Rob, Thanks, I appreciated this response. I have a few thoughts but I don’t want the focus on pushbacks to give the impression I think negatively of what you said-I think overall it was a positive update. It’s also easier for me to sit and push back and say things that just sound like hindsight bias, but I’m erring on the side of sharing them because I’m taking you at face value RE: these being views you have already held for as long as you recall.
As you allude to below, I think it’s really hard in a podcast setting to cover all the nuances and be super precise with language, and I think that’s understandable. OTOH, from the 2020 EA survey: “more than half (50.7%) of respondents cited 80,000 Hours as important for them getting involved in EA.” 80,000 hours is one of the most public facing EA organizations, and what 80,000 hours publishes will often be seen as “what EA thinks”, and I think one initial reaction when this happened was something like “Maybe 80,000 hours don’t really take that seriously enough” or something (the pushback Ben received online when tweeting the climate change problem profile was another example of how these kinds of public facing concerns seemed to be underrated, especially because the tweet was later deleted) and I hope this will be considered more seriously when deciding what (if any) changes are appropriate going forward.
Another point: it seems a little weird to say the blog post gets away with less scrutiny because the interview provides more subtlety and then not actually provide more subtlety in the interview, which is I think what happened here? Like if you can’t explore the nuance during the podcast because of the podcast format, that’s understandable, but it doesn’t seem reasonable to then also say that you don’t cover it in the accompanying blog post because you intend for the subtlety to be covered in the podcast. It’s also not like you’re deciding about whether to include layer 5 and 6 of the nuance, but whether to include a disclaimer about a view that you personally find severely misguided.
I guess one possible suggestion might be to review the transcript/blog post and add relevant caveats and disclaimers after the podcast (especially since there’s already a relevant article you’ve already published on it). I think a general disclaimer would be an even lower cost version, but less helpful in this specific case where you appear to be putting aside your disagreement with SBF’s views and actively not pushing back on it for the express purpose of better communication with the viewers?
The great majority of listeners (99.9%+) are not dealing with resources on the scale of billions of dollars, and so in my mind the priority was to get them to see the case for not being very risk averse, inasmuch as they’re a small fraction of all the effort going into their problem and aren’t at risk of causing massive harm to others.
I do think it’s important to consider harm to themselves and possibly their dependents as a consideration here, even if they aren’t operating in the scale of billions. Also while I agree with the point about tiny minority etc, you probably don’t want to stake reputational risks to 80,000 hours or the EA movement more broadly on whether or not your listeners or guests are ‘sensible’.
I agree it seems valuable to let guests talk about points of disagreement, but where you do this it seems important to be clear at some stage whether you are letting them talk about their views because you want to showcases a different viewpoint, or at least that you aren’t endorsing their message, and especially if the message is a potentially harmful one. It also minimizes scenarios where you pretty reasonably justify yourself but people from the outside or those who are less charitable find it hard to tell the difference between how you’ve justified yourself in this comment VS a world where you were endorsing SBF’s views followed by some combination of post-hoc rationalization/hindsight bias when things turned out poorly (in this case, I wouldn’t consider it uncharitable if people thought you were in fact endorsing SBF’s stated views, based just on the podcast and blog). I think this could be harmful not only for you, but also for 80,000 hours and the EA movement more broadly.
Again, thanks for all your work, and I’m aware it’s easier for me to sit behind a pseudonym and throw critical comments over than actually do the work you have to do-but I’m doing this with the intention of hopefully contributing to something constructive.
Rob,
Thanks, I appreciated this response. I have a few thoughts but I don’t want the focus on pushbacks to give the impression I think negatively of what you said-I think overall it was a positive update. It’s also easier for me to sit and push back and say things that just sound like hindsight bias, but I’m erring on the side of sharing them because I’m taking you at face value RE: these being views you have already held for as long as you recall.
As you allude to below, I think it’s really hard in a podcast setting to cover all the nuances and be super precise with language, and I think that’s understandable. OTOH, from the 2020 EA survey: “more than half (50.7%) of respondents cited 80,000 Hours as important for them getting involved in EA.” 80,000 hours is one of the most public facing EA organizations, and what 80,000 hours publishes will often be seen as “what EA thinks”, and I think one initial reaction when this happened was something like “Maybe 80,000 hours don’t really take that seriously enough” or something (the pushback Ben received online when tweeting the climate change problem profile was another example of how these kinds of public facing concerns seemed to be underrated, especially because the tweet was later deleted) and I hope this will be considered more seriously when deciding what (if any) changes are appropriate going forward.
Another point: it seems a little weird to say the blog post gets away with less scrutiny because the interview provides more subtlety and then not actually provide more subtlety in the interview, which is I think what happened here? Like if you can’t explore the nuance during the podcast because of the podcast format, that’s understandable, but it doesn’t seem reasonable to then also say that you don’t cover it in the accompanying blog post because you intend for the subtlety to be covered in the podcast. It’s also not like you’re deciding about whether to include layer 5 and 6 of the nuance, but whether to include a disclaimer about a view that you personally find severely misguided.
I guess one possible suggestion might be to review the transcript/blog post and add relevant caveats and disclaimers after the podcast (especially since there’s already a relevant article you’ve already published on it). I think a general disclaimer would be an even lower cost version, but less helpful in this specific case where you appear to be putting aside your disagreement with SBF’s views and actively not pushing back on it for the express purpose of better communication with the viewers?
I do think it’s important to consider harm to themselves and possibly their dependents as a consideration here, even if they aren’t operating in the scale of billions. Also while I agree with the point about tiny minority etc, you probably don’t want to stake reputational risks to 80,000 hours or the EA movement more broadly on whether or not your listeners or guests are ‘sensible’.
I agree it seems valuable to let guests talk about points of disagreement, but where you do this it seems important to be clear at some stage whether you are letting them talk about their views because you want to showcases a different viewpoint, or at least that you aren’t endorsing their message, and especially if the message is a potentially harmful one. It also minimizes scenarios where you pretty reasonably justify yourself but people from the outside or those who are less charitable find it hard to tell the difference between how you’ve justified yourself in this comment VS a world where you were endorsing SBF’s views followed by some combination of post-hoc rationalization/hindsight bias when things turned out poorly (in this case, I wouldn’t consider it uncharitable if people thought you were in fact endorsing SBF’s stated views, based just on the podcast and blog). I think this could be harmful not only for you, but also for 80,000 hours and the EA movement more broadly.
Again, thanks for all your work, and I’m aware it’s easier for me to sit behind a pseudonym and throw critical comments over than actually do the work you have to do-but I’m doing this with the intention of hopefully contributing to something constructive.