People talk about running critical posts by the criticized person or org ahead of time, and there are a lot of advantages to that. But the plans I’ve seen are all fairly one sided: all upside goes to the criticized, all the extra work goes to the critic.
What I’d like to see is some reciprocal obligation from recipients of criticism, especially formal organizations with many employees. Things like answering questions from potential critics very early in the process, with a certain level of speed and reliability. Right now it feels like orgs are very fast to respond to polished, public posts, but you can’t count on them to even answer questions. They’ll respond quickly to public criticism, and maybe even to polished posts sent to them before publication, but they are not fast or reliable at answering questions with implicit potential criticism behind them. Which is a pretty shitty deal for the critic, who I’m sure would love to find out their concern was unmerited before spending dozens of hours writing a polished post.
This might be unfair. I’m quite sure it used to be true, but a lot of the orgs have professionalized over the years. In which case I’d like to ask they make their commitments around this public and explicit, and share them in the same breath that they ask for heads up on criticism.
But the plans I’ve seen are all fairly one sided: all upside goes to the criticized, all the extra work goes to the critic.
I see a pretty important benefit to the critic, because you’re ensuring that there isn’t some obvious response to your criticisms that you are missing.
I once posted something that revised/criticized an Open Philanthropy model, without running it by anyone there, and it turned out that my conclusions were shifted dramatically by a coding error that was detected immediately in the comments.
That’s a particularly dramatic example that I don’t expect to generalize, but often if a criticism goes “X organization does something bad” the natural question is, why do they do that? Is there a reason that’s obvious in hindsight that they’ve thought about a lot, but I haven’t? Maybe there isn’t, but I would want to run a criticism by them just to see if that’s the case.
I don’t think people are obligated to build in the feedback they get extensively if they don’t think it’s valid/their point still stands.
I don’t have any disagreement with getting people information early, I just think characterizing the current system as one where only the criticizee benefits is wrong.
A few benefits I see to the critic even in the status quo:
The post generally ends up stronger, because it’s more accurate. Even if you only got something minor wrong, readers will (reasonably!) assume that if you’re not getting your details right then they should pay less attention to your post.
To the extent that the critic wants the public view to end up balanced and isn’t just trying to damage the criticizee, having the org’s response go live at the same time as the criticism helps.
If the critic does get some things wrong despite giving the criticizee the opportunity to review and bring up additional information, either because the criticizee didn’t mention these issues or refused to engage, the community would generally see it as unacceptable for the crtiticizee to sue the critic for defamation. Whereas if a critic posts damaging false claims without that (and without a good reason for skipping review, like “they abused me and I can’t sanely interact with them”) then I think the law is still on the table.
A norm where orgs need to answer critical questions promptly seems good on it’s face, but I’m less sure in practice. Many questions take far more effort to answer well than they do to pose, especially if they can’t be answered from memory. Writing a ready-to-go criticism post is a way of demonstrating that you really do care a lot about the answer to this question, which might be needed to keep the work in answering not-actually-that-important questions down? But there could be other ways?
You’re not wrong, but I feel like your response doesn’t make sense in context.
The post generally ends up stronger, because it’s more accurate
Handled vastly better by being able to reliably get answers about concerns earlier.
To the extent that the critic wants the public view to end up balanced and isn’t just trying to damage the criticizee
Assumes things are on a roughly balanced footing and unanswered criticism pushes it out of balance. If criticism is undersupplied for large orgs, making it harder makes things less balanced (but rushed or bad criticism doesn’t actually fix this, now you just have two bad things happening)
If the critic does get some things wrong despite giving the criticizee the opportunity to review and bring up additional information, either because the criticizee didn’t mention these issues or refused to engage, the community would generally see it as unacceptable for the crtiticizee to sue the critic for defamation
I’m asking the potential criticizee to provide that information earlier in the process.
People talk about running critical posts by the criticized person or org ahead of time, and there are a lot of advantages to that. But the plans I’ve seen are all fairly one sided: all upside goes to the criticized, all the extra work goes to the critic.
What I’d like to see is some reciprocal obligation from recipients of criticism, especially formal organizations with many employees. Things like answering questions from potential critics very early in the process, with a certain level of speed and reliability. Right now it feels like orgs are very fast to respond to polished, public posts, but you can’t count on them to even answer questions. They’ll respond quickly to public criticism, and maybe even to polished posts sent to them before publication, but they are not fast or reliable at answering questions with implicit potential criticism behind them. Which is a pretty shitty deal for the critic, who I’m sure would love to find out their concern was unmerited before spending dozens of hours writing a polished post.
This might be unfair. I’m quite sure it used to be true, but a lot of the orgs have professionalized over the years. In which case I’d like to ask they make their commitments around this public and explicit, and share them in the same breath that they ask for heads up on criticism.
I see a pretty important benefit to the critic, because you’re ensuring that there isn’t some obvious response to your criticisms that you are missing.
I once posted something that revised/criticized an Open Philanthropy model, without running it by anyone there, and it turned out that my conclusions were shifted dramatically by a coding error that was detected immediately in the comments.
That’s a particularly dramatic example that I don’t expect to generalize, but often if a criticism goes “X organization does something bad” the natural question is, why do they do that? Is there a reason that’s obvious in hindsight that they’ve thought about a lot, but I haven’t? Maybe there isn’t, but I would want to run a criticism by them just to see if that’s the case.
I don’t think people are obligated to build in the feedback they get extensively if they don’t think it’s valid/their point still stands.
This seems like a good argument against not asking, but a bad argument against getting people information as early as possible.
I don’t have any disagreement with getting people information early, I just think characterizing the current system as one where only the criticizee benefits is wrong.
A few benefits I see to the critic even in the status quo:
The post generally ends up stronger, because it’s more accurate. Even if you only got something minor wrong, readers will (reasonably!) assume that if you’re not getting your details right then they should pay less attention to your post.
To the extent that the critic wants the public view to end up balanced and isn’t just trying to damage the criticizee, having the org’s response go live at the same time as the criticism helps.
If the critic does get some things wrong despite giving the criticizee the opportunity to review and bring up additional information, either because the criticizee didn’t mention these issues or refused to engage, the community would generally see it as unacceptable for the crtiticizee to sue the critic for defamation. Whereas if a critic posts damaging false claims without that (and without a good reason for skipping review, like “they abused me and I can’t sanely interact with them”) then I think the law is still on the table.
A norm where orgs need to answer critical questions promptly seems good on it’s face, but I’m less sure in practice. Many questions take far more effort to answer well than they do to pose, especially if they can’t be answered from memory. Writing a ready-to-go criticism post is a way of demonstrating that you really do care a lot about the answer to this question, which might be needed to keep the work in answering not-actually-that-important questions down? But there could be other ways?
You’re not wrong, but I feel like your response doesn’t make sense in context.
Handled vastly better by being able to reliably get answers about concerns earlier.
Assumes things are on a roughly balanced footing and unanswered criticism pushes it out of balance. If criticism is undersupplied for large orgs, making it harder makes things less balanced (but rushed or bad criticism doesn’t actually fix this, now you just have two bad things happening)
I’m asking the potential criticizee to provide that information earlier in the process.