November 2022: FLI inform Nya Dagbladet Foundation (NDF) that they will not be funding them
15 December 2022: FLI learn of media interest in the story
Yeah, if the early EA Forum comments had explicitly said “FLI should have said something public about this as soon as they discovered that NDF was bad”, “FLI should have said something public about this as soon as Expo contacted them”, or “FLI should have been way more response to Expo’s inquiries”—and if we’d generally expressed a lot more uncertainty and been more measured in what we said in the first few days—then I might still have disagreed, but I wouldn’t have seen this as an embarrassingly bad response in the same way.
I, as a casual reader who wasn’t trying to carefully track all the timestamps, had no idea when I first skimmed these threads on Jan. 13-14 that the article had only come out a few hours ago, and I didn’t track timestamps carefully enough to register just how fast the EA Forum went from “a top-level post exists about this at all” to “wow, FLI is stonewalling us” and “wow, there must be something really sinister here given that FLI still hasn’t responded”. I feel like I was misled by these comments, because I just took for granted (to some degree) that the people writing these highly upvoted comments were probably not saying something transparently silly.
If a commenter like Jason thought that FLI was “stonewalling” because they didn’t release a public statement about this in December, then it’s important to be explicit about that, so casual readers don’t come away from the comment section thinking that FLI is displaying some amazing level of unresponsiveness to the forum post or to the news article.
once they became aware of the media attention, I think they should have issued something more like their current statement.
This is less obvious to me, if they didn’t owe a public response before Expo reached out to them. A lot of press inquiries don’t end up turning into articles, and if the goal is to respond to press coverage, it’s often better to wait and see what’s in the actual article, since you might end up surprised about the article’s contents.
I don’t think anyone owes an apology for expecting FLI to do better than this.
“Do better than this”, notably, is switching out concrete actions for a much more general question, one that’s closer to “What’s the correct overall level of affect we should have about FLI right now?”.
If we’re going to have “apologize when you mess up enough” norms, I think they should be more about evaluating local process, and less about evaluating the overall character of the person you’re apologizing to. (Or even the character-in-this-particular-case, since it’s possible to owe someone an apology even if that person owes an apology too.) “Did I fuck-up when I did X?” should be a referendum on whether the local action was OK, not a referendum on the people you fucked up at.
More thoughts about apology norms in my comment here.
Yeah, if the early EA Forum comments had explicitly said “FLI should have said something public about this as soon as they discovered that NDF was bad”, “FLI should have said something public about this as soon as Expo contacted them”, or “FLI should have been way more response to Expo’s inquiries”—and if we’d generally expressed a lot more uncertainty and been more measured in what we said in the first few days—then I might still have disagreed, but I wouldn’t have seen this as an embarrassingly bad response in the same way.
I, as a casual reader who wasn’t trying to carefully track all the timestamps, had no idea when I first skimmed these threads on Jan. 13-14 that the article had only come out a few hours ago, and I didn’t track timestamps carefully enough to register just how fast the EA Forum went from “a top-level post exists about this at all” to “wow, FLI is stonewalling us” and “wow, there must be something really sinister here given that FLI still hasn’t responded”. I feel like I was misled by these comments, because I just took for granted (to some degree) that the people writing these highly upvoted comments were probably not saying something transparently silly.
If a commenter like Jason thought that FLI was “stonewalling” because they didn’t release a public statement about this in December, then it’s important to be explicit about that, so casual readers don’t come away from the comment section thinking that FLI is displaying some amazing level of unresponsiveness to the forum post or to the news article.
This is less obvious to me, if they didn’t owe a public response before Expo reached out to them. A lot of press inquiries don’t end up turning into articles, and if the goal is to respond to press coverage, it’s often better to wait and see what’s in the actual article, since you might end up surprised about the article’s contents.
“Do better than this”, notably, is switching out concrete actions for a much more general question, one that’s closer to “What’s the correct overall level of affect we should have about FLI right now?”.
If we’re going to have “apologize when you mess up enough” norms, I think they should be more about evaluating local process, and less about evaluating the overall character of the person you’re apologizing to. (Or even the character-in-this-particular-case, since it’s possible to owe someone an apology even if that person owes an apology too.) “Did I fuck-up when I did X?” should be a referendum on whether the local action was OK, not a referendum on the people you fucked up at.
More thoughts about apology norms in my comment here.