UK Civil Servant and prolific tweeter (@EAheadlines)
Kirsten
Karma: 11,712
“When life gives you Lemiens”?
Okay, sorry for misreading, the poll makes much more sense now! I’ve edited the first part of my comment at it doesn’t make much sense
Sorry, did this always say externally? Maybe I just need better reading comprehension!
As a government employee, I have a duty to speak candidly internally and not to share restricted information externally. I suspect most organisations have weaker but similar norms about the difference between how you speak to colleagues and externals.
My first question would be: is the particular suicide hotline you’re looking at currently turning people away/making people wait a long time because of lack of volunteers? If so, every extra person could be very valuable.
If not, you might be replacing a less skilled volunteer. The question then becomes, how often would you save a life when they wouldn’t? That’s a hard question and it’s not easy for me to know the answer, but it’s probably not every night. Lots of people call a hotline with their mind already made up one way or the other.
What’s more, in areas that use primarily observational data there’s a really big gap between fields in how often papers even try to use causal inference methods and how hard they work to show that their identifying assumptions hold.
Just highlighting this paragraph because I think it’s extremely important. As a policymaker, the vast majority of research I see from think tanks etc include poorly justified assumptions. It’s become one of the first things I look for now, in part because it’s an easy prompt for me to spot a wide range of issues.
Thanks for sharing your story, and for your family’s sacrifice for the sake of those who need it most
I disliked the opening parable too
-13 karma from 5 votes for a comment that doesn’t seem to break any Forum norms? Odd
You’re right about the effort involved, but when these are real people who you are discussing deanonymizing in order to try to stop them from getting jobs, you should make the effort.
I raised some awkward questions, without offering any answers, conclusions, or recommendations.
I don’t feel like you raised discussion with no preference for what the community decided. When I gave my answer, which many people seem to agree with, your response was to question whether that’s REALLY what the EA community wants. I think it’s a bit disingenuous to suggest that you’re just asking a question when you clearly have a preference for how people answer!
Whistleblower anonymity should remain protected in the vast majority of situations, including this one, imo
Yes, I’ve been wondering who’s on Nonlinear’s board for the better part of a year!
Before Ben’s post, I had heard some good things and many bad things about Nonlinear, to the point that I was trying to figure out who their board members were in case I needed to raise concerns about one or both of the co-founders (I failed to figure it out because they weren’t a registered charity and didn’t have their board members listed on their website either).
Can I suggest you make this a new top-level post and link to it here? It sounds like you’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think continued discussion would probably be better in its own post rather than here (although your original comment makes sense here for sure!)
Yes, I meant some combination of this + this was not a good place to publish that allegation, which again imo harms the accuser if it’s true. No worries at all Joel!
Yes, that’s what I mean. If a friend of mine confided in me about something really bad that had happened to her, I wouldn’t want to publish it 2⁄3 of the way down a post about my own drama, even if she said it was okay—and especially wouldn’t then tell people not to believe her. But obviously I wasn’t sitting in on the conversation and there might be important context I’m missing. It just seems really wrong to me.
Sorry that was an error! I didn’t know how else to see who had found it helpful on mobile, but I meant to untap it after I had checked
“she said it was finally time to be strong and speak up now, as long as she was fully anonymized … She’s still lying awake each night, replaying, over and over, the nightmare of what Ben did to her.”
And then you publish it for the first time telling everyone not to believe her???
If what you describe is actually what she told you, how dare you use it for your own gain here? What a cruel and bizarre thing to do
If I’m truly stuck on a task—no matter how hard I try, my focus always slides off of it—I set a timer for 10 minutes. During those 10 minutes I give myself free licence to either work on that one task, or just sit in my chair. I often spend a few minutes noticing a variety of feelings. Eventually I often hit a thought like, “Well, I wish I could make progress on this, but I don’t really even know what to do. How would I even start?” or “I want to do so much more but I’m just exhausted; I’m at my limit” or “I’m not sure this task is even that useful.” That is generally the thought that gets me unstuck.