(1) I’m sorry to hear that you’ve found my writing too vague. There is always a tradeoff between time spent, breadth of issues covered, and detail/precision. The posts you hold up as more precise are on narrower topics; the posts you say are too vague are attempts to summarize/distill views I have (or changes of opinions I’ve had) that stem from a lot of different premises, many hard to articulate, but that are important enough that I’ve tried to give people an idea of what I’m thinking. In many cases their aim is to give people an idea of what factors we are and aren’t weighing, and to help people locate beliefs of ours they disagree (or might disagree) with, rather than to provide everything needed to evaluate our decisions (which I don’t consider feasible).
While I concede that these posts have had limited precision, I strongly disagree with this: “the vagueness is not a bug, from your perspective, it’s a corollary of trying to make your content really hard for people to take issue with.” That is not my intention. The primary goal of these posts has been to help people understand where I’m coming from and where the most likely points of disagreement are likely to lie. Perhaps they failed at this (I suspect different readers feel differently about this), but that was what they were aiming to do, and if I hadn’t thought they could do that, I wouldn’t have written them.
(2) I agree with all of your thoughts here except for the way you’ve characterized my comments. Is there a part of this essay that you thought was making a universal claim about transparency, as opposed to a claim about my own experience with it and how it has affected my own behavior and principles? The quote you provide does not seem to point this way.
(3) My definition of “public discourse” does not exclude benefits that come from fundraising/advocacy/promotion. It simply defines “public discourse” as writing whose focus is on truth-seeking rather than those things. This post, and any Open Phil blog post, would count as “public discourse” by my definition, and any fundraising benefits of these posts would count as benefits of public discourse.
I also did not claim that the reputational effects of openness are skewed negative. I believe that the reputational effects of our public discourse have been net positive. I believe that the reputational effects of less careful public discourse would be skewed negative, and that has implications for how time-consuming it is for us to engage, which in turn has implications for how much we engage.
(4) We have incurred few costs from public discourse, but we are trying to avoid risks that we perceive. As for “who gets the blame,” I didn’t intend to cover that topic one way or the other in this post. The intent of the post was to help people understand how and why my attitude toward public discourse has changed and what to expect from me in the future.
Thanks for the thoughts, Vipul! Responses follow.
(1) I’m sorry to hear that you’ve found my writing too vague. There is always a tradeoff between time spent, breadth of issues covered, and detail/precision. The posts you hold up as more precise are on narrower topics; the posts you say are too vague are attempts to summarize/distill views I have (or changes of opinions I’ve had) that stem from a lot of different premises, many hard to articulate, but that are important enough that I’ve tried to give people an idea of what I’m thinking. In many cases their aim is to give people an idea of what factors we are and aren’t weighing, and to help people locate beliefs of ours they disagree (or might disagree) with, rather than to provide everything needed to evaluate our decisions (which I don’t consider feasible).
While I concede that these posts have had limited precision, I strongly disagree with this: “the vagueness is not a bug, from your perspective, it’s a corollary of trying to make your content really hard for people to take issue with.” That is not my intention. The primary goal of these posts has been to help people understand where I’m coming from and where the most likely points of disagreement are likely to lie. Perhaps they failed at this (I suspect different readers feel differently about this), but that was what they were aiming to do, and if I hadn’t thought they could do that, I wouldn’t have written them.
(2) I agree with all of your thoughts here except for the way you’ve characterized my comments. Is there a part of this essay that you thought was making a universal claim about transparency, as opposed to a claim about my own experience with it and how it has affected my own behavior and principles? The quote you provide does not seem to point this way.
(3) My definition of “public discourse” does not exclude benefits that come from fundraising/advocacy/promotion. It simply defines “public discourse” as writing whose focus is on truth-seeking rather than those things. This post, and any Open Phil blog post, would count as “public discourse” by my definition, and any fundraising benefits of these posts would count as benefits of public discourse.
I also did not claim that the reputational effects of openness are skewed negative. I believe that the reputational effects of our public discourse have been net positive. I believe that the reputational effects of less careful public discourse would be skewed negative, and that has implications for how time-consuming it is for us to engage, which in turn has implications for how much we engage.
(4) We have incurred few costs from public discourse, but we are trying to avoid risks that we perceive. As for “who gets the blame,” I didn’t intend to cover that topic one way or the other in this post. The intent of the post was to help people understand how and why my attitude toward public discourse has changed and what to expect from me in the future.