There is an established industry committed to providing criticism from outside (well, kind of): external auditors, commonly known as the Big 4. These companies are paid by usually big firms to evaluate their financial statements with regards to accuracy and unlawful activity. While these accountants are supposed to serve the shareholders of the company and the public, they are remunerated and chosen by the companies themselves, which creates an obvious incentive problem. Empirically, this has led to serious doubt about the quality of their work, even after governments had to step in because of poor audits and provide stringent legal requirements for auditors. See: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/05/24/reforming-the-big-four
Essentially, a similar problem would arise if CEA would pay external people to provide feedback, which is something GiveWell also ran into (from memory: the page somebody below already linked outlines that finding people who are qualified AND willing to provide free criticism is really hard). If you pay a reviewer beforehand, how do you choose a reviewer? Having such a reviewer might actually be a net negative, if it provides a false sense of security (in probabilistic terms: it would seem from the outside that estimates A and B are independent of each other, but in fact since the first evaluator chooses the second they are not). If you use a format like the current one, where everybody is free to submit criticism, but the organization itself chooses the best arguments, there is no incentive for the organization to pick the most scathing criticisms, when it could just as well pick only moderate ones. (although it is probably better to incorporate moderate criticism rather than none at all)
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. There are several reasons to consider this as a realistic danger: 1) On the internet people seem to really love reading negative pieces, they capture our interest and they are shared more often. 2)The more negative the opinion expressed, the more salient to the memory it is. 3) With EA, it’s likely that this might end up being on of the first impressions people have of it.
4)All of this is what happened above with the link to the glassdoor review of CEA: we now have a discussion in this thread about the negative reviews on there, but not really of the positive ones. Previously I had no special information about whether CEA was internally open to self-criticism, but now I only have these negative reviews to go on with and I expect that in a year I will still remember them.
I realize that these points do not necessarily apply to asking for external criticism in itself, just for certain ways to go about it, but I do believe that avoiding the aforementioned problems requires clever and nontrivial design.
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.
There is an established industry committed to providing criticism from outside (well, kind of): external auditors, commonly known as the Big 4. These companies are paid by usually big firms to evaluate their financial statements with regards to accuracy and unlawful activity. While these accountants are supposed to serve the shareholders of the company and the public, they are remunerated and chosen by the companies themselves, which creates an obvious incentive problem. Empirically, this has led to serious doubt about the quality of their work, even after governments had to step in because of poor audits and provide stringent legal requirements for auditors. See: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/05/24/reforming-the-big-four
Essentially, a similar problem would arise if CEA would pay external people to provide feedback, which is something GiveWell also ran into (from memory: the page somebody below already linked outlines that finding people who are qualified AND willing to provide free criticism is really hard). If you pay a reviewer beforehand, how do you choose a reviewer? Having such a reviewer might actually be a net negative, if it provides a false sense of security (in probabilistic terms: it would seem from the outside that estimates A and B are independent of each other, but in fact since the first evaluator chooses the second they are not). If you use a format like the current one, where everybody is free to submit criticism, but the organization itself chooses the best arguments, there is no incentive for the organization to pick the most scathing criticisms, when it could just as well pick only moderate ones. (although it is probably better to incorporate moderate criticism rather than none at all)
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. There are several reasons to consider this as a realistic danger: 1) On the internet people seem to really love reading negative pieces, they capture our interest and they are shared more often. 2)The more negative the opinion expressed, the more salient to the memory it is. 3) With EA, it’s likely that this might end up being on of the first impressions people have of it.
4)All of this is what happened above with the link to the glassdoor review of CEA: we now have a discussion in this thread about the negative reviews on there, but not really of the positive ones. Previously I had no special information about whether CEA was internally open to self-criticism, but now I only have these negative reviews to go on with and I expect that in a year I will still remember them.
I realize that these points do not necessarily apply to asking for external criticism in itself, just for certain ways to go about it, but I do believe that avoiding the aforementioned problems requires clever and nontrivial design.
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.