It depends. In isolation, that statement does seem concerning to me, like they may have been overestimating the potential negative optics.
What matters to me here is whether sufficient thought was put into all the different aspects. Clearly, they thought a lot about the non-optics stuff. I have no way of easily evaluating those kinds of statements, as I have very little experience organizing conferences. But I’m concerned that maybe there wasn’t sufficient thought given to just how bad the optics can get with this sort of thing.
My career has been in communications, so I’m used to thinking about PR risks and advocating for thinking about those aspects. Perhaps I’m posting here with a bias from that point of view. If I were in a room with decision-makers, I’d expect my comments here to be balanced by arguments on the other side.
Even so, my suspicion is that, if you write something like “do what really is good rather than just what seems good”, you’re more likely to be underestimating rather than overestimating PR risks.
FWIW, as someone who also works in communications, I strongly disagree here and think EA spends massively too much of its mental energy thinking about optics.
More specifically:
I tend to criticize virtue ethics and deontology a lot more than I praise them—IMO these are approaches that often go badly wrong. But I think PR (for a community like EA) is an area where deontology-like adherence to “behave honestly and with integrity” and virtue-ethics-like focus on “be the sort of person internally who you would find most admirable and virtuous” tends to have far better consequences than “select the action that naively looks as though it will make others like you the most”.
If you’re an EA and you want to improve EA’s reputation, my main advice to you is going to look very virtue-ethics-flavored: be brave, be thoughtful, be discerning, be honest, be honorable, be fair, be compassionate, be trustworthy; and insofar as you’re not those things, be honest about it (because honesty is on the list, and is paramount to trusting everything else about your apparent virtues); and let your reputation organically follow from the visible signs of those internal traits of yours, rather than being a thing you work hard on optimizing separately from optimizing whether you’re actually an awesome person.
Have integrity, and speak truth even when you’re scared to, and be the sort of person you’d have found inspiring to run into in your early days at EA, if someone could read your mind and see the generators of your behavior.
Do stuff that you feel really and deeply proud of, rather than stuff that you’d be embarrassed by if someone fully understood what you were doing and why, context and all.
I think that for all or nearly-all EAs, that should pretty much be the entire focus of their thoughts about EA’s reputation.
The other 10% is something like: “But sometimes adding time and care to how, when, and whether you say something can be a big deal. It could have real effects on the first impressions you, and the ideas and communities and memes you care about, make on people who (a) could have a lot to contribute on goals you care about; (b) are the sort of folks for whom first impressions matter.”
10% is maybe an average. I think it should be lower (5%?) for an early-career person who’s prioritizing exploration, experimentation and learning. I think it should be higher (20%?) for someone who’s in a high-stakes position, has a lot of people scrutinizing what they say, and would lose the opportunity to do a lot of valuable things if they substantially increased the time they spent clearing up misunderstandings.
I wish it could be 0% instead of 5-20%, and this emphatically includes what I wish for myself. I deeply wish I could constantly express myself in exploratory, incautious ways—including saying things colorfully and vividly, saying things I’m not even sure I believe, and generally ‘trying on’ all kinds of ideas and messages. This is my natural way of being; but I feel like I’ve got pretty unambiguous reasons to think it’s a bad idea.
If you want to defend 0%, can you give me something here beyond your intuition? The stakes are high (and I think “Heuristics are almost never >90% right” is a pretty good prior).
It depends. In isolation, that statement does seem concerning to me, like they may have been overestimating the potential negative optics.
What matters to me here is whether sufficient thought was put into all the different aspects. Clearly, they thought a lot about the non-optics stuff. I have no way of easily evaluating those kinds of statements, as I have very little experience organizing conferences. But I’m concerned that maybe there wasn’t sufficient thought given to just how bad the optics can get with this sort of thing.
My career has been in communications, so I’m used to thinking about PR risks and advocating for thinking about those aspects. Perhaps I’m posting here with a bias from that point of view. If I were in a room with decision-makers, I’d expect my comments here to be balanced by arguments on the other side.
Even so, my suspicion is that, if you write something like “do what really is good rather than just what seems good”, you’re more likely to be underestimating rather than overestimating PR risks.
FWIW, as someone who also works in communications, I strongly disagree here and think EA spends massively too much of its mental energy thinking about optics.
More specifically:
I tend to criticize virtue ethics and deontology a lot more than I praise them—IMO these are approaches that often go badly wrong. But I think PR (for a community like EA) is an area where deontology-like adherence to “behave honestly and with integrity” and virtue-ethics-like focus on “be the sort of person internally who you would find most admirable and virtuous” tends to have far better consequences than “select the action that naively looks as though it will make others like you the most”.
If you’re an EA and you want to improve EA’s reputation, my main advice to you is going to look very virtue-ethics-flavored: be brave, be thoughtful, be discerning, be honest, be honorable, be fair, be compassionate, be trustworthy; and insofar as you’re not those things, be honest about it (because honesty is on the list, and is paramount to trusting everything else about your apparent virtues); and let your reputation organically follow from the visible signs of those internal traits of yours, rather than being a thing you work hard on optimizing separately from optimizing whether you’re actually an awesome person.
Have integrity, and speak truth even when you’re scared to, and be the sort of person you’d have found inspiring to run into in your early days at EA, if someone could read your mind and see the generators of your behavior.
Do stuff that you feel really and deeply proud of, rather than stuff that you’d be embarrassed by if someone fully understood what you were doing and why, context and all.
I think that for all or nearly-all EAs, that should pretty much be the entire focus of their thoughts about EA’s reputation.
My take is about 90% in agreement with this.
The other 10% is something like: “But sometimes adding time and care to how, when, and whether you say something can be a big deal. It could have real effects on the first impressions you, and the ideas and communities and memes you care about, make on people who (a) could have a lot to contribute on goals you care about; (b) are the sort of folks for whom first impressions matter.”
10% is maybe an average. I think it should be lower (5%?) for an early-career person who’s prioritizing exploration, experimentation and learning. I think it should be higher (20%?) for someone who’s in a high-stakes position, has a lot of people scrutinizing what they say, and would lose the opportunity to do a lot of valuable things if they substantially increased the time they spent clearing up misunderstandings.
I wish it could be 0% instead of 5-20%, and this emphatically includes what I wish for myself. I deeply wish I could constantly express myself in exploratory, incautious ways—including saying things colorfully and vividly, saying things I’m not even sure I believe, and generally ‘trying on’ all kinds of ideas and messages. This is my natural way of being; but I feel like I’ve got pretty unambiguous reasons to think it’s a bad idea.
If you want to defend 0%, can you give me something here beyond your intuition? The stakes are high (and I think “Heuristics are almost never >90% right” is a pretty good prior).