If you try to send something privately to thousands of people there’s a pretty good chance it will get leaked, especially if it is as newsworthy as the stuff around FTX was.
Is the legal status of unintentionally public things better than explicitly public things, such that people would have been able to speak more freely in the kind of large but not public communications system you are envisioning? (Pretty sure no, but not a lawyer)
In general, I think the status quo of reaching EAs by posting publicly on the Forum is a good one:
When you make a system that attempts to classify which people are EA enough to receive your communication it’s likely you will miss a lot of people who arguably should be included. This risks both that they’ll be people you needed to communicate with and and they’ll feel left out.
Your ‘private’ group will likely not actually be very private, since the sort of criteria you’re floating include a very large number of people.
While transparency isn’t as important to EAs as it was 10 years ago, there are still a lot of benefits to it and I think our culture of talking publicly is really valuable.
I think that if private channels would lead to less sharing, they’d be net bad.
I’d predict that they would lead to more sharing in total. There’s a lot of information currently shared either not at all or in tiny groups—I’d be hoping for more of this to be shared more broadly.
Like, if we could only post public messages in my organization, QURI, we would probably post some more things publicly, but it would also be a pain, and we’d probably communicate much less with each other.
I think organizations having internal content makes lots of sense. But the EA community is not an organization, and I don’t think the analogy works very well?
I think the biggest place where it breaks down is that there is no clear definition of membership, but there are also issues with people not feeling like they’re part of a coherent entity which could have internal-only information.
the EA community is not an organization, and I don’t think the analogy works very well?
It’s definitely not one single entity with super clear delineations, but I think there are some sizeable clusters within the professional EA community (in my mind, mainly funders, EA community organizers, research organizations) that do work fairly closely together
Maybe one sign is that I think there are a bunch of “EA Bureaucracy” roles where it’s fairly easy to transfer from one to another, even though they are in technically different organizations.
This seems similar to me to larger organizations.
The finance team at Google arguably doesn’t have much in common with the IT department. But I think it’s still useful they have some private communication channels that cover both.
If you try to send something privately to thousands of people there’s a pretty good chance it will get leaked, especially if it is as newsworthy as the stuff around FTX was.
Is the legal status of unintentionally public things better than explicitly public things, such that people would have been able to speak more freely in the kind of large but not public communications system you are envisioning? (Pretty sure no, but not a lawyer)
In general, I think the status quo of reaching EAs by posting publicly on the Forum is a good one:
When you make a system that attempts to classify which people are EA enough to receive your communication it’s likely you will miss a lot of people who arguably should be included. This risks both that they’ll be people you needed to communicate with and and they’ll feel left out.
Your ‘private’ group will likely not actually be very private, since the sort of criteria you’re floating include a very large number of people.
While transparency isn’t as important to EAs as it was 10 years ago, there are still a lot of benefits to it and I think our culture of talking publicly is really valuable.
(Copying a comment I made on the original post.)
I think that if private channels would lead to less sharing, they’d be net bad.
I’d predict that they would lead to more sharing in total. There’s a lot of information currently shared either not at all or in tiny groups—I’d be hoping for more of this to be shared more broadly.
Like, if we could only post public messages in my organization, QURI, we would probably post some more things publicly, but it would also be a pain, and we’d probably communicate much less with each other.
I think organizations having internal content makes lots of sense. But the EA community is not an organization, and I don’t think the analogy works very well?
I think the biggest place where it breaks down is that there is no clear definition of membership, but there are also issues with people not feeling like they’re part of a coherent entity which could have internal-only information.
It’s definitely not one single entity with super clear delineations, but I think there are some sizeable clusters within the professional EA community (in my mind, mainly funders, EA community organizers, research organizations) that do work fairly closely together
Maybe one sign is that I think there are a bunch of “EA Bureaucracy” roles where it’s fairly easy to transfer from one to another, even though they are in technically different organizations.
This seems similar to me to larger organizations.
The finance team at Google arguably doesn’t have much in common with the IT department. But I think it’s still useful they have some private communication channels that cover both.