I’m not sure what I think of this particular suggestion yet. I want to mention that I have principles that pull in two opposite directions—the large part of me that is strongly pro transparency, honesty and openness, and also the smaller (but still important!) part of me that is against disclaimers.
I think Stefan is basically correct, and perhaps we should distinguish between Disclaimers (where I largely agree with Robin’s critique) and Disclosure (which I think is very important). For example, suppose a doctor were writing an article about how Amigdelogen can treat infection.
Disclaimers:
Obviously, I’m not saying Amigdelogen is the only drug that can treat infection. Also, I’m not saying it can treat cancer. And infection is not the only problem; world hunger is bad too. Also you shouldn’t spend 100% of your money on Amigdelogen. And just because we have Amigdelogen doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful about washing your hands.
This is unnecessary because no reasonable person would assume you were making any of these claims. Additionally, as Robin points out, by making these disclosures you add pressure for others to make them too.
Disclosure:
I received a $5,000 payment from the manufacturer of Amigdelogen for writing this article, and hope to impress their hot sales rep.
This is useful information, because readers would reasonably assume you were unbiased, and this lets them more accurately evaluate how much weight to put on your claim, given that as non-experts they do not have the expertise to directly evaluate the evidence.
My current read is that the Fund is currently abiding by such disclosure norms, but that you were asking for repeated disclaimers. Like, it might make more sense in one place on the EA LTF Fund page for it to say what the disclosure policy is, and then for the Fund to continue to abide by that disclosure policy. This is different to repeatedly saying at the end of the writeups (4 times per year) “not only is it our public policy to disclose such info, but I want to repeat that we definitely disclosed all the things above and didn’t hide anything”. Which is a request that I think is important to have a schelling fence to not simply make every time people request it. Pretty sure the potential list of disclaimers it could be reasonable to make is longer than this round’s writeup, which is already 19k words.
I’m not sure Robin Hanson’s argument against disclaimers is relevant here. It seems to have more to do with disclaimers (whose purpose is to defeat possible implicatures) being stylistically objectionable and communicationally inefficient in blog posts and similar contexts (cf. his support of Classic style of writing). The grant writeup context seems quite different. (As a side-note, I’m not sure Hanson is right; he frequently argues people misattribute views to him, and I think that could in part be avoided if he included more disclaimers.)
Note that these considerations are not relevant to Michelle’s comment above; her arguments are quite different.
I’m not sure what I think of this particular suggestion yet. I want to mention that I have principles that pull in two opposite directions—the large part of me that is strongly pro transparency, honesty and openness, and also the smaller (but still important!) part of me that is against disclaimers.
I think Stefan is basically correct, and perhaps we should distinguish between Disclaimers (where I largely agree with Robin’s critique) and Disclosure (which I think is very important). For example, suppose a doctor were writing an article about how Amigdelogen can treat infection.
Disclaimers:
Obviously, I’m not saying Amigdelogen is the only drug that can treat infection. Also, I’m not saying it can treat cancer. And infection is not the only problem; world hunger is bad too. Also you shouldn’t spend 100% of your money on Amigdelogen. And just because we have Amigdelogen doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful about washing your hands.
This is unnecessary because no reasonable person would assume you were making any of these claims. Additionally, as Robin points out, by making these disclosures you add pressure for others to make them too.
Disclosure:
I received a $5,000 payment from the manufacturer of Amigdelogen for writing this article, and hope to impress their hot sales rep.
This is useful information, because readers would reasonably assume you were unbiased, and this lets them more accurately evaluate how much weight to put on your claim, given that as non-experts they do not have the expertise to directly evaluate the evidence.
My current read is that the Fund is currently abiding by such disclosure norms, but that you were asking for repeated disclaimers. Like, it might make more sense in one place on the EA LTF Fund page for it to say what the disclosure policy is, and then for the Fund to continue to abide by that disclosure policy. This is different to repeatedly saying at the end of the writeups (4 times per year) “not only is it our public policy to disclose such info, but I want to repeat that we definitely disclosed all the things above and didn’t hide anything”. Which is a request that I think is important to have a schelling fence to not simply make every time people request it. Pretty sure the potential list of disclaimers it could be reasonable to make is longer than this round’s writeup, which is already 19k words.
I’m not sure Robin Hanson’s argument against disclaimers is relevant here. It seems to have more to do with disclaimers (whose purpose is to defeat possible implicatures) being stylistically objectionable and communicationally inefficient in blog posts and similar contexts (cf. his support of Classic style of writing). The grant writeup context seems quite different. (As a side-note, I’m not sure Hanson is right; he frequently argues people misattribute views to him, and I think that could in part be avoided if he included more disclaimers.)
Note that these considerations are not relevant to Michelle’s comment above; her arguments are quite different.