I’d be curious to learn more about the analogy to law, so that I can update. Perhaps you can post some links here for the basis of your perspective?
Gleb_T
Karma: 577
If the organizations concerned give permission, I am happy to share documentary evidence in my email of them reviewing the script and giving access to their high-quality logo images. I am also happy to share evidence of me running the final video by them and giving them an opportunity to comment on the wording of the description below the video, which some did to help optimize the description to suit their preferences. I would need permission from the orgs before sharing such email evidence, of course.
Jeff, in your comments above, you say describe yourself as having two kinds of concerns, the ones about the content being more serious. However, in your comments here, you describe your “primary concern” as the nature of the content. I am now not sure about your actual position.
So question 1: Were you revealing your true beliefs earlier or now?
I also want to point out what you said above
While I think the second category is more serious, the first category is much easier to document and communicate.
This to me seems a classical example of bikeshedding (not focusing on the “primary concern”) and motte-and-bailey (defending a much narrower but stronger position after making initially grand but indifensible claims).
So question 2: Do you agree or disagree that these are examples of bikeshedding and motte-and-bailey?
I’m fine taking a random sample of 20 people.
Regarding positive connections, the claim made by Oliver is what we’re trying to measure—that I made “significantly worse” the experience of being a member of the EA community for “something like 80%” of the people there. I had not made any claims about my positive connections.
I will think about this further, as I am not in a good space mentally to give this the consideration it deserves
One of the things I’m trying to do, as I noted above, is a meta-move to change the culture of humility about good deeds. I generally have an attitude of trying to be the change that I want to see in the world and leading by example. It’s a long-term strategy that has short-term costs, clearly :-)
I’ll be happy to take that bet. So if I understand correctly, we’d choose a random 10 people on the EA FB group—ones who are not FB friends with you or I to avoid potential personal factors getting into play—and then ask them if their experience of the EA community has been “significantly worsened” by InIn. If 8 or more say yes, you win. I suggest 1K to a charity of the choice of the winning party? We can let a third party send messages to prevent any framing effects.
Carl, I guess we have a basic disagreement about the ethics of this. I think it is unethical to disclose any aspect of the exchange without the consent of the other person. You believe it is appropriate to disclose one’s own aspect of the exchange without the consent of the other person. We can let other people make up their minds about what they consider ethical.
I am claiming that it is highly problematic ethically to disclose private email exchanges in order to damage other people, without an accusation against you that can be rectified only through disclosing these exchanges. I am comfortable standing by that statement.
True, I don’t have a very good perception of social status instincts. I focus more on the quality of someone’s contributions and expertise rather than their status. I despise status games.
Also, there’s a basic inference gap between people who perceive InIn and me as being excessively self-promotional. I am trying to break the typical and very unhelpful humility characteristic of do-gooders. See more about this in my piece here.
I am confused by how you believe that citing words from an email written by Michelle Hutchinson to me, without my consent to the email being cited, does not constitute disclosure of a private email exchange. The specific method by which this citation got out doesn’t matter—what matters is that it happened.
I have indeed shared private emails when I have been accused of something improperly, and doing so was the only way to address this accusation. I have similarly done so in my statement above with regard to Leah’s email allowing me to share her comment on how InIn helped ACE. I have never done so as an aggressive move to defame someone.
Note – I will make separate responses as my original comment was too long for the system to handle. This is part three of my comments.
Now that we got through the specifics, let me share my concerns with this document.
1) This document is a wonderful testimony to bikeshedding, motte-and-bailey, and confirmation bias.
It’s an example of bikeshedding because the much larger underlying concerns are quite different from the relatively trivial things brought up in this document: see link
Consider the disclosures. Heck, even one of the authors of this document who is a GiveWell employee has very recently engaged in doing the same kind of non-disclosure of her official employment despite GiveWell having a clear disclosures policy and being triply careful after having gotten in trouble for actual astroturfing before: see image So is one of the core issues throughout this whole thread, of InIn volunteer/contractors engaging with InIn content on Facebook through likes/shares. This is something that is widely done within the EA sphere. Why does the disclosures part of the document not list people’s actual motivations and beliefs that led them to write this document?
A) For example, let’s take the originator of the thread, Jeff Kaufman. He stated that his real concerns were not with the engagement by contractrors – the original topic of his post – but that his real concerns were about the nature of the content: see image
Now, I responded here: see image with Jeff not raising points in response. This is a classical motte-and-bailey situation – making a strong claim, and then backing away to a more narrow one after being called out on it: see link
This is similar to the concerns that Gregory Lewis raised in his comments in response to the post.
B) Let’s consider Oliver Habryka’s real concerns, about how I personally made the experience of nearly everyone in EA worse: see image Gregory Lewis says something similar but not quite as strong in his comments here
The experience of nearly everyone in EA being worse due to me is highly questionable, as a number of EAs have upvoted the following comments supportive of InIn/myself: see image or this comment: see image or this comment: see image
I find it hard to fathom how Oliver can say what he said, as all three comments and the upvotes happened before Oliver’s comment. This is a clear case of confirmation bias – twisting the evidence to make it agree with one’s pre-formed conclusion: see link To me Oliver right now is fundamentally discredited as either someone with integrity or as someone who has a good grasp of the mood and dynamics of EAs overall, despite being a central figure in the EA movement and a CEA staff member.
2) This document engages in unethical disclosures of my private messages with others.
When I corresponded with Michelle, I did so from a position as a member of GWWC and the head of another EA organization. Neither was I asked nor did I implicitly permit my personal email exchange to be disclosed publicly. In other words, it was done without my permission in an explicit attempt to damage InIn.
After this situation, both with Michelle and Oliver, how can anyone trust CEA and its arm GWWC right now to not use private emails against them when they might want in the future to damage them after any potential disagreements? And it’s not like I was accusing CEA/GWWC/Michelle of anything that they were trying to defend themselves with. This is a purely aggressive, not defensive, use of emails. It’s especially ironic in a document where I received criticism for sharing my impressions of a phone call, one that I later acknowledged was inappropriate to do but was done in the heat of the moment and in no way intended to damage the other person
Now, I do not know if Michelle herself provided the email, or if Oliver found it through his access to CEA email servers, or if it ended up in the document through other means. Regardless, it had to come from CEA staff. Why would CEA/GWWC permit its staff to use confidential access to information they have only as CEA staff to critize a nonprofit whose mission is at least somewhat competing, as Vipul Naiak pointed out: see image ? How is the CEA/GWWC going to be perceived as a result of this? What is the reputation cost there?
I bet some of you might be hating on me right now for pointing this out. Well, you’re welcome to commit the cognitive bias of shooting the messenger, but I am simply pointing out the reality of the situation. In fact, I am using only publicly available statements, and am not revealing in my comment any of the reputationally damaging information I have in personal communications, despite the fact that my own personal communications with CEA staff has been revealed publicly by CEA staff. I do not consider it ethical to share personal exchanges with others in a way that damages those people. I hope we as a movement can condemn this practice.
3) I am incredibly frustrated by all the time and resources – and therefore money, and therefore lives – this episode cost. And for what? For finding out about our volunteer/contractors doing social media engagement on their volunteer time? For finding out about my use of the term best-selling author, a standard practice even if I didn’t make the NYT best-seller list? I very much appreciate the information about Facebook boosting being problematic, and other things I pointed out as correct in my comments, but this could have been done in a way that didn’t drain so much money, time, lives, reputation, and other costs. This is a black mark in the history of the EA movement.
4) And talking about black marks, how many people were driven away from the EA movement because of this? I had many people approach me about how this caused them to be alienated from the EA movement. I asked one of them allowed me to share his comments and impressions publicly: see image
5) Building on the last point, this episode is a classic example of the “Founder effect” that plagues the EA movement: see link The authors and their supporters are trying to drive away people who share their goals and aspirations, but are somewhat different in their methods. The result of such activities is the evaporative cooling effect, where only those who hold the same methods being part of the movement. This results in the movement being increasingly limited to only a small demographic category. And it’s not like InIn is trying to bring people into the movement – we are trying to spread the ideas of effective giving in an effective manner. Such intolerance is deeply damaging to the movement as a whole.
6) The document and the episode as a whole reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature among the authors. What if I was a different person than I am? What if this drove me to break away from and criticize publicly the EA movement? Emotions have a funny way of reversing themselves sometimes when people feel rejected. Think of a bad breakup you might have had. How much damage do you think would be done in that case to the movement itself, considering the media sway that InIn has? We regularly appear on TV, radio, in prominent public venues. Why would the authors of this document risk such damage? Now, there’s certainly a part of me that wants to do it, but fortunately I am enough of an aspiring rationalist to recognize that this is an emotion that will pass, and am not overwhelmed with it. What if I was not?
To conclude:
I don’t expect that those who come from an established conclusion that “InIn is bad” or “Gleb is bad” or something in that style will update. Many have already committed themselves to this belief, and for the sake of consistency, they will hold that belief.
Just keep in mind the deep damage done by this episode, and consider focusing on how to strengthen others aligned with your goals, not bring them down and drive them away. When conflicts within the EA movement grow personal and irrational – “Gleb made the experience of almost all EAs significantly worse” – this tears apart the movement as a whole.
While still enthusiastic about the ideas of EA, and excited to work with many people in the movement, I am deeply disappointed in some EAs at the higher levels of the movement. For the sake of my own mental health, I have been taking a break from the EA Forum and to a large extent from the EA main FB as well. I will continue to be happy to work with those people who want to build up and create and actually do as much good as they can to spread effective giving ideas broadly. Contact me if interested by email, I anticipate I won’t be checking the Forum much: gleb (at) intentionalinsights (dot) org
Finally, let’s get on with it. Let’s orient toward leaving this in the past, learning from it, avoiding doing anything like this again, and trying to work together to do the most good that we can, even if we may disagree somewhat on the best ways of accomplishing these goals.
P. S. Based on past experience, I learned that back and forth online about this will not be productive, so I did not plan to engage with, and if someone wants to learn more about my perspective, they are welcome to contact me privately by my email.
Note – I will make separate responses as my original comment was too long for the system to handle. This is part two of my comments.
Some of you will be tempted to just downvote this comment because I wrote it. I want you to think about whether that’s the best thing to do for the sake of transparency. If this post gets significant downvotes and is invisible, I’ll be happy to post it as a separate EA Forum post. If that’s what you want, please go ahead and downvote.
I disagree with other aspects of the post.
1) For instance, the points about affiliation, of which there were 2 substantial ones, about GWWC and ACE (I noted earlier it was a mistake to post about the conversation with Kerry).
A) After Michelle Hutchinson sent the email, we changed the wording to be very clear regarding what we mean, stating that we engaged in “collaboration with Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, The Life You Can Save, GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, Giving What We Can, and others about them providing us with numbers of clicks and donations that they can trace to our article.” see link
In other words, to prevent any semantic and philosophical discussion about the meaning of the term “collaboration,” we gave a very specific and clear statement about the nature of the collaboration at hand to prevent folks from getting confused about what it means. I am very comfortable standing by this statement.
B) Leah’s words were not in any way indicative of a formal endorsement for InIn, nor did we claim they were. They were just a statement of the kind of positive impact that InIn had for ACE. And in fact, we did ask Leah about quoting her in our internal documentation, which is where this information is located, our internal document about our EA impact: see image
2) The claims about astroturfing are way out of line: by comparing it to what GiveWell did, the authors are creating a harsh horns effect – smearing by association, in other words. For context, GiveWell’s senior staff on their paid time as employees went to forums where donations were discussed, and made up fake names to pose as forum members singing the praises of GiveWell. I and many other folks were very disappointed upon finding out what GiveWell did, although I appreciate the way they handled it. I would never want to do anything of the sort.
So let’s compare it to InIn. What the authors of this document point to is instances of InIn volunteers and volunteer/contractors on their own, non-paid time, and without any direction from the leadership, and using their real names, engaging with InIn content and posting mostly supportive messages, although with some criticism as well. They did not at all try to hide their identity, nor did they do so on paid time, as did GiveWell employees. We pay people only for specific things, such as doing video editing or social media management, and our miniscule budget does not cover low-impact and unethical activities such as the kind of thing done by GiveWell employees employees in the past.
I do not control what our volunteers or volunteer-contractors do on their non-paid time. I don’t have time to monitor all that our volunteers do, and I generally leave it up to them to figure out, as I have an attitude of trust and faith in them. Volunteer management is a delicate balance, as anyone who actually managed volunteers knows. So I only intervene when I hear about problems, otherwise I focus on more high-impact activities such as actually doing the work of outreach to a broad audience that makes a difference in improving the world. When folks engaged in things that got pushback, such as posting on Less Wrong without sharing in their introduction statements their role with InIn, I asked them politely to revise their introduction statements in one-on-one conversations.
Now, since this blowup, I have had a thorough conversation with the Board of Directors and our Advisory Board, and we decided to institute a more formal Conflict of Interest policy. We decided it would be appropriate to have a systematic policy that applies to anyone with an official position in the organization, meaning holding an office or being paid. Hopefully this will help guide people’s behavior in a way that results in appropriate disclosures. However, we anticipate it will take some time to shift behavior and not everything will go right. You are welcome to point out to me any instances where there’s an issues, and I’ll talk to the person who engaged in problematic behavior.
3) I’m not sure why the volunteer/contractor is listed as a dubious practice. All people who are contractors started off by being volunteers. Over time, as we had a need for more work being done, we approached some volunteers who we knew already had a background as contractors on Odesk to do some part-time work for the organization. You can see the screenshots with my description for more details.
It is very common for nonprofit organizations to offer people who volunteer for them to do some part-time work. This is how many other EA organizations besides InIn got started – with volunteers who then went on to do some part-time work. Eventually, these organizations became large enough to have full-time employees, and we’d like InIn to be there eventually.
Some folks expressed disbelief that the volunteer/contractors are really there because they support the mission and instead believe that they are just there for the money. Well, that’s simply not the case. Let’s take the example of Ella, who in October 2015, in response to a fundraising email, made a $10/month donation: see image She voluntarily, out of her own desire, chose to make this donation. Let me repeat – she voluntarily, out of her own volition in response to a fundraising call that went out to all of our supporters, chose to make this donation. Just to be clear, we send out fundraising letters regularly, so it’s not like this was some special occasion. She did not have to do it, it’s just something she wanted to do out of her own volition.
Nor is this in any way an explicit or implicit obligation for contractors – about half of the contractors are also donors, and the others are not. I value, respect, and treasure Ella and all the others contractors, they are a great team and I feel close to them. We have a family environment in the organization, and care about and support each othyer. It makes me very upset and frustrated to see the relationship between us described in this twisted way as a “dubious practice.”
4) The claims about it being bad to call oneself a best-selling author if one did not do it through making the New York Times best-seller list are silly. There are many best-seller lists, and authors who make it to the top of any list describe themselves as best-selling authors: see link The document makes it seem like I’m not following standard author practice here, and that’s simply false.
5) The claims about not disclosing paid support are not backed up by any real evidence. I said that I ran the t-shirts by multiple people. Sure, some of them were volunteer/contractors for InIn. Does that fact cause them to not count as “people?” Wouldn’t they be more likely to want higher-quality products so the organization succeeds more? In fact, they gave some of the more stringent criticism of the initial design, because they are more invested in the success of the design.
6) Regarding the Huffington Post piece, the person – Jeff Boxell – did not hear of effective giving before. Now he did, and he intends to use GiveWell and TLYCS as the guide for his donations. I am very comfortable standing by that claim.
P. S. Based on past experience, I learned that back and forth online about this will not be productive, so I did not plan to engage with, and if someone wants to learn more about my perspective, they are welcome to contact me privately by my email.
Note – I will make separate responses as my original comment was too long for the system to handle. This is part one of my comments.
Some of you will be tempted to just downvote this comment because I wrote it. I want you to think about whether that’s the best thing to do for the sake of transparency. If this post gets significant downvotes and is invisible, I’ll be happy to post it as a separate EA Forum post. If that’s what you want, please go ahead and downvote.
I’m very proud of and happy with the work that Intentional Insights does to promote rational thinking, wise decision-making, and effective giving to a broad audience. To be clear, we focus on spreading rational thinking in all areas of life, not only charitable giving, with the goal of raising the sanity waterline and ameliorating x-risk. We place articles in major venues, appear on radio and television, and spread our content through a wide variety of other channels. It is not an exaggeration to say we have reached millions of people through our work. Now, we don’t have a large resource base. We have a miniscule budget of just over 40K, mostly provided by my wife and I. It’s thanks to our broad network of volunteers of over 50 people that we can make this difference. A few of these volunteers also provide some contract work, and I’m really happy they can do so. Thanks to all the folks who helped make this happen!
Let’s go on to the content of the post. I appreciate the constructive part of the criticism of the authors of this post, and think some of points are quite correct.
1) I do think we made some mistakes with our social media, especially on Facebook, and we are working to address that.
2) We have instituted a Conflict of Interest policy to provide clear guidance to anyone in an official position with InIn to disclose their affiliations when making public statements about the organization.
3) Unfortunately, the person I asked to update our social media impact after Jacy Reese thoughtfully pointed out the “shares” vs. “likes” issue forgot to update the EA Impact document, although she did update the others. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, and it’s now fixed.
4) While I was careful to avoid explicitly soliciting upvotes, my actions were intended to bring information about opportunities to upvote to supporters of Intentional Insights. I should have been clear about that, and I noted that later in the FB post.
5) I am at heart a trusting person. I trusted the figures from TLYCS, and why shouldn’t I? They are the experts on their figures. I’m glad that this situation led to a revision of the figures, as I want to know the actual impact that we are making, and not have a false and inflated belief about our impact.
In part two, I will describe what aspects of the post I disagreed with.
P. S. Based on past experience, I learned that back and forth online about this will not be productive, so I did not plan to engage with, and if someone wants to learn more about my perspective, they are welcome to contact me privately by my email.
Glad to hear of your support, SHIC is an important and worthwhile project!
Nice to see this progress!
It seems to me that risk aversion and selfishness are orthogonal to each other—i.e., they are different axes. Based on the case study of Alex, it seems that Alex does not truly—with their System 1 - believe that a far-future cause is 10X better than a current cause. Their System 1 has a lower expected utility on donating to a far future cause than poverty relief, and the “risk aversion” is a post-factum rationalization of a System 1, subconscious mental calculus.
I’d suggest for Alex to sit down and see if they have any emotional doubts about the 10X figure for the far-future cause. Then, figure out any emotional doubts they have, and place accurate weights on far-future donations versus poverty relief. Once Alex has their System 1 and System 2 aligned, then proceed.
Thanks for the tip! We haven’t looked into these, we’ll have to check them out.
I am unwilling to take “active members of the EA group” as representative of the EA community, since your actual claim was that I made the experience of the EA community significantly worse, and that includes all members, not simply activists. On average, only 1% of any internet community contribute, but the rest are still community members. Instead, I am fine taking the bet than Benito describes—who is clearly far from friendly to InIn.
I am even fine with going with your lower estimate of 14 out of 20.
I am fine including friends.
I am fine with the two questions, although I would insist the second question be “significantly worse” not simply “negative impact,” since that is the claim we are testing, and the same for “significant preference for Gleb or InIn to not have engaged.” Words matter.
I am fine with having a pledge of $1K to be contributed as either of us has the money to do so in the future. I presume you will eventually have $1K.