I understand you received EAIF funds to explore social change.
That seems like a challenging and important project.
Following links in this post, you have made a website for your Social Change Lab and have yourself as Founder and Director, and hired another person as “Research Manager”.
It would be valuable to get details on your new institution and “object level objectives” and work. The link (“initial research”) on your website goes to the initial post you made on the EA forum before you received the IF grant, and doesn’t address issues with that post that others brought up.
Can you describe what your plans have been, how your ideas or theories are playing out, or succeeding or failing? What have you learned or expect to learn?
To be clear, I don’t think you need to be successful in any one grant to be a very valuable EA or person (as long as the externalities are low). In fact, this person here received $40,000 from the EA animal welfare fund, a much more funding constrained area and for a project one might expect a tangible output from. It’s not clear what happened there, as there is no legible output at all on the EA forum about this from him about his project.
The subtext of this comment is complex and negative to you. TLDR; I think it’s OK to try to steer or criticize EA, and even take EA resources when doing so. I’m concerned about this being done in a certain way, occupying or tagging niches in a high-trust environment.
The EA forum is complex and probably unique. I think there are several important features:
It’s performative, as EA has various audiences to whom maintaining tone and norms is important. It’s also part work forum, like a company intranet. Every funder and collaborator can see everything you ever write, so breaking norms, such as being negative or confrontational, is costly (while certain actions may be risky or have no personal reward).
The forum is a way to communicate and try to find the truth about important causes or decisions. However it does this in a funky way—you can confront ideas with extreme aggression (and get authority for doing so), yet you might not even be able to indirectly suggest that there are issues about someone’s relevant credentials or ability (even when they use these explicitly or you suspect they have arrogated themselves).
The forum has strikingly different reactions based on insider or outsider status: content from newcomers and many critics are treated well, even when it’s pretty bad, or they make direct personal attacks. At the same time, people who occupy meta positions, places of authority regularly encounter hostility. This is probably a feature, not a defect. However, it’s possible someone could straddle the space between these roles, and shield themselves by the norms of one, while using the other to advance their goals.
There’s more prosaic issues. Like other forums, it isn’t always representative and can acquire constituencies with their own views. Issues or grievances (that are very real or neglected) can be hard to explain or confront, and exist for long periods of time without challenge or solution.
There’s some other features that are relevant, but this is too long already.
If you thought people were exploiting these features in some way, I guess you could write a short form post or something directly denouncing people personally. But that seems hard and bad for lots of reasons. It also doesn’t give you a chance to collect more information.
If for some reason, you had a pretty deep model where you thought someone was doing this, you might write a comment that isn’t that confrontational, and whose consequent reaction gives more information to you.
Note:
Note that a compelling reason to do this is if you think you were involved (or held back in some earlier process) and might bear some responsibility, especially if the underlying issue involves entrenchment.
You might be worried about making a mistake and the comment having various negative externalities. If in the past you interrogated the reactions of the EA forum to negative comments, you might have information that suggests these externalities are small.
Hi James, I think my comment is reasonable, I don’t see why you can’t answer the question raised.
I view your private message (which asserts my comment is inappropriate and strongly suggests I only raise them in private to you), strong downvoting my comment and pointing to my subtext (which exists whether I write it or not) as negative.
I’m happy to answer your questions, we’re working on our introduction post now so it’ll be up by the end of next week hopefully. For the record, I didn’t strong downvote your comment or “assert” anything but I’m not sure this conversation will be a productive dialogue anymore so I’ll send you the document once we’ve finished it.
Hi James,
I understand you received EAIF funds to explore social change.
That seems like a challenging and important project.
Following links in this post, you have made a website for your Social Change Lab and have yourself as Founder and Director, and hired another person as “Research Manager”.
It would be valuable to get details on your new institution and “object level objectives” and work. The link (“initial research”) on your website goes to the initial post you made on the EA forum before you received the IF grant, and doesn’t address issues with that post that others brought up.
Can you describe what your plans have been, how your ideas or theories are playing out, or succeeding or failing? What have you learned or expect to learn?
To be clear, I don’t think you need to be successful in any one grant to be a very valuable EA or person (as long as the externalities are low). In fact, this person here received $40,000 from the EA animal welfare fund, a much more funding constrained area and for a project one might expect a tangible output from. It’s not clear what happened there, as there is no legible output at all on the EA forum about this from him about his project.
The subtext of this comment is complex and negative to you. TLDR; I think it’s OK to try to steer or criticize EA, and even take EA resources when doing so. I’m concerned about this being done in a certain way, occupying or tagging niches in a high-trust environment.
This question seems like it should be a private message? I don’t see how it’s relevant to the post you’re replying to.
The EA forum is complex and probably unique. I think there are several important features:
It’s performative, as EA has various audiences to whom maintaining tone and norms is important. It’s also part work forum, like a company intranet. Every funder and collaborator can see everything you ever write, so breaking norms, such as being negative or confrontational, is costly (while certain actions may be risky or have no personal reward).
The forum is a way to communicate and try to find the truth about important causes or decisions. However it does this in a funky way—you can confront ideas with extreme aggression (and get authority for doing so), yet you might not even be able to indirectly suggest that there are issues about someone’s relevant credentials or ability (even when they use these explicitly or you suspect they have arrogated themselves).
The forum has strikingly different reactions based on insider or outsider status: content from newcomers and many critics are treated well, even when it’s pretty bad, or they make direct personal attacks. At the same time, people who occupy meta positions, places of authority regularly encounter hostility. This is probably a feature, not a defect. However, it’s possible someone could straddle the space between these roles, and shield themselves by the norms of one, while using the other to advance their goals.
There’s more prosaic issues. Like other forums, it isn’t always representative and can acquire constituencies with their own views. Issues or grievances (that are very real or neglected) can be hard to explain or confront, and exist for long periods of time without challenge or solution.
There’s some other features that are relevant, but this is too long already.
If you thought people were exploiting these features in some way, I guess you could write a short form post or something directly denouncing people personally. But that seems hard and bad for lots of reasons. It also doesn’t give you a chance to collect more information.
If for some reason, you had a pretty deep model where you thought someone was doing this, you might write a comment that isn’t that confrontational, and whose consequent reaction gives more information to you.
Note:
Note that a compelling reason to do this is if you think you were involved (or held back in some earlier process) and might bear some responsibility, especially if the underlying issue involves entrenchment.
You might be worried about making a mistake and the comment having various negative externalities. If in the past you interrogated the reactions of the EA forum to negative comments, you might have information that suggests these externalities are small.
Hi Charles, I’m quite confused by this comment (especially the subtext) and messaged you directly to hopefully sort this out.
Hi James, I think my comment is reasonable, I don’t see why you can’t answer the question raised.
I view your private message (which asserts my comment is inappropriate and strongly suggests I only raise them in private to you), strong downvoting my comment and pointing to my subtext (which exists whether I write it or not) as negative.
I’m happy to answer your questions, we’re working on our introduction post now so it’ll be up by the end of next week hopefully. For the record, I didn’t strong downvote your comment or “assert” anything but I’m not sure this conversation will be a productive dialogue anymore so I’ll send you the document once we’ve finished it.