Makes sense to me! I appreciate knowing your perspective better, Shakeel. :)
On reflection, I think the thing I care about in situations like this is much more “mutual understanding of where people were coming from and where they’re at now”, whether or not anyone technically “apologizes”.
Apologizing is one way of communicating information about that (because it suggests we’re on the same page that there was a nontrivial foreseeable-in-advance fuck-up), but IMO a comment along those lines could be awesome without ever saying the words “I’m sorry”.
One of my concerns about “I’m sorry” is that I think some people think you can only owe apologies to Good Guys, not to Bad Guys. So if there’s a disagreement about who the Good Guys are, communities can get stuck arguing about whether X should apologize for Y, when it would be more productive to discuss upstream disagreements about facts and values.
I think some people are still uncertain about exactly how OK or bad FLI’s actions here were, but whether or not FLI fucked up badly here and whether or not FLI is bad as an org, I think the EA Forum’s response was bad given the evidence we had at the time. I want our culture to be such that it’s maximally easy for us to acknowledge that sort of thing and course-correct so we do better next time. And my intuition is that a sufficiently honest explanation of where you were coming from, that’s sufficiently curious about and open to understanding others’ perspectives, and sufficiently lacking in soldier-mindset-style defensiveness, can do even more than an apology to contribute to a healthy culture.
(In this case the apology is to FLI/Max, not to me, so it’s mostly none of my business. 😛 But since I called for “apologies” earlier, I wanted to consider the general question of whether that’s the thing that matters most.)
Makes sense to me! I appreciate knowing your perspective better, Shakeel. :)
On reflection, I think the thing I care about in situations like this is much more “mutual understanding of where people were coming from and where they’re at now”, whether or not anyone technically “apologizes”.
Apologizing is one way of communicating information about that (because it suggests we’re on the same page that there was a nontrivial foreseeable-in-advance fuck-up), but IMO a comment along those lines could be awesome without ever saying the words “I’m sorry”.
One of my concerns about “I’m sorry” is that I think some people think you can only owe apologies to Good Guys, not to Bad Guys. So if there’s a disagreement about who the Good Guys are, communities can get stuck arguing about whether X should apologize for Y, when it would be more productive to discuss upstream disagreements about facts and values.
I think some people are still uncertain about exactly how OK or bad FLI’s actions here were, but whether or not FLI fucked up badly here and whether or not FLI is bad as an org, I think the EA Forum’s response was bad given the evidence we had at the time. I want our culture to be such that it’s maximally easy for us to acknowledge that sort of thing and course-correct so we do better next time. And my intuition is that a sufficiently honest explanation of where you were coming from, that’s sufficiently curious about and open to understanding others’ perspectives, and sufficiently lacking in soldier-mindset-style defensiveness, can do even more than an apology to contribute to a healthy culture.
(In this case the apology is to FLI/Max, not to me, so it’s mostly none of my business. 😛 But since I called for “apologies” earlier, I wanted to consider the general question of whether that’s the thing that matters most.)