Within the domain of politics (and to a lesser degree, global health), PR impact makes an extremely large difference in how effective you’re able to be at the end of the day. If you want, I’d be happy to provide data on that, but my guess is you’d agree with me there (please let me know if that isn’t the case). As such, if you care about results, you should care about PR as well.
I suspect that your unease mostly lies in the second half of your response—we should do things for “direct, non-reputational reasons,” and actions done for reputational reasons would impugn on our perceived integrity. The thing is, reputation is actually one of the things we are already paying a tremendous amount of attention to—in the context of both forecasting and charity evaluation. To explain:
In forecasting, if you want your predictions to be maximally accurate, it is highly worthwhile to see what domain experts and superforecasters are saying, since they either have a confirmed track record of getting predictions right, or a track record of contributing to the relevant field (which means they will likely have a more robust inside-view). In charity evaluation, the only thing we usually have to go on to determine the effectiveness of existing charities is what the charities themselves say about their impact, and if we’re very lucky, what outside researchers have evaluated. Ultimately, the only real reason we have to trust some people or organizations more than others is their track record (certifications are merely proxies for that). Organizations like GiveWell partially function as track-record evaluators, doing the hard parts of the work for us to determine if charities are actually doing what they say they’re doing (comparing effectiveness once that’s done is the other aspect of their job, of course).
When dealing with longtermist charities, things get trickier. It’s impossible to evaluate a direct track record of impact, so the only thing we have to go on is proxies for effectiveness—is the charity structured well, do we trust the people working there, have they been effective at short-termist projects in the past, etc…evaluation becomes a semi-formalized game of trust.
The outside world cares about track record as much—if not significantly more than—we do. I do not think it would signal a lack of integrity for SBF to deliberately invest in short-term altruistic projects which can establish a positive track record, showing that not only does he sincerely want to make the world a better place, he knows how to actually go about doing that.
Within the domain of politics (and to a lesser degree, global health), PR impact makes an extremely large difference in how effective you’re able to be at the end of the day. If you want, I’d be happy to provide data on that, but my guess is you’d agree with me there (please let me know if that isn’t the case). As such, if you care about results, you should care about PR as well. I suspect that your unease mostly lies in the second half of your response—we should do things for “direct, non-reputational reasons,” and actions done for reputational reasons would impugn on our perceived integrity. The thing is, reputation is actually one of the things we are already paying a tremendous amount of attention to—in the context of both forecasting and charity evaluation. To explain:
In forecasting, if you want your predictions to be maximally accurate, it is highly worthwhile to see what domain experts and superforecasters are saying, since they either have a confirmed track record of getting predictions right, or a track record of contributing to the relevant field (which means they will likely have a more robust inside-view). In charity evaluation, the only thing we usually have to go on to determine the effectiveness of existing charities is what the charities themselves say about their impact, and if we’re very lucky, what outside researchers have evaluated. Ultimately, the only real reason we have to trust some people or organizations more than others is their track record (certifications are merely proxies for that). Organizations like GiveWell partially function as track-record evaluators, doing the hard parts of the work for us to determine if charities are actually doing what they say they’re doing (comparing effectiveness once that’s done is the other aspect of their job, of course). When dealing with longtermist charities, things get trickier. It’s impossible to evaluate a direct track record of impact, so the only thing we have to go on is proxies for effectiveness—is the charity structured well, do we trust the people working there, have they been effective at short-termist projects in the past, etc…evaluation becomes a semi-formalized game of trust.
The outside world cares about track record as much—if not significantly more than—we do. I do not think it would signal a lack of integrity for SBF to deliberately invest in short-term altruistic projects which can establish a positive track record, showing that not only does he sincerely want to make the world a better place, he knows how to actually go about doing that.