I was unfortunately unable to go to EAG this year due to work commitments. By all accounts I missed out—additionally, I had less exposure to the EAG marketing than others—I mostly ignored the promotional material as I knew I was unavailable.
I confess I find these practices pretty shady, and I am unpleasantly surprised that EAG made what I view to be a fairly large error of judgement on appropriate marketing tactics. (I am pleasantly unsurprised in the straightforward and open manner with which this criticism has been received). On the issues raised by Kit above.
If I recommended (e.g.) Kit to EAG and he doesn’t reply a couple of times, he gets an email ‘from Greg via EAG’, despite: 1) I’m not sending it, 2) none of the content is written by me, 3) I’m not asked whether I consent to this message being sent ‘on my behalf’, and 4) I’m not told it happens unless the recipient gets back to me.
Although uncharitable, this looks like ventriloquism or arrogation—and such an impression may well occur in cases where do not read the body of the message. Perhaps the most accurate account is: ‘Greg’s social tie with Kit is leveraged (without Greg’s knowledge and consent) in a misleading subject line to get Kit to click on the last ditch sales pitch’, which I think should be avoided.
Especially given in this case Kit is receiving emails he did not solicit on Greg’s say so. I might think Kit might value knowing about the opportunity, but I might also have a sufficiently high view of his powers of judgement that he can decide after the first email whether he’s interested or not. When he gets a third such email, ostensibly with my approbation and/or involvement, he might start feeling irritation towards me. If I really want Kit to attend EAG so much I’d send him multiple emails, I can send these myself; if instead I think the costs of ‘pushing it’ to whatever social tie we have outweigh the increased likelihood of another email prodding him to EAG, I definitely do not want it being done ostensibly ‘on my behalf’ without asking—and especially without telling—me. (The same concerns apply to my implicit endorsement of whatever this email actually says).
[This paragraph is mistaken, and remains just so people can follow the thread of discussion] The worry with ‘rolling deadlines’ is if the deadline isn’t really a deadline for those in the earlier waves. The threat of missing out is scares them to commit early to help you, but after the ‘sham deadline’ passes, the mask drops, and you are happy for them to confirm etc. Although often just akrasia or poor organisation, people may have good reason for waiting if they are weighing up other ways to spend their time, and there’s an (admittedly remote) risk getting them to commit to tickets earlier than they need to deprives them of other opportunities. I confess I’m still not entirely clear what the rolling deadlines entailed, so please disregard if it is inapposite to what EAG’s deadlines represented.
I think the ‘looking through the attendee database’ also sails too close to the wind. I think the impression that evokes is something like, “I was checking our list of attendees, and I suddenly realised you hadn’t got a ticket (!) Given your high status and reputation, I realised your non-attendance would be a great shame, so I thought I’d take the trouble to reach our personally”. What actually happened, I assume, is the list of non-ticket buying attendees are pulled via a query on 1-2 Booleans from the database, a stock email is constructed, and a mail merge is performed.
These less than wholly candid approaches weren’t necessary: one could have sent a final reminder without anyone’s name—if one thought social proof was really key, one could have asked the nominators if they were happy for this email to be sent, or prodded the nominators to reach out to the nominees, module suggestions or even an email template. One could genuinely pre-commit to treating early deadlines as deadlines and making this clear, or simply urge people to sign up earlier to help the logistics. “Our records show” or similar is strictly more accurate than “I was looking through our database”.
I agree there is likely a trade off between candour and efficacy: the alternatives are probably less persuasive, entail more overhead, or both. I think this should be unsurprising on reflection—to whatever degree marketing is subterfuge, or trying to encourage as much ‘buying’ as possible, good marketing strategies can be hindered by frank honesty of the objective merits. Yet I aver one should take candour as all-but-lexically prior to efficacy concerns, as this is much consonant with EA norms (whatever exactly they are).
It is a common refrain to object to overblown empirical claims about (e.g.) how many lives you can save for a dollar, and to insist it is important to see how the world really works to understand how to best improve it. I think the sample principles should apply to our interactions with one another: groups shouldn’t ‘oversell’ their impact, and we should not mislead other EAs into our own designs. We should counter-signal many marketing gimmicks in the same way we (try to) countersignal shoddy empirical work.
There is both a commons problem and an increasingly common problem. The costs of increasing marketing and other behaviours (one of the other commonly remarked upon is how frequently EAG posts were shared to all EA related fb groups) are external to the group itself, who are likely much more sensitive to their own efficacy. They will have a skewed impression of the true exchange between these goods: I got the impression—correct me if I’m wrong—that EAG was at times struggling to secure the anticipated attendance, and in such situations high-handed and often unobserved restraint are unappealing. There have also been deeply regrettable behaviours of a particular EA org which will likely be described on this forum soon. Although I stress these are far, far more egregious, they are not a million miles away from stuff mentioned by Kit above.
Relying on all officers for EA orgs to have the resilience of Penelope refuting endless suitors in fealty to the ideal of extremely honest communication is perhaps utopian. Inculcating a general norm across the community to view this stuff poorly may work better. I’d suggest that marketing techniques mentioned by Kit are not used in future by anyone (plus maybe other behaviours—Kit mentioned these were ‘highlights’). I would also recommend caution and circumspection before adopting anything that even treads into the penumbra of the duplicitous—Caesar’s wife principles would be good to internalize. I hope to encourage the wider EA ecosystem to uphold an ethos along these lines, and robustly challenge mistakes—as, happily, Kit exemplified above.
Agree with most of what you said here. But I had a different interpretation of the facts with respect to the “via EAG” issue than you did.
Your impression is that:
if I recommended (e.g.) Kit to EAG and he doesn’t reply a couple of times, he gets an email with ‘greetings from Greg’ or similar in the subject heading
My impression is that “Greg Lewis (via EAG)” would appear in the “from” line. (In the way that email clients often replace the sender’s email address with their name.
If I understand correctly then the practice strikes me as much more likely to deceive a recipient.
It’d be helpful if you could clear this up. If I was confused and you actually just put “Greetings from FirstName LastName” in the subject line or some such, I’d have a substantially weaker reaction.
Thanks for the note. I’ve responded to some aspects of it below.
1) I’m not sending it, 2) none of the content is written by me, 3) I’m not asked whether I consent to this message being sent ‘on my behalf’, and 4) I’m not told it happens unless the recipient gets back to me.
I’ve updated away from sending messages of this type in the future. But, I do think you’re representing the decision as a clear violation whereas I think it’s less clear.
I think we disagree on two things: 1) does the third email cause people to think that you send it and 2) what did people consent to when filling out the nomination form.
With regards to 1), I don’t think there’s any realistic risk that nominees walked away from the third email thinking that the nominator sent it. They might wonder whether this is the case initially, but I think it’s pretty clear that the email was a template send by EA Global.
With regards to 2)
I think the relevant question seems to be what nominators expected would happen after entering someone’s contact information.
I think it’s reasonable to expect that we wouldn’t attempt to cause the recipient to think the email came directly from you. It would be a clear breach if the email address, name, and copy all appeared to be sent directly from you. However, I also think it would be unreasonable to expect that we wouldn’t mention you at all in the email. For example, if the body of the email said that [fname] [lname] nominated you, that seems uncontroversial to me.
The relevant question is where in between those extremes is OK and where is not OK. My current sense is that email body mentions are OK, and subject line mentions are probably OK, but other tactics are not OK unless we explicitly asked for consent before doing it. Do you have a different take?
The worry with ‘rolling deadlines’ is if the deadline isn’t really a deadline for those in the earlier waves. The threat of missing out is scares them to commit early to help you, but after the ‘sham deadline’ passes, the mask drops, and you are happy for them to confirm etc. Although often just akrasia or poor organisation, people may have good reason for waiting if they are weighing up other ways to spend their time, and there’s an (admittedly remote) risk getting them to commit to tickets earlier than they need to deprives them of other opportunities. I confess I’m still not entirely clear what the rolling deadlines entailed, so please disregard if it is inapposite to what EAG’s deadlines represented.
This worry doesn’t seem to apply to the expedited application review version of the rolling deadline. That is, if the deadline is one to apply and hear back quick then attendees can simply not apply for that deadline if they need additional information.
Yet I aver one should take candour as all-but-lexically prior to efficacy concerns, as this is much consonant with EA norms (whatever exactly they are).
Does this claim entail that one should always choose candor over efficacy? If so, that would seem to me to be a very difficult claim to justify.
Kerry, many thanks for your reply. On the matters you remark upon:
The email ‘from X via EAG’
Re. the risk to ‘mistaken identity of sender’, I think a lot of this depends on whether people read the message body or not. I doubt I’m the only person who deletes emails based on the top-line of subject, sender, etc. Perhaps savvier people would realize the ‘X via Y (and with Y’s email address)’ always means a sort of mass-mailing approach that X didn’t have a huge amount to do with, but I doubt that applies to everyone. It doesn’t seem crazy to interpret this as ‘Y is sending this email from X to me’ before they read the message body. If they just delete the email before doing so, it seems likely they will maintain this impression.
Re. Nominator consent, I agree that if you recommend X to ‘pitch’ at Y, I don’t think one can be too aghast to find X uses your recommendation as part of their pitch—I agree mentioning it in the message body or the subject is fine, and also agree the other approach you say is inappropriate is inappropriate.
I still think what actually happened falls on the wrong side of the line. The problem is not so much ‘where do you use X’s name in the pitch’, but the manner of its use. If I nominate Kit to go to EAG, it just isn’t the case that the pitch for EAG is sent ‘from me via EAG’ - especially in the present case where I have no hand in the content of the pitch email. It is not being sent from me in any sense. I think uses along these lines should demand explicit consent.
Rolling deadlines
Sounds fine to me. Forgive my misunderstanding.
Candour/efficacy trade-off
Yet I aver one should take candour as all-but-lexically prior to efficacy concerns, as this is much consonant with EA norms (whatever exactly they are).
Does this claim entail that one should always choose candor over efficacy? If so, that would seem to me to be a very difficult claim to justify.
Not always (hence the ‘all but’ lexical priority) but something like, ‘barring very exceptional circumstances’. I think having this sort of high bar is justifiable on grounds of community norms and overall brand equity: judging from Kit’s remarks, this behaviour has considerably damaged his trust in CEA; judging by the number of upvotes, he may not be the only one.
Naturally, one may worry about how representative this is of overall opinion. What happened ex post is not always the best steer on what was wise ex ante, but if you know how many extra attendees were marshalled by this sort of email, that could be helpful information.
I offer an analogy to one of my interests—mental health law. In the UK (and many places elsewhere) there is a huge emphasis on ‘the least restrictive option’. Out of the variety of coercive actions that might be appropriate in for a person with mental health issues, one should use whatever is the least restrictive and has the least impact on personal freedom. This is pretty much lexically prior to other issues.
I am sure there are many occasions where the least restrictive option is not the best. One may be justifiably confident that the least restrictive option is unlikely to succeed, and early escalation to a more restrictive option would give better outcomes. One may also think that a less restrictive option may be acceptable, yet give chronically worse outcomes compared to a more restrictive one. Yet I think the law is right to uphold this principle even conditioned on consequentialism which sees no non-instrumental value in personal freedom: the risks (realized many times historically) about the overuse and misuse of psychiatric detention and coercion recommend considerable circumspection and reluctance in their present application, and the costs of a rule obliging the least restrictive option are justified by the reduction in risk of similar incidents happening prospectively.
There are going to be occasions more generally in EA where candour is inappropriate (e.g. information hazards). Yet when it comes to marketing and other aspects of intra-EA communication, I think there should be a similar drive towards picking the ‘most candid option’: that, out of the communication content and approaches available, one should select the one that has the lowest chance of misleading or misunderstanding. Although I am sure the alternatives I suggested above would have proven less effective marketing, I am similarly sure the benefits of better preserving commons of mutual trust and a brand equity of extremely high epistemic standards is outweigh them.
The relevant question is where in between those extremes is OK and where is not OK. My current sense is that email body mentions are OK, and subject line mentions are probably OK, but other tactics are not OK unless we explicitly asked for consent before doing it. Do you have a different take?
My read is that this is correct, with the additional caveat that it depends on the wording of the mentions in the body and the subject line. Saying “X nominated you” is fine; implying something stronger probably wouldn’t be.
[Edited for some corrections and conciseness.]
I was unfortunately unable to go to EAG this year due to work commitments. By all accounts I missed out—additionally, I had less exposure to the EAG marketing than others—I mostly ignored the promotional material as I knew I was unavailable.
I confess I find these practices pretty shady, and I am unpleasantly surprised that EAG made what I view to be a fairly large error of judgement on appropriate marketing tactics. (I am pleasantly unsurprised in the straightforward and open manner with which this criticism has been received). On the issues raised by Kit above.
If I recommended (e.g.) Kit to EAG and he doesn’t reply a couple of times, he gets an email ‘from Greg via EAG’, despite: 1) I’m not sending it, 2) none of the content is written by me, 3) I’m not asked whether I consent to this message being sent ‘on my behalf’, and 4) I’m not told it happens unless the recipient gets back to me.
Although uncharitable, this looks like ventriloquism or arrogation—and such an impression may well occur in cases where do not read the body of the message. Perhaps the most accurate account is: ‘Greg’s social tie with Kit is leveraged (without Greg’s knowledge and consent) in a misleading subject line to get Kit to click on the last ditch sales pitch’, which I think should be avoided.
Especially given in this case Kit is receiving emails he did not solicit on Greg’s say so. I might think Kit might value knowing about the opportunity, but I might also have a sufficiently high view of his powers of judgement that he can decide after the first email whether he’s interested or not. When he gets a third such email, ostensibly with my approbation and/or involvement, he might start feeling irritation towards me. If I really want Kit to attend EAG so much I’d send him multiple emails, I can send these myself; if instead I think the costs of ‘pushing it’ to whatever social tie we have outweigh the increased likelihood of another email prodding him to EAG, I definitely do not want it being done ostensibly ‘on my behalf’ without asking—and especially without telling—me. (The same concerns apply to my implicit endorsement of whatever this email actually says).
[This paragraph is mistaken, and remains just so people can follow the thread of discussion] The worry with ‘rolling deadlines’ is if the deadline isn’t really a deadline for those in the earlier waves. The threat of missing out is scares them to commit early to help you, but after the ‘sham deadline’ passes, the mask drops, and you are happy for them to confirm etc. Although often just akrasia or poor organisation, people may have good reason for waiting if they are weighing up other ways to spend their time, and there’s an (admittedly remote) risk getting them to commit to tickets earlier than they need to deprives them of other opportunities. I confess I’m still not entirely clear what the rolling deadlines entailed, so please disregard if it is inapposite to what EAG’s deadlines represented.
I think the ‘looking through the attendee database’ also sails too close to the wind. I think the impression that evokes is something like, “I was checking our list of attendees, and I suddenly realised you hadn’t got a ticket (!) Given your high status and reputation, I realised your non-attendance would be a great shame, so I thought I’d take the trouble to reach our personally”. What actually happened, I assume, is the list of non-ticket buying attendees are pulled via a query on 1-2 Booleans from the database, a stock email is constructed, and a mail merge is performed.
These less than wholly candid approaches weren’t necessary: one could have sent a final reminder without anyone’s name—if one thought social proof was really key, one could have asked the nominators if they were happy for this email to be sent, or prodded the nominators to reach out to the nominees, module suggestions or even an email template. One could genuinely pre-commit to treating early deadlines as deadlines and making this clear, or simply urge people to sign up earlier to help the logistics. “Our records show” or similar is strictly more accurate than “I was looking through our database”.
I agree there is likely a trade off between candour and efficacy: the alternatives are probably less persuasive, entail more overhead, or both. I think this should be unsurprising on reflection—to whatever degree marketing is subterfuge, or trying to encourage as much ‘buying’ as possible, good marketing strategies can be hindered by frank honesty of the objective merits. Yet I aver one should take candour as all-but-lexically prior to efficacy concerns, as this is much consonant with EA norms (whatever exactly they are).
It is a common refrain to object to overblown empirical claims about (e.g.) how many lives you can save for a dollar, and to insist it is important to see how the world really works to understand how to best improve it. I think the sample principles should apply to our interactions with one another: groups shouldn’t ‘oversell’ their impact, and we should not mislead other EAs into our own designs. We should counter-signal many marketing gimmicks in the same way we (try to) countersignal shoddy empirical work.
There is both a commons problem and an increasingly common problem. The costs of increasing marketing and other behaviours (one of the other commonly remarked upon is how frequently EAG posts were shared to all EA related fb groups) are external to the group itself, who are likely much more sensitive to their own efficacy. They will have a skewed impression of the true exchange between these goods: I got the impression—correct me if I’m wrong—that EAG was at times struggling to secure the anticipated attendance, and in such situations high-handed and often unobserved restraint are unappealing. There have also been deeply regrettable behaviours of a particular EA org which will likely be described on this forum soon. Although I stress these are far, far more egregious, they are not a million miles away from stuff mentioned by Kit above.
Relying on all officers for EA orgs to have the resilience of Penelope refuting endless suitors in fealty to the ideal of extremely honest communication is perhaps utopian. Inculcating a general norm across the community to view this stuff poorly may work better. I’d suggest that marketing techniques mentioned by Kit are not used in future by anyone (plus maybe other behaviours—Kit mentioned these were ‘highlights’). I would also recommend caution and circumspection before adopting anything that even treads into the penumbra of the duplicitous—Caesar’s wife principles would be good to internalize. I hope to encourage the wider EA ecosystem to uphold an ethos along these lines, and robustly challenge mistakes—as, happily, Kit exemplified above.
Agree with most of what you said here. But I had a different interpretation of the facts with respect to the “via EAG” issue than you did.
Your impression is that:
My impression is that “Greg Lewis (via EAG)” would appear in the “from” line. (In the way that email clients often replace the sender’s email address with their name.
If I understand correctly then the practice strikes me as much more likely to deceive a recipient.
@Kerry_Vaughan:
It’d be helpful if you could clear this up. If I was confused and you actually just put “Greetings from FirstName LastName” in the subject line or some such, I’d have a substantially weaker reaction.
The third email has the sender name of “[fname] [lname] via EAG” but with hello@eaglobal.org as the email address.
Thanks. That’s what I thought.
Thanks for the correction, Howie and Kerry—I’ll edit my original comment.
Hey Greg,
Thanks for the note. I’ve responded to some aspects of it below.
I’ve updated away from sending messages of this type in the future. But, I do think you’re representing the decision as a clear violation whereas I think it’s less clear.
I think we disagree on two things: 1) does the third email cause people to think that you send it and 2) what did people consent to when filling out the nomination form.
With regards to 1), I don’t think there’s any realistic risk that nominees walked away from the third email thinking that the nominator sent it. They might wonder whether this is the case initially, but I think it’s pretty clear that the email was a template send by EA Global.
With regards to 2)
I think the relevant question seems to be what nominators expected would happen after entering someone’s contact information.
I think it’s reasonable to expect that we wouldn’t attempt to cause the recipient to think the email came directly from you. It would be a clear breach if the email address, name, and copy all appeared to be sent directly from you. However, I also think it would be unreasonable to expect that we wouldn’t mention you at all in the email. For example, if the body of the email said that [fname] [lname] nominated you, that seems uncontroversial to me.
The relevant question is where in between those extremes is OK and where is not OK. My current sense is that email body mentions are OK, and subject line mentions are probably OK, but other tactics are not OK unless we explicitly asked for consent before doing it. Do you have a different take?
This worry doesn’t seem to apply to the expedited application review version of the rolling deadline. That is, if the deadline is one to apply and hear back quick then attendees can simply not apply for that deadline if they need additional information.
Does this claim entail that one should always choose candor over efficacy? If so, that would seem to me to be a very difficult claim to justify.
Kerry, many thanks for your reply. On the matters you remark upon:
The email ‘from X via EAG’
Re. the risk to ‘mistaken identity of sender’, I think a lot of this depends on whether people read the message body or not. I doubt I’m the only person who deletes emails based on the top-line of subject, sender, etc. Perhaps savvier people would realize the ‘X via Y (and with Y’s email address)’ always means a sort of mass-mailing approach that X didn’t have a huge amount to do with, but I doubt that applies to everyone. It doesn’t seem crazy to interpret this as ‘Y is sending this email from X to me’ before they read the message body. If they just delete the email before doing so, it seems likely they will maintain this impression.
Re. Nominator consent, I agree that if you recommend X to ‘pitch’ at Y, I don’t think one can be too aghast to find X uses your recommendation as part of their pitch—I agree mentioning it in the message body or the subject is fine, and also agree the other approach you say is inappropriate is inappropriate.
I still think what actually happened falls on the wrong side of the line. The problem is not so much ‘where do you use X’s name in the pitch’, but the manner of its use. If I nominate Kit to go to EAG, it just isn’t the case that the pitch for EAG is sent ‘from me via EAG’ - especially in the present case where I have no hand in the content of the pitch email. It is not being sent from me in any sense. I think uses along these lines should demand explicit consent.
Rolling deadlines
Sounds fine to me. Forgive my misunderstanding.
Candour/efficacy trade-off
Not always (hence the ‘all but’ lexical priority) but something like, ‘barring very exceptional circumstances’. I think having this sort of high bar is justifiable on grounds of community norms and overall brand equity: judging from Kit’s remarks, this behaviour has considerably damaged his trust in CEA; judging by the number of upvotes, he may not be the only one.
Naturally, one may worry about how representative this is of overall opinion. What happened ex post is not always the best steer on what was wise ex ante, but if you know how many extra attendees were marshalled by this sort of email, that could be helpful information.
I offer an analogy to one of my interests—mental health law. In the UK (and many places elsewhere) there is a huge emphasis on ‘the least restrictive option’. Out of the variety of coercive actions that might be appropriate in for a person with mental health issues, one should use whatever is the least restrictive and has the least impact on personal freedom. This is pretty much lexically prior to other issues.
I am sure there are many occasions where the least restrictive option is not the best. One may be justifiably confident that the least restrictive option is unlikely to succeed, and early escalation to a more restrictive option would give better outcomes. One may also think that a less restrictive option may be acceptable, yet give chronically worse outcomes compared to a more restrictive one. Yet I think the law is right to uphold this principle even conditioned on consequentialism which sees no non-instrumental value in personal freedom: the risks (realized many times historically) about the overuse and misuse of psychiatric detention and coercion recommend considerable circumspection and reluctance in their present application, and the costs of a rule obliging the least restrictive option are justified by the reduction in risk of similar incidents happening prospectively.
There are going to be occasions more generally in EA where candour is inappropriate (e.g. information hazards). Yet when it comes to marketing and other aspects of intra-EA communication, I think there should be a similar drive towards picking the ‘most candid option’: that, out of the communication content and approaches available, one should select the one that has the lowest chance of misleading or misunderstanding. Although I am sure the alternatives I suggested above would have proven less effective marketing, I am similarly sure the benefits of better preserving commons of mutual trust and a brand equity of extremely high epistemic standards is outweigh them.
My read is that this is correct, with the additional caveat that it depends on the wording of the mentions in the body and the subject line. Saying “X nominated you” is fine; implying something stronger probably wouldn’t be.