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.
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.