Out of curiosity, when you “announce intention to publish a paper or blogpost,” how often has a staff member objected in the past, and how often has that led to major changes or not publishing?
I recall three in depth conversations about particular Epoch products. None of them led to a substantive change in publication and content.
OTOH I can think of at least three instances where we decided to not pursue projects or we edited some information out of an article guided by considerations like “we may not want to call attention about this topic”.
In general I think we are good at preempting when something might be controversial or could be presented in a less conspicuous framing, and acting on it.
Cool, that’s what I expected; I was just surprised by your focus in the above comment on intervening after something had already been written and on the intervention being don’t publish rather than edit.
OBJECT LEVEL REPLY:
Our current publication policy is:
Any Epoch staff member can object when we announce intention to publish a paper or blogpost.
We then have a discussion about it. If we conclude that there is a harm and that the harm outweights the benefits we refrain from publishing.
If no consensus is reached we discuss the issue with some of our trusted partners and seek advice.
Some of our work that is not published is instead disseminated privately on a case-by-case basis
We think this policy has a good mix of being flexible and giving space for Epoch staff to raise concerns.
Out of curiosity, when you “announce intention to publish a paper or blogpost,” how often has a staff member objected in the past, and how often has that led to major changes or not publishing?
I recall three in depth conversations about particular Epoch products. None of them led to a substantive change in publication and content.
OTOH I can think of at least three instances where we decided to not pursue projects or we edited some information out of an article guided by considerations like “we may not want to call attention about this topic”.
In general I think we are good at preempting when something might be controversial or could be presented in a less conspicuous framing, and acting on it.
Cool, that’s what I expected; I was just surprised by your focus in the above comment on intervening after something had already been written and on the intervention being don’t publish rather than edit.
Why’d you strong-downvote?
That´s a good point—I expect most of these discussions to lead to edits rather than publications.
I downvoted because 1) I want to discourage more conversation on the topic and 2) I think its bad policy to ask organizations if they have any projects they decided to keep secret (because if its true they might have to lie about it)
In hindsight I think I am overthinking this, and I retracted my downvotes on this thread of comments.