I often see public criticisms of EA orgs claiming poor execution on some object level activity or falling short on some aspect of the activity (e.g. my shortform about the 80k jobs board). I think this is often unproductive.
In general I think we want to give feedback to change the organisations policy (decision making algorithm), and maybe the EA movements policy. When you publicly criticise an org on some activity you should be aware that you are disincentivising the org from generally doing stuff.
Imagine the case where the org was choosing between scrappily running a project to get data and some of the upside value strategically as opposed to carefully planning and failing to execute fully. I think in these cases you should react differently and from the outside it is hard to know which situation the org was in.
If we also criticised orgs for not doing enough stuff I might feel differently, but this is an extremely hard criticism to make unless you are on the inside. I’d only trust a few people who didn’t have inside information to do this kind of analysis.
Maybe a good idea would be to describe the amount of resources that would have had to have gone into the project for you to see the outcome as being reasonably successful ??? Idk seems hard to be well calibrated.
I expect some people to react negatively to this, and think that I am generally discouraging of criticism. I think that I feel moderately about most criticism, neither helpful nor particularly unhelpful. The few pieces of thoughtful criticism I see written up I think are very valuable, but thoughtful criticism in my view is hard to come by and requires substantial effort.
One of my criticisms of criticisms
I often see public criticisms of EA orgs claiming poor execution on some object level activity or falling short on some aspect of the activity (e.g. my shortform about the 80k jobs board). I think this is often unproductive.
In general I think we want to give feedback to change the organisations policy (decision making algorithm), and maybe the EA movements policy. When you publicly criticise an org on some activity you should be aware that you are disincentivising the org from generally doing stuff.
Imagine the case where the org was choosing between scrappily running a project to get data and some of the upside value strategically as opposed to carefully planning and failing to execute fully. I think in these cases you should react differently and from the outside it is hard to know which situation the org was in.
If we also criticised orgs for not doing enough stuff I might feel differently, but this is an extremely hard criticism to make unless you are on the inside. I’d only trust a few people who didn’t have inside information to do this kind of analysis.
Maybe a good idea would be to describe the amount of resources that would have had to have gone into the project for you to see the outcome as being reasonably successful ??? Idk seems hard to be well calibrated.
I expect some people to react negatively to this, and think that I am generally discouraging of criticism. I think that I feel moderately about most criticism, neither helpful nor particularly unhelpful. The few pieces of thoughtful criticism I see written up I think are very valuable, but thoughtful criticism in my view is hard to come by and requires substantial effort.