I suspect the reason InIn’s quality is low is because, given their reputation disadvantage, they cannot attract and motivate the best writers and volunteers. I strongly relate to your concerns about the damage that could be done if InIn does not improve. I have severely limited my own involvement with InIn because of the same things you describe. My largest time contribution by far has been in giving InIn feedback about reputation problems and general quality. A while back, I felt demoralized with the problems, myself, and decided to focus more on other things instead. That Gleb is getting so much attention for these problems right now has potential to be constructive.
Gleb can’t improve InIn until he really understands the problem that’s going on. I think this is why Intentional Insights has been resistant to change. I hope I provided enough insight in my comment about social status instincts for it to be possible for us all to overcome the inferential distance.
I’m glad to see that so many people have come together to give Gleb feedback on this. It’s not just me trying to get through to him by myself anymore. I think it’s possible for InIn to improve up to standards with enough feedback and a lot of work on Gleb’s part. I mean, that is a lot of work for Gleb, but given what I’ve seen of his interest in self-improvement and his level of dedication to InIn, I believe Gleb is willing to go through all of that and do whatever it takes.
Really understanding what has gone wrong with Intentional Insights is hard, and it will probably take him months. After he understands the problems better, he will need a new plan for the organization. All of that is a lot of work. It will take a lot of time.
I think Gleb is probably willing to do it. This is a man who has a tattoo of Intentional Insights on his forearm. Because I believe Gleb would probably do just about anything to make it work, I would like to suggest an intervention.
In other words, perhaps we should ask him to take a break from promoting Intentional Insights for a while in order to do a bunch of self-improvement, make his major updates and plan out a major version upgrade for Intentional Insights.
Perhaps I didn’t get the memo, but I don’t think we’ve tried organizing in order to demand specific constructive actions first before talking about shutting down Intentional Insights and/or driving Gleb out of the EA movement.
The world does need an org that promotes rationality to a broader audience… and rationalists aren’t exactly known for having super people skills… Since Gleb is so dedicated and is willing to work really hard, and since we’ve all finally organized in public to do something about this, maybe we aught to try using this new source of leverage to heave him onto the right track.
I have read your replies on various comment threads on this post. If you’ll forgive the summary, your view is that Tsipursky’s behaviour may arise from some non-malicious shortcomings he has, and that, with some help, these can be mitigated, thus leading InIn to behave better and do more good. In medicalese, I’m uncertain of the diagnosis, strongly doubt the efficacy of the proposed management plan, and I anticipate a bleak prognosis. As I recommend generally, I think your time and laudable energy is better spent elsewhere.
A lot of the subsequent discussion has looked at whether Tsipursky’s behaviour is malicious or not. I’d guess in large part it is not: deep incompetence combined with being self-serving and biased towards ones org to succeed probably explain most of it—regrettably, Tsipursky’s response to this post (e.g. trumped-up accusations against Jeff and Michelle, pre-emptive threats if his replies are downvoted, veiled hints at ‘wouldn’t it be bad if someone in my position started railing against EA’, etc.) seem to fit well with malice.
Yet this is fairly irrelevant. Tsipursky is multiply incompetant: at creating good content, at generating interest in his org (i.e. almost all of its social media reach is ilusory), at understanding the appropriate ambit for promotional efforts, at not making misleading statements, and at changing bad behaviour. I am confident that any EA I know in a similar position would not have performed as badly. I highly doubt this can all be traced back to a single easy-to-fix flaw. Furthermore, I understand multiple people approached Tsipursky multiple times about these issues; the post documents problems occurring over a number of months. The outside view is not favourable to yet further efforts.
In any case, InIn’s trajectory in the EA community is probably fairly set at this point. As I write this, InIn is banned from the FB group, CEA has officially disavowed it, InIn seems to have lost donors and prospective donations from EAs, and my barometer of ‘EA public opinion’ is that almost all EAs who know of InIn and Tsipursky have very adverse attitudes towards both. Given the understandable reticience of EAs towards corporate action like this, one can anticipate these decisions have considerable inertia. A nigh-Damascene conversion of Tsipursky and InIn would be required for these things to begin to move favourably to InIn again.
In light of all this, attempting to ‘reform InIn’ now seems almost as ill-starred as trying to reform a mismanaged version of homeopaths without borders: such a transformation is required to be surely worth starting afresh. The opportunity cost is also substantial as there are other better performing EA outreach orgs (i.e. all of them), which promise far greater returns on the margin for basically any return one migh be interested in. Please help them out instead.
I’m not completely sure what’s going on with Gleb, but I feel a great deal of concern for people with Asperger’s, and I think it made me overly sympathetic in this case. Thank you for this.
One thing to consider is that too much charity for Gleb is actively harmful for people with ASDs in the community.
If I am at a party of a trusted friend and know they’ve only invited people the trust, and someone hurts my feelings, I’m likely to ascribe it to a misunderstanding and talk it out with them. If I’m at a party where lots of people have been jerks to me before, and someone hurts my feelings, I’m likely to assume this person is a jerk too and withdraw.
By saying “I’m updating” and then committing the same problems again, Gleb is lessening the value of the words. He is teaching people it’s not worth correcting others, because they won’t change. This is most harmful to the people who most need the most direct feedback and the longest lead time to incorporate it.
Wow. More excellent arguments. More updates on my side. You’re on fire. I almost never meet people who can change my mind this much. I would like to add you as a friend.
I suspect the reason InIn’s quality is low is because, given their reputation disadvantage, they cannot attract and motivate the best writers and volunteers. I strongly relate to your concerns about the damage that could be done if InIn does not improve. I have severely limited my own involvement with InIn because of the same things you describe. My largest time contribution by far has been in giving InIn feedback about reputation problems and general quality. A while back, I felt demoralized with the problems, myself, and decided to focus more on other things instead. That Gleb is getting so much attention for these problems right now has potential to be constructive.
Gleb can’t improve InIn until he really understands the problem that’s going on. I think this is why Intentional Insights has been resistant to change. I hope I provided enough insight in my comment about social status instincts for it to be possible for us all to overcome the inferential distance.
I’m glad to see that so many people have come together to give Gleb feedback on this. It’s not just me trying to get through to him by myself anymore. I think it’s possible for InIn to improve up to standards with enough feedback and a lot of work on Gleb’s part. I mean, that is a lot of work for Gleb, but given what I’ve seen of his interest in self-improvement and his level of dedication to InIn, I believe Gleb is willing to go through all of that and do whatever it takes.
Really understanding what has gone wrong with Intentional Insights is hard, and it will probably take him months. After he understands the problems better, he will need a new plan for the organization. All of that is a lot of work. It will take a lot of time.
I think Gleb is probably willing to do it. This is a man who has a tattoo of Intentional Insights on his forearm. Because I believe Gleb would probably do just about anything to make it work, I would like to suggest an intervention.
In other words, perhaps we should ask him to take a break from promoting Intentional Insights for a while in order to do a bunch of self-improvement, make his major updates and plan out a major version upgrade for Intentional Insights.
Perhaps I didn’t get the memo, but I don’t think we’ve tried organizing in order to demand specific constructive actions first before talking about shutting down Intentional Insights and/or driving Gleb out of the EA movement.
The world does need an org that promotes rationality to a broader audience… and rationalists aren’t exactly known for having super people skills… Since Gleb is so dedicated and is willing to work really hard, and since we’ve all finally organized in public to do something about this, maybe we aught to try using this new source of leverage to heave him onto the right track.
Hello Kathy,
I have read your replies on various comment threads on this post. If you’ll forgive the summary, your view is that Tsipursky’s behaviour may arise from some non-malicious shortcomings he has, and that, with some help, these can be mitigated, thus leading InIn to behave better and do more good. In medicalese, I’m uncertain of the diagnosis, strongly doubt the efficacy of the proposed management plan, and I anticipate a bleak prognosis. As I recommend generally, I think your time and laudable energy is better spent elsewhere.
A lot of the subsequent discussion has looked at whether Tsipursky’s behaviour is malicious or not. I’d guess in large part it is not: deep incompetence combined with being self-serving and biased towards ones org to succeed probably explain most of it—regrettably, Tsipursky’s response to this post (e.g. trumped-up accusations against Jeff and Michelle, pre-emptive threats if his replies are downvoted, veiled hints at ‘wouldn’t it be bad if someone in my position started railing against EA’, etc.) seem to fit well with malice.
Yet this is fairly irrelevant. Tsipursky is multiply incompetant: at creating good content, at generating interest in his org (i.e. almost all of its social media reach is ilusory), at understanding the appropriate ambit for promotional efforts, at not making misleading statements, and at changing bad behaviour. I am confident that any EA I know in a similar position would not have performed as badly. I highly doubt this can all be traced back to a single easy-to-fix flaw. Furthermore, I understand multiple people approached Tsipursky multiple times about these issues; the post documents problems occurring over a number of months. The outside view is not favourable to yet further efforts.
In any case, InIn’s trajectory in the EA community is probably fairly set at this point. As I write this, InIn is banned from the FB group, CEA has officially disavowed it, InIn seems to have lost donors and prospective donations from EAs, and my barometer of ‘EA public opinion’ is that almost all EAs who know of InIn and Tsipursky have very adverse attitudes towards both. Given the understandable reticience of EAs towards corporate action like this, one can anticipate these decisions have considerable inertia. A nigh-Damascene conversion of Tsipursky and InIn would be required for these things to begin to move favourably to InIn again.
In light of all this, attempting to ‘reform InIn’ now seems almost as ill-starred as trying to reform a mismanaged version of homeopaths without borders: such a transformation is required to be surely worth starting afresh. The opportunity cost is also substantial as there are other better performing EA outreach orgs (i.e. all of them), which promise far greater returns on the margin for basically any return one migh be interested in. Please help them out instead.
I’m not completely sure what’s going on with Gleb, but I feel a great deal of concern for people with Asperger’s, and I think it made me overly sympathetic in this case. Thank you for this.
One thing to consider is that too much charity for Gleb is actively harmful for people with ASDs in the community.
If I am at a party of a trusted friend and know they’ve only invited people the trust, and someone hurts my feelings, I’m likely to ascribe it to a misunderstanding and talk it out with them. If I’m at a party where lots of people have been jerks to me before, and someone hurts my feelings, I’m likely to assume this person is a jerk too and withdraw.
By saying “I’m updating” and then committing the same problems again, Gleb is lessening the value of the words. He is teaching people it’s not worth correcting others, because they won’t change. This is most harmful to the people who most need the most direct feedback and the longest lead time to incorporate it.
Wow. More excellent arguments. More updates on my side. You’re on fire. I almost never meet people who can change my mind this much. I would like to add you as a friend.