Note – I will make separate responses as my original comment was too long for the system to handle. This is part one of my comments.
Some of you will be tempted to just downvote this comment because I wrote it. I want you to think about whether that’s the best thing to do for the sake of transparency. If this post gets significant downvotes and is invisible, I’ll be happy to post it as a separate EA Forum post. If that’s what you want, please go ahead and downvote.
I’m very proud of and happy with the work that Intentional Insights does to promote rational thinking, wise decision-making, and effective giving to a broad audience. To be clear, we focus on spreading rational thinking in all areas of life, not only charitable giving, with the goal of raising the sanity waterline and ameliorating x-risk. We place articles in major venues, appear on radio and television, and spread our content through a wide variety of other channels. It is not an exaggeration to say we have reached millions of people through our work. Now, we don’t have a large resource base. We have a miniscule budget of just over 40K, mostly provided by my wife and I. It’s thanks to our broad network of volunteers of over 50 people that we can make this difference. A few of these volunteers also provide some contract work, and I’m really happy they can do so. Thanks to all the folks who helped make this happen!
Let’s go on to the content of the post. I appreciate the constructive part of the criticism of the authors of this post, and think some of points are quite correct.
1) I do think we made some mistakes with our social media, especially on Facebook, and we are working to address that.
2) We have instituted a Conflict of Interest policy to provide clear guidance to anyone in an official position with InIn to disclose their affiliations when making public statements about the organization.
3) Unfortunately, the person I asked to update our social media impact after Jacy Reese thoughtfully pointed out the “shares” vs. “likes” issue forgot to update the EA Impact document, although she did update the others. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, and it’s now fixed.
4) While I was careful to avoid explicitly soliciting upvotes, my actions were intended to bring information about opportunities to upvote to supporters of Intentional Insights. I should have been clear about that, and I noted that later in the FB post.
5) I am at heart a trusting person. I trusted the figures from TLYCS, and why shouldn’t I? They are the experts on their figures. I’m glad that this situation led to a revision of the figures, as I want to know the actual impact that we are making, and not have a false and inflated belief about our impact.
In part two, I will describe what aspects of the post I disagreed with.
P. S. Based on past experience, I learned that back and forth online about this will not be productive, so I did not plan to engage with, and if someone wants to learn more about my perspective, they are welcome to contact me privately by my email.
I have down-voted this comment because I think as a community we should strongly disapprove of this sort of threat
“If this post gets significant downvotes and is invisible, I’ll be happy to post it as a separate EA Forum post. If that’s what you want, please go ahead and downvote.”
The criticisms have been raised in an exceptionally transparent manner: Jeff made a public post on Facebook, and Gleb was tagged in to participate. Within that thread the plans to make this document were explained and even linked to: anybody (Gleb included) could read and contribute to that document while it was under construction.
This statement—that all criticism in the form of down-voting is likely to be driven by personal animosity or an attempt to hide negative feedback—is both baseless and appears to be an attempt to ward off all criticism. While I feel that Gleb is currently in a very difficult position, this framing of the conversation makes engagement impossible, hence downvoting.
Note – I will make separate responses as my original comment was too long for the system to handle. This is part one of my comments.
Some of you will be tempted to just downvote this comment because I wrote it. I want you to think about whether that’s the best thing to do for the sake of transparency. If this post gets significant downvotes and is invisible, I’ll be happy to post it as a separate EA Forum post. If that’s what you want, please go ahead and downvote.
I’m very proud of and happy with the work that Intentional Insights does to promote rational thinking, wise decision-making, and effective giving to a broad audience. To be clear, we focus on spreading rational thinking in all areas of life, not only charitable giving, with the goal of raising the sanity waterline and ameliorating x-risk. We place articles in major venues, appear on radio and television, and spread our content through a wide variety of other channels. It is not an exaggeration to say we have reached millions of people through our work. Now, we don’t have a large resource base. We have a miniscule budget of just over 40K, mostly provided by my wife and I. It’s thanks to our broad network of volunteers of over 50 people that we can make this difference. A few of these volunteers also provide some contract work, and I’m really happy they can do so. Thanks to all the folks who helped make this happen!
Let’s go on to the content of the post. I appreciate the constructive part of the criticism of the authors of this post, and think some of points are quite correct.
1) I do think we made some mistakes with our social media, especially on Facebook, and we are working to address that.
2) We have instituted a Conflict of Interest policy to provide clear guidance to anyone in an official position with InIn to disclose their affiliations when making public statements about the organization.
3) Unfortunately, the person I asked to update our social media impact after Jacy Reese thoughtfully pointed out the “shares” vs. “likes” issue forgot to update the EA Impact document, although she did update the others. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, and it’s now fixed.
4) While I was careful to avoid explicitly soliciting upvotes, my actions were intended to bring information about opportunities to upvote to supporters of Intentional Insights. I should have been clear about that, and I noted that later in the FB post.
5) I am at heart a trusting person. I trusted the figures from TLYCS, and why shouldn’t I? They are the experts on their figures. I’m glad that this situation led to a revision of the figures, as I want to know the actual impact that we are making, and not have a false and inflated belief about our impact.
In part two, I will describe what aspects of the post I disagreed with.
P. S. Based on past experience, I learned that back and forth online about this will not be productive, so I did not plan to engage with, and if someone wants to learn more about my perspective, they are welcome to contact me privately by my email.
I have down-voted this comment because I think as a community we should strongly disapprove of this sort of threat
The criticisms have been raised in an exceptionally transparent manner: Jeff made a public post on Facebook, and Gleb was tagged in to participate. Within that thread the plans to make this document were explained and even linked to: anybody (Gleb included) could read and contribute to that document while it was under construction.
This statement—that all criticism in the form of down-voting is likely to be driven by personal animosity or an attempt to hide negative feedback—is both baseless and appears to be an attempt to ward off all criticism. While I feel that Gleb is currently in a very difficult position, this framing of the conversation makes engagement impossible, hence downvoting.