My understanding is that UK law and state law whistleblower protections are extremely weak and only cover knowledge of literal and usually substantial crimes (including in California). I don’t think any legally-mandated whistleblower protections make much of a difference for the kind of thing that EAs are likely to encounter.
I checked the state of the law in the FTX case, and unless someone knew specifically of clear fraud going on, they would have not been protected, which seems like it makes them mostly useless for things we care about. They also wouldn’t cover e.g. capabilities companies being reckless or violating commitments they made, unless they break some clear law, and even then protections are pretty limited. So I can’t really think of any case, except the most extreme, in which at least the US state protections come into play.
I was not aware of any CEA or 80k whistleblower systems. If they have some, that seems good! Is there any place that has more details on them? (you also didn’t mention them in the article you linked, which I had read recently, so I wasn’t aware of them)
Also, for the record, organizational whisteblower protections seem not that important to me. I e.g. care more about having norms against libel suits and other litigious behavior, though the norms for that seem mostly gone, so I expect substantially less whistleblowing of that type in the future. I mostly covered them because I was comprehensively covering the list of things people submitted to the Coordination Forum.
They also wouldn’t cover e.g. capabilities companies being reckless or violating commitments they made, unless they break some clear law, and even then protections are pretty limited.
My understanding is that UK law and state law whistleblower protections are extremely weak and only cover knowledge of literal and usually substantial crimes (including in California). I don’t think any legally-mandated whistleblower protections make much of a difference for the kind of thing that EAs are likely to encounter.
I checked the state of the law in the FTX case, and unless someone knew specifically of clear fraud going on, they would have not been protected, which seems like it makes them mostly useless for things we care about. They also wouldn’t cover e.g. capabilities companies being reckless or violating commitments they made, unless they break some clear law, and even then protections are pretty limited. So I can’t really think of any case, except the most extreme, in which at least the US state protections come into play.
I was not aware of any CEA or 80k whistleblower systems. If they have some, that seems good! Is there any place that has more details on them? (you also didn’t mention them in the article you linked, which I had read recently, so I wasn’t aware of them)
Also, for the record, organizational whisteblower protections seem not that important to me. I e.g. care more about having norms against libel suits and other litigious behavior, though the norms for that seem mostly gone, so I expect substantially less whistleblowing of that type in the future. I mostly covered them because I was comprehensively covering the list of things people submitted to the Coordination Forum.
An alternative take on this (I haven’t researched this topic myself): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LttenWwmRn8LHoDgL/josh-jacobson-s-quick-takes?commentId=ZA2N2LNqQteD5dE4g