EA organizations frequently ask for people to run criticism by them ahead of time. I’ve been wary of the push for this norm. My big concerns were that orgs wouldn’t comment until a post was nearly done, and that it would take a lot of time. My recent post mentioned a lot of people and organizations, so it seemed like useful data.
I reached out to 12 email addresses, plus one person in FB DMs and one open call for information on a particular topic. This doesn’t quite match what you see in the post because some people/orgs were used more than once, and other mentions were cut. The post was in a fairly crude state when I sent it out.
Of those 14: 10 had replied by the start of next day. More than half of those replied within a few hours. I expect this was faster than usual because no one had more than a few paragraphs relevant to them or their org, but is still impressive.
It’s hard to say how sending an early draft changed things. One person got some extra anxiety because their paragraph was full of TODOs (because it was positive and I hadn’t worked as hard fleshing out the positive mentions ahead of time). I could maybe have saved myself one stressful interaction if I’d realized I was going to cut an example ahead of time
Only 80,000 Hours, Anima International, and GiveDirectly failed to respond before publication (7 days after I emailed them). Of those, only 80k’s mention was negative.
I didn’t keep as close track of changes, but at a minimum replies led to 2 examples being removed entirely, 2 clarifications and some additional information that made the post better. So overall I’m very glad I solicited comments, and found the process easier than expected.
Nice, thanks for keeping track of this and reporting on the data!! <3
No pressure to respond, but I’m curious how long it took you to find the relevant email addresses, send the messages, then reply to all the people etc.? I imagine for me, the main costs would probably be in the added overhead (time + psychological) of having to keep track of so many conversations.
Off the top of my head: in maybe half the cases I already had the contact info. In one or two cases cases one of beta readers passed on the info. For the remainder it was maybe <2m per org, and it turns out they all use info@domain.org so it would be faster next time.
EA organizations frequently ask for people to run criticism by them ahead of time. I’ve been wary of the push for this norm. My big concerns were that orgs wouldn’t comment until a post was nearly done, and that it would take a lot of time. My recent post mentioned a lot of people and organizations, so it seemed like useful data.
I reached out to 12 email addresses, plus one person in FB DMs and one open call for information on a particular topic. This doesn’t quite match what you see in the post because some people/orgs were used more than once, and other mentions were cut. The post was in a fairly crude state when I sent it out.
Of those 14: 10 had replied by the start of next day. More than half of those replied within a few hours. I expect this was faster than usual because no one had more than a few paragraphs relevant to them or their org, but is still impressive.
It’s hard to say how sending an early draft changed things. One person got some extra anxiety because their paragraph was full of TODOs (because it was positive and I hadn’t worked as hard fleshing out the positive mentions ahead of time). I could maybe have saved myself one stressful interaction if I’d realized I was going to cut an example ahead of time
Only 80,000 Hours, Anima International, and GiveDirectly failed to respond before publication (7 days after I emailed them). Of those, only 80k’s mention was negative.
I didn’t keep as close track of changes, but at a minimum replies led to 2 examples being removed entirely, 2 clarifications and some additional information that made the post better. So overall I’m very glad I solicited comments, and found the process easier than expected.
Nice, thanks for keeping track of this and reporting on the data!! <3
No pressure to respond, but I’m curious how long it took you to find the relevant email addresses, send the messages, then reply to all the people etc.? I imagine for me, the main costs would probably be in the added overhead (time + psychological) of having to keep track of so many conversations.
Off the top of my head: in maybe half the cases I already had the contact info. In one or two cases cases one of beta readers passed on the info. For the remainder it was maybe <2m per org, and it turns out they all use info@domain.org so it would be faster next time.