Optics is real. We live in the real world. Optics factor into QUALYs or any other metric. Why would the reverse be true, that we ignore reputation-related effects, even if they are fully real?
I feel a bit awkward quoting the Bible, but there’s one part that’s super relevant to this discussion from a secular perspective. It’s Corinthians 8:6 to 8:13, and is basically like, “hey, we know doing X isn’t bad, but anyone seeing us doing X they’d think we’re casting away our principles, which would cause them to do wrong, so we’re not going to do X.” Here’s the quote,
yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. However, not all possess this knowledge. But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, will he not be encouraged, if his conscience is weak, to eat food offered to idols? And so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died. Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble.
It also comes off as quite manipulative and dishonest, which puts people off. There are many people who’ll respect you if you disagree with them but state your opinion plainly and clearly, without trying to hide the weird or objectionable parts of your view. There are relatively few who will respect you if they find out you tried to manipulate their opinion of you, prioritizing optics over substance.
And this seems especially harmful for EA, whose central selling point is “we’re the people who try to actually do the most good, not just signal goodness or go through the motions”. Most public conversations about EA optics are extremely naive on this point, treating it as a free action for EAs to spend half their time publicly hand-wringing about their reputations.
What sort of message do you think that sends to people who come to the EA Forum for the first time, interested in EA, and find the conversations dominated by reputation obsession, panicky glances at the news cycle, complicated strategies to toss first-order utility out the window for the sake of massaging outsiders’ views of EA, etc.? Is that the best possible public face you could pick for EA?
In fact, I don’t think that we should adopt the stance “be so terrified of PR risks that you refuse to talk about PR”. I think EA should blurt far more than it currently does, and this will inevitably mean talking at least a little about people’s emotional fears re looking weird to others, being embarrassed to do something, etc.
But recognizing the deep PR costs of EA’s long-standing public obsession with reputation management is at least a first step in the direction of unraveling the obsession for some people, I’d hope.
Yeah I totally agree. I’d agree with the statement “it’s helpful to take optics into account, but not let it dominate our decision making process”. My original comment was in response to the idea that ‘actually doing good is more important than looking like doing good’ which I would argue is an oversimplification of the real world and not a good principle. I don’t think that it’s helpful to care entirely about optics or never care about optics. It’s more nuanced.
I also think it could help to break down the term “optics” a bit. I think the purchase is bad for first impressions, which is one particular type of optics.
Anyways this whole discussion about optics is kind of a red herring. People will be shocked by the purchase because it was by a charity and was pretty exorbitant, and in fact it was (by that one guy’s admission… I’m on a phone and don’t want to look up his name in the comment above) purchased for to make conference participants feel inspired and was not made as a cost savings mechanism. Appearance (not being frugal) reflects reality in this case, at least based on that comment I read by that one guy (and if I’m wrong just let me be wrong at this point, I have work to do and don’t care to debate this further).
But yeah I agree about let’s not wholly concentrate on optics. Of course.
Let’s say we had one charitable person who has a reputation for being charitable, and another charitable person who has a reputation for hurting others. Someone needing charity avoid the latter, even though the latter is also beneficial.
There’s a big difference between trying to represent yourself in an accurate or an inaccurate way. In either case you’re caring about what people think about you, but if we assume the perceiver is acting in their self interest, then the accurate representation will benefit them, and the inaccurate representation may harm them.
I’m not disagreeing with what you wrote. I’m adding to it that “caring about optics” can actually be more honest. It’s possible to care about optics so that you’re represented honestly, too.
SBF caused damage not because he virtue signaled with his cheap car and lack of style, but because he was misrepresenting himself and being a dick.
It makes sense for people to talk about not wanting to be misrepresented, and if I were a new visitor to the forum and I saw people upset about being misrepresented, I’d probably be sympathetic to them. I also might think they were cry babies and too obsessed with their image, which is what you’re saying could be the case, and I agree with that.
Also just by the way, I guess the ideal would be to care what other people think but be strong enough to do what one thinks is right. I think there’s a psychological element to all this. I’ve lived in some places where I was looked down on, even though I was working hard for their benefit, and it did suck psychologically. It would’ve been better for everyone if people had known how much I cared about them, but yeah it can be important to not worry too much about what other people think, as you wrote.
I do think it’s great when EAs see a false thing being said about EA and they speak up to say what they think the true thing is.
Which can look like “optics”, and is not exactly the same as “just be internally virtuous and go about your business”.
Ideally, though, I think this would apply to false positive claims about EA, as well as false negative claims about EA.
Otherwise, discerning people will be rightly skeptical when you object to criticisms of EA, or will generally suspect you of cherry-picking evidence when you want to push a specific conclusion.
I don’t think EA should be indifferent to “other human beings have false beliefs about something that seems very important to me”.
And plausibly a few EAs should specialize in thinking about EA’s reputation, and go further still. Though I think EA PR specialists should still ground their activities in “first and foremost, be actually-virtuous and honest”.
The stronger claim I want to make is less “never ever think about EA’s reputation”, more “make it your goal to give people accurate models of EA, rather than to improve EA’s reputation per se”.
Treat people (including non-EAs) more like agents, and more like peers.
Even when you don’t actually think someone is your peer, I think that on the whole it turns out to be a really good behavioral policy to share information with people like you would with a (new-to-this-topic) peer.
Try to empower them by giving them more accurate models, even if you’re quietly worried they’ll screw it up somehow. Even when it’s tempting to try to steer people by feeding them subtly-unrepresentative data, resist the temptation and just tell them what your actual model is.
You’ll lose some winnable battles that way, but I think the net effect of EA adopting this approach is that we’re a lot likelier to win the war and cause things to go well in the future.
EA is typically an (honest) virtue signal to sufficiently savvy, discerning assessors of virtue.
This isn’t the only reason people do EA, but it’s a good and important reason, because virtue is a good thing and therefore it’s good when there are incentives to honestly signal it.
Like, the central reason EA is a good idea is that helping people is good, and EA is a good approach / community / body of knowledge for achieving that.
But if something is a way to help others, then it’s also typically a way to show that you care about others (and are smart, discerning, etc.)
And that’s good too. Because it’s socially valuable to have ways to accurately signal those characteristics to others, and because (insofar as visibly having those characteristics is socially rewarded) this increases the incentive to actually do good.
This also suggests that some level of insularity and elitism is prosocial, as long as you don’t fuck up the process of picking which people to trust and value the opinions of.
“EA is a signal of goodness” incentivizes actual goodness insofar as either (a) EA’s good in a way that’s maximally legible, impressive, and emotionally salient to a Random Human Being, or (b) you care more about signaling goodness to the most discerning and knowledgeable people.
It’s the same mechanism as, e.g., an academic field: the quality of academic discourse depends on the fact that physicists care more about impressing their colleagues (plus visibly smart and discerning outsiders), than about impressing random CNN viewing audiences.
If physicists cared more about impressing CNN watchers, then there would be a lot more wannabe Deepak Chopras, people engaged in hyperbole and fuzzy thinking, etc. It’s important that physicists care primarily about elite opinion, and it’s important they chose the right elite.
[...] Embracing the wrong elites can potentially be arbitrarily bad, because any group can be thought of as an “elite” relative to some selection process. For some people, Infowars is elite opinion, and Infowars fans are the specialists you try to impress. For others, theologians are the elite. Or nutrition scientists, or psi researchers, or your favorite political party, or...
Picking the wrong elite to signal to (and defer to, etc.) can be a complete disaster. That, plus general pressures to virtue-signal egalitarianism, causes a lot of people to try to find some way to avoid having to pick an “elite”.
But populism faces the same core problem as elitism: just as elites can be wrong, Mass Opinion can be wrong too.
In the end, there’s no good alternative to putting in the hard work to identify which people have a stronger grasp on reality.
But once you’ve put in that work, insofar as you feel confident about the result, you should indeed care more about the opinion of people who have accurate beliefs than about what a random person on the street thinks of you.
This has failure modes, because every option has failure modes. But the failure mode “the physics community mostly just cares about popular book sales a la Deepak Chopra” is a lot worse than the failure mode “physicists sometimes put too much weight on a researcher’s bad work”.
And it’s a lot worse, at the meta / civilizational level, for humanity to have no true community of rigorous physicists, than for humanity to have rigorous physicists and theologians. Some things aren’t worth giving up in order to prevent the existence of theology.
Optics is real. We live in the real world. Optics factor into QUALYs or any other metric. Why would the reverse be true, that we ignore reputation-related effects, even if they are fully real?
I feel a bit awkward quoting the Bible, but there’s one part that’s super relevant to this discussion from a secular perspective. It’s Corinthians 8:6 to 8:13, and is basically like, “hey, we know doing X isn’t bad, but anyone seeing us doing X they’d think we’re casting away our principles, which would cause them to do wrong, so we’re not going to do X.” Here’s the quote,
yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. However, not all possess this knowledge. But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, will he not be encouraged, if his conscience is weak, to eat food offered to idols? And so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died. Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble.
Here’s an explanation of some of the reasons it’s often harmful for a community to fixate on optics, even though optics is real: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Js34Ez9nrDeJCTYQL/politics-is-way-too-meta
It also comes off as quite manipulative and dishonest, which puts people off. There are many people who’ll respect you if you disagree with them but state your opinion plainly and clearly, without trying to hide the weird or objectionable parts of your view. There are relatively few who will respect you if they find out you tried to manipulate their opinion of you, prioritizing optics over substance.
And this seems especially harmful for EA, whose central selling point is “we’re the people who try to actually do the most good, not just signal goodness or go through the motions”. Most public conversations about EA optics are extremely naive on this point, treating it as a free action for EAs to spend half their time publicly hand-wringing about their reputations.
What sort of message do you think that sends to people who come to the EA Forum for the first time, interested in EA, and find the conversations dominated by reputation obsession, panicky glances at the news cycle, complicated strategies to toss first-order utility out the window for the sake of massaging outsiders’ views of EA, etc.? Is that the best possible public face you could pick for EA?
In fact, I don’t think that we should adopt the stance “be so terrified of PR risks that you refuse to talk about PR”. I think EA should blurt far more than it currently does, and this will inevitably mean talking at least a little about people’s emotional fears re looking weird to others, being embarrassed to do something, etc.
But recognizing the deep PR costs of EA’s long-standing public obsession with reputation management is at least a first step in the direction of unraveling the obsession for some people, I’d hope.
Yeah I totally agree. I’d agree with the statement “it’s helpful to take optics into account, but not let it dominate our decision making process”. My original comment was in response to the idea that ‘actually doing good is more important than looking like doing good’ which I would argue is an oversimplification of the real world and not a good principle. I don’t think that it’s helpful to care entirely about optics or never care about optics. It’s more nuanced.
I also think it could help to break down the term “optics” a bit. I think the purchase is bad for first impressions, which is one particular type of optics.
Anyways this whole discussion about optics is kind of a red herring. People will be shocked by the purchase because it was by a charity and was pretty exorbitant, and in fact it was (by that one guy’s admission… I’m on a phone and don’t want to look up his name in the comment above) purchased for to make conference participants feel inspired and was not made as a cost savings mechanism. Appearance (not being frugal) reflects reality in this case, at least based on that comment I read by that one guy (and if I’m wrong just let me be wrong at this point, I have work to do and don’t care to debate this further).
But yeah I agree about let’s not wholly concentrate on optics. Of course.
Let’s say we had one charitable person who has a reputation for being charitable, and another charitable person who has a reputation for hurting others. Someone needing charity avoid the latter, even though the latter is also beneficial.
There’s a big difference between trying to represent yourself in an accurate or an inaccurate way. In either case you’re caring about what people think about you, but if we assume the perceiver is acting in their self interest, then the accurate representation will benefit them, and the inaccurate representation may harm them.
I’m not disagreeing with what you wrote. I’m adding to it that “caring about optics” can actually be more honest. It’s possible to care about optics so that you’re represented honestly, too.
SBF caused damage not because he virtue signaled with his cheap car and lack of style, but because he was misrepresenting himself and being a dick.
It makes sense for people to talk about not wanting to be misrepresented, and if I were a new visitor to the forum and I saw people upset about being misrepresented, I’d probably be sympathetic to them. I also might think they were cry babies and too obsessed with their image, which is what you’re saying could be the case, and I agree with that.
Also just by the way, I guess the ideal would be to care what other people think but be strong enough to do what one thinks is right. I think there’s a psychological element to all this. I’ve lived in some places where I was looked down on, even though I was working hard for their benefit, and it did suck psychologically. It would’ve been better for everyone if people had known how much I cared about them, but yeah it can be important to not worry too much about what other people think, as you wrote.
Some related stuff I’ve said:
And: