FWIW if I was in a position similar to ACE’s here are a few potential “compromises” I would have explored.
Inferring from the list you wrote, you seem to be under the impression that the speaker in question was going to deliver a talk at the conference, but according to Eric Herboso’s top-level comment, “the facebook commenter in question would be on a panel talking about BLM”. Also, the following sentence from ACE’s Facebook post makes it sound like the only way ACE staff members would attend the conference was if the speaker would not be there at all, which I think rules out all of the compromise ideas you generated.
In fact, asking our staff to participate in an event where a person who had made such harmful statements would be in attendance, let alone presenting, would be a violation of our own anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policy.
Inferring from the list you wrote, you seem to be under the impression that the speaker in question was going to deliver a talk at the conference, but according to Eric Herboso’s top-level comment, “the facebook commenter in question would be on a panel talking about BLM”.
Yes, I had been under that impression (based on my vague memory of having heard about this situation when Buck had posted about it on Facebook). Given what Eric wrote, it sounds like you’re probably right that the “baseline plan” was a panel rather than a talk, so obviously my list of potential compromises would need to be modified (change topic of the panel, move the person from the panel to a talk on another topic, make the panel “informal” etc.). I don’t think this by itself matters much for the key points I was trying to make in my comment.
Separately, I agree that the second quote at least suggests that maybe what in fact happened was that ACE asked CARE to ban this person from even attending the conference. I haven’t followed this situation enough to have an object-level view of whether I think that would have been a reasonable/good demand. I also didn’t mean to say that the hypothetical compromises I suggested in my earlier comment would have in fact been good for the world overall.
I still think that (i) negotiation by demanding/suggesting particular outcomes (as opposed to first getting on the same page on both parties’ interests) is usually instrumentally bad even for one’s own interests [so no matter the content of the demand, if ACE’s negotiation strategy had been of that type, I’d think they probably made a mistake], (ii) confidentiality norms for specifics of negotiations are often good, would often be undermined even by disclosing just what one said oneself (i.e. without directly revealing anything the other party did or said) and (iii) while somewhat uncertain I would tentatively push back pretty strongly against outside demands to break confidentiality or outside signals that discourage an org from entering into confidential negotiations in the future
Indeed, (iii) was the main reason why I commented at all. I’m not that interested in what happens in the animal advocacy world, but I tentatively don’t want incentives that punish EA-ish orgs for utilizing dispute resolution mechanisms that involve confidentiality because I think eroding the norm that confidentiality is OK in such situations could be pretty bad.
[ETA: I wasn’t trying to comment on the object level, but for the record based on this comment by Anima International leadership staff it does sound like ACE may in fact not have approached the dispute in the way I outlined here. I’m specifically referring to claims that (1) ACE started the conversation by freezing funds and (2) them to some extent having violated strict confidentiality themselves by having disclosed that some of the ‘negotiations’ were about racism, attitudes toward DEI, etc. - I think that (2) may actually be a dynamic of the problem I pointed to, i.e., that by disclosing partial information you can create pressures on the involved parties to disclose even more information or otherwise justify their behavior. However, note that ACE may be disputing these claims.
To be clear, I also think that accurately assessing such situations “from the outside” is very tricky, and I don’t think I can reasonably have a strong view on whether or not any detail such as disclosing the topic of some conversation was or wasn’t a mistake. I also think that ACE is in a particularly tricky situation when navigating such matters because it’s not some “random” actor who has a dispute with the conference organizers but also by virtue of their mission is committed to evaluating the conference organizer’s performance. I think this raises some interesting more general question about good practices for how to navigate disputes between charity evaluators and charities.]
Inferring from the list you wrote, you seem to be under the impression that the speaker in question was going to deliver a talk at the conference, but according to Eric Herboso’s top-level comment, “the facebook commenter in question would be on a panel talking about BLM”. Also, the following sentence from ACE’s Facebook post makes it sound like the only way ACE staff members would attend the conference was if the speaker would not be there at all, which I think rules out all of the compromise ideas you generated.
Yes, I had been under that impression (based on my vague memory of having heard about this situation when Buck had posted about it on Facebook). Given what Eric wrote, it sounds like you’re probably right that the “baseline plan” was a panel rather than a talk, so obviously my list of potential compromises would need to be modified (change topic of the panel, move the person from the panel to a talk on another topic, make the panel “informal” etc.). I don’t think this by itself matters much for the key points I was trying to make in my comment.
Separately, I agree that the second quote at least suggests that maybe what in fact happened was that ACE asked CARE to ban this person from even attending the conference. I haven’t followed this situation enough to have an object-level view of whether I think that would have been a reasonable/good demand. I also didn’t mean to say that the hypothetical compromises I suggested in my earlier comment would have in fact been good for the world overall.
I still think that (i) negotiation by demanding/suggesting particular outcomes (as opposed to first getting on the same page on both parties’ interests) is usually instrumentally bad even for one’s own interests [so no matter the content of the demand, if ACE’s negotiation strategy had been of that type, I’d think they probably made a mistake], (ii) confidentiality norms for specifics of negotiations are often good, would often be undermined even by disclosing just what one said oneself (i.e. without directly revealing anything the other party did or said) and (iii) while somewhat uncertain I would tentatively push back pretty strongly against outside demands to break confidentiality or outside signals that discourage an org from entering into confidential negotiations in the future
Indeed, (iii) was the main reason why I commented at all. I’m not that interested in what happens in the animal advocacy world, but I tentatively don’t want incentives that punish EA-ish orgs for utilizing dispute resolution mechanisms that involve confidentiality because I think eroding the norm that confidentiality is OK in such situations could be pretty bad.
[ETA: I wasn’t trying to comment on the object level, but for the record based on this comment by Anima International leadership staff it does sound like ACE may in fact not have approached the dispute in the way I outlined here. I’m specifically referring to claims that (1) ACE started the conversation by freezing funds and (2) them to some extent having violated strict confidentiality themselves by having disclosed that some of the ‘negotiations’ were about racism, attitudes toward DEI, etc. - I think that (2) may actually be a dynamic of the problem I pointed to, i.e., that by disclosing partial information you can create pressures on the involved parties to disclose even more information or otherwise justify their behavior. However, note that ACE may be disputing these claims.
To be clear, I also think that accurately assessing such situations “from the outside” is very tricky, and I don’t think I can reasonably have a strong view on whether or not any detail such as disclosing the topic of some conversation was or wasn’t a mistake. I also think that ACE is in a particularly tricky situation when navigating such matters because it’s not some “random” actor who has a dispute with the conference organizers but also by virtue of their mission is committed to evaluating the conference organizer’s performance. I think this raises some interesting more general question about good practices for how to navigate disputes between charity evaluators and charities.]