I don’t understand. I do not consider myself to be under the obligation that all negative takes I share about an organization must be accompanied by a full case for why I think those are justified.
Similar to how it would IMO be crazy to request people to justify that all positive comments about an organization must be accompanied by full justifications for ones judgement.
I have written about my feelings about CSER and Leverhulme some in the past (one of my old LTFF writeups for example includes a bunch of more detailed models I have of CSER). I have definitely not written up most of my thoughts, as they would span many dozens of pages.
But to my mind high integrity actors don’t make the claims you’ve made in both of these comments without bringing examples or evidence.
I think holding criticism to a higher standard than praise is one of the most common low level violations of integrity that people engage in on an ongoing basis. I absolutely do not consider it part my of concept of integrity to only make negative claim about people without also making a comprehensive argument and providing extensive evidence of its veracity.
Indeed the honor culture from which my guess that instinct comes from is one of the things I am culturally most opposed to, so in as much as you have a concept of integrity here, it doesn’t seem that have that much overlap with mine (which is fine, words are hard, we can disambiguate in the future).
...I do not consider myself to be under the obligation that all negative takes I share about an organization...
Fwiw I think part of the issue that I had[1] with your comment is that the comment came across much more aggressively and personally, rather than as a critique of an organization. I do think the bar for critiquing individuals ought to be moderately higher than the bar for critiquing organizations. Particularly when the critique comes from a different place/capacity[2] than strictly necessary for the conversation[3].
I expect some other people like JWS had a similar reaction to me, and stronger in magnitude. I did think your comment was on net useful for the conversation (not including the more global effects/externalities).
Before your comment blew up, I upvoted/agreevoted it because I do think there’s a true and important point to be made about FHI being much more successful at doing future-of-humanityish research than “peer” organizations that are more successful at looking like a normal/respectable organization. But I did wince (and didn’t strong upvote). I also lacked the information necessary to judge whether your perceived causal models were correct.
Put another way, I read your comment as quite far on the “contextualizing” end of contextualizaing vs decoupling norms, and I expected more decoupling in online spaces we both frequent.
Eg, if this was a fundraising post for CSER, or a post similar to the Conjecture critique, public criticisms of Sean in his capacity as director might be necessary. Similarly, if Sean made logical errors locally in his comment, or displayed poor reading comprehension, or was overly aggressive, criticisms of him in his capacity as an internet commentator may be necessary.
Hmm, I agree that there was some aggression here, but I felt like Sean was the person who first brought up direct criticism of a specific person, and very harsh one at that (harsher than mine I think).
Like, Sean’s comment basically said “I think it was directly Bostrom’s fault that FHI died a slow painful death, and this could have been avoided with the injection of just a bit of competence in the relevant domain”. My comment is more specific, but I don’t really see it as harsher. I also have a prior to not go into critiques of individual people, but that’s what Sean did in this context (of course Bostrom’s judgement is relevant, but I think in that case so is Sean’s).
Sure, social aggression is a rather subjective call. I do think decoupling/locality norms are relevant here. “Garden variety incompetence” may not have been the best choice of words on Sean’s part,[1] but it did seem like a) a locally scoped comment specifically answering a question that people on the forum understandably had, b) much of it empirically checkable (other people formerly at FHI, particularly ops staff, could present their perspectives re: relationship management), and c) Bostom’s capacity as director is very much relevant to the discussion of the organization’s operations or why the organization shut down.
Your comment first presents what I consider to be a core observation that is true and important, namely, FHI did a lot of good work, and this type of magic might not be easy to replicate if you do everything with apparent garden-variety competence. But afterwards, it also brought in a bunch of what I consider to be extraneous details on Sean’s competency, judgment, and integrity. The points you raise are also more murkily defined and harder to check. So overall I think of your comment as more escalatory.
It wasn’t carefully chosen. It was the term used by the commenter I was replying to. I was a little frustrated, because it was another example of a truth-seeking enquiry by Milena getting pushed down the track of only-considering-answers-in-which-all-the-agency/wrongness-is-on-the-university side (including some pretty unpleasant options relating to people I’d worked with (‘parasitic egregore/siphon money’).
>Did Oxford think it was a reputation risk? Were the other philosophers jealous of the attention and funding FHI got? Was a beaurocratic parasitic egregore putting up roadblocks to siphon off money to itself? Garden variety incompetence?
So I just did copy and paste on the most relevant phrase, but flipped it. Bit blunter and more smart-arse than I would normally be (as you’ve presumably seen from my writing, I normally caveat to a probably-tedious degree), but I was finding it hard to challenge the simplistic fhi-good-uni-bad narrative. It was one line, I didn’t think much about it.
I remain of the view that the claim is true/a reasonable interpretation, but de novo / in a different context I would have phrased differently.
One other observation that might explain some of the different perceptions on ‘blame’ here.
I don’t think Oxford’s bureaucracy/administration is good, and I think it did behave very badly at points*. But overall, I don’t think Oxford’s bureaucracy/behaviour was a long way outside what you would expect for the reference class of thousand-year-old-institutions with >10,000 employees. And Nick knew that was what it was, chose to be situated there, and did benefit (particularly in the early days) from the reputation boost. I think there is some reasonable expectation that having made that choice, he would put some effort into either figuring out how to operate effectively within its constraints, or take it somewhere else.
(*it did at point have the feeling of grinding inevitability of a failing marriage, where beyond a certain point everything one side did was perceived in the worst light and with maximal irritation by the other side, going in both directions, which contributed to bad behaviour I think).
For what it’s worth, I’m (at least partly) sympathetic to Oli’s position here. If nothing else, from my end I’m not confident that the combined time usage of:
[Oli producing book-length critique of CSER/Leverhulme, or me personally, depending] + [me producing presumably book-length response] + [further back and forth] + [a whole lot of forum readers trying to unpick the disagreements]
is overall worth it, particularly given (a) it seems likely to me there are some worldview/cultural differences that would take time to unpick and (b) I will be limited in what I can say on certain matters by professional constraints/norms.
And as to the claim “I also wouldn’t be surprised if Sean’s takes were ultimately responsible for a good chunk of associated pressure and attacks on people’s intellectual integrity” it seems like some of this is based on my online comments/writing. I don’t believe I’ve ever deleted anything on the EA forum, LW, or very much on twitter/linkedin (the online mediums I use), my papers are all online, and so again a decent place to start is to search for my username and come to their own conclusions.
I think this might be one of the LTFF writeups Oli mentions (apologies if wrong), and seems like a good place to start
Yep, that’s the one I was thinking about. I’ve changed my mind on some of the things in that section in the (many) years since I wrote it, but it still seems like a decent starting point.
In my experience people update less from positive comments and more from negative comments intuitively to correct for this asymmetry (that it’s more socially acceptable to give unsupported praise than unsupported criticism). Your preferred approach to correcting the asymmetry, while I agree is in the abstract better, doesn’t work in the context of these existing corrections.
Yeah, I agree this is a real dynamic. It doesn’t sound unreasonable for me to have a standard link that l link to if I criticize people on here that makes it salient that I am aspiring to be less asymmetric in the information I share (I do think the norms are already pretty different over on LW, where if anything I think criticism is a bit less scrutinized than praise, so its not like this is a totally alien set of norms).
Perhaps this old comment from Rohin Shah could serve as the standard link?
(Note that it’s on the particular case of recommending people do/don’t work at a given org, rather than the general case of praise/criticism, but I don’t think this changes the structure of the argument other than maybe making point 1 less salient.)
Excerpting the relevant part:
On recommendations: Fwiw I also make unconditional recommendations in private. I don’t think this is unusual, e.g. I think many people make unconditional recommendations not to go into academia (though I don’t).
I don’t really buy that the burden of proof should be much higher in public. Reversing the position, do you think the burden of proof should be very high for anyone to publicly recommend working at lab X? If not, what’s the difference between a recommendation to work at org X vs an anti-recommendation (i.e. recommendation not to work at org X)? I think the three main considerations I’d point to are:
(Pro-recommendations) It’s rare for people to do things (relative to not doing things), so we differentially want recommendations vs anti-recommendations, so that it is easier for orgs to start up and do things.
(Anti-recommendations) There are strong incentives to recommend working at org X (obviously org X itself will do this), but no incentives to make the opposite recommendation (and in fact usually anti-incentives). Similarly I expect that inaccuracies in the case for the not-working recommendation will be pointed out (by org X), whereas inaccuracies in the case for working will not be pointed out. So we differentially want to encourage the opposite recommendations in order to get both sides of the story by lowering our “burden of proof”.
(Pro-recommendations) Recommendations have a nice effect of getting people excited and positive about the work done by the community, which can make people more motivated, whereas the same is not true of anti-recommendations.
Overall I think point 2 feels most important, and so I end up thinking that the burden of proof on critiques / anti-recommendations should be lower than the burden of proof on recommendations—and the burden of proof on recommendations is approximately zero. (E.g. if someone wrote a public post recommending Conjecture without any concrete details of why—just something along the lines of “it’s a great place doing great work”—I don’t think anyone would say that they were using their power irresponsibly.)
I would actually prefer a higher burden of proof on recommendations, but given the status quo if I’m only allowed to affect the burden of proof on anti-recommendations I’d probably want it to go down to ~zero. Certainly I’d want it to be well below the level that this post meets.
Yeah, that’s a decent link. I do think this comment is more about whether anti-recommendations for organizations should be held to a similar standard. My comment also included some criticisms of Sean personally, which I think do also make sense to treat separately, though at least I definitely intend to also try to debias my statements about individuals after my experiences with SBF in-particular on this dimension.
I don’t understand your lack of understanding. My point is that you’re acting like a right arse.
When people make claims, we expect there to be some justification proportional to the claims made. You made hostile claims that weren’t following on from prior discussion,[1] and in my view nasty and personal insinuations as well, and didn’t have anything to back it up.
I don’t understand how you wouldn’t think that Sean would be hurt by it.[2] So to me, you behaved like arse, knowing that you’d hurt someone, didn’t justify it, got called out, and are now complaining.
So I don’t really have much interest in continuing this discussion for now, or much opinion at the moment of your behaviour or your ‘integrity’
You made hostile claims that weren’t following on from prior discussion,[1] and in my view nasty and personal insinuations as well, and didn’t have anything to back it up.
This seems relatively straightforwardly false. In as much as Sean is making claims about the right strategy to follow for FHI, and claiming that the errors at FHI were straightforwardly Bostrom’s fault and attributable to ‘garden variety incompetence’, the degree of historical success of the strategies that Sean seems to be advocating for is of course relevant in assessing whether that’s accurate. And CSER and Leverhulme seem like the obvious case studies that are available here.
We can quibble over the exact degree of relevance of the points I brought up, but the logical connection here seems straightforward.
didn’t have anything to back it up.
Separately, I see no way how you could know whether I have anything to back up my criticism. I have written about my thoughts on CSER in the past, and I did not intend to write up all the thoughts and evidence I have in this thread.
If you want we can have a call for an hour, or you can investigate this question yourself and come to your own conclusion, and then you can make a judgement of whether I have anything to back up my opinion, but as I have said upthread, I don’t consider myself to have an obligation to extensively document the evidence for all of my opinions and judgements before I feel comfortable expressing them.
I don’t understand. I do not consider myself to be under the obligation that all negative takes I share about an organization must be accompanied by a full case for why I think those are justified.
Similar to how it would IMO be crazy to request people to justify that all positive comments about an organization must be accompanied by full justifications for ones judgement.
I have written about my feelings about CSER and Leverhulme some in the past (one of my old LTFF writeups for example includes a bunch of more detailed models I have of CSER). I have definitely not written up most of my thoughts, as they would span many dozens of pages.
I think holding criticism to a higher standard than praise is one of the most common low level violations of integrity that people engage in on an ongoing basis. I absolutely do not consider it part my of concept of integrity to only make negative claim about people without also making a comprehensive argument and providing extensive evidence of its veracity.
Indeed the honor culture from which my guess that instinct comes from is one of the things I am culturally most opposed to, so in as much as you have a concept of integrity here, it doesn’t seem that have that much overlap with mine (which is fine, words are hard, we can disambiguate in the future).
Fwiw I think part of the issue that I had[1] with your comment is that the comment came across much more aggressively and personally, rather than as a critique of an organization. I do think the bar for critiquing individuals ought to be moderately higher than the bar for critiquing organizations. Particularly when the critique comes from a different place/capacity[2] than strictly necessary for the conversation[3].
I expect some other people like JWS had a similar reaction to me, and stronger in magnitude. I did think your comment was on net useful for the conversation (not including the more global effects/externalities).
Before your comment blew up, I upvoted/agreevoted it because I do think there’s a true and important point to be made about FHI being much more successful at doing future-of-humanityish research than “peer” organizations that are more successful at looking like a normal/respectable organization. But I did wince (and didn’t strong upvote). I also lacked the information necessary to judge whether your perceived causal models were correct.
Put another way, I read your comment as quite far on the “contextualizing” end of contextualizaing vs decoupling norms, and I expected more decoupling in online spaces we both frequent.
Eg, if this was a fundraising post for CSER, or a post similar to the Conjecture critique, public criticisms of Sean in his capacity as director might be necessary. Similarly, if Sean made logical errors locally in his comment, or displayed poor reading comprehension, or was overly aggressive, criticisms of him in his capacity as an internet commentator may be necessary.
Hmm, I agree that there was some aggression here, but I felt like Sean was the person who first brought up direct criticism of a specific person, and very harsh one at that (harsher than mine I think).
Like, Sean’s comment basically said “I think it was directly Bostrom’s fault that FHI died a slow painful death, and this could have been avoided with the injection of just a bit of competence in the relevant domain”. My comment is more specific, but I don’t really see it as harsher. I also have a prior to not go into critiques of individual people, but that’s what Sean did in this context (of course Bostrom’s judgement is relevant, but I think in that case so is Sean’s).
Sure, social aggression is a rather subjective call. I do think decoupling/locality norms are relevant here. “Garden variety incompetence” may not have been the best choice of words on Sean’s part,[1] but it did seem like a) a locally scoped comment specifically answering a question that people on the forum understandably had, b) much of it empirically checkable (other people formerly at FHI, particularly ops staff, could present their perspectives re: relationship management), and c) Bostom’s capacity as director is very much relevant to the discussion of the organization’s operations or why the organization shut down.
Your comment first presents what I consider to be a core observation that is true and important, namely, FHI did a lot of good work, and this type of magic might not be easy to replicate if you do everything with apparent garden-variety competence. But afterwards, it also brought in a bunch of what I consider to be extraneous details on Sean’s competency, judgment, and integrity. The points you raise are also more murkily defined and harder to check. So overall I think of your comment as more escalatory.
or maybe it was under the circumstances. I don’t know the details here, maybe the phrase was carefully chosen.
It wasn’t carefully chosen. It was the term used by the commenter I was replying to. I was a little frustrated, because it was another example of a truth-seeking enquiry by Milena getting pushed down the track of only-considering-answers-in-which-all-the-agency/wrongness-is-on-the-university side (including some pretty unpleasant options relating to people I’d worked with (‘parasitic egregore/siphon money’).
>Did Oxford think it was a reputation risk? Were the other philosophers jealous of the attention and funding FHI got? Was a beaurocratic parasitic egregore putting up roadblocks to siphon off money to itself? Garden variety incompetence?
So I just did copy and paste on the most relevant phrase, but flipped it. Bit blunter and more smart-arse than I would normally be (as you’ve presumably seen from my writing, I normally caveat to a probably-tedious degree), but I was finding it hard to challenge the simplistic fhi-good-uni-bad narrative. It was one line, I didn’t think much about it.
I remain of the view that the claim is true/a reasonable interpretation, but de novo / in a different context I would have phrased differently.
One other observation that might explain some of the different perceptions on ‘blame’ here.
I don’t think Oxford’s bureaucracy/administration is good, and I think it did behave very badly at points*. But overall, I don’t think Oxford’s bureaucracy/behaviour was a long way outside what you would expect for the reference class of thousand-year-old-institutions with >10,000 employees. And Nick knew that was what it was, chose to be situated there, and did benefit (particularly in the early days) from the reputation boost. I think there is some reasonable expectation that having made that choice, he would put some effort into either figuring out how to operate effectively within its constraints, or take it somewhere else.
(*it did at point have the feeling of grinding inevitability of a failing marriage, where beyond a certain point everything one side did was perceived in the worst light and with maximal irritation by the other side, going in both directions, which contributed to bad behaviour I think).
For what it’s worth, I’m (at least partly) sympathetic to Oli’s position here. If nothing else, from my end I’m not confident that the combined time usage of:
[Oli producing book-length critique of CSER/Leverhulme, or me personally, depending] +
[me producing presumably book-length response] +
[further back and forth] +
[a whole lot of forum readers trying to unpick the disagreements]
is overall worth it, particularly given (a) it seems likely to me there are some worldview/cultural differences that would take time to unpick and (b) I will be limited in what I can say on certain matters by professional constraints/norms.
I think this might be one of the LTFF writeups Oli mentions (apologies if wrong), and seems like a good place to start:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/an9GrNXrdMwBJpHeC/long-term-future-fund-august-2019-grant-recommendations-1#Addendum__Thoughts_on_a_Strategy_Article_by_the_Leadership_of_Leverhulme_CFI_and_CSER
And as to the claim “I also wouldn’t be surprised if Sean’s takes were ultimately responsible for a good chunk of associated pressure and attacks on people’s intellectual integrity” it seems like some of this is based on my online comments/writing. I don’t believe I’ve ever deleted anything on the EA forum, LW, or very much on twitter/linkedin (the online mediums I use), my papers are all online, and so again a decent place to start is to search for my username and come to their own conclusions.
Yep, that’s the one I was thinking about. I’ve changed my mind on some of the things in that section in the (many) years since I wrote it, but it still seems like a decent starting point.
In my experience people update less from positive comments and more from negative comments intuitively to correct for this asymmetry (that it’s more socially acceptable to give unsupported praise than unsupported criticism). Your preferred approach to correcting the asymmetry, while I agree is in the abstract better, doesn’t work in the context of these existing corrections.
Yeah, I agree this is a real dynamic. It doesn’t sound unreasonable for me to have a standard link that l link to if I criticize people on here that makes it salient that I am aspiring to be less asymmetric in the information I share (I do think the norms are already pretty different over on LW, where if anything I think criticism is a bit less scrutinized than praise, so its not like this is a totally alien set of norms).
Perhaps this old comment from Rohin Shah could serve as the standard link?
(Note that it’s on the particular case of recommending people do/don’t work at a given org, rather than the general case of praise/criticism, but I don’t think this changes the structure of the argument other than maybe making point 1 less salient.)
Excerpting the relevant part:
Yeah, that’s a decent link. I do think this comment is more about whether anti-recommendations for organizations should be held to a similar standard. My comment also included some criticisms of Sean personally, which I think do also make sense to treat separately, though at least I definitely intend to also try to debias my statements about individuals after my experiences with SBF in-particular on this dimension.
I don’t understand your lack of understanding. My point is that you’re acting like a right arse.
When people make claims, we expect there to be some justification proportional to the claims made. You made hostile claims that weren’t following on from prior discussion,[1] and in my view nasty and personal insinuations as well, and didn’t have anything to back it up.
I don’t understand how you wouldn’t think that Sean would be hurt by it.[2] So to me, you behaved like arse, knowing that you’d hurt someone, didn’t justify it, got called out, and are now complaining.
So I don’t really have much interest in continuing this discussion for now, or much opinion at the moment of your behaviour or your ‘integrity’
Like nobody was discussing CSER/CFI or Sean directly until you came in with it
Even if you did think it was justified
This seems relatively straightforwardly false. In as much as Sean is making claims about the right strategy to follow for FHI, and claiming that the errors at FHI were straightforwardly Bostrom’s fault and attributable to ‘garden variety incompetence’, the degree of historical success of the strategies that Sean seems to be advocating for is of course relevant in assessing whether that’s accurate. And CSER and Leverhulme seem like the obvious case studies that are available here.
We can quibble over the exact degree of relevance of the points I brought up, but the logical connection here seems straightforward.
Separately, I see no way how you could know whether I have anything to back up my criticism. I have written about my thoughts on CSER in the past, and I did not intend to write up all the thoughts and evidence I have in this thread.
If you want we can have a call for an hour, or you can investigate this question yourself and come to your own conclusion, and then you can make a judgement of whether I have anything to back up my opinion, but as I have said upthread, I don’t consider myself to have an obligation to extensively document the evidence for all of my opinions and judgements before I feel comfortable expressing them.