Am interested to hear why you think the public investigation is “obviously” net negative. You can make a strong argument for net negativity, but I’m not sure it would meet the “obvious” bar in this kind of complex situation There are plenty potential positives and negatives with varying wieghtings IMO. Just a quick list I made up in a couple of minutes (missed heaps)
Potential Positives - Post like Rockwell’s with good discussions about shifting EA norms - Individual EA orgs look at their own policies and make positive changers - Likelihood of higher level institutional change to help prevent these kinds of issues - Encouragement for other whistleblowers - Increased sense and confidence from the community that EA is more serious about addressing these kind of workplace issues. - Sense of “public justice” for potential victims
Potential Negatives - More negative press for EA (which I haven’t seen yet) - Reducing morale of EA people in general, causing lower productivity or even people leaving the movement. - Shame and “cancelling” potential within EA for Nonlinear staff (even those who may not have done much wrong) and even potential complainants - Risks of fast public “justice” being less fair than a proper investigative process. - Lightcone time (Although even if it wasn’t public, someone would have to put in this kind of time counterfactually anyway)
Just a few like I said, not even necessarily the most important
Post like Rockwell’s with good discussions about shifting EA norms
I think I agreed with the things in that post, but I felt like it’s a bit missing the mark if one key takeaway is that this has a lot to do with movement norms. I feel like the issue is less about norms and more about character? I feel like that about many things. Even if you have great norms, specific people will find ways to ignore them selectively with good-sounding justifications or otherwise make a mess out of them.
Thanks Lukas I agree. I just quickly made a list of potential positives and negatives, to illustrate the point that e situation was complex and that it wasn’t obvious to me that the pubic investigation here was net negative. I didn’t mean to say that was a “key takeaway”.
- More negative press for EA (which I haven’t seen yet) - Reducing morale of EA people in general, causing lower productivity or even people leaving the movement.
My sense is that these two can easily go the other way.
If you try to keep all your worries about bad actors a secret you basically count on their bad actions never becoming public. But if they do become public at a later date (which seems fairly likely because bad actors usually don’t become more wise and sane with age, and, if they aren’t opposed, they get more resources and thus more opportunities to create harm and scandals), then the resulting PR fallout is even bigger. I mean, in the case of SBF, it would have been good for the EA brand if there were more public complaints about SBF early on and then EAs could refer to them and say “see, we didn’t fully trust him, we weren’t blindly promoting him”.
Keeping silent about bad actors can easily decrease morale because many people who interacted with bad actors will have become distrustful of them and worry about the average character/integrity of EAs. Then they see these bad actors giving talks at EAGs, going on podcast interviews, and so on. That can easily give rise to thoughts/emotions like “man, EA is just not my tribe anymore, they just give a podium to whomever is somewhat productive, doesn’t matter if they’re good people or not.”
Good point, I agree that second order effects like this make the situation even more complex and can even make a seemingly negative effect net positive in the long run.
Then they see these bad actors giving talks at EAGs, going on podcast interviews, and so on.
????????? This seems like evidence of failure of investigations (or followup effort after investigations), not failure of public exposes of such investigations.
Sorry, yeah, I didn’t make my reasoning fully transparent.
One worry is that most private investigations won’t create common knowledge/won’t be shared widely enough that they cause the targets of these investigations to be sufficiently prevented from participating in a community even if this is appropriate. It’s just difficult and has many drawbacks to share a private investigations with every possible EA organization, EAGx organizer, podcast host, community builder, etc.
My understanding is that this has actually happened to some extent in the case of NonLinear and in other somewhat similar cases (though I may be wrong!).
But you’re right, if private investigations are sufficiently compelling and sufficiently widely shared they will have almost the same effects. Though at some point, you may also wonder how different very widely shared private investigations are from public investigations. In some sense, the latter may be more fair because the person can read the accusations and defend themselves. (Also, frequent widely shared private investigations might contribute even more to a climate of fear, paranoia and witch hunts than public investigations.)
ETA: Just to be clear, I also agree that public investigations should be more of a “last resort” measure and not be taken lightly. I guess we disagree about where to draw this line.
Lightcone time (Although even if it wasn’t public, someone would have to put in this kind of time counterfactually anyway)
Maybe this is the crux? I think investigative time for public vs private accountability is extremely asymmetric.
I also expect public investigations/exposes to be more costly to a) bystanders and b) victims (in cases where there are clear identifiable victims[1]). Less importantly, misunderstandings are harder to retract in ways that make both sides save “face.”
I think there are some cases where airing out the problems are cathartic or otherwise beneficial to victims, but I expect those to be the minority. Most of the time reliving past cases of harm has a high chance of being a traumatic experience, or at minimum highly unpleasant.
I agree with you that it could be asymmetrical, but its not the crux for me.
Personally in this case I would weight “time spent on the investigation” as a pretty low downside/upside compared to many of the other positive/negatives I listed, but this is subjective and/or hard to measure.
I agree with it taking a lot of time (take your 500 hours).
I just don’t weight one person spending 500 hours as highly (although very important, as its 3 monthish work) as other potential positives/negatives. I don’t think its the crux for me of whether a public investigation is net positive/negative. I think its one factor but not necessarily the most important.
Factors I would potentially rate as more important in the discussion of whether this public investigation is worth it or not.
- Potential positives for multiple EA orgs improving practices and reducing harm in future. - Potential negatives for the org Nonlinear in question, their work and the ramifications for the people in it.
Your comparison is too local. Given the shortage of people with the capacity and ability to do investigations, if your standard becomes one of public investigation-by-default, the difference in practice isn’t Z public investigations for cases that look as bad ex anteas Nonlinear vs Z private investigations, it’s 1 public investigation for cases that look as bad ex ante as Nonlinear and 0 other investigations, vs Z private investigations.
The benefits of public investigations are visible whereas the opportunity cost of people not doing private investigations is invisible.
Am interested to hear why you think the public investigation is “obviously” net negative. You can make a strong argument for net negativity, but I’m not sure it would meet the “obvious” bar in this kind of complex situation There are plenty potential positives and negatives with varying wieghtings IMO. Just a quick list I made up in a couple of minutes (missed heaps)
Potential Positives
- Post like Rockwell’s with good discussions about shifting EA norms
- Individual EA orgs look at their own policies and make positive changers
- Likelihood of higher level institutional change to help prevent these kinds of issues
- Encouragement for other whistleblowers
- Increased sense and confidence from the community that EA is more serious about addressing these kind of workplace issues.
- Sense of “public justice” for potential victims
Potential Negatives
- More negative press for EA (which I haven’t seen yet)
- Reducing morale of EA people in general, causing lower productivity or even people leaving the movement.
- Shame and “cancelling” potential within EA for Nonlinear staff (even those who may not have done much wrong) and even potential complainants
- Risks of fast public “justice” being less fair than a proper investigative process.
- Lightcone time (Although even if it wasn’t public, someone would have to put in this kind of time counterfactually anyway)
Just a few like I said, not even necessarily the most important
I think I agreed with the things in that post, but I felt like it’s a bit missing the mark if one key takeaway is that this has a lot to do with movement norms. I feel like the issue is less about norms and more about character? I feel like that about many things. Even if you have great norms, specific people will find ways to ignore them selectively with good-sounding justifications or otherwise make a mess out of them.
Thanks Lukas I agree. I just quickly made a list of potential positives and negatives, to illustrate the point that e situation was complex and that it wasn’t obvious to me that the pubic investigation here was net negative. I didn’t mean to say that was a “key takeaway”.
My sense is that these two can easily go the other way.
If you try to keep all your worries about bad actors a secret you basically count on their bad actions never becoming public. But if they do become public at a later date (which seems fairly likely because bad actors usually don’t become more wise and sane with age, and, if they aren’t opposed, they get more resources and thus more opportunities to create harm and scandals), then the resulting PR fallout is even bigger. I mean, in the case of SBF, it would have been good for the EA brand if there were more public complaints about SBF early on and then EAs could refer to them and say “see, we didn’t fully trust him, we weren’t blindly promoting him”.
Keeping silent about bad actors can easily decrease morale because many people who interacted with bad actors will have become distrustful of them and worry about the average character/integrity of EAs. Then they see these bad actors giving talks at EAGs, going on podcast interviews, and so on. That can easily give rise to thoughts/emotions like “man, EA is just not my tribe anymore, they just give a podium to whomever is somewhat productive, doesn’t matter if they’re good people or not.”
Good point, I agree that second order effects like this make the situation even more complex and can even make a seemingly negative effect net positive in the long run.
????????? This seems like evidence of failure of investigations (or followup effort after investigations), not failure of public exposes of such investigations.
Sorry, yeah, I didn’t make my reasoning fully transparent.
One worry is that most private investigations won’t create common knowledge/won’t be shared widely enough that they cause the targets of these investigations to be sufficiently prevented from participating in a community even if this is appropriate. It’s just difficult and has many drawbacks to share a private investigations with every possible EA organization, EAGx organizer, podcast host, community builder, etc.
My understanding is that this has actually happened to some extent in the case of NonLinear and in other somewhat similar cases (though I may be wrong!).
But you’re right, if private investigations are sufficiently compelling and sufficiently widely shared they will have almost the same effects. Though at some point, you may also wonder how different very widely shared private investigations are from public investigations. In some sense, the latter may be more fair because the person can read the accusations and defend themselves. (Also, frequent widely shared private investigations might contribute even more to a climate of fear, paranoia and witch hunts than public investigations.)
ETA: Just to be clear, I also agree that public investigations should be more of a “last resort” measure and not be taken lightly. I guess we disagree about where to draw this line.
Yeah I think I agree with this.
Maybe this is the crux? I think investigative time for public vs private accountability is extremely asymmetric.
I also expect public investigations/exposes to be more costly to a) bystanders and b) victims (in cases where there are clear identifiable victims[1]). Less importantly, misunderstandings are harder to retract in ways that make both sides save “face.”
I think there are some cases where airing out the problems are cathartic or otherwise beneficial to victims, but I expect those to be the minority. Most of the time reliving past cases of harm has a high chance of being a traumatic experience, or at minimum highly unpleasant.
I agree with you that it could be asymmetrical, but its not the crux for me.
Personally in this case I would weight “time spent on the investigation” as a pretty low downside/upside compared to many of the other positive/negatives I listed, but this is subjective and/or hard to measure.
I’m sorry, this position just seems baffling tbh. How many public investigations have you done?
I agree with it taking a lot of time (take your 500 hours).
I just don’t weight one person spending 500 hours as highly (although very important, as its 3 monthish work) as other potential positives/negatives. I don’t think its the crux for me of whether a public investigation is net positive/negative. I think its one factor but not necessarily the most important.
Factors I would potentially rate as more important in the discussion of whether this public investigation is worth it or not.
- Potential positives for multiple EA orgs improving practices and reducing harm in future.
- Potential negatives for the org Nonlinear in question, their work and the ramifications for the people in it.
Your comparison is too local. Given the shortage of people with the capacity and ability to do investigations, if your standard becomes one of public investigation-by-default, the difference in practice isn’t Z public investigations for cases that look as bad ex ante as Nonlinear vs Z private investigations, it’s 1 public investigation for cases that look as bad ex ante as Nonlinear and 0 other investigations, vs Z private investigations.
The benefits of public investigations are visible whereas the opportunity cost of people not doing private investigations is invisible.
EDITED: I think it would have been useful to write this in the original comment.
Can you clarify?
Oops, I meant “this”, but autocorrect got me