Also, thinking on Q4, I think that I might be worried that as people’s personal network gets larger and more skilled, that they might post less publicly or only material that is heavily polished.
Yeah. I think it’s great that people can build networks of people with relevant interests and expertise and get thoughtful feedback from those networks, but also a shame if that means that people don’t take the little bit of extra time to post work that’s already been done and written up.
I think that this sort of thing is why I wanted to say “But first I should flag that I think there are also good reasons to post to the EA Forum/LW other than to get feedback...”.
I plan to indefinitely continue posting publicly except in cases (which do exist) where there are specific reasons not to do so,[1] such as:
the piece of writing is likely to be more polished and useful in future, so I’m deferring posting it till then
In cases where the work isn’t fully polished but the writer has no plans to ever polish it, I’d say it’s often worth posting anyway with some disclaimers, and letting others just decide for themselves whether to bother reading it
there are reasons to believe the work will confuse or mislead people more than it informs them (see also)
(Tangentially, I also feel like it’s a shame when people do post EA-relevant work publicly, but just post it on their personal blog or their organisation’s website or something, without also crossposting it to the Forum. It seems to me that that unnecessarily increases how hard it can be for people to find relevant info.)
[1] This sentence used to say “I plan to indefinitely continue posting publicly unless there are specific reasons not to do so, such as:” (emphasis added). That was more ambiguous, so I edited it.
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.
Yeah. I think it’s great that people can build networks of people with relevant interests and expertise and get thoughtful feedback from those networks, but also a shame if that means that people don’t take the little bit of extra time to post work that’s already been done and written up.
I think that this sort of thing is why I wanted to say “But first I should flag that I think there are also good reasons to post to the EA Forum/LW other than to get feedback...”.
I plan to indefinitely continue posting publicly except in cases (which do exist) where there are specific reasons not to do so,[1] such as:
potential infohazards
the piece of writing is likely to be more polished and useful in future, so I’m deferring posting it till then
In cases where the work isn’t fully polished but the writer has no plans to ever polish it, I’d say it’s often worth posting anyway with some disclaimers, and letting others just decide for themselves whether to bother reading it
there are reasons to believe the work will confuse or mislead people more than it informs them (see also)
(Tangentially, I also feel like it’s a shame when people do post EA-relevant work publicly, but just post it on their personal blog or their organisation’s website or something, without also crossposting it to the Forum. It seems to me that that unnecessarily increases how hard it can be for people to find relevant info.)
[1] This sentence used to say “I plan to indefinitely continue posting publicly unless there are specific reasons not to do so, such as:” (emphasis added). That was more ambiguous, so I edited it.
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.