What bothers me is that if I said that I was excited about funding WAW research, no one would have said anything. I was free to say that. But to say that I’m not excited, I have to go through all these hurdles. This introduces a bias because a lot of the time researchers won’t want to go through hurdles and opinions that would indirectly threaten RP’s funding won’t be shared. Hence, funders would have a distorted view of researchers’ opinions.
Put yourself into my shoes. OpenPhil sends an email to multiple people asking for opinions on a WAW grant. What I did was that I wrote a list of pros and cons about funding that grant, recommended funding it, and pressed “send”. It took like 30 minutes. Later OpenPhil said that it helped them to make the decision. Score! I felt energized. I probably had more impact in those 30 minutes than I had in three months of writing about aquatic noise.
Now imagine I knew that I had to inform the management about saying that I’m not excited about WAW. My manager was new to RP, he would’ve needed to escalate to directors. Writing my manager’s manager’s manager a message like “Can I write this thing that threatens the funding of our organisation?” is awkward. Also, these sorts of complex conversations can sometimes take a lot of time for both me and the upper management who are very busy. So I might not have done it. And I’m a very disagreeable employee who knows directors personally, so other researchers are probably less likely to do stuff like that. I also didn’t want to write OpenPhil an email that speaks frankly about the pros of funding the grant but not the cons. So it might have been easier to just ignore OpenPhil’s email and focus on finishing the aquatic noise report.
Maybe all of this is very particular to this situation. Situations like this didn’t arise when I worked at RP very often. I spent most of my time researching stuff where my conclusions had no impact on RP’s funding. But if RP grows, conflicts of interest are likely to arise more often. And such concerns might apply more often to cause-prioritisation research. If a cause prioritisation researcher concluded that say AI safety research is more important than all other causes, would they be able to talk about that freely to funders, even though it would threaten RP’s funding? If not, that’s a problem.
Great points, Saulius! I think it would be pretty valuable to have a question post asking about how organisations are handling situations such as yours (you may be interested in doing it; if you or other person do not, I may do it myself). I would say employees/contractors should be free, and ideally encouraged, to share their takes with funders and publicly, more of less regardless of what are the consequences for their organisation, as long as they are not sharing confidential information.
Thanks Vasco. Personally, I won’t do it. Actually, I pushed this issue here way further than I intended to and I don’t want to talk about it more. I’m afraid that this might be one of those things that might seem like a big deal in theory but is rarely relevant in practice because reality is usually more complicated. And it’s the sort of topic that can be discussed for too long, distracting busy EA executives from their actual work. Many people seem to have read this discussion, so arguments on both sides will likely be considered at RP and some other EA orgs. That is enough for me. I particularly hope it will be discussed by RP’s cause prioritization team.
If you do decide to pose a question, I suggest focusing on whether employees at EA organizations feel any direct or indirect pressure to conform to specific opinions due to organizational policies and dynamics, or even due to direct pressure from management. Or just don’t feel free to speak their minds on certain issues related to their job. People should have an option to answer anonymously. Basically to find out if my case was an isolated incident or not.
Thank you for your answer Marcus.
What bothers me is that if I said that I was excited about funding WAW research, no one would have said anything. I was free to say that. But to say that I’m not excited, I have to go through all these hurdles. This introduces a bias because a lot of the time researchers won’t want to go through hurdles and opinions that would indirectly threaten RP’s funding won’t be shared. Hence, funders would have a distorted view of researchers’ opinions.
Put yourself into my shoes. OpenPhil sends an email to multiple people asking for opinions on a WAW grant. What I did was that I wrote a list of pros and cons about funding that grant, recommended funding it, and pressed “send”. It took like 30 minutes. Later OpenPhil said that it helped them to make the decision. Score! I felt energized. I probably had more impact in those 30 minutes than I had in three months of writing about aquatic noise.
Now imagine I knew that I had to inform the management about saying that I’m not excited about WAW. My manager was new to RP, he would’ve needed to escalate to directors. Writing my manager’s manager’s manager a message like “Can I write this thing that threatens the funding of our organisation?” is awkward. Also, these sorts of complex conversations can sometimes take a lot of time for both me and the upper management who are very busy. So I might not have done it. And I’m a very disagreeable employee who knows directors personally, so other researchers are probably less likely to do stuff like that. I also didn’t want to write OpenPhil an email that speaks frankly about the pros of funding the grant but not the cons. So it might have been easier to just ignore OpenPhil’s email and focus on finishing the aquatic noise report.
Maybe all of this is very particular to this situation. Situations like this didn’t arise when I worked at RP very often. I spent most of my time researching stuff where my conclusions had no impact on RP’s funding. But if RP grows, conflicts of interest are likely to arise more often. And such concerns might apply more often to cause-prioritisation research. If a cause prioritisation researcher concluded that say AI safety research is more important than all other causes, would they be able to talk about that freely to funders, even though it would threaten RP’s funding? If not, that’s a problem.
Great points, Saulius! I think it would be pretty valuable to have a question post asking about how organisations are handling situations such as yours (you may be interested in doing it; if you or other person do not, I may do it myself). I would say employees/contractors should be free, and ideally encouraged, to share their takes with funders and publicly, more of less regardless of what are the consequences for their organisation, as long as they are not sharing confidential information.
Thanks Vasco. Personally, I won’t do it. Actually, I pushed this issue here way further than I intended to and I don’t want to talk about it more. I’m afraid that this might be one of those things that might seem like a big deal in theory but is rarely relevant in practice because reality is usually more complicated. And it’s the sort of topic that can be discussed for too long, distracting busy EA executives from their actual work. Many people seem to have read this discussion, so arguments on both sides will likely be considered at RP and some other EA orgs. That is enough for me. I particularly hope it will be discussed by RP’s cause prioritization team.
If you do decide to pose a question, I suggest focusing on whether employees at EA organizations feel any direct or indirect pressure to conform to specific opinions due to organizational policies and dynamics, or even due to direct pressure from management. Or just don’t feel free to speak their minds on certain issues related to their job. People should have an option to answer anonymously. Basically to find out if my case was an isolated incident or not.