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 won’t 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 don’t know how relevant this fact is to the Gates case, though.
While I don’t have the time to respond point-by-point, I’ll 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 Holden’s 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 “standard”, and my own rules for when a trade-off is worthwhile or when I’ve hit the limit of “trying”.
Still, I think I ascribe a higher value than most people to “EA being an unusually kind and honest community, even outside its direct impact”.
I don’t understand what would result from an analysis of “what types of unethical behavior could be condoned”:
Whatever result someone comes up with, their view is unlikely to be widely adopted, even within EA (given differences in people’s ethical standards)
In cases where someone behaves unethically within the EA community, there are so many small details we’ll know about that trying to argue for any kind of general rule seems foolhardy. (Especially since “not condoning” can mean so many different things—whether 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, I’d rather replace questions like “should we condone person/behavior X?” with “should this person X be invited to speak at a conference?” or “should an organization still take grant money from a person who did X?” Or, in a broader sense, “is it acceptable to lie in a situation like X if the likely impact is Y?”
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 won’t 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 don’t know how relevant this fact is to the Gates case, though.
While I don’t have the time to respond point-by-point, I’ll 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 Holden’s 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 “standard”, and my own rules for when a trade-off is worthwhile or when I’ve hit the limit of “trying”.
Still, I think I ascribe a higher value than most people to “EA being an unusually kind and honest community, even outside its direct impact”.
I don’t understand what would result from an analysis of “what types of unethical behavior could be condoned”:
Whatever result someone comes up with, their view is unlikely to be widely adopted, even within EA (given differences in people’s ethical standards)
In cases where someone behaves unethically within the EA community, there are so many small details we’ll know about that trying to argue for any kind of general rule seems foolhardy. (Especially since “not condoning” can mean so many different things—whether 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, I’d rather replace questions like “should we condone person/behavior X?” with “should this person X be invited to speak at a conference?” or “should an organization still take grant money from a person who did X?” Or, in a broader sense, “is it acceptable to lie in a situation like X if the likely impact is Y?”