I think I have a handful of critiques I want to make about EA that I am fairly certain would negatively impact my career to voice, even though I believe they are good faith criticisms, and I think engaging with them would strengthen EA.
This seems suboptimal, particularly if more people feel like that. But it does seem fixable: I’m up for receiving things like this anonymously at this link, waiting for a random period, rewording them using GPT-3, and publishing them. Not sure what proportion of that problem that would fix, though.
It’s not anonymous, it records the name associated with your google account. (Of course you can just create a google account with a fake name, but then you can also just make an EA forum account with a fake name and post here.)
I believe this is just the confusing way that Google handles anonymous forms. It states the account you are currently using, but then has a parenthetical indicating that the information won’t be shared.
The issue was that we were letting people upload files as submissions. If you uploaded a file, your email or name would be shared (and we had a note explaining this in the description of the question that offered the upload option). Nearly no one was using the upload option, and if you didn’t upload anything, your information wasn’t shared.
Unfortunately, Google’s super confusing UI says: “The name and photo associated with your Google account will be recorded when you upload files and submit this form. Your email is not part of your response,” which makes it seem like the form is never anonymous. (See below.)
I removed the upload option today to reduce confusion, and hope people will just create a pseudonym or fake Google account if they want to share something that’s not publicly accessible on the internet via link anonymously.
What the form looked like:
I don’t remember what the wording of the description actually was, but it was along these lines.
Here’s what the settings for the test form look like:
Yeah, I think that some percentage of this problem is fixable, but I think one issue is that there are lots of important critiques that might be made from a place of privileged information, and filling in a form will be deanonymizing to some extent. I think this is especially true when an actor’s actions diverge from stated values/goals — I think many of the most important critiques of EA that need to be made come from actions diverging from stated values/goals, so this seems hard to navigate. E.g. I think your recent criminal justice reform post is a pretty good example of the kind of critique I’m thinking of, but there are ones like it based on actions that aren’t public or at least aren’t written up anywhere that seem really important to have shared.
Related to this, I feel like a lot of people in EA lately have expressed a sentiment that they have general concerns like the one I outlined here, but can’t point to specific situations. One explanation for this is that their concerns aren’t justified, but another is that people are unwilling to talk about the specifics.
That being said, I think the anonymous submission form is really helpful, and glad it exists.
For what its worth, I’ve privately been contacted more about about this particular critique resonating with people than any other in this post by a large degree, which suggests to me that many people share this view.
This seems suboptimal, particularly if more people feel like that. But it does seem fixable: I’m up for receiving things like this anonymously at this link, waiting for a random period, rewording them using GPT-3, and publishing them. Not sure what proportion of that problem that would fix, though.
The criticism contest has an anonymous submission form too.
It’s not anonymous, it records the name associated with your google account. (Of course you can just create a google account with a fake name, but then you can also just make an EA forum account with a fake name and post here.)
I believe this is just the confusing way that Google handles anonymous forms. It states the account you are currently using, but then has a parenthetical indicating that the information won’t be shared.
Think that changed after Aleks commented
The issue was that we were letting people upload files as submissions. If you uploaded a file, your email or name would be shared (and we had a note explaining this in the description of the question that offered the upload option). Nearly no one was using the upload option, and if you didn’t upload anything, your information wasn’t shared.
Unfortunately, Google’s super confusing UI says: “The name and photo associated with your Google account will be recorded when you upload files and submit this form. Your email is not part of your response,” which makes it seem like the form is never anonymous. (See below.)
I removed the upload option today to reduce confusion, and hope people will just create a pseudonym or fake Google account if they want to share something that’s not publicly accessible on the internet via link anonymously.
What the form looked like:
Here’s what the settings for the test form look like:
It previously said: “Your name and profile picture will be shared” (or something like that), but this seems to be fixed now.
Yeah I asked em to fix this
Yeah, I think that some percentage of this problem is fixable, but I think one issue is that there are lots of important critiques that might be made from a place of privileged information, and filling in a form will be deanonymizing to some extent. I think this is especially true when an actor’s actions diverge from stated values/goals — I think many of the most important critiques of EA that need to be made come from actions diverging from stated values/goals, so this seems hard to navigate. E.g. I think your recent criminal justice reform post is a pretty good example of the kind of critique I’m thinking of, but there are ones like it based on actions that aren’t public or at least aren’t written up anywhere that seem really important to have shared.
Related to this, I feel like a lot of people in EA lately have expressed a sentiment that they have general concerns like the one I outlined here, but can’t point to specific situations. One explanation for this is that their concerns aren’t justified, but another is that people are unwilling to talk about the specifics.
That being said, I think the anonymous submission form is really helpful, and glad it exists.
For what its worth, I’ve privately been contacted more about about this particular critique resonating with people than any other in this post by a large degree, which suggests to me that many people share this view.
There are multiple examples of EA orgs behaving badly I can’t really discuss in public. The community really does not ask for much ‘openness’.