I haven’t seen any quotes but Joey saying he had the same experience, Zoe confirming that she didn’t misremember this part, and none of the reviewers speaking up saying “This isn’t how things happened,” made me update that maybe one or more people actually did say the thing I considered cartoonish.
And because people are never cartoon villains in real life, I’m now trying to understand what their real motivations were.
For instance, one way I thought of how the comment could make sense is if someone brought it up because they are close to Zoe and care most about her future career and how she’ll be doing, and they already happen to have a (for me very surprising) negative view of EA funders and are pessimistic about bringing about change. In that scenario, it makes sense to voice the concerns for Zoe’s sake.
Initially, I simply assumed that the comment must be coming from the people who have strong objections to (parts of) Zoe’s paper. And I was thinking “If you think the paper is really unfair, why not focus on that? Why express a concern about funding that only makes EA look even worse?”
So my new model is that the people who gave Zoe this sort of advice may not have been defending EA at all, but rather shared Zoe’s criticisms or were, if anything, more pessimistic than Zoe.
(I’m probably wrong about the above hypothesis, but then I’m back to being confused.)
It might be useful to hear from the reviewers themselves as to the thought process here. As mentioned above, I don’t really understand why anyone would advise the authors not to publish this. For comparison, I have published several critiques of the research of several Open Phil-funded EA orgs while working at an open phil-funded EA org. In my experience, I think if the arguments are good, it doesn’t really matter if you disagree with something Open Phil funds. Perhaps that is not true in this domain for some reason?
(In my words: Some reviewers like and support Zoe and Luke but are worried about the sustainability of their funding situation because of the model that these reviewers have of some big funders. So these reviewers are well-intentioned and supportive in their own way. I just hope that their worries are unwarranted.)
I think a third hypothesis is that they really think funding whatever we are funding at the moment is more important than continuing to check whether we are right; and don’t see the problems with this attitude (perhaps because the problem is more visible from a movement-wide, longterm perspective rather than an immediate local one?).
I’m a bit lost, are you saying that the quotes you have seen were or were not as cartoon villainish as you thought?
I haven’t seen any quotes but Joey saying he had the same experience, Zoe confirming that she didn’t misremember this part, and none of the reviewers speaking up saying “This isn’t how things happened,” made me update that maybe one or more people actually did say the thing I considered cartoonish.
And because people are never cartoon villains in real life, I’m now trying to understand what their real motivations were.
For instance, one way I thought of how the comment could make sense is if someone brought it up because they are close to Zoe and care most about her future career and how she’ll be doing, and they already happen to have a (for me very surprising) negative view of EA funders and are pessimistic about bringing about change. In that scenario, it makes sense to voice the concerns for Zoe’s sake.
Initially, I simply assumed that the comment must be coming from the people who have strong objections to (parts of) Zoe’s paper. And I was thinking “If you think the paper is really unfair, why not focus on that? Why express a concern about funding that only makes EA look even worse?”
So my new model is that the people who gave Zoe this sort of advice may not have been defending EA at all, but rather shared Zoe’s criticisms or were, if anything, more pessimistic than Zoe.
(I’m probably wrong about the above hypothesis, but then I’m back to being confused.)
It might be useful to hear from the reviewers themselves as to the thought process here. As mentioned above, I don’t really understand why anyone would advise the authors not to publish this. For comparison, I have published several critiques of the research of several Open Phil-funded EA orgs while working at an open phil-funded EA org. In my experience, I think if the arguments are good, it doesn’t really matter if you disagree with something Open Phil funds. Perhaps that is not true in this domain for some reason?
This is also how I interpreted the situation.
(In my words: Some reviewers like and support Zoe and Luke but are worried about the sustainability of their funding situation because of the model that these reviewers have of some big funders. So these reviewers are well-intentioned and supportive in their own way. I just hope that their worries are unwarranted.)
I think a third hypothesis is that they really think funding whatever we are funding at the moment is more important than continuing to check whether we are right; and don’t see the problems with this attitude (perhaps because the problem is more visible from a movement-wide, longterm perspective rather than an immediate local one?).