Overall I feel relatively supportive of more investigation and (especially) postmortem work. I also don’t fully understand why more wasn’t shared from the EV investigation[1].
However, I think it’s all a bit more fraught and less obvious than you imply. The main reasons are:
Professional external investigations are expensive
Especially if they’re meaningfully fact-finding and not just interviewing a few people, I think this could easily run into hundreds of thousands of dollars
Who is to pay for this? If a charity is doing it, I think it’s important that their donors are on board with that use of funds
I kind of think someone should fundraise for this specifically; I’m genuinely unsure about donor appetite to support it
I’m somewhat worried about the “re-victimizing” effect you allude to of just sharing everything transparently
Worry that it would cause in-my-view-unjust headaches for people is perhaps the main inhibitory force on my just publicly sharing the pieces of what I know (there’s also sometimes feeling like something isn’t mine to share)
If there were an investigation which was going to make all its factual findings public, I’d expect this to be an inhibitory force on people choosing to share information with them
The possible mistakes we’re talking about are all nuanced
It’s going to be a judgement call what was or wasn’t a mistake
(This is compatible with mistakes being large)
So if we’re hoping for an investigation which doesn’t make all its factual findings public, then we’re trusting in the judgement of the investigators to make a fair assessment
This makes me not want independent lawyers (who may most naturally be drawn to assess things from a perspective of “was this reasonably minimizing of legal exposure”)
But then who?
If this was just a question about conduct at one org, the natural answer might be “some sensible but uninvolved EA”, but if the whole of EA might somehow be called into question, what’s even appropriate?
At the end of this I would be most interested in multiple people who seemed very sensible giving their own post-mortems. I think that this would ideally include a mix of folks in EA and outsiders. I think some fact-finding should inform these people’s takes, without all of the facts themselves necessarily being made public (in order to facilitate the facts actually being shared, as well as to mitigate possible re-victimizing). I’m not certain how much it’s good for this to be via some centralized fact-finding exercise which is then privately shared, vs giving them the opportunity to interview people directly (as you get some more granular data that way). Perhaps ideally a mix. (But that’s making it more time-expensive as an exercise.)
I think there are people close enough to what happened that they can meaningfully give post-mortems without a fact-finding investigation. And I am interested in their views and supportive of them sharing those. But they’re also the people whose judgement is most likely to be distorted by being close to things. So even among EAs I’d prefer to have very sensible people who were further from what happened.
(That’s all where-I-stand-right-now. I can certainly imagine being moved on this.)
I guess that there would have been downsides for EV in doing so, but think these might well have been outweighed by the benefits to the community. However, I want to stress that I think the boards are sensible people making sometimes-difficult trade-offs; I don’t know for sure what I’d have thought with full context; I have some deference to them.
Overall I feel relatively supportive of more investigation and (especially) postmortem work. I also don’t fully understand why more wasn’t shared from the EV investigation[1].
However, I think it’s all a bit more fraught and less obvious than you imply. The main reasons are:
Professional external investigations are expensive
Especially if they’re meaningfully fact-finding and not just interviewing a few people, I think this could easily run into hundreds of thousands of dollars
Who is to pay for this? If a charity is doing it, I think it’s important that their donors are on board with that use of funds
I kind of think someone should fundraise for this specifically; I’m genuinely unsure about donor appetite to support it
I’m somewhat worried about the “re-victimizing” effect you allude to of just sharing everything transparently
Worry that it would cause in-my-view-unjust headaches for people is perhaps the main inhibitory force on my just publicly sharing the pieces of what I know (there’s also sometimes feeling like something isn’t mine to share)
If there were an investigation which was going to make all its factual findings public, I’d expect this to be an inhibitory force on people choosing to share information with them
The possible mistakes we’re talking about are all nuanced
It’s going to be a judgement call what was or wasn’t a mistake
(This is compatible with mistakes being large)
So if we’re hoping for an investigation which doesn’t make all its factual findings public, then we’re trusting in the judgement of the investigators to make a fair assessment
This makes me not want independent lawyers (who may most naturally be drawn to assess things from a perspective of “was this reasonably minimizing of legal exposure”)
But then who?
If this was just a question about conduct at one org, the natural answer might be “some sensible but uninvolved EA”, but if the whole of EA might somehow be called into question, what’s even appropriate?
At the end of this I would be most interested in multiple people who seemed very sensible giving their own post-mortems. I think that this would ideally include a mix of folks in EA and outsiders. I think some fact-finding should inform these people’s takes, without all of the facts themselves necessarily being made public (in order to facilitate the facts actually being shared, as well as to mitigate possible re-victimizing). I’m not certain how much it’s good for this to be via some centralized fact-finding exercise which is then privately shared, vs giving them the opportunity to interview people directly (as you get some more granular data that way). Perhaps ideally a mix. (But that’s making it more time-expensive as an exercise.)
I think there are people close enough to what happened that they can meaningfully give post-mortems without a fact-finding investigation. And I am interested in their views and supportive of them sharing those. But they’re also the people whose judgement is most likely to be distorted by being close to things. So even among EAs I’d prefer to have very sensible people who were further from what happened.
(That’s all where-I-stand-right-now. I can certainly imagine being moved on this.)
I guess that there would have been downsides for EV in doing so, but think these might well have been outweighed by the benefits to the community. However, I want to stress that I think the boards are sensible people making sometimes-difficult trade-offs; I don’t know for sure what I’d have thought with full context; I have some deference to them.