I think the issue you’re addressing is a real and important one. However, I think current norms are a response to disadvantages of blurting, both on an individual and movement level. As you note, most people’s naive divergent first impressions are wrong, and on issues most salient to the community, there’s usually somebody else who’s thought about it more. If we added lots more blurting, we’d have an even greater problem with finding the signal in the noise. This adds substantial costs in terms of reader energy, and it also decreases the reward for sharing carefully vetted information because it gets crowded out by less considered blurting.
Hence, the current equilibria, in which ill-considered blurting gets mildly socially punished by people with better-considered views frustrated by the blurter, leading to pre-emptive self-censorship and something of a runaway “stay in your lane” feedback loop that can result in “emperor has no clothes” problems like this one. Except it wasn’t a child or “blurter” who exposed SBF—it was his lead competitor, one of the most expert people on the topic.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, EA’s response to this fraud cannot be—not just shouldn’t, but can’t—to achieve some combination of oracular predictive ability and perfect social coordination for high-fidelity information transmission. It just ain’t gonna happen. We should assume that we cannot predict the next scandal. Instead we should focus on finding general-purpose ways to mitigate or prevent scandal without having to know exactly how it will occur.
This comes down to governance. It’s things like good accounting, finding ways to better protect grantees in the case that their funder goes under, perhaps increased transparency of internal records of EA orgs, that sort of thing.
I’ve spent time in the non-EA nonprofit sector, and the “standard critical story” there is one of suppressed anger among the workers. To be clear, this “standard critical story” is not always fair, accurate, or applicable. By and large, I also think that, when it is applicable, most of the people involved are not deliberately trying to play into this dynamic. It’s just that, when people are making criticisms, this is often the story I’ve heard them tell, or seen for myself.
It goes something like this:
Part of the core EA thesis is that we want to have a different relationship with money and labor: pay for impact, avoid burnout, money is good, measure what you’re doing, trust the argument and evidence rather than the optics. I expect that anybody reading this comment is very familiar with this thesis.
It’s not a thesis that’s optimized for optics or for warm fuzzies. So it should not be surprising that it’s easy to make it look bad, or that it provokes anxiety.
This is unfortunate, though, because appearances and bad feelings are heuristics we rely on to avoid getting sucked into bad situations.
Personally, I think the best way to respond to such anxieties is to spend the energy you put into worrying to critically, carefully investigate some aspect of EA . We make constant calls for criticism, either from inside or outside. Part of the culture of the movement involves an unusual level of transparency, and responsiveness to the argument rather than the status of the arguer.
One way to approach this would simply be to make a hypothesis (i.e. the bar for grants is being lowered, we’re throwing money at nonsense grants), and then see what evidence you can gather for and against it.
Another way would be to identify a hypothesis for which it’s hard to gather evidence either way. For example, let’s say you’re worried that an EA org is run by a bunch of friends who use their billionaire grant money to pay each other excessive salaries and and sponsor Bahama-based “working” vacations. What sort of information would you need in order to support this to the point of being able to motivate action, or falsify it to the point of being able to dissolve your anxiety? If that information isn’t available, then why not? Could it be made available? Identifying a concrete way in which EA could be more transparent about its use of money seems like an excellent, constructive research project.