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Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles
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RobertM
Credibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
Written in January 2023 amid post-FTX reflection on EA community dynamics; relevant to AI safety insofar as funder-driven epistemic distortions affect which AI safety concerns get raised and taken seriously.
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94
Comments
12
Forum
eaforum
Forum Tags
Building effective altruismCommunityCommunity epistemic healthCommunity experiencesCriticism of the effective altruism communityTransparency
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Importance: 42/100blog postcommentary
Summary
A January 2023 EA Forum post arguing that community members are harmfully self-censoring valid criticisms out of fear of losing funder support, written in the wake of the FTX collapse. The author uses a decision-matrix analysis to show that suppressing accurate criticism is net-negative for community epistemic health, and calls for greater transparency and willingness to voice disagreements publicly despite personal risk.
Key Points
- •Community members are self-censoring valid criticisms due to fear of losing funding or favor from influential donors, distorting EA's epistemic landscape.
- •Having fears about speaking up is understandable, but acting on those fears by suppressing accurate criticism is harmful to collective sensemaking.
- •A Cartesian product analysis of outcomes shows that withholding accurate criticism is net-negative even accounting for potential funding losses.
- •Written in the aftermath of the FTX collapse, reflecting on how power concentration in funders creates chilling effects on honest discourse.
- •Advocates that intellectual integrity and community accountability require voicing disagreements publicly even when doing so carries personal and professional risk.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| EA Epistemic Failures in the FTX Era | -- | 84.0 |
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Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles — EA Forum
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by RobertM Jan 14 2023 6 min read 12 94
Building effective altruism Community Community epistemic health Community experiences Criticism of the effective altruism community Transparency Frontpage Epistemic status: Motivated by the feeling that there's something like a missing mood in the EA sphere. Informed by my personal experience, not by rigorous survey. Probably a bit scattershot, but it's already more than a month after I wanted to publish this. (Minus this parenthetical, this post was entirely written before the Bostrom thing. I just kept forgetting to post it.)
The last half year - the time since I moved to Berkeley to work on LessWrong, and consequently found myself embedded in the broader Bay Area rationality & EA communities - have been surprisingly normal.
The weeks following the FTX collapse, admittedly, a little less so.
One thing has kept coming up, though. I keep hearing that people are reluctant to voice disagreements, criticisms, or concerns they have, and each time I do a double-take. (My consistent surprise is part of what prompted me to write this post: both those generating the surprise, and those who are surprised like me, might benefit from this perspective.)
The type of issue where one person has an unpleasant [1] interaction with another person is difficult to navigate. The current solution of discussing those things with the CEA Community Health team at least tries to balance both concerns of reducing false positive and false negatives; earlier and more public discussion of those concerns is not a Pareto-improvement [2] .
But most of them are other fears: that you will annoy an important funder, by criticizing ideas that they support, or by raising concerns about their honesty, given publicly-available evidence, or something similar. And the degree to which these fears have shaped the epistemic landscape makes me feel like I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a mirror universe .
Having these fears - probably common! Discussing those fears in public - not crazy! Acting on those fears ? (I keep running face-first into the fact that not everybody has read The Sequences , that not everybody who has read them has internalized them, and that not everybody who has internalized them has externalized that understanding through their actions. [3] )
My take is that acting on those fears, by not publishing that criticism, or raising those concerns, with receipts attached, is harmful [4] . For simplicity's sake, let's consider the cartesian product of the options:
to publicize a criticism, or not
the criticism being accurate, or not
the funder deciding to fund your work, or not
The set of possible outcomes:
you publicize a criticism; the
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