Thinking about the idea of an “Evaluation Consent Policy” for charitable projects.
For example, for a certain charitable project I produce, I’d explicitly consent to allow anyone online, including friends and enemies, to candidly review it to their heart’s content. They’re free to use methods like LLMs to do this.
Such a policy can give limited consent. For example:
You can’t break laws when doing this evaluation
You can’t lie/cheat/steal to get information for this evaluation
Consent is only provided for under 3 years
Consent is only provided starting in 5 years
Consent is “contagious” or has a “share-alike provision”. Any writing that takes advantage of this policy, must itself have a consent policy that’s at least as permissive. If someone writes a really bad evaluation, they agree that you and others are correspondingly allowed to critique this evaluation.
The content must score less than 6⁄10 when run against Claude on a prompt roughly asking, “Is this piece written in a way that’s unnecessarily inflammatory?”
Consent can be limited to a certain group of people. Perhaps you reject certain inflammatory journalists, for example. (Though these might be the people least likely to care about getting your permission anyway)
This would work a lot like Creative Commons or Software Licenses. However, it would cover different territory, and (at this point at least) won’t be based on legal enforcement.
Criticisms:
“Why do we need this? People are already allowed to critique anything they want.”
While this is technically true, I think it would frequently break social norms. There are a lot of cases where people would get upset if their projects were provided any negative critique, even if it came with positive points. This would act as a signal that the owners might be particularly okay with critique. I think we live in a society that’s far from maximum-candidness, and it’s often difficult to tell where candidness would be accepted—so explicit communication could be useful.
“But couldn’t people who sign such a policy just attack evaluators anyway?”
I don’t think an explicit policy here will be a silver bullet, but I think it would help. I expect that a boss known for being cruel wouldn’t be trusted if they provided such a policy, but I imagine many other groups would be. Ideally there could be some common knowledge about which people/organizations fail to properly honor their policies. I don’t think this would work for Open Philanthropy that much (in the sense that effective altruists might expect OP to not complain publicly, but later not fund the writer’s future projects), but it could for many smaller orgs (that would have much less secretive power over public evaluators/writers)
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Anyway, I’m interested in thoughts by this community.
Thinking about the idea of an “Evaluation Consent Policy” for charitable projects.
For example, for a certain charitable project I produce, I’d explicitly consent to allow anyone online, including friends and enemies, to candidly review it to their heart’s content. They’re free to use methods like LLMs to do this.
Such a policy can give limited consent. For example:
You can’t break laws when doing this evaluation
You can’t lie/cheat/steal to get information for this evaluation
Consent is only provided for under 3 years
Consent is only provided starting in 5 years
Consent is “contagious” or has a “share-alike provision”. Any writing that takes advantage of this policy, must itself have a consent policy that’s at least as permissive. If someone writes a really bad evaluation, they agree that you and others are correspondingly allowed to critique this evaluation.
The content must score less than 6⁄10 when run against Claude on a prompt roughly asking, “Is this piece written in a way that’s unnecessarily inflammatory?”
Consent can be limited to a certain group of people. Perhaps you reject certain inflammatory journalists, for example. (Though these might be the people least likely to care about getting your permission anyway)
This would work a lot like Creative Commons or Software Licenses. However, it would cover different territory, and (at this point at least) won’t be based on legal enforcement.
Criticisms:
“Why do we need this? People are already allowed to critique anything they want.”
While this is technically true, I think it would frequently break social norms. There are a lot of cases where people would get upset if their projects were provided any negative critique, even if it came with positive points. This would act as a signal that the owners might be particularly okay with critique. I think we live in a society that’s far from maximum-candidness, and it’s often difficult to tell where candidness would be accepted—so explicit communication could be useful.
“But couldn’t people who sign such a policy just attack evaluators anyway?”
I don’t think an explicit policy here will be a silver bullet, but I think it would help. I expect that a boss known for being cruel wouldn’t be trusted if they provided such a policy, but I imagine many other groups would be. Ideally there could be some common knowledge about which people/organizations fail to properly honor their policies. I don’t think this would work for Open Philanthropy that much (in the sense that effective altruists might expect OP to not complain publicly, but later not fund the writer’s future projects), but it could for many smaller orgs (that would have much less secretive power over public evaluators/writers)
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Anyway, I’m interested in thoughts by this community.