in favour of public criticism within movements/communities, and think it is usually underproduced. In general, I would prefer public-criticism-without-prior-warning to no criticism, if those are the only choices available. However:
I think prior consultation significantly increases the social value of criticism, and that there should be a pretty strong norm of doing so, at least on the Forum (perhaps less so on social media groups). As such, I’m not sympathetic to excuses of the form “I didn’t have time to do this” in this context, unless the post is, for some reason, very urgent.
Excuses of the form “I didn’t think reaching out in advance would be productive”, meanwhile, are quite prone to self-serving biases and the horns effect, and should be avoided, with the possible exception of cases where the target of criticism is flagrantly dishonest and manipulative.
In this case, there are several important places where criticism either concerns actions that have since been reversed (the blog post) or depends on speculation about the non-public motives of ACE staff (Anima International). These seem like cases where giving ACE the chance to respond would be especially valuable.
Being afraid of retaliation is potentially a good reason not to share in advance, but (a) the sharing could still be done anonymously, e.g. from a new Gmail account or via a proxy, and (b) if this was the reason, it’s dishonest to say that the author “[has] not had the chance to share a draft of this post with ACE”.
In sum, I think there’s a decent probability that I do disapprove of the author’s posting this without discussing it with ACE in advance – but, until/unless I hear their reasoning, I am not sure.
Because I’m worried that this post could hurt my future ability to get a job in EAA, I’m choosing to remain anonymous.
I personally would also find it emotionally draining to criticize possible employers and would understand if one decides against contacting them privately. Not saying this happened here, but another seemingly valid reason I’d want to keep in mind.
I think that’s a very fair point. I do think it would be possible to run the post by an org in an anonymous way (create a new email account & send clean copy of doc), but as e.g. Larks points out it’s easy to accidentally break anonymity.
Your question reads a bit like you disapprove of the author posting it without doing this. I agree that people criticizing an org should strongly consider contacting the org before their public criticism. But I think there are reasons to not contact an org before, besides urgency, e.g. lacking time, or predicting that private communication will not be productive enough to spend the little time we have at our disposal. So I currently think we should approve if people bring up the energy to voice honest concerns even if they don’t completely follow the ideal playbook. What do you, or others think?
I agree with the spirit of “I currently think we should approve if people bring up the energy to voice honest concerns even if they don’t completely follow the ideal playbook”.
However, at first glance I don’t find the specific “reasons to not contact an org before” that you state convincing:
“Lacking time”—I think there are ways that require minimal time commitment. For instance, committing to not (or not substantially) revise the post based on an org’s response. I struggle to imagine a situation where someone is able to spend several hours writing a post but then absolutely can’t find the 10 minutes required to send an email to the org the post is about.
“Predicting that private communication will not be productive enough to spend the little time we have at our disposal”—I think this misunderstands one key reason for running a post about an org/person by that org/person before publishing. In my view, the key reason for this norm is not that private communication can be better but to improve a public conversation that’s going to happen anyway by delaying it a bit so each involved party can ‘prepare’ for it.
Basically, I think in many cases the “ideal” process would be:
<author> runs post by <org> saying “fyi I’m going to publish this by <date>. I’m giving you a heads up b/c I think this is good practice and allows you to think about if/how to reply. If there are clear misunderstandings or factual mistakes in my post, let me know and I might be able to correct them. However, I’d prefer substantive discussion to take place publicly.”
<org> deliberates internally if/how to reply publicly, and sends minor suggestions for corrections to <author>.
<author> posts, potentially after correcting some clear mistakes/misunderstandings (I expect this usually takes 5-30 minutes if the post was well done).
<org> posts their reply shortly after <author>’s post (if they want to post one).
Concretely, as a “public spectator” in such cases it tends to be quite useful to “hear both sides”. If I see something by just one side, then unless I see a reason for urgency, my reaction will tend to be “OK I guess I’ll wait engaging with this until I can hear both sides”.
That makes a lot of sense to me, especially the points about how little time this might take and that there is not conflict with prefering the discussion to be public. Thanks!
I might be a little bit less worried about the time delay of the response. I’d be surprised if fewer than say 80% of the people who would say they find this very concerning won’t end up also reading the response from ACE. I’d be more worried if this would be a case where most people would just form a quick negative association and won’t follow up later when this all turns out to be more or less benign.
Yeah, I agree with this. I don’t think the time delay is that big of a deal by itself, more like something that might be slightly annoying / slightly time-costly to a medium number of people.
FWIW, depending on the definition of ‘very concerning’, I wouldn’t find this surprising. I think people often read things, vaguely update, know that there’s another side of the story that they don’t know, have the thing they read become a lot less salient, happen to not see the follow-up because they don’t check the forum much, and end up having an updated opinion (e.g. about ACE in this case) much later without really remembering why.
(e.g. I find myself very often saying things like “oh, there was this EA post that vaguely said X and maybe you should be concerned about Y because of this, although I don’t know how exactly this ended in the end” when others talk about some X-or-Y-related topic, esp. when the post is a bit older. My model of others is that they then don’t go check, but some of them go on to say “Oh, I think there’s a post that vaguely says X, and maybe you be concerned about Y because of this, but I didn’t read it, so don’t take me too seriously” etc. and this post sounds like something this could happen with.)
Maybe I’m just particularly epistemically unvirtuous and underestimate others. Maybe for the people who don’t end up looking it up but just having this knowingly-shifty-somewhat-update the information just isn’t very decision-relevant and it doesn’t matter much. But I generally think information that I got with lots of epistemic disclaimers and that have lots of disclaimers in my head do influence me quite a bit and writing this makes me think I should just stop saying dubious things.
In general, I am in favour of public criticism within movements/communities, and think it is usually underproduced. In general, I would prefer public-criticism-without-prior-warning to no criticism, if those are the only choices available. However:
I think prior consultation significantly increases the social value of criticism, and that there should be a pretty strong norm of doing so, at least on the Forum (perhaps less so on social media groups). As such, I’m not sympathetic to excuses of the form “I didn’t have time to do this” in this context, unless the post is, for some reason, very urgent.
Excuses of the form “I didn’t think reaching out in advance would be productive”, meanwhile, are quite prone to self-serving biases and the horns effect, and should be avoided, with the possible exception of cases where the target of criticism is flagrantly dishonest and manipulative.
In this case, there are several important places where criticism either concerns actions that have since been reversed (the blog post) or depends on speculation about the non-public motives of ACE staff (Anima International). These seem like cases where giving ACE the chance to respond would be especially valuable.
Being afraid of retaliation is potentially a good reason not to share in advance, but (a) the sharing could still be done anonymously, e.g. from a new Gmail account or via a proxy, and (b) if this was the reason, it’s dishonest to say that the author “[has] not had the chance to share a draft of this post with ACE”.
In sum, I think there’s a decent probability that I do disapprove of the author’s posting this without discussing it with ACE in advance – but, until/unless I hear their reasoning, I am not sure.
I personally would also find it emotionally draining to criticize possible employers and would understand if one decides against contacting them privately. Not saying this happened here, but another seemingly valid reason I’d want to keep in mind.
I think that’s a very fair point. I do think it would be possible to run the post by an org in an anonymous way (create a new email account & send clean copy of doc), but as e.g. Larks points out it’s easy to accidentally break anonymity.