Lots of the relevant posts/commentary have been deleted
I was surprised by this since a decent chunk of the relevant discussion happened quite recently (maybe a year ago). I checked back and it seems like Guzey has deleted both the post in question and most of his relevant comments, both here and on LessWrong.
I’m sad about this, since it makes it quite hard to follow the dispute unless you were there at the time (e.g. I had some back-and-forth with Guzey at the time of the Decade Review, that I found quite informative, that is now unreadable). That said, the archived link includes the original post, the original discussion, and Guzey’s depiction of the confidentiality screwup, which is a decent chunk of the relevant context; the main thing that is missing is (the more detailed version of) CEA’s side of the story.
(FWIW, I think it’s reasonable to update negatively about the relevant parts of CEA to some degree as a result of the confidentiality screwup, but IMO the subsequent reactions to and discussion of the event reflected more badly on Guzey than on CEA.)
I don’t understand why you think subsequent reactions and discussion reflected worse on Guzey than on CEA. I think the incident seems pretty clear-cut.
I had the opportunity to discuss this incident with someone who knew Julia Wise personally and they also said that they don’t know what to make of it as they didn’t think Wise would do what Guzey was accusing her of. However, even if Julia Wise just made a honest mistake, MacAskill appears to have tried to conceal the fact that he had access to the draft Guzey sent to Wise in confidence.
For me this incident is telling because it shows MacAskill is willing to be dishonest even when the issue at stake is entirely trivial. The response to this blaming Guzey instead of MacAskill and Wise was very disturbing to me and I think it’s a good example of EA not taking criticism that bites seriously. Even if Guzey’s post was of low quality, and I think in some parts it indeed was, the events surrounding the publication of the post ought to dwarf any substantive concern you might have with Guzey’s criticism of Doing Good Better.
(Note that I’m not the author of the post, but someone else posting under a throwaway account.)
Obviously, I disagree with this. I think Guzey pulled together some fairly flimsy fragments of evidence of wrongdoing, and spun them into a story of deliberate, malicious conspiracy wildly out of proportion with the strength of the available evidence. His accusations here were entirely lacking in the kind of epistemic and rhetorical care I expect when making allegations like this, and his persistent refusal to moderate his claims or adduce additional evidence in response to pushback was a substantial negative update for me.
It’s probably easier at this point if I just quote one of my comments to Guzey from last year (now sadly hard to find due to him deleting his posts & comments):
Do you believe that [Guzey’s representation] of the incident is unfair?
Yes, at present I do.
I haven’t yet seen evidence to support the strong claims you are making about Julia Wise’s knowledge and intentions at various stages in this process. If your depiction of events is true (i.e. Wise both knowingly concealed the leak from you after realising what had happened, and explicitly lied about it somewhere) that seems very bad, but I haven’t seen evidence for that. Her own explanation of what happened seems quite plausible to me.
(Conversely, we do have evidence that MacAskill read your draft, and realised it was confidential, but didn’t tell you he’d seen it. That does seem bad to me, but much less bad than the leak itself – and Will has apologised for it pretty thoroughly.)
Your initial response to Julia’s apology seemed quite reasonable, so I was surprised to see you revert so strongly in your LessWrong comment a few months back. What new evidence did you get that hardened your views here so much? [NB: Guzey responded that he hadn’t yet pulled together the threads that led him to make his accusations at the time.]
And that since “the actual consequences were so minor and that the alternative hypothesis (that it was just a mistake) is so plausible” this doesn’t really matter?
It matters – it was a serious error and breach of Wise’s duty of confidentiality, and she has acknowledged it as such (it is now listed on CEA’s mistakes page). But I do think it is important to point out that, other than having your expectation of confidentiality breached per se, nothing bad happened to you.
One reason I think this is important is because it makes the strong “conspiracy” interpretation of these events much less plausible. You present these events as though the intent of these actions was to in some way undermine or discredit your criticisms (you’ve used the word “sabotage”) in order to protect MacAskill’s reputation. But nobody did this, and it’s not clear to me what they plausibly could have done – so what’s the motive?
What sharing the draft with MacAskill did enable was a prepared response – but that’s normal in EA and generally considered good practice when posting public criticism. Said norm is likely a big part of the reason this screw-up happened.
I continue to basically believe this. I think the lack of a credible story by which Guzey was or could credibly have been harmed by CEA’s actions here is a big red flag, and the stories of harm that Guzey has provided have been very weak.
I also have a further claim, which is that what Guzey asked Wise to do in the first place is pretty strange and unreasonable. That doesn’t make it right to break his confidentiality—I think the correct response would have been to say “no, sorry, it doesn’t make sense for me to do this, I’d need to share it with Will”—but it makes the downstream mistakes much more understandable to me.
(Note that I’m not the author of the post, but someone else posting under a throwaway account.)
I really wish you’d chosen a more distinct username. I think not doing so is a disservice to the original post author.
I don’t think the evidence for wrongdoing is “flimsy”. It only looks that way to you because you’re starting with a very high prior confidence in Wise and MacAskill.
I think the likely story of wrongdoing looks something like the following: Julia Wise sends the confidential draft to MacAskill as the result of an oversight. She realizes afterwards that she wasn’t actually supposed to do this, and tries to cover up the fact that she did this. MacAskill feels personally attacked due to the hostile tone of Guzey’s confidential draft (which he has admitted to in public) and decides to exploit this opportunity to draft a preemptive response to kill Guzey’s post as quickly as possible. In the process, he overlooks that he is responding to something that Guzey has cut from the draft prior to publication, and therefore the entire incident is exposed.
The initial oversight of Wise is not the problem here. The problem is that neither she nor MacAskill felt it necessary to inform Guzey that his confidential draft had been leaked to exactly the person that he didn’t want to have access to the draft. Guzey has a habit of writing private drafts in a highly adversarial tone and toning this down after feedback from reviewers, so he would understandably be reluctant to share these private drafts with the targets that they are critical of. I don’t understand why you think this is “strange and unreasonable”.
It’s true that the issue at stake there was of trivial importance, but that makes MacAskill’s bizarre refusal to be transparent about reading a confidential draft even more disturbing. What would he do if he actually had a strong motive to deceive others?
As a final remark, I’ll tell you that there are “bad rumors” about MacAskill circulating in EA circles right now. People are reluctant to express exactly what they are concerned about and I can only guess at this as I have no inside information here, but I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what that could mean.
I don’t understand why you think this is “strange and unreasonable”.
I think it’s strange to ask for feedback on a post about a book from someone uninvolved in publishing the book, and unreasonable to ask them to give that feedback without consulting anyone who might actually be able to provide an informed response.
The most natural thing for Wise to do in this situation was to share the draft with MacAskill (or MacAskill’s research team for the book, if he had one). With that option excluded, sharing the draft with Wise was pretty pointless. I think it’s totally reasonable for Wise to have been confused here. (ETA: But it was still wrong to share it given Guzey’s request for confidentiality, as I’ve said several times.)
MacAskill feels personally attacked due to the hostile tone of Guzey’s confidential draft (which he has admitted to in public) and decides to exploit this opportunity to draft a preemptive response to kill Guzey’s post as quickly as possible.
This is the part that seems extremely weak to me. I see zero evidence of anyone trying to “kill Guzey’s post”, and I think preparing a pre-emptive response is both totally reasonable and actively good for the discourse.
tries to cover up the fact that she did this
By “cover up” here, do you mean “not mention”? Because “cover up” to me strongly implies active destruction of evidence, silencing of witnesses, &/or other nefarious activity, and I haven’t seen evidence of this.
The most natural thing for Wise to do in this situation was to share the draft with MacAskill (or MacAskill’s research team for the book, if he had one). With that option excluded, sharing the draft with Wise was pretty pointless. I think it’s totally reasonable for Wise to have been confused here.
I hope that I never have to share a confidential draft with you if those are your standards of proper conduct when someone does so.
This is the part that seems extremely weak to me. I see zero evidence of anyone trying to “kill Guzey’s post”, and I think preparing a pre-emptive response is both totally reasonable and actively good for the discourse.
In that case, MacAskill would have had no reason to conceal the fact that he had read Guzey’s draft. He even placed a line in his response claiming that “Guzey’s post keeps changing” to hedge against the possibility that he might appear to be responding to something that’s not actually in the post.
I can’t understand how you can defend this blatantly dishonest behavior. It’s possible Julia Wise acted in good faith the entire time, but reasonably making this claim about MacAskill seems impossible to me.
By “cover up” here, do you mean “not mention”? Because “cover up” to me strongly implies active destruction of evidence, silencing of witnesses, &/or other nefarious activity, and I haven’t seen evidence of this.
I don’t understand what “evidence” you think they could have attempted to destroy. They actively tried to hide the fact from Guzey by not mentioning it and not admitting it when they were confronted on the subject by Guzey after he caught MacAskill responding to something that was cut from the post prior to publication.
What else would you be looking for to classify what happened as a “cover up”? I don’t understand.
I hope that I never have to share a confidential draft with you if those are your standards of proper conduct when someone does so.
It’s pretty difficult for me to respond to this kind of personal rudeness politely. I don’t think this is the kind of discourse that will make our community better.
I already said several times that Wise shouldn’t have shared the draft with MacAskill, that it was a serious error, that the breach of confidentiality is per se bad, et cetera et cetera. This is not in dispute, even by CEA.
I don’t care if you’re personally rude to me or not. I’m just a throwaway account and I assure you that my feelings won’t be hurt by you failing to be polite on an online forum. If my comment comes across as rude, keep in mind that I don’t write anything I don’t mean to say—I legitimately would not share a confidential draft with you given the views you’ve expressed in this thread so far, because I consider you to be insufficiently trustworthy.
Setting that aside, what I want to understand is how you think Guzey somehow comes across worse in this incident than MacAskill and Wise. I think it’s very hard to tell a story of this incident in which MacAskill was not intentionally deceptive on an issue with only trivial stakes. Julia Wise was at best incompetent and at worst complicit ex post after having leaked the draft by accident, as she didn’t reveal that the draft had been leaked to Guzey.
She looks even worse because this incident wasn’t added to the page of CEA’s mistakes until after Guzey discussed the incident in public 3 years after it took place. I can imagine Wise acting in good faith throughout this episode, but I can’t imagine the same for MacAskill, and it’s MacAskill that I really care about.
I already stated, IMO fairly clearly, why I think Guzey comes across poorly in this incident. I think there’s insufficient evidence of malice here, that your & Guzey’s stories of what a conspiracy to harm Guzey aimed to actually achieve are way too thin, and that the strength of Guzey’s reaction & his accusations are seriously out of proportion to both the strength of his evidence and the actual harm that occurred (in a way that I think is consistent with the many other online dust-ups that Guzey regularly gets into).
I could start going through your comments and responding line by line, but given how low my credence is that you’re actually truth-seeking here, it doesn’t seem like a good use of my time.
I could start going through your comments and responding line by line, but given how low my credence is that you’re actually truth-seeking here, it doesn’t seem like a good use of my time.
This is a typical way in which people in EA shut down discussions of subjects they don’t like, especially when they involve members of the outgroup. You simply accuse the person disagreeing with you of being insufficiently truth-seeking (whatever that means).
I’ve told you what I think most likely happened, and you’ve offered no counterargument other than “I see no evidence of anyone trying to kill Guzey’s post”, even though what happened is obviously evidence (in the Bayesian sense) for MacAskill attempting to do exactly that. It’s not like MacAskill could have prevented the publication of the post on the forum. What he had the power to do was influence the reception of the post, and I believe his response did influence the reception in a negative direction.
Guzey’s post indeed “died” and some of his substantive criticisms of the book were not addressed at all. I think most of this was due to natural dynamics on the forum that were beyond MacAskill’s control, but he certainly tried to accelerate this process and (I believe) succeeded in doing so. Whether that means he tried to kill the post or not is up to your judgment.
I was surprised by this since a decent chunk of the relevant discussion happened quite recently (maybe a year ago). I checked back and it seems like Guzey has deleted both the post in question and most of his relevant comments, both here and on LessWrong.
I’m sad about this, since it makes it quite hard to follow the dispute unless you were there at the time (e.g. I had some back-and-forth with Guzey at the time of the Decade Review, that I found quite informative, that is now unreadable). That said, the archived link includes the original post, the original discussion, and Guzey’s depiction of the confidentiality screwup, which is a decent chunk of the relevant context; the main thing that is missing is (the more detailed version of) CEA’s side of the story.
(FWIW, I think it’s reasonable to update negatively about the relevant parts of CEA to some degree as a result of the confidentiality screwup, but IMO the subsequent reactions to and discussion of the event reflected more badly on Guzey than on CEA.)
I don’t understand why you think subsequent reactions and discussion reflected worse on Guzey than on CEA. I think the incident seems pretty clear-cut.
I had the opportunity to discuss this incident with someone who knew Julia Wise personally and they also said that they don’t know what to make of it as they didn’t think Wise would do what Guzey was accusing her of. However, even if Julia Wise just made a honest mistake, MacAskill appears to have tried to conceal the fact that he had access to the draft Guzey sent to Wise in confidence.
For me this incident is telling because it shows MacAskill is willing to be dishonest even when the issue at stake is entirely trivial. The response to this blaming Guzey instead of MacAskill and Wise was very disturbing to me and I think it’s a good example of EA not taking criticism that bites seriously. Even if Guzey’s post was of low quality, and I think in some parts it indeed was, the events surrounding the publication of the post ought to dwarf any substantive concern you might have with Guzey’s criticism of Doing Good Better.
(Note that I’m not the author of the post, but someone else posting under a throwaway account.)
Obviously, I disagree with this. I think Guzey pulled together some fairly flimsy fragments of evidence of wrongdoing, and spun them into a story of deliberate, malicious conspiracy wildly out of proportion with the strength of the available evidence. His accusations here were entirely lacking in the kind of epistemic and rhetorical care I expect when making allegations like this, and his persistent refusal to moderate his claims or adduce additional evidence in response to pushback was a substantial negative update for me.
It’s probably easier at this point if I just quote one of my comments to Guzey from last year (now sadly hard to find due to him deleting his posts & comments):
I continue to basically believe this. I think the lack of a credible story by which Guzey was or could credibly have been harmed by CEA’s actions here is a big red flag, and the stories of harm that Guzey has provided have been very weak.
I also have a further claim, which is that what Guzey asked Wise to do in the first place is pretty strange and unreasonable. That doesn’t make it right to break his confidentiality—I think the correct response would have been to say “no, sorry, it doesn’t make sense for me to do this, I’d need to share it with Will”—but it makes the downstream mistakes much more understandable to me.
I really wish you’d chosen a more distinct username. I think not doing so is a disservice to the original post author.
I don’t think the evidence for wrongdoing is “flimsy”. It only looks that way to you because you’re starting with a very high prior confidence in Wise and MacAskill.
I think the likely story of wrongdoing looks something like the following: Julia Wise sends the confidential draft to MacAskill as the result of an oversight. She realizes afterwards that she wasn’t actually supposed to do this, and tries to cover up the fact that she did this. MacAskill feels personally attacked due to the hostile tone of Guzey’s confidential draft (which he has admitted to in public) and decides to exploit this opportunity to draft a preemptive response to kill Guzey’s post as quickly as possible. In the process, he overlooks that he is responding to something that Guzey has cut from the draft prior to publication, and therefore the entire incident is exposed.
The initial oversight of Wise is not the problem here. The problem is that neither she nor MacAskill felt it necessary to inform Guzey that his confidential draft had been leaked to exactly the person that he didn’t want to have access to the draft. Guzey has a habit of writing private drafts in a highly adversarial tone and toning this down after feedback from reviewers, so he would understandably be reluctant to share these private drafts with the targets that they are critical of. I don’t understand why you think this is “strange and unreasonable”.
It’s true that the issue at stake there was of trivial importance, but that makes MacAskill’s bizarre refusal to be transparent about reading a confidential draft even more disturbing. What would he do if he actually had a strong motive to deceive others?
As a final remark, I’ll tell you that there are “bad rumors” about MacAskill circulating in EA circles right now. People are reluctant to express exactly what they are concerned about and I can only guess at this as I have no inside information here, but I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what that could mean.
I think it’s strange to ask for feedback on a post about a book from someone uninvolved in publishing the book, and unreasonable to ask them to give that feedback without consulting anyone who might actually be able to provide an informed response.
The most natural thing for Wise to do in this situation was to share the draft with MacAskill (or MacAskill’s research team for the book, if he had one). With that option excluded, sharing the draft with Wise was pretty pointless. I think it’s totally reasonable for Wise to have been confused here. (ETA: But it was still wrong to share it given Guzey’s request for confidentiality, as I’ve said several times.)
This is the part that seems extremely weak to me. I see zero evidence of anyone trying to “kill Guzey’s post”, and I think preparing a pre-emptive response is both totally reasonable and actively good for the discourse.
By “cover up” here, do you mean “not mention”? Because “cover up” to me strongly implies active destruction of evidence, silencing of witnesses, &/or other nefarious activity, and I haven’t seen evidence of this.
I hope that I never have to share a confidential draft with you if those are your standards of proper conduct when someone does so.
In that case, MacAskill would have had no reason to conceal the fact that he had read Guzey’s draft. He even placed a line in his response claiming that “Guzey’s post keeps changing” to hedge against the possibility that he might appear to be responding to something that’s not actually in the post.
I can’t understand how you can defend this blatantly dishonest behavior. It’s possible Julia Wise acted in good faith the entire time, but reasonably making this claim about MacAskill seems impossible to me.
I don’t understand what “evidence” you think they could have attempted to destroy. They actively tried to hide the fact from Guzey by not mentioning it and not admitting it when they were confronted on the subject by Guzey after he caught MacAskill responding to something that was cut from the post prior to publication.
What else would you be looking for to classify what happened as a “cover up”? I don’t understand.
It’s pretty difficult for me to respond to this kind of personal rudeness politely. I don’t think this is the kind of discourse that will make our community better.
I already said several times that Wise shouldn’t have shared the draft with MacAskill, that it was a serious error, that the breach of confidentiality is per se bad, et cetera et cetera. This is not in dispute, even by CEA.
I don’t care if you’re personally rude to me or not. I’m just a throwaway account and I assure you that my feelings won’t be hurt by you failing to be polite on an online forum. If my comment comes across as rude, keep in mind that I don’t write anything I don’t mean to say—I legitimately would not share a confidential draft with you given the views you’ve expressed in this thread so far, because I consider you to be insufficiently trustworthy.
Setting that aside, what I want to understand is how you think Guzey somehow comes across worse in this incident than MacAskill and Wise. I think it’s very hard to tell a story of this incident in which MacAskill was not intentionally deceptive on an issue with only trivial stakes. Julia Wise was at best incompetent and at worst complicit ex post after having leaked the draft by accident, as she didn’t reveal that the draft had been leaked to Guzey.
She looks even worse because this incident wasn’t added to the page of CEA’s mistakes until after Guzey discussed the incident in public 3 years after it took place. I can imagine Wise acting in good faith throughout this episode, but I can’t imagine the same for MacAskill, and it’s MacAskill that I really care about.
I already stated, IMO fairly clearly, why I think Guzey comes across poorly in this incident. I think there’s insufficient evidence of malice here, that your & Guzey’s stories of what a conspiracy to harm Guzey aimed to actually achieve are way too thin, and that the strength of Guzey’s reaction & his accusations are seriously out of proportion to both the strength of his evidence and the actual harm that occurred (in a way that I think is consistent with the many other online dust-ups that Guzey regularly gets into).
I could start going through your comments and responding line by line, but given how low my credence is that you’re actually truth-seeking here, it doesn’t seem like a good use of my time.
This is a typical way in which people in EA shut down discussions of subjects they don’t like, especially when they involve members of the outgroup. You simply accuse the person disagreeing with you of being insufficiently truth-seeking (whatever that means).
I’ve told you what I think most likely happened, and you’ve offered no counterargument other than “I see no evidence of anyone trying to kill Guzey’s post”, even though what happened is obviously evidence (in the Bayesian sense) for MacAskill attempting to do exactly that. It’s not like MacAskill could have prevented the publication of the post on the forum. What he had the power to do was influence the reception of the post, and I believe his response did influence the reception in a negative direction.
Guzey’s post indeed “died” and some of his substantive criticisms of the book were not addressed at all. I think most of this was due to natural dynamics on the forum that were beyond MacAskill’s control, but he certainly tried to accelerate this process and (I believe) succeeded in doing so. Whether that means he tried to kill the post or not is up to your judgment.