Meta: I’m worried there could be some people-talking-past-each-other here. I never meant to claim that PR concerns shouldn’t influence one’s decision-making, but that they shouldn’t drive one’s decision-making. On this view you should certainly be willing to change direction on relatively unimportant issues for PR reasons, but should be somewhat resolute against doing so when it would change what was otherwise the central important thing you wanted to do.
Similarly, I agree with Habryka’s clarification in the thread above:
I am not saying that we should fully blind ourselves to considerations of reputation and public relations. However, I think this kind of reputational optimization is perilous and if is one of the domains where naive consequentialist-type reasoning tends to most often go awry.
In any case I don’t think that the case in point was primarily a PR-driven decision of the type being objected to. If it had been, I think that that would have been a little corrosive to the reputation of Open Philanthropy of trying to take everything seriously and go after the most fundamental things.
Alexander Berger’s reflections on Wytham are consistent with the thing that seems to me to be desirable. He regretted not weighing possible PR risks more heavily on a grant that they regarded as marginal—that seems fine. If they let such PR risks dominate their decision-making for a non-marginal grant, or mean that they wouldn’t even get to the point of assessing whether a grant was marginal, that would (of course depending on the details) seem more unwise.
But of course you’re right that it would be bad to ~never weigh PR considerations. I used to sometimes find it kind of distasteful (/veering towards ~immoral) to try explicitly to model how other people might think of me or of orgs I was a part of. But I think this was just a mistake.
Meta: I’m worried there could be some people-talking-past-each-other here. I never meant to claim that PR concerns shouldn’t influence one’s decision-making, but that they shouldn’t drive one’s decision-making. On this view you should certainly be willing to change direction on relatively unimportant issues for PR reasons, but should be somewhat resolute against doing so when it would change what was otherwise the central important thing you wanted to do.
I defended a similar broad position to this in a post a couple of years back on the perils of optimizing in social contexts.
Similarly, I agree with Habryka’s clarification in the thread above:
In any case I don’t think that the case in point was primarily a PR-driven decision of the type being objected to. If it had been, I think that that would have been a little corrosive to the reputation of Open Philanthropy of trying to take everything seriously and go after the most fundamental things.
Alexander Berger’s reflections on Wytham are consistent with the thing that seems to me to be desirable. He regretted not weighing possible PR risks more heavily on a grant that they regarded as marginal—that seems fine. If they let such PR risks dominate their decision-making for a non-marginal grant, or mean that they wouldn’t even get to the point of assessing whether a grant was marginal, that would (of course depending on the details) seem more unwise.
But of course you’re right that it would be bad to ~never weigh PR considerations. I used to sometimes find it kind of distasteful (/veering towards ~immoral) to try explicitly to model how other people might think of me or of orgs I was a part of. But I think this was just a mistake.