Guy Raveh comments on A personal statement on FTX

[Guy Raveh]

often decisions don’t benefit a ton from “the whole community weighs in” over “twenty smart advisors weighed in”.

I don’t think this is true? Especially for decisions in the billions of dollars? Why do you think 20 smart advisors can spot all the problems that thousands of community members will, or even the major ones?

[RobBensinger]

See Holden Karnofsky’s Some Thoughts on Public Discourse:

For nearly a decade now, we’ve been putting a huge amount of work into putting the details of our reasoning out in public, and yet I am hard-pressed to think of cases (especially in more recent years) where a public comment from an unexpected source raised novel important considerations, leading to a change in views. This isn’t because nobody has raised novel important considerations, and it certainly isn’t because we haven’t changed our views. Rather, it seems to be the case that we get a large amount of valuable and important criticism from a relatively small number of highly engaged, highly informed people. Such people tend to spend a lot of time reading, thinking and writing about relevant topics, to follow our work closely, and to have a great deal of context. They also tend to be people who form relationships of some sort with us beyond public discourse.

The feedback and questions we get from outside of this set of people are often reasonable but familiar, seemingly unreasonable, or difficult for us to make sense of. [...]

Regardless of the underlying reasons, we have put a lot of effort over a long period of time into public discourse, and have reaped very little of this particular kind of benefit (though we have reaped other benefits—more below). I’m aware that this claim may strike some as unlikely and/​or disappointing, but it is my lived experience, and I think at this point it would be hard to argue that it is simply explained by a lack of effort or interest in public discourse.