One relevant dimension is that we think that if one of our researchers, especially while representing RP, is sending something to a funder that has a plausible implication that one of the main funders of a department should seriously reduce or stop funding that department, we should know they are planning to do so before they do so, and roughly what is being said so that we can be prepared. While we don’t want to be seen as censoring our researchers, we do think it’s important to approach these sorts of things with clarity and tact.
There are also times when we think it is important for RP to speak with a unified voice to our most important donors and represent a broader, coordinated consensus on what we think. Or, if minority views of one of our researchers that RP leadership disagrees with are to be considered, this needs to be properly contextualized and coordinated so that we can interact with our donors with full knowledge of what is being shared with them (for example, we don’t want to accidentally convey that the view of a single member of staff represents RP’s overall position).
FWIW, this sounds to me like a very substantial tax on sharing information with funders, and I am surprised by this policy.
As someone who is sometimes acting in a funder capacity I wasn’t expecting my information to be filtered this way (and also, I feel very capable of not interpreting the statements of a single researcher as being non-representative of a whole organization, I expect other funders are similarly capable of doing that).
Indeed, I think I was expecting the opposite, which is that I can ask researchers openly and freely about their takes on RP programs, and they have no obligation to tell you that they spoke to me at all. Even just an obligation to inform you after the fact seems like it would frequently introduce substantial chilling effects. I certainly don’t think my employees are required to tell me if they give a reference or give an assessment of any Lightcone project, and would consider an obligation to inform me if they do as quite harmful for healthy information flow (and if someone considers funding Lightcone, or wants to work with us in some capacity, I encourage you to get references from my employees or other people we’ve worked with, including offering privacy or confidentiality however you see fit about the information you gain this way).
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.
Would you consider whipping this up into a publicly posted policy? I’m sure Lightcone employees don’t need a formal policy, but I think it would be desirable for orgs to have legible published policies on this as a way to flag which ones are / are not insisting their staff filter their opinions through management. Donors/funders will be able to weigh opinions from organizational employees accordingly.
I feel weird making a top-level post about it (and feel like I would need to polish it a bunch before I feel comfortable making it an official policy). Do feel free to link to my comments here.
If many people would find this helpful, I would be happy to do it, but it does seem like a bunch of work so wouldn’t want to do it based on just the support expressed so far.
FWIW, this sounds to me like a very substantial tax on sharing information with funders, and I am surprised by this policy.
As someone who is sometimes acting in a funder capacity I wasn’t expecting my information to be filtered this way (and also, I feel very capable of not interpreting the statements of a single researcher as being non-representative of a whole organization, I expect other funders are similarly capable of doing that).
Indeed, I think I was expecting the opposite, which is that I can ask researchers openly and freely about their takes on RP programs, and they have no obligation to tell you that they spoke to me at all. Even just an obligation to inform you after the fact seems like it would frequently introduce substantial chilling effects. I certainly don’t think my employees are required to tell me if they give a reference or give an assessment of any Lightcone project, and would consider an obligation to inform me if they do as quite harmful for healthy information flow (and if someone considers funding Lightcone, or wants to work with us in some capacity, I encourage you to get references from my employees or other people we’ve worked with, including offering privacy or confidentiality however you see fit about the information you gain this way).
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.
Would you consider whipping this up into a publicly posted policy? I’m sure Lightcone employees don’t need a formal policy, but I think it would be desirable for orgs to have legible published policies on this as a way to flag which ones are / are not insisting their staff filter their opinions through management. Donors/funders will be able to weigh opinions from organizational employees accordingly.
I feel weird making a top-level post about it (and feel like I would need to polish it a bunch before I feel comfortable making it an official policy). Do feel free to link to my comments here.
If many people would find this helpful, I would be happy to do it, but it does seem like a bunch of work so wouldn’t want to do it based on just the support expressed so far.
Hi Oliver,
I think you meant “interpreting” instead of “not interpreting”, given you write “non-representive” afterwards.