This is a good comment! Upvoted for making a reasonable challenge to a point that often goes unchallenged.
There are trade-offs to honesty and cooperation, and sometimes those virtues wonât be worth the loss of impact or potential risk. I suspect that Holden!2013 would endorse this; he may come off as fairly absolutist here, but I think you could imagine scenarios where he would, in fact, miss a family event to accomplish some work-related objective (e.g. if a billion-dollar grant were at stake).
I donât know how relevant this fact is to the Gates case, though.
While I donât have the time to respond point-by-point, Iâll share some related thoughts:
My initial comment was meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive: in my experience, most people in EA seem to be aligned with Holdenâs view. Whether they should be is a different question.
I include myself in the list of those aligned, but like anyone, I have my own sense of what constitutes âstandardâ, and my own rules for when a trade-off is worthwhile or when Iâve hit the limit of âtryingâ.
Still, I think I ascribe a higher value than most people to âEA being an unusually kind and honest community, even outside its direct impactâ.
I donât understand what would result from an analysis of âwhat types of unethical behavior could be condonedâ:
Whatever result someone comes up with, their view is unlikely to be widely adopted, even within EA (given differences in peopleâs ethical standards)
In cases where someone behaves unethically within the EA community, there are so many small details weâll know about that trying to argue for any kind of general rule seems foolhardy. (Especially since ânot condoningâ can mean so many different thingsâwhether someone is fired, whether they speak at a given event, whether a given org decides to fund them...)
In cases outside EA (e.g. that of Gates), the opinion of some random people in EA has effectively no impact.
All in all, Iâd rather replace questions like âshould we condone person/âbehavior X?â with âshould this person X be invited to speak at a conference?â or âshould an organization still take grant money from a person who did X?â Or, in a broader sense, âis it acceptable to lie in a situation like X if the likely impact is Y?â
This is a good comment! Upvoted for making a reasonable challenge to a point that often goes unchallenged.
There are trade-offs to honesty and cooperation, and sometimes those virtues wonât be worth the loss of impact or potential risk. I suspect that Holden!2013 would endorse this; he may come off as fairly absolutist here, but I think you could imagine scenarios where he would, in fact, miss a family event to accomplish some work-related objective (e.g. if a billion-dollar grant were at stake).
I donât know how relevant this fact is to the Gates case, though.
While I donât have the time to respond point-by-point, Iâll share some related thoughts:
My initial comment was meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive: in my experience, most people in EA seem to be aligned with Holdenâs view. Whether they should be is a different question.
I include myself in the list of those aligned, but like anyone, I have my own sense of what constitutes âstandardâ, and my own rules for when a trade-off is worthwhile or when Iâve hit the limit of âtryingâ.
Still, I think I ascribe a higher value than most people to âEA being an unusually kind and honest community, even outside its direct impactâ.
I donât understand what would result from an analysis of âwhat types of unethical behavior could be condonedâ:
Whatever result someone comes up with, their view is unlikely to be widely adopted, even within EA (given differences in peopleâs ethical standards)
In cases where someone behaves unethically within the EA community, there are so many small details weâll know about that trying to argue for any kind of general rule seems foolhardy. (Especially since ânot condoningâ can mean so many different thingsâwhether someone is fired, whether they speak at a given event, whether a given org decides to fund them...)
In cases outside EA (e.g. that of Gates), the opinion of some random people in EA has effectively no impact.
All in all, Iâd rather replace questions like âshould we condone person/âbehavior X?â with âshould this person X be invited to speak at a conference?â or âshould an organization still take grant money from a person who did X?â Or, in a broader sense, âis it acceptable to lie in a situation like X if the likely impact is Y?â