My reading of your original synopsis and conclusion: “The de facto EA policy is not to engage with journalists unless you’re CEA-sanctioned and extremely confident they’ll report your ideas exactly as you describe them. So CEA almost forced us to mess this nice man around, causing the situation to go much worse than it would have otherwise.”
My synopsis and conclusion: “As the decision-maker here I felt very unsure, sought input from others, and ultimately because of several reasons (one of which was CEA’s wariness of journalists in certain situations) I decided not to engage, but I did give the owner the opportunity to get interviewed by this Economist journalist or a nicer Economist journalist. Given that this journalist doesn’t seem very nice, that I didn’t have the spoons (or beds?) to host a journalist, and worries about a popular piece attracting too many freeloaders, it’s not clear whether welcoming him for a few days would have gone better.”
On thinking it’s deliberately written to paint CEA in a bad light: The whole post generally sounds quite exaggerated to me and only talks about downsides.
a) the thesis of the whole post, which is that CEA’s approach hasn’t been a good idea in retrospect;
b) the claim that CEA have previously used their influence on funding to enforce their policy, which I didn’t argue for and can’t publicly discuss, but stand by;
c) the approach of the post, which is to assume that linking to the case for the policy’s upsides was sufficient—and focus on the undiscussed downsides; and
d) the synopsis of that particular event, which wasn’t meant to imply that we did anything other than follow the advice of our own free will—I’ve edited it again to make that as clear as I can.
You can say I wrote the post badly—I only had a couple of days to spare on it—or that such a downside-focused approach was never a good idea (though since I don’t have anywhere near the time or resources to do the empirical research I’m advocating, that would amount to saying I just shouldn’t have criticised CEA’s media policy).
But no, I’m not going to ‘agree to disagree’ that I intentionally said anything misleading.
I think it is justified.
On thinking it’s a warped summary:
My reading of your original synopsis and conclusion: “The de facto EA policy is not to engage with journalists unless you’re CEA-sanctioned and extremely confident they’ll report your ideas exactly as you describe them. So CEA almost forced us to mess this nice man around, causing the situation to go much worse than it would have otherwise.”
My synopsis and conclusion: “As the decision-maker here I felt very unsure, sought input from others, and ultimately because of several reasons (one of which was CEA’s wariness of journalists in certain situations) I decided not to engage, but I did give the owner the opportunity to get interviewed by this Economist journalist or a nicer Economist journalist. Given that this journalist doesn’t seem very nice, that I didn’t have the spoons (or beds?) to host a journalist, and worries about a popular piece attracting too many freeloaders, it’s not clear whether welcoming him for a few days would have gone better.”
On thinking it’s deliberately written to paint CEA in a bad light: The whole post generally sounds quite exaggerated to me and only talks about downsides.
Perhaps we should agree to disagree.
You’re throwing together -
a) the thesis of the whole post, which is that CEA’s approach hasn’t been a good idea in retrospect;
b) the claim that CEA have previously used their influence on funding to enforce their policy, which I didn’t argue for and can’t publicly discuss, but stand by;
c) the approach of the post, which is to assume that linking to the case for the policy’s upsides was sufficient—and focus on the undiscussed downsides; and
d) the synopsis of that particular event, which wasn’t meant to imply that we did anything other than follow the advice of our own free will—I’ve edited it again to make that as clear as I can.
You can say I wrote the post badly—I only had a couple of days to spare on it—or that such a downside-focused approach was never a good idea (though since I don’t have anywhere near the time or resources to do the empirical research I’m advocating, that would amount to saying I just shouldn’t have criticised CEA’s media policy).
But no, I’m not going to ‘agree to disagree’ that I intentionally said anything misleading.