The attitude in EA communities is “give an inch, fight a mile”. So I’ll choose to be less legible instead.
As a datapoint (which you can completely ignore), I feel like in the circles I travel in, I’ve heard a lot more criticism of OP that look more like “shady non-transparent group that makes huge decisions/mistakes without consulting anyone except a few Trusted People who all share the same opinions.”
There are certainly some cases in which the attack surface is increased when you’re fully open/transparent about reasoning.
But I do think it can be easy to underestimate the amount of reputational damage that OP (and you, by extension) take from being less legible/transparent. I think there’s a serious risk that many subgroups in EA will continue to feel more critical of OP as it becomes more clear that OP is not interested in explaining its reasoning to the broader community, becomes more insular, etc. I also suspect this will have a meaningful effect on how OP is perceived in non-EA circles. I don’t mean e/accs being like “OP are evil doomers who want to give our future to China”– I mean neutral third-parties who dispassionately try to form an impression of OP. When they encounter arguments like “well OP is just another shady billionaire-funded thing that is beholden to a very small group of people who end up deciding things in non-transparent and illegible ways, and those decisions sometimes produce pretty large-scale failures”, I expect that they will find these concerns pretty credible.
Caveating that not all of these concerns would go away with more transparency and that I do generally buy that more transparency will (in some cases) lead to a net increase on the attack surface. The tradeoffs here seem quite difficult.
But my own opinion is that OP has shifted too far in the “worry a lot about PR in the conventional sense” direction in ways that have not only led to less funding for important projects but also led to a corresponding reduction in reputation/status/prestige, both within and outside of EA circles.
As a datapoint (which you can completely ignore), I feel like in the circles I travel in, I’ve heard a lot more criticism of OP that look more like “shady non-transparent group that makes huge decisions/mistakes without consulting anyone except a few Trusted People who all share the same opinions.”
There are certainly some cases in which the attack surface is increased when you’re fully open/transparent about reasoning.
But I do think it can be easy to underestimate the amount of reputational damage that OP (and you, by extension) take from being less legible/transparent. I think there’s a serious risk that many subgroups in EA will continue to feel more critical of OP as it becomes more clear that OP is not interested in explaining its reasoning to the broader community, becomes more insular, etc. I also suspect this will have a meaningful effect on how OP is perceived in non-EA circles. I don’t mean e/accs being like “OP are evil doomers who want to give our future to China”– I mean neutral third-parties who dispassionately try to form an impression of OP. When they encounter arguments like “well OP is just another shady billionaire-funded thing that is beholden to a very small group of people who end up deciding things in non-transparent and illegible ways, and those decisions sometimes produce pretty large-scale failures”, I expect that they will find these concerns pretty credible.
Caveating that not all of these concerns would go away with more transparency and that I do generally buy that more transparency will (in some cases) lead to a net increase on the attack surface. The tradeoffs here seem quite difficult.
But my own opinion is that OP has shifted too far in the “worry a lot about PR in the conventional sense” direction in ways that have not only led to less funding for important projects but also led to a corresponding reduction in reputation/status/prestige, both within and outside of EA circles.