I think I am across the board a bit more negative than this, but yeah, this assessment seems approximately correct to me.
On the whistleblower protections: I think real whistleblower protection would be great, but I think setting this up is actually really hard and it’s very common in the real world that institutions like this end up traps and net-negative and get captured by bad actors in ways that strengthens the problems they are trying to fix.
As examples, many university health departments are basically traps where if you go to them, they expel you from the university because you outed yourself as not mentally stable. Many PR departments are traps that will report your complaints to management and identify you as a dissenter. Many regulatory bodies are weapons that bad actors use to build moats around their products (indeed, looks like indeed that crypto regulatory bodies in the U.S. ended up played by SBF, and were one of the main tools that he used against his competitors). Many community dispute committees end up being misled and siding with perpetrators instead of victims (a lesson the rationality community learned from the Brent situation).
I think it’s possible to set up good institutions like this, but rushing towards it is quite dangerous and in-expectation bad, and the details of how you do it really matter (and IMO it’s better to not do anything here than to not try exceptionally hard at making this go well).
It seems worth noting that UK employment law has provisions to protect whistleblowers and for this reason (if not others) all UK employers should have whistleblowing policies. I tend to assume that EA orgs based in the UK are compliant with their obligations as employers and therefore do have such policies. Some caution would be needed in setting up additional protections, e.g. since nobody should ever be fired for whistleblowing, why would you have a policy to support people who were?
In practice, I notice two problems. Firstly, management (particularly in small organisations) frequently circumvent policies they experience as bureaucratic restrictions on their ability to manage. Secondly, disgruntled employees seek ways to express what are really personal grievances as blowing the whistle.
I think I am across the board a bit more negative than this, but yeah, this assessment seems approximately correct to me.
On the whistleblower protections: I think real whistleblower protection would be great, but I think setting this up is actually really hard and it’s very common in the real world that institutions like this end up traps and net-negative and get captured by bad actors in ways that strengthens the problems they are trying to fix.
As examples, many university health departments are basically traps where if you go to them, they expel you from the university because you outed yourself as not mentally stable. Many PR departments are traps that will report your complaints to management and identify you as a dissenter. Many regulatory bodies are weapons that bad actors use to build moats around their products (indeed, looks like indeed that crypto regulatory bodies in the U.S. ended up played by SBF, and were one of the main tools that he used against his competitors). Many community dispute committees end up being misled and siding with perpetrators instead of victims (a lesson the rationality community learned from the Brent situation).
I think it’s possible to set up good institutions like this, but rushing towards it is quite dangerous and in-expectation bad, and the details of how you do it really matter (and IMO it’s better to not do anything here than to not try exceptionally hard at making this go well).
It seems worth noting that UK employment law has provisions to protect whistleblowers and for this reason (if not others) all UK employers should have whistleblowing policies. I tend to assume that EA orgs based in the UK are compliant with their obligations as employers and therefore do have such policies. Some caution would be needed in setting up additional protections, e.g. since nobody should ever be fired for whistleblowing, why would you have a policy to support people who were?
In practice, I notice two problems. Firstly, management (particularly in small organisations) frequently circumvent policies they experience as bureaucratic restrictions on their ability to manage. Secondly, disgruntled employees seek ways to express what are really personal grievances as blowing the whistle.