By the end, the line between genuine scientific inquiry and activistic ‘research’ got quite blurry at FHI. I don’t think papers such as: ‘Proposal for a New UK National Institute for Biological Security’, belong in an academic institution, even if I agree with the conclusion.
For the disagree voters (I didn’t agreevote either way) -- perhaps a more neutral way to phrase this is might be:
Oxford and/or its philosophy department apparently decided that continuing to be affiliated with FHI wasn’t in its best interests. It seems this may have developed well before the Bostrom situation. Given that, and assuming EA may want to have orgs affiliated with other top universities, what lessons might be learned from this story? To the extent that keeping the university happy might limit the org’s activities, when is accepting that compromise worth it?
I also didn’t vote but would be very surprised if that particular paper—a policy proposal for a biosecurity institute in the context of a pandemic—was an example of the sort of thing Oxford would be concerned about affiliating with (I can imagine some academics being more sceptical of some of the FHI’s other research topics). Social science faculty academics write papers making public policy recommendations on a routine basis, many of them far more controversial.
The postmortem doc says “several times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we misunderstood how the message would be received” which suggests it might be internal messaging that lost them friends and alienated people. It’d be interesting if there are any specific lessons to be learned, but it might well boil down to academics being rude to each other, and the FHI seems to want to emphasize it was more about academic politics than anything else.
I think I’m sympathetic to Oxford’s decision.
By the end, the line between genuine scientific inquiry and activistic ‘research’ got quite blurry at FHI. I don’t think papers such as: ‘Proposal for a New UK National Institute for Biological Security’, belong in an academic institution, even if I agree with the conclusion.
For the disagree voters (I didn’t agreevote either way) -- perhaps a more neutral way to phrase this is might be:
Oxford and/or its philosophy department apparently decided that continuing to be affiliated with FHI wasn’t in its best interests. It seems this may have developed well before the Bostrom situation. Given that, and assuming EA may want to have orgs affiliated with other top universities, what lessons might be learned from this story? To the extent that keeping the university happy might limit the org’s activities, when is accepting that compromise worth it?
I also didn’t vote but would be very surprised if that particular paper—a policy proposal for a biosecurity institute in the context of a pandemic—was an example of the sort of thing Oxford would be concerned about affiliating with (I can imagine some academics being more sceptical of some of the FHI’s other research topics). Social science faculty academics write papers making public policy recommendations on a routine basis, many of them far more controversial.
The postmortem doc says “several times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we misunderstood how the message would be received” which suggests it might be internal messaging that lost them friends and alienated people. It’d be interesting if there are any specific lessons to be learned, but it might well boil down to academics being rude to each other, and the FHI seems to want to emphasize it was more about academic politics than anything else.