It directly claims that the investigation was part of an “internal reflection process” and “instutitional reform”, and I have been shared on documents by CEA employees where the legal investigation was explicitly called out as not being helpful for facilitating a reflection process and institutional reform.
This seems like the headline claim to me. EAs should not be claiming false things in the Washington Post, of all things.
I didn’t intend the above to be a straightforward accusation of lying. My sense is that different people at CEA disagree here about how useful this investigation was for reform purposes (which I think is evidence of the claim being false, but not strong evidence of deception).
If I had to make a bet, I would say majority opinion at CEA on the question of “did this investigation obstruct or assist internal reform efforts at CEA (as opposed to e.g. address legal liability and reputational risks independent from their best guess about what appropriate reform is)?” would be “obstruct”, but I don’t know, I haven’t done a survey.
When I was talking to people about the investigation in the context of broader reform, the almost universal response was “oh, I don’t think you should get your hopes up about this investigation” and “oh, I don’t really think the investigation is going to help much with that”. And that seemed reflected in some Google Docs I saw. But idk, maybe Zack thinks it was more part of it.
This seems like the headline claim to me. EAs should not be claiming false things in the Washington Post, of all things.
I didn’t intend the above to be a straightforward accusation of lying. My sense is that different people at CEA disagree here about how useful this investigation was for reform purposes (which I think is evidence of the claim being false, but not strong evidence of deception).
If I had to make a bet, I would say majority opinion at CEA on the question of “did this investigation obstruct or assist internal reform efforts at CEA (as opposed to e.g. address legal liability and reputational risks independent from their best guess about what appropriate reform is)?” would be “obstruct”, but I don’t know, I haven’t done a survey.
When I was talking to people about the investigation in the context of broader reform, the almost universal response was “oh, I don’t think you should get your hopes up about this investigation” and “oh, I don’t really think the investigation is going to help much with that”. And that seemed reflected in some Google Docs I saw. But idk, maybe Zack thinks it was more part of it.