Even though call-out culture may be popular or expected in other contexts, it is not professional or appropriate for the Comms Head of CEA to initiate an interaction with an EA org by publicly putting them on blast and seemingly seconding what could be very damaging accusations (as well as inventing others by speculating about financial misconduct). Did you try to contact FLI before publicly commenting to get an idea of what happened (perhaps before they could prepare their statement)?
For what it’s worth, this seems like the wrong way around to me. I don’t know exactly about the role and responsibilities of the “Head of Comm”, but in-general I would like people in EA to be more comfortable criticizing each other, and to feel less constrained to first air all criticism privately and resolve things behind closed doors.
I think the key thing that went wrong here was the absence of a concrete logical argument or probabilities about why the thing that was happening was actually quite bad, and also the time pressure, which made the context of the conversation much worse. Another big thing was also jumping to conclusions about FLI’s character in a way that felt like it was trying to apply direct political pressure instead of focusing on propagating accurate information.
For what it’s worth, this seems like the wrong way around to me. I don’t know exactly about the role and responsibilities of the “Head of Comm”, but in-general I would like people in EA to be more comfortable criticizing each other, and to feel less constrained to first air all criticism privately and resolve things behind closed doors.
I think the key thing that went wrong here was the absence of a concrete logical argument or probabilities about why the thing that was happening was actually quite bad, and also the time pressure, which made the context of the conversation much worse. Another big thing was also jumping to conclusions about FLI’s character in a way that felt like it was trying to apply direct political pressure instead of focusing on propagating accurate information.