Hey, thanks for the feedback. I do think reasonable people can disagree about this policy and it entails an important trade-off.
To understand a bit about the other side of the trade-off, I would ask that you consider that we at RP are roughly an order of magnitude bigger than Lightcone Infrastructure and we need policies to be able to work well with ~70 people that I agree make no sense with ~7 (relatively independent, relatively senior) people.
Could you say more about the other side of the tradeoff? As in, what’s the affirmative case for having this policy? So far in this thread the main reason has been “we don’t want people to get the impression that X statement by a junior researcher represents RP’s views”. I see a very simple alternative as “if individuals make statements that don’t represent RP’s views they should always make that clear up front”. So is there more reason to have this policy?
Fair, but the flip side of that is that it’s considerably less likely that a sophisticated donor would somehow misunderstand a junior researcher’s clearly-expressed-as-personal views as expressing the institutional view of a 70-person org.
Hmm, my sense is that the tradeoffs here mostly go in the opposite direction. It seems like the costs scale with the number of people, and it’s clear that very large organizations (200+) don’t really have a chance of maintaining such a policy anyways, as the cost of enforcement grows with the number of members (as well as the costs on information flow), while the benefits don’t obviously scale in the same way.
It seems to me more reasonable for smaller organizations to have a policy like this, and worse the larger the organization is (in terms of how unhappy to be with the leadership of the organization for instituting such a policy).
I think most larger orgs attempt to have even less information leave than this. So you’re statement seems wrong. Many large organisations have good boundaries in terms of information—apple is very good at keeping upcoming product releases quiet.
I think larger organizations are obviously worse than this, though I agree that some succeed nevertheless. I was mostly just making an argument about relative cost (and think that unless you put a lot of effort into it, at 200+ it usually becomes prohibitively expensive, though it of course depends on the exact policy and). See Google and OpenAI for organizations that I think are more representative here (and are more what I was thinking about).
Naah I think I still disagree. I guess the median large consultancy or legal firm is much more likely to go after you for sharing stuff than than the median small business. Because they have the resources and organisational capital to do so, and because their hiring allows them to find people who probably won’t mind and because they capture more of the downside and lose less to upside.
I’m not endorsing this but it’s what I would expect from Rethink, OpenPhil, FTX, Manifold, 80k, Charity Entreprenurship, Longview, CEA, Lightcone, Miri. And looking at those orgs, It’s what, Lightcone and Manifold that aren’t normal to secretive in terms of internal information. Maybe I could be convinced to give MIRI/Longivew a pass because their secrecy might be for non-institutional reasons but “organisations become less willing for random individuals to speak their true views about internal processes as they get larger/more powerful” seems a reasonable rule of thumb, inside and outside EA.
Peter, I’m not sure if it is worth your time to share, but I wonder if there are some additional policies RP has which are obvious to you but are not obvious to outsiders, and this is what is causing outsiders to be surprised.
E.g. perhaps you have a formal policy about how funders can get feedback from your employees without going through RP leadership which replaces the informal conversations that funders have with employees at other organizations. And this policy would alleviate some of the concerns people like Habryka have; we just aren’t aware of it because we aren’t familiar enough with RP.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. I do think reasonable people can disagree about this policy and it entails an important trade-off.
To understand a bit about the other side of the trade-off, I would ask that you consider that we at RP are roughly an order of magnitude bigger than Lightcone Infrastructure and we need policies to be able to work well with ~70 people that I agree make no sense with ~7 (relatively independent, relatively senior) people.
Could you say more about the other side of the tradeoff? As in, what’s the affirmative case for having this policy? So far in this thread the main reason has been “we don’t want people to get the impression that X statement by a junior researcher represents RP’s views”. I see a very simple alternative as “if individuals make statements that don’t represent RP’s views they should always make that clear up front”. So is there more reason to have this policy?
Fair, but the flip side of that is that it’s considerably less likely that a sophisticated donor would somehow misunderstand a junior researcher’s clearly-expressed-as-personal views as expressing the institutional view of a 70-person org.
Hmm, my sense is that the tradeoffs here mostly go in the opposite direction. It seems like the costs scale with the number of people, and it’s clear that very large organizations (200+) don’t really have a chance of maintaining such a policy anyways, as the cost of enforcement grows with the number of members (as well as the costs on information flow), while the benefits don’t obviously scale in the same way.
It seems to me more reasonable for smaller organizations to have a policy like this, and worse the larger the organization is (in terms of how unhappy to be with the leadership of the organization for instituting such a policy).
I think most larger orgs attempt to have even less information leave than this. So you’re statement seems wrong. Many large organisations have good boundaries in terms of information—apple is very good at keeping upcoming product releases quiet.
I think Apple is very exceptional here, and it does come at great cost as many Apple employees have complained about over the past years:
I think larger organizations are obviously worse than this, though I agree that some succeed nevertheless. I was mostly just making an argument about relative cost (and think that unless you put a lot of effort into it, at 200+ it usually becomes prohibitively expensive, though it of course depends on the exact policy and). See Google and OpenAI for organizations that I think are more representative here (and are more what I was thinking about).
Naah I think I still disagree. I guess the median large consultancy or legal firm is much more likely to go after you for sharing stuff than than the median small business. Because they have the resources and organisational capital to do so, and because their hiring allows them to find people who probably won’t mind and because they capture more of the downside and lose less to upside.
I’m not endorsing this but it’s what I would expect from Rethink, OpenPhil, FTX, Manifold, 80k, Charity Entreprenurship, Longview, CEA, Lightcone, Miri. And looking at those orgs, It’s what, Lightcone and Manifold that aren’t normal to secretive in terms of internal information. Maybe I could be convinced to give MIRI/Longivew a pass because their secrecy might be for non-institutional reasons but “organisations become less willing for random individuals to speak their true views about internal processes as they get larger/more powerful” seems a reasonable rule of thumb, inside and outside EA.
Peter, I’m not sure if it is worth your time to share, but I wonder if there are some additional policies RP has which are obvious to you but are not obvious to outsiders, and this is what is causing outsiders to be surprised.
E.g. perhaps you have a formal policy about how funders can get feedback from your employees without going through RP leadership which replaces the informal conversations that funders have with employees at other organizations. And this policy would alleviate some of the concerns people like Habryka have; we just aren’t aware of it because we aren’t familiar enough with RP.