(2) Overstated connotations of expertise with respect to the value of transparency and openness:
“Regardless of the underlying reasons, we have put a lot of effort over a long period of time into public discourse, and have reaped very little of this particular kind of benefit (though we have reaped other benefits—more below). I’m aware that this claim may strike some as unlikely and/or disappointing, but it is my lived experience, and I think at this point it would be hard to argue that it is simply explained by a lack of effort or interest in public discourse.”
Your writing makes it appear like you’ve left no stone unturned to try every approach at transparency and confirmed that the masses are wanting. But digging into the facts suggests support for a much weaker conclusion. Which is: for the particular approach that GiveWell used and the particular kind of content that GiveWell shared, the people who responded in ways that made sense to you and were useful to you were restricted to a narrow pool. There is no good reason offered on why these findings would be general across any domains or expository approaches than the ones you’ve narrowly tried at GiveWell.
This doesn’t mean GiveWell or Open Phil is obligated to try new approaches—but it does suggest more humility in making claims about the broader value of transparency and openness.
There is a wealth of ways that people seek to make their work transparent. Public projects on GitHub make details about both their code evolution and contributor list available by default, without putting in any specific effort into it, because of the way the system is designed. This pays off to different extents for different kinds of projects; in some cases, there are a lot of issue reports and bugfixes from random strangers, in many others, nobody except the core contributors cares. In some, malicious folks find vulnerabilities in the code because it’s so open. If you ran a few projects on GitHub and observed something about how frequently strangers make valuable commits or file bug reports, it would not behoove you to then use that information to make broad claims about the value of putting projects on GitHub. Well, you seem to be doing the same based on a couple of things you ran (GiveWell, Open Phil).
Transparency/Semi-transparency/openness is a complex subject and a lot of its value comes from a wide variety of downstream effects that differentially apply in different contexts. Just a few of the considerations: precommitment (which gives more meaning to transparency, think research preregistration), transparent-by-definition processes and workflows (think tools like git on GitHub, automatically and transparently updated accounts ledgers such as those on blockchains), computability and pluggability (stuff that is in a computable format and can therefore be plugged into other datasets or analyses with minimal effort by others, e.g., the Open Philanthropy grants database and the International Aid Transparency Initiative (both of which were used by Issa in collating summary information about grant trends and patterns), donation logs (which I used to power the donations lists at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/)), integrity and consistency forced by transparency (basically your data has to check out if you are making it transparently available, e.g., when I moved all my contract work payments to https://contractwork.vipulnaik.com/ , I had to make sure the entire payment system was consistent), etc.
It seems like, at GiveWell, many of the key parts of transparency (precommitment, transparent-by-definition processes and workflows, computability and pluggability, integrity and consistency) are in minimal use. Given this rather abridged use case of transparency (which could be great for you), it really doesn’t make sense to argue broadly about the value of being transparent.
Here is what I’d consider a better way to frame this:
“At GiveWell, we made some of our reasoning and the output of our work transparent, and reaped a variety of benefits. However, we did not get widespread engagement from the general public for our work. Getting engagement from the general public was something we wanted and hoped to achieve but not the main focus of our work. We couldn’t figure out the right strategy for doing it, and have deprioritized it. I hope that others can benefit from what worked and didn’t work in our efforts to engage the public with our research, and come up with better strategies to engender public engagement. I should be clear that I am not making any broader claims about the value of transparency in contexts beyond ours.”
(2) Overstated connotations of expertise with respect to the value of transparency and openness:
“Regardless of the underlying reasons, we have put a lot of effort over a long period of time into public discourse, and have reaped very little of this particular kind of benefit (though we have reaped other benefits—more below). I’m aware that this claim may strike some as unlikely and/or disappointing, but it is my lived experience, and I think at this point it would be hard to argue that it is simply explained by a lack of effort or interest in public discourse.”
Your writing makes it appear like you’ve left no stone unturned to try every approach at transparency and confirmed that the masses are wanting. But digging into the facts suggests support for a much weaker conclusion. Which is: for the particular approach that GiveWell used and the particular kind of content that GiveWell shared, the people who responded in ways that made sense to you and were useful to you were restricted to a narrow pool. There is no good reason offered on why these findings would be general across any domains or expository approaches than the ones you’ve narrowly tried at GiveWell.
This doesn’t mean GiveWell or Open Phil is obligated to try new approaches—but it does suggest more humility in making claims about the broader value of transparency and openness.
There is a wealth of ways that people seek to make their work transparent. Public projects on GitHub make details about both their code evolution and contributor list available by default, without putting in any specific effort into it, because of the way the system is designed. This pays off to different extents for different kinds of projects; in some cases, there are a lot of issue reports and bugfixes from random strangers, in many others, nobody except the core contributors cares. In some, malicious folks find vulnerabilities in the code because it’s so open. If you ran a few projects on GitHub and observed something about how frequently strangers make valuable commits or file bug reports, it would not behoove you to then use that information to make broad claims about the value of putting projects on GitHub. Well, you seem to be doing the same based on a couple of things you ran (GiveWell, Open Phil).
Transparency/Semi-transparency/openness is a complex subject and a lot of its value comes from a wide variety of downstream effects that differentially apply in different contexts. Just a few of the considerations: precommitment (which gives more meaning to transparency, think research preregistration), transparent-by-definition processes and workflows (think tools like git on GitHub, automatically and transparently updated accounts ledgers such as those on blockchains), computability and pluggability (stuff that is in a computable format and can therefore be plugged into other datasets or analyses with minimal effort by others, e.g., the Open Philanthropy grants database and the International Aid Transparency Initiative (both of which were used by Issa in collating summary information about grant trends and patterns), donation logs (which I used to power the donations lists at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/)), integrity and consistency forced by transparency (basically your data has to check out if you are making it transparently available, e.g., when I moved all my contract work payments to https://contractwork.vipulnaik.com/ , I had to make sure the entire payment system was consistent), etc.
It seems like, at GiveWell, many of the key parts of transparency (precommitment, transparent-by-definition processes and workflows, computability and pluggability, integrity and consistency) are in minimal use. Given this rather abridged use case of transparency (which could be great for you), it really doesn’t make sense to argue broadly about the value of being transparent.
Here is what I’d consider a better way to frame this:
“At GiveWell, we made some of our reasoning and the output of our work transparent, and reaped a variety of benefits. However, we did not get widespread engagement from the general public for our work. Getting engagement from the general public was something we wanted and hoped to achieve but not the main focus of our work. We couldn’t figure out the right strategy for doing it, and have deprioritized it. I hope that others can benefit from what worked and didn’t work in our efforts to engage the public with our research, and come up with better strategies to engender public engagement. I should be clear that I am not making any broader claims about the value of transparency in contexts beyond ours.”