Thanks for this—I imagine this has been a difficult few months for you as the interim head of the community health team.
I just wanted to bring Q4 from this comment to your attention, (specifically, lilly’s set of questions here) as you seem better placed to answer about the general case (as opposed to the specifics around OCB, which might be better suited for Julia)
Separately, I’m wondering what from the investigation if any, would you be happy to pre-commit to sharing publicly? I’d also love to get a sense of how you and the team hope to ensure the CH team has processes and systems in place to manage these kinds of cases going forward, and what you’d be happy to pre-commit to sharing in terms of internal investigations and reflections. Non-exhaustive categories of information I would be interested in would be:
Methodology for investigations
Conflicts of Interests identified
Problems identified
Changes considered / explored
Changes made + reasoning
My sense is that rebuilding trust in the CH team will be important going forward, and such a precommitment combined with transparent and appropriately timely follow-up may be useful here.
I’ll respond to the second set of questions here (we’ll respond to comments from the other post there).
I can’t speak to the external investigation since I’m not involved (it’s going through the board so as to be external to my team).
In terms of our internal investigation, since I don’t currently know the form it will take there’s not much I can precommit to, but I definitely think we should publicly say new processes or other changes we’re putting in place (or if none, that it’s none), so that people know how we’re planning to approach things in the future.
I think the categories you’ve laid out are good ones though I don’t yet know if those will end up being exactly the categories I end up using as Ben and I go through this—appreciate you writing them up and flagging them. My strong guess is that relevant categories will include (as I noted in things I wanted to keep in mind during reflection) conflicts of interest and powerful people in EA.
I want to also address some elephant-in-the-room feeling (which may not be relevant to you, but feels important to say), which is that as I go into this only knowing what I learned recently, it feels important that before an investigation is finished to be able to “split and commit”. I want to hold onto multiple hypotheses, including
that we made serious mistakes and should change a lot
that our processes need serious change
that with the information they had at the time, people acted reasonably
that people didn’t act reasonably but that the processes are basically fine, since no process is going to yield no mistakes.
I don’t put equal weight on all those hypotheses, but I do want to be able to hold them, and at the end of the investigation, to say publicly what conclusions I’ve come to about those things.
Hi Chana,
Thanks for this—I imagine this has been a difficult few months for you as the interim head of the community health team.
I just wanted to bring Q4 from this comment to your attention, (specifically, lilly’s set of questions here) as you seem better placed to answer about the general case (as opposed to the specifics around OCB, which might be better suited for Julia)
Separately, I’m wondering what from the investigation if any, would you be happy to pre-commit to sharing publicly? I’d also love to get a sense of how you and the team hope to ensure the CH team has processes and systems in place to manage these kinds of cases going forward, and what you’d be happy to pre-commit to sharing in terms of internal investigations and reflections. Non-exhaustive categories of information I would be interested in would be:
Methodology for investigations
Conflicts of Interests identified
Problems identified
Changes considered / explored
Changes made + reasoning
My sense is that rebuilding trust in the CH team will be important going forward, and such a precommitment combined with transparent and appropriately timely follow-up may be useful here.
(commenting in personal capacity etc)
Thanks for your comment and kind words.
I’ll respond to the second set of questions here (we’ll respond to comments from the other post there).
I can’t speak to the external investigation since I’m not involved (it’s going through the board so as to be external to my team).
In terms of our internal investigation, since I don’t currently know the form it will take there’s not much I can precommit to, but I definitely think we should publicly say new processes or other changes we’re putting in place (or if none, that it’s none), so that people know how we’re planning to approach things in the future.
I think the categories you’ve laid out are good ones though I don’t yet know if those will end up being exactly the categories I end up using as Ben and I go through this—appreciate you writing them up and flagging them. My strong guess is that relevant categories will include (as I noted in things I wanted to keep in mind during reflection) conflicts of interest and powerful people in EA.
I want to also address some elephant-in-the-room feeling (which may not be relevant to you, but feels important to say), which is that as I go into this only knowing what I learned recently, it feels important that before an investigation is finished to be able to “split and commit”. I want to hold onto multiple hypotheses, including
that we made serious mistakes and should change a lot
that our processes need serious change
that with the information they had at the time, people acted reasonably
that people didn’t act reasonably but that the processes are basically fine, since no process is going to yield no mistakes.
I don’t put equal weight on all those hypotheses, but I do want to be able to hold them, and at the end of the investigation, to say publicly what conclusions I’ve come to about those things.