(edit: I was mostly thinking of public criticism of EA projects—particularly projects with <10 FTE. This isn’t clear from the post. )
I think it’s wild how pro-criticism of projects the EA forum is when:
Most people agree that there are a lack of good projects, and public critique clearly creates barriers to starting new projects
Almost all EA projects have low downside risk in absolute terms
There are almost no examples of criticism clearly mattering (e.g. getting someone to significantly improve their project)
Criticism obviously driving away valuable people from the forum—like (at least in part) the largest ever EA donor
(Less important, but on priors, I’m not sure you should expect high-quality criticism of EA projects because they are often neglected, and most useful criticism comes from people who have operated in a similar area before. )
Edit: I’m curious about counterexamples or points against any of the bullets. There are lots of disagree reacts, and presumably some of those people have seen critques that were actually useful.
Almost all EA projects have low downside risk in absolute terms
I might agree with this on a technicality, in that depending on your bar or standard, I could imagine agreeing that almost all EA projects (at least for more speculative causes) have negligible impact in absolute terms.
But presumably you mean that almost all EA projects are such that their plausible good outcomes are way bigger in magnitude than their plausible bad outcomes, or something like that. This seems false, e.g.
FTX
Any kind of political action can backfire if a different political party gains power
AI safety research could be used as a form of safety washing
AI evaluations could primarily end up as a mechanism to speed up timelines (not saying that’s necessarily bad, but certainly under some models it’s very bad)
Movement building can kill the movement by making it too diffuse and regressing to the mean, and by creating opponents to the movement
Vegan advocacy could polarize people, such that factory farming lasts longer than it would be default (e.g. if cheap and tasty substitutes would have caused people to switch over if they weren’t polarized)
There are almost no examples of criticism clearly mattering
Back in the era when EA discussions happened mainly on Facebook there were all sorts of critiques and flame wars between protest-tactics and incremental-change-tactics for animal advocacy, I don’t think this particularly changed what any given organization tried to do, but it surely changed views of individual people
I’d be happy to endorse something like “public criticism rarely causes an organization to choose to do something different in a major org-defining way” (but note that’s primarily because people in a good position to change an organization through criticism will just do so privately, not because criticism is totally ineffective).
Almost all EA projects have low downside risk in absolute terms
I agree with some of the points on point 1, though other than FTX, I don’t think the downside risk of any of those examples is very large. I’d walk back my claim to the downside risk to most EA projects seems low (but there are ofc exceptions).
on
There are almost no examples of criticism clearly mattering
Agree that criticisms of AI companies can be good, I don’t really consider them EA projects but it wasn’t clear that was what I was referring to in my post—my bad. Responding quickly to some of the other ones.
Idk if these are “EA” projects. I think I’m much more pessimistic than you are that these posts made better things happen in the world. I’d guess that people overupdated on these somewhat. That said, I quite like these posts and the discussion in the commentts.
Gossip-based criticism of Leverage clearly mattered and imo it would have been better if it was more public
This also seems good, though it was a long time ago and I wasn’t around when leverage was a thing.
Sign seems pretty negative to me. Like even the title is misleading and this generated a lot of drama.
Back in the era when EA discussions happened mainly on Facebook there were all sorts of critiques and flame wars between protest-tactics and incremental-change-tactics for animal advocacy, I don’t think this particularly changed what any given organization tried to do, but it surely changed views of individual people
Not familiar but maybe this is useful? Idk.
Open Phil and RP both had pieces that were pretty critical of clean meat work iirc that were large updates for me. I don’t think they were org-level critiques, but I could imagine a version of them being critiques of GFI.
So overall, I think I stand by the claim that there aren’t many criticisms that clearly mattered, but this was a positive update for me. Maybe I should have said that a very small fraction of critical EA forum posts have clear positive effects or give people useful information.
I agree with some of the points on point 1, though other than FTX, I don’t think the downside risk of any of those examples is very large
Fwiw I find it pretty plausible that lots of political action and movement building for the sake of movement building has indeed had a large negative impact, such that I feel uncertain about whether I should shut it all down if I had the option to do so (if I set aside concerns like unilateralism). I also feel similarly about particular examples of AI safety research but definitely not for the field as a whole.
Agree that criticisms of AI companies can be good, I don’t really consider them EA projects but it wasn’t clear that was what I was referring to in my post
Fair enough for the first two, but I was thinking of the FrontierMath thing as mostly a critique of Epoch, not of OpenAI, tbc, and that’s the sense in which it mattered—Epoch made changes, afaik OpenAI did not. Epoch is at least an EA-adjacent project.
Sign seems pretty negative to me.
I agree that if I had to guess I’d say that the sign seems negative for both of the things you say it is negative for, but I am uncertain about it, particularly because of people standing behind a version of the critique (e.g. Habryka for the Nonlinear one, Alexander Berger for the Wytham Abbey one, though certainly in the latter case it’s a very different critique than what the original post said).
I think I stand by the claim that there aren’t many criticisms that clearly mattered, but this was a positive update for me.
Fwiw, I think there are probably several other criticisms that I alone could find given some more time, let alone impactful criticisms that I never even read. I didn’t even start looking for the genre of “critique of individual part of GiveWell cost-effectiveness analysis, which GiveWell then fixes”, I think there’s been at least one and maybe multiple such public criticisms in the past.
I also remember there being a StrongMinds critique and a Happier Lives Institute critique that very plausibly caused changes? But I don’t know the details and didn’t follow it
I think I agree with your overall point but some counterexamples:
EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest winners. E.g. GiveWell said “We believe HLI’s feedback is likely to change some of our funding recommendations, at least marginally, and perhaps more importantly improve our decision-making across multiple interventions”
GiveWell said of their Change Our Mind contest “To give a general sense of the magnitude of the changes we currently anticipate, our best guess is that Matthew Romer and Paul Romer Present’s entry will change our estimate of the cost-effectiveness of Dispensers for Safe Water by very roughly 5 to 10% and that Noah Haber’s entry may lead to an overall shift in how we account for uncertainty (but it’s too early to say how it would impact any given intervention).”
HLI discussed some meaningful ways they changed as the result of criticism here.
I feel like you are missing some important causal avenues through which plentiful criticism can be good:
If the expectation of harsh future criticism is a major deterrent from engagement, presumably it disproportionately deters the type of projects that expect to be especially criticized.
Criticism is educational for third parties reading and can help improve their future projects.
Disproportionately deterring bad projects is a crux. I think if people are running a “minimise criticism policy” they aren’t going to end up doing very useful things (or they’ll do everything in secret or far from EA). I currently don’t think nearly enough people are trying to start projects and many project explorations seem good to me on net, so the discrimination power needs to be pretty strong for the benefits to pencil.
I think there are positives about criticism which I didn’t focus on, but yeah if I were to write a more comprehensive post I think the points you raised are good to include.
I’m not convinced that criticism is very counterfactually educational for 3rd parties. Particularly when imo lots of criticism is bad. Feels like it could go either way. If more criticism came from people who had run substantial projects or operated in the same field or whatever I think I’d trust their takes more. Many of the examples raised in this thread are good imo and have this property.
There are almost no examples of criticism clearly mattering (e.g. getting someone to significantly improve their project)
I don’t know what “clearly mattering” means, but I think this characterization unduly tips the scales. People who don’t like being criticized are often going to be open about that fact, which makes it easier to build an anti-criticism case under a “clearly” standard.
Also, “criticism” covers a lot of ground—you may have a somewhat narrower definition in mind, but (even after limiting to EA projects with <10 FTEs) people are understandably reacting to a pretty broad definition.
The most obvious use of criticism is probably to deter and respond to inappropriate conduct. Setting aside whether the allegations were sustained, I think that was a major intended mechanism of action in several critical pieces. I can’t prove that having a somewhat pro-criticism culture furthers this goal, but I think it’s appropriate to give it some weight. It does seem plausible on the margin that (e.g.) orgs will be less likely to exaggerate their claims and cost-effectiveness analyses given the risk of someone posting criticism with receipts.
A softer version of this purpose could be phrased as follows: criticism is a means by which the community expresses how it expects others to act (and hopefully influences future actions by third parties even if not by the criticized organization). In your model, “public critique clearly creates barriers to starting new projects,” so one would expect public critique (or the fear thereof) to influence decisions by existing orgs as well. Then we have to decide whether that critique is on the whole good or not.
Criticism can help direct resources away from certain orgs to more productive uses. The StrongMinds-related criticisms of 2023 come to mind here. The resources could include not only funding but also mindshare (e.g., how much do I want to defer to this org?) and decisions by talent. This kind of criticism doesn’t generally pay in financial terms, so it’s reasonable to be generous in granting social credit to compensate for that. These outcomes could be measured, but doing so will often be resource-intensive and so they may not make the cut under a “clearly” standard either.
Criticism can also serve the function of market research. The usual response to people who aren’t happy about how orgs are doing their work is to go start their own org. That’s a costly response—for both the unhappy person and for the ecosystem! Suppose someone isn’t happy about CEA and EA Funds spinning off together and is thinking about trying to stand up an independent grantmaker. First off, they need to test their ideas against people who have different perspectives. They would also need to know whether a critical mass of people would move their donations over to an independent grantmaker for this or other reasons. (I think it would also be fair for someone not in a position to lead a new org to signal support for the idea, hoping that it might inspire someone else.)
It’s probably better for the market-research function to happen in public rather than in back channels. Among other things, it gives the org a chance to defend its position, and gives it a chance to adjust course if too many relevant stakeholders agree with the critic. The counterargument to this one is that little criticism actually makes it into a new organization. But I’m not sure what success rate we should expect given considerable incumbency advantage in some domains.
“People who don’t like being criticized are often going to be open about that fact”
[Just responding to this narrow point and not the comment as a whole, which contains plenty of things I agree with.]
Fwiw, I don’t think this is true in this community. Disliking criticism is a bad look and seeming responsive to criticism is highly valued. I’ve seen lots of situations up close where it would have been very aversive/costly for someone to say “I totally disagree with this criticism and think it wasn’t useful” and very tempting for someone to express lots of gratitude for criticism and change in response to it whether or not it was right. I think it’s not uncommon for the former to take more bravery than the latter and I personally feel unsure whether I’ve felt more bias towards agreeing with criticism that was wrong or disagreeing with criticism that was right.
Do you have an alternate suggestion for how flaws and mistakes made by projects in the EA sphere can be discovered?
As a scientist, one of the reasons people trust our work is the expectation that the work we publish has been vetted and checked by other experts in the field (and even with peer review, sloppy work gets published all the time). Isn’t one of the goals of the EA forum to crowdsource at least some of this valuable scrutiny?
I don’t think it’s obvious that less chance of criticism implies a higher chance of starting a project. There are many things in the world that are prestigious precisely because they have a high quality bar.
I’m a huge fan of having high standards. Posts that are like “we reproduced this published output and think they made these concrete errors” are often great. But I notice much more “these people did a bad job or spent too much money” takes often from people who afaict haven’t done a bunch of stuff themselves so aren’t very calibrated, and don’t seem very scope sensitive. If people saw their projects being critiqued and were then motivated to go and do more things more quickly I’d think that was great (or were encouraged to do more things more quickly from “fear” of critiques) I think we’d be in a better equilibrium.
For example people often point out that LW and the forum are somewhat expensive per user as evidence they are being mismanaged and imo this is a bad take which is rarely made by people who have built or maintained popular software projects/forums or used the internet enough to know that discussion of the kind in these venues is really quite rare and special.
To be clear, I think the “but have they actually done stuff” critique should also be levelled at grantmakers. I’m sympathetic to grantmakers who are like “the world is burning and I just need to do a leveraged thing right now” but my guess is that if more grantmakers had run projects in the reference class of things they want to fund (or founded any complicated or unusual and ambitious projects) we’d be in a better position. I think this general take is very common in YC/VC spaces, which perform a similar function to grantmaking for their ecosystem.
Many examples of criticism in replies, are high quality posts that I think improve standards. I may spend an hour going through the criticism tag and sorting them into posts I think are useful/anti-useful to check.
I’m not quite as convinced of the much greater cost of “bad criticism” over “good criticism”. I’m optimistic that discussions on the forum tend to come to a reflective equilibrium that agrees with valid criticism and disregards invalid criticism. I’ll give some examples (but pre-committing to not rehashing these too much):
I think HLI is a good example of long-discussion-that-ends-up-agreeing-with-valid-criticism, and as discussed by other people in this thread this probably led to capital + mind share being allocated more efficiently.
I think the recent back and forth between VettedCauses and Sinergia is a good example of the other side. Setting aside the remaining points of contention, I think commenters on the original post did a good job of clocking the fact that there was room for the reported flaws to have a harmless explanation. And then Carolina from Sinergia did a good job of providing a concrete explanation of most of the supposed issues[1].
It’s possible that HLI and Sinergia came away equally discouraged, but if so I think that would be a misapprehension on Sinergia’s part. Personally I went from having no preconceptions about them to having mildly positive sentiment towards them.
Perhaps we could do some work to promote the meme that “reasonably-successfully defending yourself against criticism is generally good for your reputation not bad”.
(Stopped writing here to post something rather than nothing, I may respond to some other points later)
You could also argue that not everyone has time to read through the details of these discussions, and so people go away with a negative impression. I don’t think that’s right because on a quick skim you can sort of pick up the sentiment of the comment section, and most things like this don’t escape the confines of the forum.
As I’m sure many would imagine, I think I disagree.
There are almost no examples of criticism clearly mattering (e.g. getting someone to significantly improve their project)
There’s a lot here I take issue with: 1. I’m not sure where the line is between “criticism” and “critique” or “feedback.” Would any judgements about a project that aren’t positive be considered “criticism”? We don’t have specific examples, so I don’t know what you refer to. 2. This jumps from “criticism matters” to “criticism clearly matters” (which is more easily defensible, but less important), to “criticism clearly mattering (e.g. getting someone to significantly improve their project)”, which is one of several ways that criticism could matter, clearly or otherwise. The latter seems like an incredibly specific claim that misses much of the discussion/benefits of criticism/critique/feedback.
I’d rate this post decently high on the “provocative to clarity” measure, as in it’s fairly provocative while also being short. This isn’t something I take issue with, but I just wouldn’t spend too much attention/effort on it, given this. But I would be a bit curious what a much longer and detailed version of this post would be like.
Rohin and Ben provided some examples that updated me upwards a little on critique posts being useful.
I think most of my points are fairly robust to the different definitions you gave so the line isn’t super important to me. This feels a bit nitpicky.
I don’t think that “criticism clearly mattering (e.g. getting someone to significantly improve their project)” is a very specific claim. I think that one of the main responses people would like to see to criticism of a specific project is for that project to change in line with the criticism. Unlike many of the other proposed benefits of criticism, it is a very empirical claim.
It suspect you think that this post should have been closer to “here are some points for and against criticism” on the EA Forum, but I don’t think posts need to be balanced or well-rounded like that, especially because, from my perspective, the forum is too pro-criticism but yeah, seems fine for you not to engage with this kind of content—I definitely don’t think you’re obliged to.
“public critique clearly created barriers to starting new projects” In what sense? People read criticism of other projects and decide that starting their own isn’t worth it? People with new active projects discouraged by critique?
Mostly, people with active projects are discouraged by critiques and starting new public ambitious projects is much less fun if there are a bunch of people on a forum who are out to get you.
If I have an active project I want it to be as good as possible. Certainly there’s been mean-spirited, low-quality criticism on the EA Forum before, but not a high proportion. If relatively valid criticism bothers the founder that much, their project is just probably not going to make it. Or they don’t really believe in their project (maybe for good reason, as pointed out by the critique).
I have run non-EA projects that have been criticized internally and externally. Why do you think it’s off? Criticism is just feedback + things that don’t matter, when you believe in what you’re doing. The EA world is rational enough to adjust its opinions properly in the fullness of time.
“starting new public ambitious projects is much less fun if there are a bunch of people on a forum who are out to get you”
To be clear, I assume that the phrase “are out to get you” is just you referring to people giving regular EA Forum critique?
The phrase sounds to me like this is an intentional, long-term effort from some actors to take one down, and they just so happen to use critique as a way of doing that.
(edit: I was mostly thinking of public criticism of EA projects—particularly projects with <10 FTE. This isn’t clear from the post. )
I think it’s wild how pro-criticism of projects the EA forum is when:
Most people agree that there are a lack of good projects, and public critique clearly creates barriers to starting new projects
Almost all EA projects have low downside risk in absolute terms
There are almost no examples of criticism clearly mattering (e.g. getting someone to significantly improve their project)
Criticism obviously driving away valuable people from the forum—like (at least in part) the largest ever EA donor
(Less important, but on priors, I’m not sure you should expect high-quality criticism of EA projects because they are often neglected, and most useful criticism comes from people who have operated in a similar area before. )
Edit: I’m curious about counterexamples or points against any of the bullets. There are lots of disagree reacts, and presumably some of those people have seen critques that were actually useful.
I’m not especially pro-criticism but this seems way overstated.
I might agree with this on a technicality, in that depending on your bar or standard, I could imagine agreeing that almost all EA projects (at least for more speculative causes) have negligible impact in absolute terms.
But presumably you mean that almost all EA projects are such that their plausible good outcomes are way bigger in magnitude than their plausible bad outcomes, or something like that. This seems false, e.g.
FTX
Any kind of political action can backfire if a different political party gains power
AI safety research could be used as a form of safety washing
AI evaluations could primarily end up as a mechanism to speed up timelines (not saying that’s necessarily bad, but certainly under some models it’s very bad)
Movement building can kill the movement by making it too diffuse and regressing to the mean, and by creating opponents to the movement
Vegan advocacy could polarize people, such that factory farming lasts longer than it would be default (e.g. if cheap and tasty substitutes would have caused people to switch over if they weren’t polarized)
ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can’t
Habryka on Anthropic non-disparagements
FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI
Concerns with Intentional Insights
It’s hard to tell, but I’d guess Critiques of Prominent AI Safety Labs changed who applied to the critiqued organizations
Gossip-based criticism of Leverage clearly mattered and imo it would have been better if it was more public
Sharing Information About Nonlinear clearly mattered in the sense of having some impact, though the sign is unclear
Same deal for Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
Back in the era when EA discussions happened mainly on Facebook there were all sorts of critiques and flame wars between protest-tactics and incremental-change-tactics for animal advocacy, I don’t think this particularly changed what any given organization tried to do, but it surely changed views of individual people
I’d be happy to endorse something like “public criticism rarely causes an organization to choose to do something different in a major org-defining way” (but note that’s primarily because people in a good position to change an organization through criticism will just do so privately, not because criticism is totally ineffective).
on
I agree with some of the points on point 1, though other than FTX, I don’t think the downside risk of any of those examples is very large. I’d walk back my claim to the downside risk to most EA projects seems low (but there are ofc exceptions).
on
Agree that criticisms of AI companies can be good, I don’t really consider them EA projects but it wasn’t clear that was what I was referring to in my post—my bad. Responding quickly to some of the other ones.
Concerns with Intentional Insights
This seems good, though it was a long time ago.
It’s hard to tell, but I’d guess Critiques of Prominent AI Safety Labs changed who applied to the critiqued organizations
Idk if these are “EA” projects. I think I’m much more pessimistic than you are that these posts made better things happen in the world. I’d guess that people overupdated on these somewhat. That said, I quite like these posts and the discussion in the commentts.
Gossip-based criticism of Leverage clearly mattered and imo it would have been better if it was more public
This also seems good, though it was a long time ago and I wasn’t around when leverage was a thing.
Sharing Information About Nonlinear clearly mattered in the sense of having some impact, though the sign is unclear
Sign seems pretty negative to me.
Same deal for Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
Sign seems pretty negative to me. Like even the title is misleading and this generated a lot of drama.
Back in the era when EA discussions happened mainly on Facebook there were all sorts of critiques and flame wars between protest-tactics and incremental-change-tactics for animal advocacy, I don’t think this particularly changed what any given organization tried to do, but it surely changed views of individual people
Not familiar but maybe this is useful? Idk.
Open Phil and RP both had pieces that were pretty critical of clean meat work iirc that were large updates for me. I don’t think they were org-level critiques, but I could imagine a version of them being critiques of GFI.
So overall, I think I stand by the claim that there aren’t many criticisms that clearly mattered, but this was a positive update for me. Maybe I should have said that a very small fraction of critical EA forum posts have clear positive effects or give people useful information.
This was a great comment—thanks for writing it.
Fwiw I find it pretty plausible that lots of political action and movement building for the sake of movement building has indeed had a large negative impact, such that I feel uncertain about whether I should shut it all down if I had the option to do so (if I set aside concerns like unilateralism). I also feel similarly about particular examples of AI safety research but definitely not for the field as a whole.
Fair enough for the first two, but I was thinking of the FrontierMath thing as mostly a critique of Epoch, not of OpenAI, tbc, and that’s the sense in which it mattered—Epoch made changes, afaik OpenAI did not. Epoch is at least an EA-adjacent project.
I agree that if I had to guess I’d say that the sign seems negative for both of the things you say it is negative for, but I am uncertain about it, particularly because of people standing behind a version of the critique (e.g. Habryka for the Nonlinear one, Alexander Berger for the Wytham Abbey one, though certainly in the latter case it’s a very different critique than what the original post said).
Fwiw, I think there are probably several other criticisms that I alone could find given some more time, let alone impactful criticisms that I never even read. I didn’t even start looking for the genre of “critique of individual part of GiveWell cost-effectiveness analysis, which GiveWell then fixes”, I think there’s been at least one and maybe multiple such public criticisms in the past.
I also remember there being a StrongMinds critique and a Happier Lives Institute critique that very plausibly caused changes? But I don’t know the details and didn’t follow it
I think I agree with your overall point but some counterexamples:
EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest winners. E.g. GiveWell said “We believe HLI’s feedback is likely to change some of our funding recommendations, at least marginally, and perhaps more importantly improve our decision-making across multiple interventions”
GiveWell said of their Change Our Mind contest “To give a general sense of the magnitude of the changes we currently anticipate, our best guess is that Matthew Romer and Paul Romer Present’s entry will change our estimate of the cost-effectiveness of Dispensers for Safe Water by very roughly 5 to 10% and that Noah Haber’s entry may lead to an overall shift in how we account for uncertainty (but it’s too early to say how it would impact any given intervention).”
HLI discussed some meaningful ways they changed as the result of criticism here.
Those are great examples.
I feel like you are missing some important causal avenues through which plentiful criticism can be good:
If the expectation of harsh future criticism is a major deterrent from engagement, presumably it disproportionately deters the type of projects that expect to be especially criticized.
Criticism is educational for third parties reading and can help improve their future projects.
Disproportionately deterring bad projects is a crux. I think if people are running a “minimise criticism policy” they aren’t going to end up doing very useful things (or they’ll do everything in secret or far from EA). I currently don’t think nearly enough people are trying to start projects and many project explorations seem good to me on net, so the discrimination power needs to be pretty strong for the benefits to pencil.
I think there are positives about criticism which I didn’t focus on, but yeah if I were to write a more comprehensive post I think the points you raised are good to include.
I’m not convinced that criticism is very counterfactually educational for 3rd parties. Particularly when imo lots of criticism is bad. Feels like it could go either way. If more criticism came from people who had run substantial projects or operated in the same field or whatever I think I’d trust their takes more. Many of the examples raised in this thread are good imo and have this property.
I don’t know what “clearly mattering” means, but I think this characterization unduly tips the scales. People who don’t like being criticized are often going to be open about that fact, which makes it easier to build an anti-criticism case under a “clearly” standard.
Also, “criticism” covers a lot of ground—you may have a somewhat narrower definition in mind, but (even after limiting to EA projects with <10 FTEs) people are understandably reacting to a pretty broad definition.
The most obvious use of criticism is probably to deter and respond to inappropriate conduct. Setting aside whether the allegations were sustained, I think that was a major intended mechanism of action in several critical pieces. I can’t prove that having a somewhat pro-criticism culture furthers this goal, but I think it’s appropriate to give it some weight. It does seem plausible on the margin that (e.g.) orgs will be less likely to exaggerate their claims and cost-effectiveness analyses given the risk of someone posting criticism with receipts.
A softer version of this purpose could be phrased as follows: criticism is a means by which the community expresses how it expects others to act (and hopefully influences future actions by third parties even if not by the criticized organization). In your model, “public critique clearly creates barriers to starting new projects,” so one would expect public critique (or the fear thereof) to influence decisions by existing orgs as well. Then we have to decide whether that critique is on the whole good or not.
Criticism can help direct resources away from certain orgs to more productive uses. The StrongMinds-related criticisms of 2023 come to mind here. The resources could include not only funding but also mindshare (e.g., how much do I want to defer to this org?) and decisions by talent. This kind of criticism doesn’t generally pay in financial terms, so it’s reasonable to be generous in granting social credit to compensate for that. These outcomes could be measured, but doing so will often be resource-intensive and so they may not make the cut under a “clearly” standard either.
Criticism can also serve the function of market research. The usual response to people who aren’t happy about how orgs are doing their work is to go start their own org. That’s a costly response—for both the unhappy person and for the ecosystem! Suppose someone isn’t happy about CEA and EA Funds spinning off together and is thinking about trying to stand up an independent grantmaker. First off, they need to test their ideas against people who have different perspectives. They would also need to know whether a critical mass of people would move their donations over to an independent grantmaker for this or other reasons. (I think it would also be fair for someone not in a position to lead a new org to signal support for the idea, hoping that it might inspire someone else.)
It’s probably better for the market-research function to happen in public rather than in back channels. Among other things, it gives the org a chance to defend its position, and gives it a chance to adjust course if too many relevant stakeholders agree with the critic. The counterargument to this one is that little criticism actually makes it into a new organization. But I’m not sure what success rate we should expect given considerable incumbency advantage in some domains.
“People who don’t like being criticized are often going to be open about that fact”
[Just responding to this narrow point and not the comment as a whole, which contains plenty of things I agree with.]
Fwiw, I don’t think this is true in this community. Disliking criticism is a bad look and seeming responsive to criticism is highly valued. I’ve seen lots of situations up close where it would have been very aversive/costly for someone to say “I totally disagree with this criticism and think it wasn’t useful” and very tempting for someone to express lots of gratitude for criticism and change in response to it whether or not it was right. I think it’s not uncommon for the former to take more bravery than the latter and I personally feel unsure whether I’ve felt more bias towards agreeing with criticism that was wrong or disagreeing with criticism that was right.
Do you have an alternate suggestion for how flaws and mistakes made by projects in the EA sphere can be discovered?
As a scientist, one of the reasons people trust our work is the expectation that the work we publish has been vetted and checked by other experts in the field (and even with peer review, sloppy work gets published all the time). Isn’t one of the goals of the EA forum to crowdsource at least some of this valuable scrutiny?
I agree that this is one of the upsides of criticism on the forum. I don’t think it outweighs the costs in many cases.
I think this is excellent criticism!
Damnit!
I don’t think it’s obvious that less chance of criticism implies a higher chance of starting a project. There are many things in the world that are prestigious precisely because they have a high quality bar.
I’m a huge fan of having high standards. Posts that are like “we reproduced this published output and think they made these concrete errors” are often great. But I notice much more “these people did a bad job or spent too much money” takes often from people who afaict haven’t done a bunch of stuff themselves so aren’t very calibrated, and don’t seem very scope sensitive. If people saw their projects being critiqued and were then motivated to go and do more things more quickly I’d think that was great (or were encouraged to do more things more quickly from “fear” of critiques) I think we’d be in a better equilibrium.
For example people often point out that LW and the forum are somewhat expensive per user as evidence they are being mismanaged and imo this is a bad take which is rarely made by people who have built or maintained popular software projects/forums or used the internet enough to know that discussion of the kind in these venues is really quite rare and special.
To be clear, I think the “but have they actually done stuff” critique should also be levelled at grantmakers. I’m sympathetic to grantmakers who are like “the world is burning and I just need to do a leveraged thing right now” but my guess is that if more grantmakers had run projects in the reference class of things they want to fund (or founded any complicated or unusual and ambitious projects) we’d be in a better position. I think this general take is very common in YC/VC spaces, which perform a similar function to grantmaking for their ecosystem.
Many examples of criticism in replies, are high quality posts that I think improve standards. I may spend an hour going through the criticism tag and sorting them into posts I think are useful/anti-useful to check.
I’m not quite as convinced of the much greater cost of “bad criticism” over “good criticism”. I’m optimistic that discussions on the forum tend to come to a reflective equilibrium that agrees with valid criticism and disregards invalid criticism. I’ll give some examples (but pre-committing to not rehashing these too much):
I think HLI is a good example of long-discussion-that-ends-up-agreeing-with-valid-criticism, and as discussed by other people in this thread this probably led to capital + mind share being allocated more efficiently.
I think the recent back and forth between VettedCauses and Sinergia is a good example of the other side. Setting aside the remaining points of contention, I think commenters on the original post did a good job of clocking the fact that there was room for the reported flaws to have a harmless explanation. And then Carolina from Sinergia did a good job of providing a concrete explanation of most of the supposed issues[1].
It’s possible that HLI and Sinergia came away equally discouraged, but if so I think that would be a misapprehension on Sinergia’s part. Personally I went from having no preconceptions about them to having mildly positive sentiment towards them.
Perhaps we could do some work to promote the meme that “reasonably-successfully defending yourself against criticism is generally good for your reputation not bad”.
(Stopped writing here to post something rather than nothing, I may respond to some other points later)
You could also argue that not everyone has time to read through the details of these discussions, and so people go away with a negative impression. I don’t think that’s right because on a quick skim you can sort of pick up the sentiment of the comment section, and most things like this don’t escape the confines of the forum.
As I’m sure many would imagine, I think I disagree.
There’s a lot here I take issue with:
1. I’m not sure where the line is between “criticism” and “critique” or “feedback.” Would any judgements about a project that aren’t positive be considered “criticism”? We don’t have specific examples, so I don’t know what you refer to.
2. This jumps from “criticism matters” to “criticism clearly matters” (which is more easily defensible, but less important), to “criticism clearly mattering (e.g. getting someone to significantly improve their project)”, which is one of several ways that criticism could matter, clearly or otherwise. The latter seems like an incredibly specific claim that misses much of the discussion/benefits of criticism/critique/feedback.
I’d rate this post decently high on the “provocative to clarity” measure, as in it’s fairly provocative while also being short. This isn’t something I take issue with, but I just wouldn’t spend too much attention/effort on it, given this. But I would be a bit curious what a much longer and detailed version of this post would be like.
Rohin and Ben provided some examples that updated me upwards a little on critique posts being useful.
I think most of my points are fairly robust to the different definitions you gave so the line isn’t super important to me. This feels a bit nitpicky.
I don’t think that “criticism clearly mattering (e.g. getting someone to significantly improve their project)” is a very specific claim. I think that one of the main responses people would like to see to criticism of a specific project is for that project to change in line with the criticism. Unlike many of the other proposed benefits of criticism, it is a very empirical claim.
It suspect you think that this post should have been closer to “here are some points for and against criticism” on the EA Forum, but I don’t think posts need to be balanced or well-rounded like that, especially because, from my perspective, the forum is too pro-criticism but yeah, seems fine for you not to engage with this kind of content—I definitely don’t think you’re obliged to.
“public critique clearly created barriers to starting new projects” In what sense? People read criticism of other projects and decide that starting their own isn’t worth it? People with new active projects discouraged by critique?
Mostly, people with active projects are discouraged by critiques and starting new public ambitious projects is much less fun if there are a bunch of people on a forum who are out to get you.
If I have an active project I want it to be as good as possible. Certainly there’s been mean-spirited, low-quality criticism on the EA Forum before, but not a high proportion. If relatively valid criticism bothers the founder that much, their project is just probably not going to make it. Or they don’t really believe in their project (maybe for good reason, as pointed out by the critique).
Have you run a public EA project before or spent time talking to founders of similar projects? This seems extremely off to me.
I have run non-EA projects that have been criticized internally and externally. Why do you think it’s off? Criticism is just feedback + things that don’t matter, when you believe in what you’re doing. The EA world is rational enough to adjust its opinions properly in the fullness of time.
“starting new public ambitious projects is much less fun if there are a bunch of people on a forum who are out to get you”
To be clear, I assume that the phrase “are out to get you” is just you referring to people giving regular EA Forum critique?
The phrase sounds to me like this is an intentional, long-term effort from some actors to take one down, and they just so happen to use critique as a way of doing that.