there is no incentive for the organization to pick the most scathing criticisms, when it could just as well pick only moderate ones.
If a particular criticism gets a lot of upvotes on the forum, but CEA ignores it and doesn’t give it a prize, that looks a little suspicious.
Even if you solve the incentive problem somehow, there is a danger to public criticism campaigns like that: that they will provide a negative impression of the organization to outside people that do not read about the positive aspects of the organization/movement.
You could be right. However, I haven’t seen anyone get in this kind of trouble for having a “mistakes” page. It seems possible to me that these kind of measures can proactively defuse the discontent that can lead to real drama if suppressed long enough. Note that the thing that stuck in your head was not any particular criticism of CEA, but rather just the notion that criticism might be being suppressed—I wonder if that is what leads to real drama! But you could have a good point, maybe CEA is too important of an organization to be the first ones to experiment with doing this kind of thing.
Thanks, interesting points!
If a particular criticism gets a lot of upvotes on the forum, but CEA ignores it and doesn’t give it a prize, that looks a little suspicious.
You could be right. However, I haven’t seen anyone get in this kind of trouble for having a “mistakes” page. It seems possible to me that these kind of measures can proactively defuse the discontent that can lead to real drama if suppressed long enough. Note that the thing that stuck in your head was not any particular criticism of CEA, but rather just the notion that criticism might be being suppressed—I wonder if that is what leads to real drama! But you could have a good point, maybe CEA is too important of an organization to be the first ones to experiment with doing this kind of thing.