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.
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.