Yeah, splitting it into two seems reasonable, one of which is linked more prominently and one that is here on the forum, though I do much prefer to be more concrete than the GiveWell policy.
I guess I am kind of confused about the benefit of being vague and high-level here. It just seems better for everyone if we are very concrete here, and I kind of don’t feel super great about writing things that are less informative, but make people feel better when reading them.
[Note—I endorse the idea of splitting it into two much more strongly than any of the specifics in this comment]
Agree that you shouldn’t be quite as vague as the GW policy (although I do think you should put a bunch of weight on GW’s precedent as well as Open Phil’s).
Quick thoughts on a few benefits of staying at a higher level (none of which are necessarily conclusive):
1) It’s not obviously less informative.
If somebody clicks on a conflict of interest policy wanting to figure out if they generally trust thee LTF and they see a bunch of stuff about metamours and psychedelics that’s going to end up incredibly salient to them and that’s not necessarily making them more informed about what they actually cared about. It can actually just be a distraction.
Like, let’s say analogous institutions also have psychedelic-related COIs but just group them under “important social relationships” or something. Now, the LTF looks like that fund where all the staff are doing psychedelics with the grantees. I don’t think anybody became more informed. (This is especially the case if the info is available *somewhere* for people who care about the details).
2) Flexibility
It’s just really hard to anticipate all of the relevant cases and the principles you’re using are the thing you might actually want to lock in.
3) Giving lots of detail means lack of disclosure can send a lot of signal.
If you have enough detail about exactly what level of friends someone needs to be with someone else in order to trigger a disclosure then you end up forcing members to send all sorts of weird signals by not disclosing things (e.g. I don’t actually consider my friendship with person X that important). This just gets complicated fast.
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All that said, I think a lot of this just has to be determined by the level of disclosure and type of policy LTF donors are demanding. I’ve donated a bit and would be comfortable trusting something more general but also am probably not representative.
This is a more general point that shapes my thinking here a bit, not directly responding to your comment.
If somebody clicks on a conflict of interest policy wanting to figure out if they generally trust thee LTF and they see a bunch of stuff about metamours and psychedelics that’s going to end up incredibly salient to them and that’s not necessarily making them more informed about what they actually cared about. It can actually just be a distraction.
I feel like the thing that is happening here makes me pretty uncomfortable, and I really don’t want to further incentivize this kind of assessment of stuff.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics says that you can have a particle spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time – until you look at it, at which point it definitely becomes one or the other. The theory claims that observing reality fundamentally changes it.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.
I feel like there is a similar thing going on with being concrete about stuff like sexual and romantic relationships (which obviously have massive consequences in large parts of the world). And maybe more broadly having this COI policy in the first place. My sense is that we can successfully avoid a lot of criticism by just not having any COI policy, or having a really high-level and vague one, because any policy we would have would clearly signal we have looked at the problem, and are now to blame for any consequences related to it.
More broadly, I just feel really uncomfortable with having to write all of our documents to make sense on a purely associative level. I as a donor would be really excited to see a COI policy as concrete as the one above, similarly to how all the concrete mistake pages on all the EA org websites make me really excited. I feel like making the policy less concrete trades of getting something right and as such being quite exciting to people like me, in favor of being more broadly palatable to some large group of people, and maybe making a bit fewer enemies. But that feels like it’s usually going to be the wrong strategy for a fund like ours, where I am most excited about having a small group of really dedicated donors who are really excited about what we are doing, much more than being very broadly palatable to a large audience, without anyone being particularly excited about it.
More broadly, I just feel really uncomfortable with having to write all of our documents to make sense on a purely associative level. I as a donor would be really excited to see a COI policy as concrete as the one above, similarly to how all the concrete mistake pages on all the EA org websites make me really excited. I feel like making the policy less concrete trades of getting something right and as such being quite exciting to people like me, in favor of being more broadly palatable to some large group of people, and maybe making a bit fewer enemies. But that feels like it’s usually going to be the wrong strategy for a fund like ours, where I am most excited about having a small group of really dedicated donors who are really excited about what we are doing, much more than being very broadly palatable to a large audience, without anyone being particularly excited about it.
It seems to me like there’s probably an asymmetry here. I would be pretty surprised if the inclusion of specific references to drug use and metamours was the final factor that tipped anyone into a decision to donate to the fund. I wouldn’t be too surprised, though, if the inclusion tipped at least some small handful of potential donors into bouncing. At least, if I were encountering the fund for the first time, I can imagine these inclusions being one minor input into any feeling of wariness I might have.
(The obvious qualifier here, though, is that you presumably know the current and target demographics of the fund better than I do. I expect different groups of people will tend to react very differently.)
I feel like the thing that is happening here makes me pretty uncomfortable, and I really don’t want to further incentivize this kind of assessment of stuff.
Apologies if I’m misreading, but it feels to me like the suggestion here might be that intentionally using a more “high-level” COI is akin to trying to ‘mislead’ potential donors by withholding information. If that’s the suggestion, then I think I at least mostly disagree. I think that having a COI that describes conflicts in less concrete terms is mostly about demonstrating an expected form of professionalism.
As an obviously extreme analogy, suppose that someone applying for a job decides to include information about their sexual history on their CV. There’s some sense in which this person is being more “honest” than someone who doesn’t include that information. But any employer who receives this CV will presumably have a negative reaction. This reaction also won’t be irrational, since it suggests the applicant is either unaware of norms around this sort of thing or (admittedly a bit circularly) making a bad decision to willfully transgress them. In either case, it’s reasonable for the employer to be a lot more wary of the applicant than they otherwise be.
I think the dynamic is roughly the same as the dynamic that leads people to (rationally) prefer to hire lawyers who wear suits over those who don’t, to trust think tanks that format and copy-edit their papers properly over those who don’t, and so on.
This case is admittedly more complicated than the case of lawyers and suits, since you are in fact depriving potential donors of some amount of information. (At worst, suits just hide information about lawyers’ preferred style of dress.) So there’s an actual trade-off to be balanced. But I’m inclined to agree with Howie that the extra clarity you get from moving beyond ‘high-level’ categories probably isn’t all that decision-relevant.
I’m not totally sure, though. In part, it’s sort of an empirical question whether a merely high-level COI would give any donors an (in their view) importantly inaccurate or incomplete impression of how COIs are managed. If enough potential donors do seem to feel this way, then it’s presumably worth being more detailed.
less concrete terms is mostly about demonstrating an expected form of professionalism.
Hmm, I think we likely have disagreements on the degree to which I think at least a significant chunk of professionalism norms are the results of individuals trying to limit accountability of themselves and people around them. I generally am not a huge fan of large fractions of professionalism norms (which is not by any means a rejection of all professionalism norms, just specific subsets of it).
I think newspeak is a pretty real thing, and the adoption of language that is broadly designed to obfuscate and limit accountability is a real phenomenon. I think that phenomenon is pretty entangled with professionalism. I agree that there is often an expectation of professionalism, but I would argue that exactly that expectation is what often causes obfuscating language to be adopted. And I think this issue is important enough that just blindly adopting professional norms is quite dangerous and can have very large negative consequences.
As an obviously extreme analogy, suppose that someone applying for a job decides to include information about their sexual history on their CV.
I think this depends a lot on the exact job, and the nature of the sexual history. If you are a registered sex-offender, and are open about this on your CV, then that will overall make a much better impression than if I find that out from doing independent research later on, since that is information that (depending on the role and the exact context) might be really highly relevant for the job.
Obviously including potentially embarrassing information in a CV without it having much purpose is a bad idea, and mostly signals various forms of social obliviousness, as well as distract from the actually important parts of your CV, which pertain to your professional experience and factors that will likely determine how well you will do at your job.
But I’m inclined to agree with Howie that the extra clarity you get from moving beyond ‘high-level’ categories probably isn’t all that decision-relevant.
So, I do think this is probably where our actual disagreement lies. Of the most concrete conflicts of interest that have given rise to abuses of power I have observed both within the EA community, and in other communities, more than 50% where the result of romantic relationships, and were basically completely unaddressed by the high-level COI policies that the relevant institutions had in place. Most of these are in weird grey-areas of confidentiality, but I would be happy to talk to you about the details of those if you send me a private message.
I think being concrete here is actually highly action relevant, and I’ve seen the lack of concreteness in company policies have very large and concrete negative consequences for those organizations.
Yeah, splitting it into two seems reasonable, one of which is linked more prominently and one that is here on the forum, though I do much prefer to be more concrete than the GiveWell policy.
I guess I am kind of confused about the benefit of being vague and high-level here. It just seems better for everyone if we are very concrete here, and I kind of don’t feel super great about writing things that are less informative, but make people feel better when reading them.
[Note—I endorse the idea of splitting it into two much more strongly than any of the specifics in this comment]
Agree that you shouldn’t be quite as vague as the GW policy (although I do think you should put a bunch of weight on GW’s precedent as well as Open Phil’s).
Quick thoughts on a few benefits of staying at a higher level (none of which are necessarily conclusive):
1) It’s not obviously less informative.
If somebody clicks on a conflict of interest policy wanting to figure out if they generally trust thee LTF and they see a bunch of stuff about metamours and psychedelics that’s going to end up incredibly salient to them and that’s not necessarily making them more informed about what they actually cared about. It can actually just be a distraction.
Like, let’s say analogous institutions also have psychedelic-related COIs but just group them under “important social relationships” or something. Now, the LTF looks like that fund where all the staff are doing psychedelics with the grantees. I don’t think anybody became more informed. (This is especially the case if the info is available *somewhere* for people who care about the details).
2) Flexibility
It’s just really hard to anticipate all of the relevant cases and the principles you’re using are the thing you might actually want to lock in.
3) Giving lots of detail means lack of disclosure can send a lot of signal.
If you have enough detail about exactly what level of friends someone needs to be with someone else in order to trigger a disclosure then you end up forcing members to send all sorts of weird signals by not disclosing things (e.g. I don’t actually consider my friendship with person X that important). This just gets complicated fast.
---
All that said, I think a lot of this just has to be determined by the level of disclosure and type of policy LTF donors are demanding. I’ve donated a bit and would be comfortable trusting something more general but also am probably not representative.
This is a more general point that shapes my thinking here a bit, not directly responding to your comment.
I feel like the thing that is happening here makes me pretty uncomfortable, and I really don’t want to further incentivize this kind of assessment of stuff.
A related concept in this space seems to me to be the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics:
I feel like there is a similar thing going on with being concrete about stuff like sexual and romantic relationships (which obviously have massive consequences in large parts of the world). And maybe more broadly having this COI policy in the first place. My sense is that we can successfully avoid a lot of criticism by just not having any COI policy, or having a really high-level and vague one, because any policy we would have would clearly signal we have looked at the problem, and are now to blame for any consequences related to it.
More broadly, I just feel really uncomfortable with having to write all of our documents to make sense on a purely associative level. I as a donor would be really excited to see a COI policy as concrete as the one above, similarly to how all the concrete mistake pages on all the EA org websites make me really excited. I feel like making the policy less concrete trades of getting something right and as such being quite exciting to people like me, in favor of being more broadly palatable to some large group of people, and maybe making a bit fewer enemies. But that feels like it’s usually going to be the wrong strategy for a fund like ours, where I am most excited about having a small group of really dedicated donors who are really excited about what we are doing, much more than being very broadly palatable to a large audience, without anyone being particularly excited about it.
It seems to me like there’s probably an asymmetry here. I would be pretty surprised if the inclusion of specific references to drug use and metamours was the final factor that tipped anyone into a decision to donate to the fund. I wouldn’t be too surprised, though, if the inclusion tipped at least some small handful of potential donors into bouncing. At least, if I were encountering the fund for the first time, I can imagine these inclusions being one minor input into any feeling of wariness I might have.
(The obvious qualifier here, though, is that you presumably know the current and target demographics of the fund better than I do. I expect different groups of people will tend to react very differently.)
Apologies if I’m misreading, but it feels to me like the suggestion here might be that intentionally using a more “high-level” COI is akin to trying to ‘mislead’ potential donors by withholding information. If that’s the suggestion, then I think I at least mostly disagree. I think that having a COI that describes conflicts in less concrete terms is mostly about demonstrating an expected form of professionalism.
As an obviously extreme analogy, suppose that someone applying for a job decides to include information about their sexual history on their CV. There’s some sense in which this person is being more “honest” than someone who doesn’t include that information. But any employer who receives this CV will presumably have a negative reaction. This reaction also won’t be irrational, since it suggests the applicant is either unaware of norms around this sort of thing or (admittedly a bit circularly) making a bad decision to willfully transgress them. In either case, it’s reasonable for the employer to be a lot more wary of the applicant than they otherwise be.
I think the dynamic is roughly the same as the dynamic that leads people to (rationally) prefer to hire lawyers who wear suits over those who don’t, to trust think tanks that format and copy-edit their papers properly over those who don’t, and so on.
This case is admittedly more complicated than the case of lawyers and suits, since you are in fact depriving potential donors of some amount of information. (At worst, suits just hide information about lawyers’ preferred style of dress.) So there’s an actual trade-off to be balanced. But I’m inclined to agree with Howie that the extra clarity you get from moving beyond ‘high-level’ categories probably isn’t all that decision-relevant.
I’m not totally sure, though. In part, it’s sort of an empirical question whether a merely high-level COI would give any donors an (in their view) importantly inaccurate or incomplete impression of how COIs are managed. If enough potential donors do seem to feel this way, then it’s presumably worth being more detailed.
Hmm, I think we likely have disagreements on the degree to which I think at least a significant chunk of professionalism norms are the results of individuals trying to limit accountability of themselves and people around them. I generally am not a huge fan of large fractions of professionalism norms (which is not by any means a rejection of all professionalism norms, just specific subsets of it).
I think newspeak is a pretty real thing, and the adoption of language that is broadly designed to obfuscate and limit accountability is a real phenomenon. I think that phenomenon is pretty entangled with professionalism. I agree that there is often an expectation of professionalism, but I would argue that exactly that expectation is what often causes obfuscating language to be adopted. And I think this issue is important enough that just blindly adopting professional norms is quite dangerous and can have very large negative consequences.
Responding on a more object-level:
I think this depends a lot on the exact job, and the nature of the sexual history. If you are a registered sex-offender, and are open about this on your CV, then that will overall make a much better impression than if I find that out from doing independent research later on, since that is information that (depending on the role and the exact context) might be really highly relevant for the job.
Obviously including potentially embarrassing information in a CV without it having much purpose is a bad idea, and mostly signals various forms of social obliviousness, as well as distract from the actually important parts of your CV, which pertain to your professional experience and factors that will likely determine how well you will do at your job.
So, I do think this is probably where our actual disagreement lies. Of the most concrete conflicts of interest that have given rise to abuses of power I have observed both within the EA community, and in other communities, more than 50% where the result of romantic relationships, and were basically completely unaddressed by the high-level COI policies that the relevant institutions had in place. Most of these are in weird grey-areas of confidentiality, but I would be happy to talk to you about the details of those if you send me a private message.
I think being concrete here is actually highly action relevant, and I’ve seen the lack of concreteness in company policies have very large and concrete negative consequences for those organizations.