The grandparent comment asks for decisions to be explained before criticism appears. Your proposal (which I do think is fairly reasonable) would not have helped in this case: Wytham Abbey would have got a nice explanation in the next quarterly report after it got done, i.e. far too late.
I think my broader frame around the issue affected how I read the parent comment. I took it as the problem being a general issue in EA transparency—my general thinking on a lot of the criticisms from within EA was something along the lines of the lack of transparency as a general issue is the larger problem, if EAs knew there would be a report/justification coming, it would not have been such an issue within the community. I do see your point now, although I do think there are some pretty easy ways around it, like determining a reasonably high bar on the basis of CEA’s general spending-per-line-item that would necessitate a kind of “this is a big deal” announcement.
I put a negative framing on it and you put a positive one, but it’s a cost that prevents staff from doing other things with their time and so should be prioritised and not just put onto an unbounded queue of “stuff that should be done”.
I agree that it is a cost, like all other things. On the point of prioritization, I would argue that because of EA principles being so heavily tied into cost effectiveness and empiricism, treating this as something that can be foregone to give CEA staff to do other stuff that should be done is not only hypocritical, it’s bad epistemically insofar as it implies that EAs (or at least EAs who work at CEA) are not beholden to the same principles of transparency and epistemic rigor that they expect from other similar organizations, ie. “we are above these principles for some reason or other”.
I think this is all pretty reasonable, but also I suspect I might think that existing similar organisations were doing too much of this kind of transparency activity.
I think my broader frame around the issue affected how I read the parent comment. I took it as the problem being a general issue in EA transparency—my general thinking on a lot of the criticisms from within EA was something along the lines of the lack of transparency as a general issue is the larger problem, if EAs knew there would be a report/justification coming, it would not have been such an issue within the community. I do see your point now, although I do think there are some pretty easy ways around it, like determining a reasonably high bar on the basis of CEA’s general spending-per-line-item that would necessitate a kind of “this is a big deal” announcement.
I agree that it is a cost, like all other things. On the point of prioritization, I would argue that because of EA principles being so heavily tied into cost effectiveness and empiricism, treating this as something that can be foregone to give CEA staff to do other stuff that should be done is not only hypocritical, it’s bad epistemically insofar as it implies that EAs (or at least EAs who work at CEA) are not beholden to the same principles of transparency and epistemic rigor that they expect from other similar organizations, ie. “we are above these principles for some reason or other”.
I think this is all pretty reasonable, but also I suspect I might think that existing similar organisations were doing too much of this kind of transparency activity.