I think you have misrepresented Holden’s argument:
Ironically, your letter disappointed me because the vitriol got in the way of good reasoning. A useful version of your letter would have tackled the question of whether it’s possible to be *both* honest and kind. Your letter implicitly assumed that you can’t do both, and left this assumption unchecked. I very much hope you don’t allow your passion to get in the way of good analysis in the rest of your work.
I do not think that Holden assumed that nice and honest feedback are mutually exclusive at all. Reading his interlocutors (e.g. Mark Petersen), he is reacting to people saying that any public negative feedback would be too demoralising for the staff. I agree that he is suggesting that charity workers need to man up and accept tough feedback—“your life’s work has been pointless” is going to hurt no matter how it’s phrased—but disagree that there is any implication that you can’t avoid being unnecessarily nasty in doing so.
If you had written this as a rebuttal piece—perhaps ‘Reasons to Avoid Unnecessarily Upsetting Crybabies’ - I might have upvoted it, despite the above. But as it is this article is unnecessarily passive aggressive. I do not think we should encourage people seeking the mantle of victimhood in order to criticise others.
Anyone with a long history of public comments is inevitably going to have some cringe material from a long time ago. I don’t think it is a good principle that people should trawl through blog posts from 13 years ago, on a different website, looking for something to demand a public apology for. If we start accepting posts like this then this entire forum could end up being nothing but such articles!
This is particularly the case here because I see little reason to think this reflects Holden’s current thinking; indeed his current organisation, OpenPhil, is generally extremely circumspect—to a fault, even. The context in which he was writing back in 2007 was very different. We had OvercomingBias, but this was before LessWrong, before GWWC, and before the rest of the EA movement. GiveWell was almost all there was—GiveWell, and an enormous philanthropy industry which treated any criticism as anathema. Staking out an extreme position early on can be a valuable exercise, to help people settle on the happy medium that I think we more or less have done so.
I think you have misrepresented Holden’s argument:
I do not think that Holden assumed that nice and honest feedback are mutually exclusive at all. Reading his interlocutors (e.g. Mark Petersen), he is reacting to people saying that any public negative feedback would be too demoralising for the staff. I agree that he is suggesting that charity workers need to man up and accept tough feedback—“your life’s work has been pointless” is going to hurt no matter how it’s phrased—but disagree that there is any implication that you can’t avoid being unnecessarily nasty in doing so.
If you had written this as a rebuttal piece—perhaps ‘Reasons to Avoid Unnecessarily Upsetting Crybabies’ - I might have upvoted it, despite the above. But as it is this article is unnecessarily passive aggressive. I do not think we should encourage people seeking the mantle of victimhood in order to criticise others.
Anyone with a long history of public comments is inevitably going to have some cringe material from a long time ago. I don’t think it is a good principle that people should trawl through blog posts from 13 years ago, on a different website, looking for something to demand a public apology for. If we start accepting posts like this then this entire forum could end up being nothing but such articles!
This is particularly the case here because I see little reason to think this reflects Holden’s current thinking; indeed his current organisation, OpenPhil, is generally extremely circumspect—to a fault, even. The context in which he was writing back in 2007 was very different. We had OvercomingBias, but this was before LessWrong, before GWWC, and before the rest of the EA movement. GiveWell was almost all there was—GiveWell, and an enormous philanthropy industry which treated any criticism as anathema. Staking out an extreme position early on can be a valuable exercise, to help people settle on the happy medium that I think we more or less have done so.