Let me separately register that I think it reflects poorly on the authors of the post that they didn’t pause to acknowledge this commonsense point. Zealous legalism is pretty unpleasant to be around, and I would hate for this sort of thing (more witch-hunt than whistleblowing, IMO) to become a standard part of EA culture.
Whistleblowers should try to expose wrongdoing, not legalistic “gotchas”. Headline references to “breaking the law” strongly implicate that one is talking about serious, morally justified laws (like against murder, fraud, etc.). But I recall reading that there are so many obscure and arbitrary laws on the books that probably anyone has unwitting broken dozens of them without ever realizing it. So if you’re going to go after people for doing nothing wrong but for making themselves vulnerable to legalistic coercion, I think it’s important to be clear on this distinction.
At least in the US, these rules are reasonable and exist for a reason—see my top-level post for an explanation of how non-EA organizations have done shady stuff with buying an insider’s books. Although I don’t like the tone of the original post, I also don’t think it is appropriate to imply that rules against private gain for charitable trustees are “obscure and arbitrary”—material on that topic is, or at least should be, in Being a Trustee/Director 101.
My read of the article is that it is alleging incompetence and/or lack of regard for laws rather than alleging wrongdoing. I’m a trustee of a number of UK charities myself and the Charity Commission sends all trustees basic information on manging conflicts of interest and data protection. They are by no means “obscure and arbitrary” and I think we as a community need to be extra careful to comply with the letter and spirit of every law given the recent FTX events.
Let me separately register that I think it reflects poorly on the authors of the post that they didn’t pause to acknowledge this commonsense point. Zealous legalism is pretty unpleasant to be around, and I would hate for this sort of thing (more witch-hunt than whistleblowing, IMO) to become a standard part of EA culture.
Whistleblowers should try to expose wrongdoing, not legalistic “gotchas”. Headline references to “breaking the law” strongly implicate that one is talking about serious, morally justified laws (like against murder, fraud, etc.). But I recall reading that there are so many obscure and arbitrary laws on the books that probably anyone has unwitting broken dozens of them without ever realizing it. So if you’re going to go after people for doing nothing wrong but for making themselves vulnerable to legalistic coercion, I think it’s important to be clear on this distinction.
At least in the US, these rules are reasonable and exist for a reason—see my top-level post for an explanation of how non-EA organizations have done shady stuff with buying an insider’s books. Although I don’t like the tone of the original post, I also don’t think it is appropriate to imply that rules against private gain for charitable trustees are “obscure and arbitrary”—material on that topic is, or at least should be, in Being a Trustee/Director 101.
My read of the article is that it is alleging incompetence and/or lack of regard for laws rather than alleging wrongdoing. I’m a trustee of a number of UK charities myself and the Charity Commission sends all trustees basic information on manging conflicts of interest and data protection. They are by no means “obscure and arbitrary” and I think we as a community need to be extra careful to comply with the letter and spirit of every law given the recent FTX events.