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 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.