You *should* have capacity for more transparency and accountability

There are frequent discussions on the EA forums regarding how transparent EA orgs should be.

Transparency is expensive and opportunity costs are high - the money and time costs that could be devoted to very quickly publishing information about the activities of orgs alongside conflicts of interest is money and time that could be spent on object level impact.

The chances of better transparency detecting bad behaviour is low - obviously, most people do not break common sense ethical rules.

But many EAs have argued that high degrees of transparency are worth it anyway, because other than making it likelier that bad behaviour is caught, it enforces accountability and *disincentivises bad behaviour in the first place *.

Obviously, the costs of letting bad behaviour continue are high, both through potential direct harm and through reputational risks to EA.

I think the FTX saga should significantly update orgs towards spending more money and time on becoming highly transparent and accountable to the community, even if it means spending less money and time on effective causes in the short term.

(I’m thinking about a post where this was discussed a while ago, and someone commented “just hire more people” or something along those lines and everyone got annoyed at them. Does anyone have a link to this post?)