There may not have been extended discussions, but there was at least one more recent warning. “E.A. leadership” is a nebulous term, but there is a small annual invitation-only gathering of senior figures, and they have conducted detailed conversations about potential public-relations liabilities in a private Slack group.
Leaking private slack conversations to journalists is a 101 on how to destroy trust. The response to SBF and FTX betrayal shouldn’t be to further erode trust within the community.
EA should not have to learn every single group dynamic from first principles—the community might not survive such a thorough testing and re-learning of all social rules around discretion, trust and why its important to have private channels of communication that you can assume will not be leaked to journalists.
If the community ignores trust, networks and support for one another—then the community will not form, ideas will not be exchanged in earnest and everyone will be looking over their shoulder for who may leak or betray their confidence.
Destroying trust decimates communities—we’ve all found that with SBF. The response to that shouldn’t be further, even more personal and deep betrayals. I will now have to update against how open I am in discussions with other EAs—which is a shame as the intellectual freedom, generosity, honesty and subtlety are what I love about this community—but it seems I will have to consider “what may a journalist think of this if this person leaked it?” as a serious concern.
There may not have been extended discussions, but there was at least one more recent warning. “E.A. leadership” is a nebulous term, but there is a small annual invitation-only gathering of senior figures, and they have conducted detailed conversations about potential public-relations liabilities in a private Slack group.
I don’t know about others, but I find it deeply uncomfortable there’s an invite-only conference and a private slack channel where, amongst other things, reputational issues are discussed. For one, there’s something weird about, on the one hand, saying “we should act with honesty and integrity” and also “oh, we have secret meetings where we discuss if other people are going to make us look bad”.
I think its completely fine for invite-only slacks to exist and for them to discuss matters that they might not want leaked elsewhere. If they were plotting murders or were implicated in serious financial crime, or criminal enterprise, or other such awful unforgiveable acts, then yes I can see why we would want to send a clear signal that anything like that is beyond the pale and discretion no longer protects you. In that instance I think no one would object to breach of trust.
However, we aren’t discussing that scenario. This is a breach of trust, which erodes honest discussion in private channels. The more this is acceptable in EA circles, the less honesty of opinion you will get—and the more paranoia will set in.
Acting with honesty and integrity does not mean opening up every discussion to the world, or having an expectation that chats will leak in the event that you discuss “if other people are going to make us look bad”. Nevermind the difficulty that arises in then attempting to predict what else warrants leaks if that’s the bar you’ve set.
The thing that most keenly worries me about this is the lack of openness and accountability of this. We are a social movement, so of course we will have power dynamics and leadership. But with no transparency or accountability, how can anyone know how to make change?
I think its wrong to say there’s no transparency or accountability (this isn’t to say we should just assume all checks now are enough, but I don’t think we should conclude that none so far exist). Obviously for anything actually criminal then proper whistleblowing paths exist and should be used! At the moment, I think even checks like this discussion are far more effective than in most other communities because EA is still quite small, so it hasn’t got the issues of scale that other institutions or communities may experience.
On transparency: Transparency is a part of honesty, but has costs and I don’t think its at all clear in this instance that that cost was remotely required to be paid. Again, this will only cause future discussions to be slower, more guarded and less honest—the community response to this will similarly decide how much we should guard ourselves when talking with other EAs. As a side point: its also the case that this instance isn’t actual “transparency” but fed lines to a journalist, then selectively quoted and given back to us.
The cost of transparency in every discussion at a high-level of leadership (for example) is that the cost of new ideas becomes prohibitively high as everyone can pick you apart, weigh in, misrepresent or re-direct discussion entirely. Compare e.g. local council meetings with the public and those without, and decisions made in committee vs those made by individual founders. Again transparency is a part of honesty but I can put my trust in you—for example—without needing you to be transparent about every conversation you have about me. If, however, the norm is that we expect total transparency of information and constant leaks—then we should expect a community of paranoia, dishonest conversation and continuous misrepresentations of one another.
I think you may be assuming what I am calling for here is much more wide-ranging. There still doesn’t seem to be good justification for not knowing who is in the coordination forum or on these leadership slack channels. Making the structures that actually exist apparent to community members would probably not come at such a prohibitively high cost as you suggest
This strikes me as weirdly one-sided. You’re against leaking, but presumably, you’re in favour of whistleblowing—people being able to raise concerns about wrongdoing. Would you have objected to someone leaking/whisteblowing that e.g. SBF was misusing customer money? If someone had done so months ago, that could have saved billions, but it would have a breach of (SBF’s) trust.
The difference between leaking and whistleblowing is … I’m actually not sure. One is official, or something?
This fundamentally misunderstands norms around whistleblowing. For instance, UK legislation on whistleblowing does not allow you to just go to journalists for any and all issues—they have to be sufficiently serious. This isn’t just for “official” reasons but because it’s understood that trust within institutions is necessary for a functioning society/group/community/company and norms that encourage paranoia over leaks lead to non-honest conversations filtered through fears of leaks.
Even in the event that a crime is being committed, you are expected to first go to authorities, rather than journalists—to journalists only if you believe authorities won’t assist. In the SBF example I’d hope someone would have done precisely that. Moreso, to protect trust, whistleblowing is protected only for issues that warrant that level of trust breach—ie my comment is that this is disproportionate breach of trust, with long term effect on community norms.
Furthermore, whistleblowing on actual crimes is entirely different to leaking private messages about managing PR. And—again—is something one should do first to authorities—not necessarily to journalists!
Essentially you are eliding very serious whistleblowing of crimes to police or public bodies, to leaked screenshots to journalists of private chats about community responses.
I’d guess the distinction would be more ‘public interest disclosure’ rather than ‘officialness’ (after all, a lot of whistleblowing ends up in the media because of inadequacy in ‘formal’ channels). Or, with apologies to Yes Minister: “I give confidential briefings, you leak, he has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act”.
The question seems to be one of proportionality: investigative or undercover journalists often completely betray the trust and (reasonable) expectations of privacy of its subjects/targets, and this can ethically vary from reprehensible to laudable depending on the value of what it uncovers (compare paparrazzi to Panorama). Where this nets out for disclosing these slack group messages is unclear to me.
Even if you’re not concerned about leaks, the possibility of compelled disclosure in a lawsuit has to be considered. So if would be seriously damaging for information to show up in the New Yorker, then phone, in-person, and Inspector Gadget telegram should be the preferred method of communication anyway.
I definitely appreciate the point about trust, just wanted to add that people should consider the risks of involuntary disclosure through legal process (or hacking) before putting stuff in writing.
What’s stunning to me is the following:
Leaking private slack conversations to journalists is a 101 on how to destroy trust. The response to SBF and FTX betrayal shouldn’t be to further erode trust within the community.
EA should not have to learn every single group dynamic from first principles—the community might not survive such a thorough testing and re-learning of all social rules around discretion, trust and why its important to have private channels of communication that you can assume will not be leaked to journalists.
If the community ignores trust, networks and support for one another—then the community will not form, ideas will not be exchanged in earnest and everyone will be looking over their shoulder for who may leak or betray their confidence.
Destroying trust decimates communities—we’ve all found that with SBF. The response to that shouldn’t be further, even more personal and deep betrayals. I will now have to update against how open I am in discussions with other EAs—which is a shame as the intellectual freedom, generosity, honesty and subtlety are what I love about this community—but it seems I will have to consider “what may a journalist think of this if this person leaked it?” as a serious concern.
I don’t know about others, but I find it deeply uncomfortable there’s an invite-only conference and a private slack channel where, amongst other things, reputational issues are discussed. For one, there’s something weird about, on the one hand, saying “we should act with honesty and integrity” and also “oh, we have secret meetings where we discuss if other people are going to make us look bad”.
I think its completely fine for invite-only slacks to exist and for them to discuss matters that they might not want leaked elsewhere. If they were plotting murders or were implicated in serious financial crime, or criminal enterprise, or other such awful unforgiveable acts, then yes I can see why we would want to send a clear signal that anything like that is beyond the pale and discretion no longer protects you. In that instance I think no one would object to breach of trust.
However, we aren’t discussing that scenario. This is a breach of trust, which erodes honest discussion in private channels. The more this is acceptable in EA circles, the less honesty of opinion you will get—and the more paranoia will set in.
Acting with honesty and integrity does not mean opening up every discussion to the world, or having an expectation that chats will leak in the event that you discuss “if other people are going to make us look bad”. Nevermind the difficulty that arises in then attempting to predict what else warrants leaks if that’s the bar you’ve set.
The thing that most keenly worries me about this is the lack of openness and accountability of this. We are a social movement, so of course we will have power dynamics and leadership. But with no transparency or accountability, how can anyone know how to make change?
I think its wrong to say there’s no transparency or accountability (this isn’t to say we should just assume all checks now are enough, but I don’t think we should conclude that none so far exist). Obviously for anything actually criminal then proper whistleblowing paths exist and should be used! At the moment, I think even checks like this discussion are far more effective than in most other communities because EA is still quite small, so it hasn’t got the issues of scale that other institutions or communities may experience.
On transparency: Transparency is a part of honesty, but has costs and I don’t think its at all clear in this instance that that cost was remotely required to be paid. Again, this will only cause future discussions to be slower, more guarded and less honest—the community response to this will similarly decide how much we should guard ourselves when talking with other EAs. As a side point: its also the case that this instance isn’t actual “transparency” but fed lines to a journalist, then selectively quoted and given back to us.
The cost of transparency in every discussion at a high-level of leadership (for example) is that the cost of new ideas becomes prohibitively high as everyone can pick you apart, weigh in, misrepresent or re-direct discussion entirely. Compare e.g. local council meetings with the public and those without, and decisions made in committee vs those made by individual founders. Again transparency is a part of honesty but I can put my trust in you—for example—without needing you to be transparent about every conversation you have about me. If, however, the norm is that we expect total transparency of information and constant leaks—then we should expect a community of paranoia, dishonest conversation and continuous misrepresentations of one another.
I think you may be assuming what I am calling for here is much more wide-ranging. There still doesn’t seem to be good justification for not knowing who is in the coordination forum or on these leadership slack channels. Making the structures that actually exist apparent to community members would probably not come at such a prohibitively high cost as you suggest
Yes, I don’t know what I think of that, but you’re right that I implied you were thinking of something much more wide reaching.
This strikes me as weirdly one-sided. You’re against leaking, but presumably, you’re in favour of whistleblowing—people being able to raise concerns about wrongdoing. Would you have objected to someone leaking/whisteblowing that e.g. SBF was misusing customer money? If someone had done so months ago, that could have saved billions, but it would have a breach of (SBF’s) trust.
The difference between leaking and whistleblowing is … I’m actually not sure. One is official, or something?
This fundamentally misunderstands norms around whistleblowing. For instance, UK legislation on whistleblowing does not allow you to just go to journalists for any and all issues—they have to be sufficiently serious. This isn’t just for “official” reasons but because it’s understood that trust within institutions is necessary for a functioning society/group/community/company and norms that encourage paranoia over leaks lead to non-honest conversations filtered through fears of leaks.
Even in the event that a crime is being committed, you are expected to first go to authorities, rather than journalists—to journalists only if you believe authorities won’t assist. In the SBF example I’d hope someone would have done precisely that. Moreso, to protect trust, whistleblowing is protected only for issues that warrant that level of trust breach—ie my comment is that this is disproportionate breach of trust, with long term effect on community norms.
Furthermore, whistleblowing on actual crimes is entirely different to leaking private messages about managing PR. And—again—is something one should do first to authorities—not necessarily to journalists!
Essentially you are eliding very serious whistleblowing of crimes to police or public bodies, to leaked screenshots to journalists of private chats about community responses.
I’m a bit confused: Which authorities would the whistleblower report to, especially if they aren’t reporting any crimes?
I’d guess the distinction would be more ‘public interest disclosure’ rather than ‘officialness’ (after all, a lot of whistleblowing ends up in the media because of inadequacy in ‘formal’ channels). Or, with apologies to Yes Minister: “I give confidential briefings, you leak, he has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act”.
The question seems to be one of proportionality: investigative or undercover journalists often completely betray the trust and (reasonable) expectations of privacy of its subjects/targets, and this can ethically vary from reprehensible to laudable depending on the value of what it uncovers (compare paparrazzi to Panorama). Where this nets out for disclosing these slack group messages is unclear to me.
Even if you’re not concerned about leaks, the possibility of compelled disclosure in a lawsuit has to be considered. So if would be seriously damaging for information to show up in the New Yorker, then phone, in-person, and Inspector Gadget telegram should be the preferred method of communication anyway.
I definitely appreciate the point about trust, just wanted to add that people should consider the risks of involuntary disclosure through legal process (or hacking) before putting stuff in writing.