I feel like “people who worked with Sam told people about specific instances of quite serious dishonesty they had personally observed” is being classed as “rumour” here, which whilst not strictly inaccurate, is misleading, because it is a very atypical case relative to the image the word “rumour” conjures.
I agree with this.
[...] I feel like we still want to know if any one in leadership argued “oh, yeah, Sam might well be dodgy, but the expected value of publicly backing him is high because of the upside”. That’s a signal someone is a bad leader in my view, which is useful knowledge going forward.
I don’t really agree with this. Everyone has some probability of turning out to be dodgy; it matters exactly how strong the available evidence was. “This EA leader writes people off immediately when they have even a tiny probability of being untrustworthy” would be a negative update about the person’s decision-making too!
I meant something in between “is” and “has a non-zero chance of being”, like assigning significant probability to it (obviously I didn’t have an exact number in mind), and not just for base rate reasons about believing all rich people to be dodgy.
I agree with this.
I don’t really agree with this. Everyone has some probability of turning out to be dodgy; it matters exactly how strong the available evidence was. “This EA leader writes people off immediately when they have even a tiny probability of being untrustworthy” would be a negative update about the person’s decision-making too!
I took that second quote to mean ‘even if Sam is dodgy it’s still good to publicly back him’
I meant something in between “is” and “has a non-zero chance of being”, like assigning significant probability to it (obviously I didn’t have an exact number in mind), and not just for base rate reasons about believing all rich people to be dodgy.