Thanks for writing this up. Impressive and super-informative as ever. Especially with Oliver I feel like I get a lot of good insight into your thought process.
Seconded. I’m quite happy with the honesty. My impression is that lots of people in positions of power/authority can’t really be open online about their criticisms of other prestigious projects (or at least, don’t feel like it’s worth the cost.) This means that a lot of the most important information is closely guarded to a few specific social circles, which makes it really difficult for others outside to really know what’s going on.
I’m not sure what the best solution is, but having at least some people in-the-know revealing their thoughts about such things seems quite good.
Ideally I’d want honest & open discussions that go both ways (for instance, a back-and-forth between evaluators and organizations), but don’t expect that any time soon.
I think my preference would be for the EA community to accept norms of honest criticism and communication, but would note that this may be very uncomfortable for some people. Bridgewater has the most similar culture to what I’m thinking of, and their culture is famously divisive.
Thank you! I agree with this assessment. My current guess is that it doesn’t necessarily make sense for everyone to run my strategy of openness and engaging in lots of discussion, but that at the margin I feel like I would like to see a lot more of that.
I also have the same sense of feeling like Bridgewater culture is both a good example and something that illustrates the problems of doing this universally.
Thanks for writing this up. Impressive and super-informative as ever. Especially with Oliver I feel like I get a lot of good insight into your thought process.
Seconded. I’m quite happy with the honesty. My impression is that lots of people in positions of power/authority can’t really be open online about their criticisms of other prestigious projects (or at least, don’t feel like it’s worth the cost.) This means that a lot of the most important information is closely guarded to a few specific social circles, which makes it really difficult for others outside to really know what’s going on.
I’m not sure what the best solution is, but having at least some people in-the-know revealing their thoughts about such things seems quite good.
Ideally I’d want honest & open discussions that go both ways (for instance, a back-and-forth between evaluators and organizations), but don’t expect that any time soon.
I think my preference would be for the EA community to accept norms of honest criticism and communication, but would note that this may be very uncomfortable for some people. Bridgewater has the most similar culture to what I’m thinking of, and their culture is famously divisive.
Thank you! I agree with this assessment. My current guess is that it doesn’t necessarily make sense for everyone to run my strategy of openness and engaging in lots of discussion, but that at the margin I feel like I would like to see a lot more of that.
I also have the same sense of feeling like Bridgewater culture is both a good example and something that illustrates the problems of doing this universally.