I think the reasons people don’t post stuff publicly isn’t out of laziness, but because there’s lots of downside risk, e.g. of someone misinterpreting you and getting upset, and not much upside relative to sharing in smaller circles.
I definitely agree that there are many cases where it does make sense not to post stuff publicly. I myself have a decent amount of work which I haven’t posted publicly. (I also wrote a small series of posts earlier this year on handling downside risks and information hazards, which I mention as an indication of my stance on this sort of thing.)
I also agree that laziness will probably rarely be a major reason why people don’t post things publicly (at least in cases where the thing is mostly written up already).
I definitely didn’t mean to imply that I believe that laziness is the main reason people don’t post things publicly, or that there are no good reasons to not post things publicly. But I can see how parts of my comment were ambiguous and could’ve been interpreted my comment that way. I’ve now made one edit to slightly reduce ambiguity.
So you and I might actually have pretty similar stances here.
But I also think that decent portions of cases in which a person doesn’t post publicly may fit one of the following descriptions:
The person sincerely believes there are good reasons to not post publicly, but they’re mistaken.
But I also think there are times when people sincerely believe they should post something publicly, and then do, even though really they shouldn’t have (e.g., for reasons related to infohazards or the unilateralist’s curse).
I’m not sure if people err in one direction more often than the other, and it’s probably more useful to think about things case by case.
The person overestimates the risks posting publicly posing to their own reputations, or (considered from a purely altruistic perspective) overweight risks to their own reputations relative to potential benefits to others/the world (basically because the benefits are mostly externalities while the risks aren’t).
That said, risks to individual EA-aligned researchers’ reputations could be significant from an altruistic perspective, depending on the case
Also, I don’t want to be judgemental about this, or imply that people are obligated to be selfless in this arena. It’s more like it’d be nice if they were more selfless (when this is the situation at hand), but understandable if they aren’t, because we’re only human.
It’s simply that the person’s default is to not post this publicly, and the person doesn’t actively think about whether to post, or don’t have enough pushing them towards doing so.
So it’s more out of something like inertia than out of weighing perceived costs and benefits.
Posting publicly would take up too much time (for further writing, editing, formatting, etc.) to be worthwhile, not because of laziness but because of other things worth prioritizing.
None of those cases primarily centre on laziness, and I wouldn’t want to be judgemental towards any of those people. But in the first three cases, it might be better if the person was nudged towards posting publicly.
(And again, to be clear, I do also think there are cases in which one shouldn’t post publicly.)
I didn’t mean to imply that laziness was the main part of your reply, I was more pointing to “high personal costs of public posting” as an important dynamic that was left out of your list. I’d guess that we probably disagree about how high those are / how much effort it takes to mitigate them, and about how reasonable it is to expect people to be selfless in this regard, but I don’t think we disagree on the overall list of considerations.
I think the reasons people don’t post stuff publicly isn’t out of laziness, but because there’s lots of downside risk, e.g. of someone misinterpreting you and getting upset, and not much upside relative to sharing in smaller circles.
(Just speaking for myself, as always)
I definitely agree that there are many cases where it does make sense not to post stuff publicly. I myself have a decent amount of work which I haven’t posted publicly. (I also wrote a small series of posts earlier this year on handling downside risks and information hazards, which I mention as an indication of my stance on this sort of thing.)
I also agree that laziness will probably rarely be a major reason why people don’t post things publicly (at least in cases where the thing is mostly written up already).
I definitely didn’t mean to imply that I believe that laziness is the main reason people don’t post things publicly, or that there are no good reasons to not post things publicly. But I can see how parts of my comment were ambiguous and could’ve been interpreted my comment that way. I’ve now made one edit to slightly reduce ambiguity.
So you and I might actually have pretty similar stances here.
But I also think that decent portions of cases in which a person doesn’t post publicly may fit one of the following descriptions:
The person sincerely believes there are good reasons to not post publicly, but they’re mistaken.
But I also think there are times when people sincerely believe they should post something publicly, and then do, even though really they shouldn’t have (e.g., for reasons related to infohazards or the unilateralist’s curse).
I’m not sure if people err in one direction more often than the other, and it’s probably more useful to think about things case by case.
The person overestimates the risks posting publicly posing to their own reputations, or (considered from a purely altruistic perspective) overweight risks to their own reputations relative to potential benefits to others/the world (basically because the benefits are mostly externalities while the risks aren’t).
That said, risks to individual EA-aligned researchers’ reputations could be significant from an altruistic perspective, depending on the case
Also, I don’t want to be judgemental about this, or imply that people are obligated to be selfless in this arena. It’s more like it’d be nice if they were more selfless (when this is the situation at hand), but understandable if they aren’t, because we’re only human.
It’s simply that the person’s default is to not post this publicly, and the person doesn’t actively think about whether to post, or don’t have enough pushing them towards doing so.
So it’s more out of something like inertia than out of weighing perceived costs and benefits.
Posting publicly would take up too much time (for further writing, editing, formatting, etc.) to be worthwhile, not because of laziness but because of other things worth prioritizing.
None of those cases primarily centre on laziness, and I wouldn’t want to be judgemental towards any of those people. But in the first three cases, it might be better if the person was nudged towards posting publicly.
(And again, to be clear, I do also think there are cases in which one shouldn’t post publicly.)
Does this roughly align with your views?
I didn’t mean to imply that laziness was the main part of your reply, I was more pointing to “high personal costs of public posting” as an important dynamic that was left out of your list. I’d guess that we probably disagree about how high those are / how much effort it takes to mitigate them, and about how reasonable it is to expect people to be selfless in this regard, but I don’t think we disagree on the overall list of considerations.