This is in response to Sarah Constantin's recent post about intellectual dishonesty within the EA community.
I roughly agree with Sarah's main object level points, but I think this essay doesn't sufficiently embody the spirit of cooperative discourse it's trying to promote. I have a lot of thoughts here, but they are building off a few existing essays. (There's been a recent revival over on Less Wrong attempting to make it a better locus for high quality discussion. I don't know if it's especially succeeded, but I think the concepts behind that intended revival and very important)
- Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- A Return to Discussion (Sarah Constantin)
- The Importance of [Less Wrong, OR another Single Conversational Locus] (Emphasis mine) (Anna Salamon)
- The Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
I think it's important to have all three concepts in context before delving into: - EA has a lying problem (Sarah Constantin)
I recommend reading all of those. But here's a rough summary of what I consider the important bits. (If you want to actually argue with these bits, please read the actual essays before doing so, so you're engaging with the full substance of the idea)
- Intellectuals and contrarians love to argue and nitpick. This is valuable - it produces novel insights, and keeps us honest. BUT it makes it harder to actually work together to achieve things. We need to understand how working-together works on a deep enough level that we can do so without turning into another random institution that's lost it's purpose. (See Why Our Kind... for more)
- Lately, people have tended to talk on social media (Facebook, Tumblr, etc) rather than in formal blogs or forums that encourage longform discussion. This has a few effects. (See A Return to Discussion for more)
- FB discussion is fragmented - it's hard to find everything that's been said on a topic. (And tumblr is even worse)
- It's hard to know whether OTHER people have read a given thing on a topic.
- A related point (not necessarily in "A Return to Discussion" is that social media incentives some of the worst kinda of discussion. People share things quickly, without reflection. People read and respond to things in 5-10 minute bursts, without having time to fully digest them.
- Having a single, long form discussion area that you can expect everyone in an intellectual community to have read, makes it much easier to building knowledge. (And most of human progress is due, not to humans being smart, but being able to stand on the shoulders of giants). Anna Salamon's "Importance of a Single Conversational Locus" is framed around x-risk, but I think it applies to all aspects of EA: the problems the world faces are so huge that they need a higher caliber of thinking and knowledge-building than we currently have in order to solve.
- In order to make true intellectual progress, you need people to be able to make critiques. You also need those critics to expect their criticism to in turn be criticized, so that the criticism is high quality. If a critique turns out to be poorly thought out, we need shared, common knowledge of that so that people don't end up rehashing the same debates.
- And finally, (one of) Sarah's points in "EA has a lying problem" is that, in order to be different from other movements and succeed where they failed, EA needs to hold itself to a higher standard than usual. There's been much criticism of, say, Intentional Insights for doing sketchy, truth-bendy things to gain prestige and power. But that plenty of "high status" people within the EA community do things that are similar, even if to a different degree. We need to be aware of that.
I would not argue as strongly as Sarah does that we shouldn't do it at all, but it's worth periodically calling each other out on it.
Cooperative Epistemology
So my biggest point here, is that we need to be more proactive and mindful about how discussion and knowledge is built upon within the EA community.
To succeed at our goals:
- EA needs to hold itself to a very high intellectual standard (higher than we currently have, probably. In some sense anyway)
- Factions within EA needs to be able to cooperate, share knowledge. Both object level knowledge (i.e. how cost effective is AMF?) and meta/epistemic knowledge like:
- How do we evaluate messy studies
- How do we discuss things online so that people actually put effort into reading and contributing the discussion.
- What kinds of conversational/debate norms lead people to be more transparent.
- We need to be able to apply all the knowledge to go out and accomplish things, which will probably involve messy political stuff.
I have specific concerns about Sarah's post, which I'll post in a comment when I have a bit more time.
Hi everyone! I’m here to formally respond to Sarah’s article, on behalf of ACE. It’s difficult to determine where the response should go, as it seems there are many discussions, and reposting appears to be discouraged. I’ve decided to post here on the EA forum (as it tends to be the central meeting place for EAs), and will try to direct people from other places to this longer response.
Firstly, I’d like to clarify why we have not inserted ourselves into the discussion happening in multiple Facebook groups and fora. We have recently implemented a formal social media policy which encourages ACE staff to respond to comments about our work with great consideration, and in a way that accurately reflects our views (as opposed to those of one staff member). We are aware that this might come across as “radio silence” or lack of concern for the criticism at hand—but that is not the case. Whenever there are legitimate critiques about our work, we take it very seriously. When there are accusations of intent to deceive, we do not take them lightly. The last thing we want to do is respond in haste only to realize that we had not given the criticism enough consideration. We also want to allow the community to discuss amongst themselves prior to posting a response. This is not only to encourage discussion amongst individual members of the community, but also so that we can prioritize responding to the concerns shared by the greatest number of community members.
It is clear to us now that we have failed to adequately communicate the uncertainty surrounding the outcomes of our leafleting intervention report. We absolutely disagree with claims of intentional deception and the characterization of our staff as acting in bad-faith—we have never tried to hide our uncertainty about the existing leafleting research report, and as others have pointed out, it is clearly stated throughout the site where leafleting is mentioned. However, our reasoning that these disclaimers would be obvious was based on the assumption that those interested in the report would read it in its entirety. After reading the responses to this article, it’s obvious that we have not made these disclaimers as apparent as they should be. We have added a longer disclaimer to the top of our leafleting report page, expressing our current thoughts and noting that we will update the report sometime in 2017.
In addition, we have decided to remove the impact calculator (a tool which included an ability to enter donations directed to leafleting and receive estimates of high and low bounds of animals spared) from our website entirely until we feel more confident that it is not misleading to those unfamiliar with cost effectiveness calculations and/or an understanding of how the low/best/high error bounds exemplify the uncertainty regarding those numbers. It is not typical for us to remove content from the site, but we intend to operate with abundant caution. This change seems to be the best option, given that people believe we are being intentionally deceptive in keeping them online.
Finally, leadership at ACE all agree it has been too long since we have updated our Mistakes page, so we have added new entries concerning issues we have reflected upon as an organization.
We also notice that there is concern among the community that our recommendations are suspect due to the weak evidence supporting our cost-effectiveness estimates of leafleting. The focus on leafleting for this criticism is confusing to us, as our cost-effectiveness estimates address many interventions, not only leafleting, and the evidence for leafleting is not much weaker than other evidence available about animal advocacy interventions. On top of that, cost-effectiveness estimates are only a factor in one of the seven criteria used in our evaluation process. In most cases, we don’t think that they have changed the outcome of our evaluation decisions. While we haven’t come up with a solution for clarifying this point, we always welcome and are appreciative of constructive feedback.
We are committed to honesty, and are disappointed that the content we've published on the website concerning leafleting has caused so much confusion as to lead anyone to believe we are intentionally deceiving our supporters for profit. On a personal note, I’m devastated to hear that our error in communication has led to the character assassination not only of ACE, but of the people who comprise the organization—some of the hardest working, well-intentioned people I’ve ever worked with.
Finally, I would like everyone to know that we sincerely appreciate the constructive feedback we receive from people within and beyond the EA movement.
*Edited to add links
When there are debates about how readers are interpreting text, or potentially being misled by it, empirical testing (e.g. having Mechanical Turk readers view a page and then answer questions about the topic where they might be misled) is a powerful tool (and also avoids reliance on staff intuitions that might be aff... (read more)