I enjoyed talking to you today. It was great that we had a chance to connect.
As you know, you did not seek permission to post the notes from our 30 minute Skype conversation on the EA forum. Since you did not set any expectation that our private conversation would be public, I consider this post to be a clear violation of trust. Given that the post is already up, I am fine with leaving it here, but I would recommend that in the future you get explicit permission before posting the details of a private conversation.
Furthermore, this post reads to me as extremely self-promoting, which continues a general theme I’ve noticed in your posts. You mention the name of your organization approximately every other paragraph and you seem to be trying hard to make it seem as though I endorse the work of Intentional Insights.
To be clear, I am not in a position to endorse Intentional Insights’ work. Let me know if you would like to discuss this in more detail.
The conversation we had stemmed from three general propositions:
-Given the choice, I think you should promote Effective Giving as an idea instead of promoting Effective Altruism. I don’t think the tactics I’ve seen you use are appropriate for spreading EA at this time.
-I argued that Effective Giving as an idea might be more easily spread than Effective Altruism because the call to action is more obvious.
-I argued for a distinction between EA as a community and EA as a set of ideas. I argued that spreading ideas widely is likely to be fine but spreading communities widely is more uncertain.
Those three claims are the only claims I am willing to endorse right now. I made no claims about the effectiveness of your work. If this post commits me to anything that does not stem from one of the positions above please do not assume that I hold this position.
Kerry, I see that I made a mistake in making this post without asking you, and that it violated your trust of a private conversation. My apologies.
Not to justify, but to explain: I was excited by the ideas we discussed, and wanted to share them broadly to get feedback from the EA community. I’m very interested in getting as much feedback as possible, as that is something that gives an opportunity to improve the ideas and flesh them out. I also wanted to give due credit to you for what I perceived as your part in creating these ideas.
For example, I appreciated the feedback given by ClaireZabel below, as that’s not something I thought about much, and it’s good to have that point in mind going forward.
However, looking back, I do recognize that I should have asked you first before sharing this in a public forum. Duly noted and updated.
Thanks for clarifying what your positions are, and I hope that nowhere in my original post did I state that you endorse Intentional Insights’ work. I can see that I should have made that clear in the post, and will put an edit in the post to reflect that.
Regarding the self-promotional element: I include what we do specifically to illustrate the points that I am referring to. I tend to be strongly committed to doing what I said I would do, and it is natural to illustrate my intentions with the specifics of my actions. I hear that it might come off as self-promotional, and will work on tweaking the wording and content of my writing. Thanks for highlighting this failure mode in my writing, appreciate it!
Could you put a disclaimer at the top rather than the bottom? When reading it I over updated my model of “what Kerry thinks”, then corrected all at once at the end. Sometimes surprise is useful rhetorically, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. :)
Gleb,
I enjoyed talking to you today. It was great that we had a chance to connect.
As you know, you did not seek permission to post the notes from our 30 minute Skype conversation on the EA forum. Since you did not set any expectation that our private conversation would be public, I consider this post to be a clear violation of trust. Given that the post is already up, I am fine with leaving it here, but I would recommend that in the future you get explicit permission before posting the details of a private conversation.
Furthermore, this post reads to me as extremely self-promoting, which continues a general theme I’ve noticed in your posts. You mention the name of your organization approximately every other paragraph and you seem to be trying hard to make it seem as though I endorse the work of Intentional Insights.
To be clear, I am not in a position to endorse Intentional Insights’ work. Let me know if you would like to discuss this in more detail.
The conversation we had stemmed from three general propositions: -Given the choice, I think you should promote Effective Giving as an idea instead of promoting Effective Altruism. I don’t think the tactics I’ve seen you use are appropriate for spreading EA at this time. -I argued that Effective Giving as an idea might be more easily spread than Effective Altruism because the call to action is more obvious. -I argued for a distinction between EA as a community and EA as a set of ideas. I argued that spreading ideas widely is likely to be fine but spreading communities widely is more uncertain.
Those three claims are the only claims I am willing to endorse right now. I made no claims about the effectiveness of your work. If this post commits me to anything that does not stem from one of the positions above please do not assume that I hold this position.
Kerry, I see that I made a mistake in making this post without asking you, and that it violated your trust of a private conversation. My apologies.
Not to justify, but to explain: I was excited by the ideas we discussed, and wanted to share them broadly to get feedback from the EA community. I’m very interested in getting as much feedback as possible, as that is something that gives an opportunity to improve the ideas and flesh them out. I also wanted to give due credit to you for what I perceived as your part in creating these ideas.
For example, I appreciated the feedback given by ClaireZabel below, as that’s not something I thought about much, and it’s good to have that point in mind going forward.
However, looking back, I do recognize that I should have asked you first before sharing this in a public forum. Duly noted and updated.
Thanks for clarifying what your positions are, and I hope that nowhere in my original post did I state that you endorse Intentional Insights’ work. I can see that I should have made that clear in the post, and will put an edit in the post to reflect that.
Regarding the self-promotional element: I include what we do specifically to illustrate the points that I am referring to. I tend to be strongly committed to doing what I said I would do, and it is natural to illustrate my intentions with the specifics of my actions. I hear that it might come off as self-promotional, and will work on tweaking the wording and content of my writing. Thanks for highlighting this failure mode in my writing, appreciate it!
Could you put a disclaimer at the top rather than the bottom? When reading it I over updated my model of “what Kerry thinks”, then corrected all at once at the end. Sometimes surprise is useful rhetorically, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. :)
Sure, I can do that—I moved the Edit up after the first paragraph, immediately after talking about the phone call.
Excellent response Gleb. :)
Tom, thank you, I try to address my mistakes and update as quickly as possible :-)