(4) Repeatedly shifting the locus of blame to external critics rather than owning up to responsibility: You keep alluding to costs of publishing your work more clearly, yet there are no examples of how such costs have negatively affected Open Phil, or the specific monetary, emotional, or other damages you have incurred (this is related to (1), where I am critical of your frustrating vagueness). This vagueness makes your claims of the risks to openness frustrating to evaluate in your case.
As a more general claim about being public, though, your claim strikes me as misguided. The main obstacle to writing up stuff for the public is just that writing stuff up takes a lot of time, but this is mostly a limitation on the part of the writer. The writer doesn’t have a clear picture of what he or she wants to say. The writer does not have a clear idea of how to convey the idea clearly. The writer lacks the time and resources to put things together. Failure to do this is a failure on the part of the writer. Blaming readers for continually trying to misinterpret their writing, or carrying out witch hunts, is simply failing to take responsibility.
A more humble framing would highlight this fact, and some of its difficult implications, e.g.: “As somebody in charge of a foundation that is spending ~$100 million a year and recommending tens of millions in donations by others, I need to be very clear in my thinking and reasoning. Unfortunately, I have found that it’s often easier and cheaper to spend millions of dollars in grants than write up a clear public-facing document on the reasons for doing so. I’m very committed to writing publicly where it is possible (and you can see evidence of this in all the grant writeups for Open Phil and the detailed charity evaluations for GiveWell). However, there are many cases where writing up my reasoning is more daunting than signing off on millions of dollars in money. I hope that we are able to figure out better approaches to reducing the costs of writing things up.”
(4) Repeatedly shifting the locus of blame to external critics rather than owning up to responsibility: You keep alluding to costs of publishing your work more clearly, yet there are no examples of how such costs have negatively affected Open Phil, or the specific monetary, emotional, or other damages you have incurred (this is related to (1), where I am critical of your frustrating vagueness). This vagueness makes your claims of the risks to openness frustrating to evaluate in your case.
As a more general claim about being public, though, your claim strikes me as misguided. The main obstacle to writing up stuff for the public is just that writing stuff up takes a lot of time, but this is mostly a limitation on the part of the writer. The writer doesn’t have a clear picture of what he or she wants to say. The writer does not have a clear idea of how to convey the idea clearly. The writer lacks the time and resources to put things together. Failure to do this is a failure on the part of the writer. Blaming readers for continually trying to misinterpret their writing, or carrying out witch hunts, is simply failing to take responsibility.
A more humble framing would highlight this fact, and some of its difficult implications, e.g.: “As somebody in charge of a foundation that is spending ~$100 million a year and recommending tens of millions in donations by others, I need to be very clear in my thinking and reasoning. Unfortunately, I have found that it’s often easier and cheaper to spend millions of dollars in grants than write up a clear public-facing document on the reasons for doing so. I’m very committed to writing publicly where it is possible (and you can see evidence of this in all the grant writeups for Open Phil and the detailed charity evaluations for GiveWell). However, there are many cases where writing up my reasoning is more daunting than signing off on millions of dollars in money. I hope that we are able to figure out better approaches to reducing the costs of writing things up.”