It seems worth acknowledging a couple of points that are in tension:
Asking difficult questions probably does affect your ability to get jobs and grants. It’s not obvious to me that this is always negative, but it does take a lot more energy to frame negative comments in a way that they aren’t taken wrongly. Sometimes being anonymous is just easier
EA as a community could be better at providing ways to gather around useful critiques. The fact that all have to be posts seems non-ideal. If people could comment on and agree/disagree on grants all listen on the forum (for instance) that might be better (or worse).
EA as a community is unusually open with its grants and pretty unpolitical in hiring. I would guess that most funders do not publish easily searchable lists of their grants. I think many communties have huge amounts of backchannels and politics about who gets the good jobs. I think we are doing well on the former and okay on the latter.
It seems worth acknowledging a couple of points that are in tension:
Asking difficult questions probably does affect your ability to get jobs and grants. It’s not obvious to me that this is always negative, but it does take a lot more energy to frame negative comments in a way that they aren’t taken wrongly. Sometimes being anonymous is just easier
EA as a community could be better at providing ways to gather around useful critiques. The fact that all have to be posts seems non-ideal. If people could comment on and agree/disagree on grants all listen on the forum (for instance) that might be better (or worse).
EA as a community is unusually open with its grants and pretty unpolitical in hiring. I would guess that most funders do not publish easily searchable lists of their grants. I think many communties have huge amounts of backchannels and politics about who gets the good jobs. I think we are doing well on the former and okay on the latter.
We could do better.