Folks who comment in this forum and who work for an EA org often append a "disclaimer" to their comments, along the lines of "speaking for myself, not my employer". I find such disclaimers slightly distracting and annoying, in part because I suspect they are unnecessary. I also fear that this practice may change commenting norms in such a way that adding disclaimers will become necessary at some point in the future ("What do you mean you were not speaking on behalf of your organization? Why didn't you add a disclaimer, then, like everyone else here now does?"). However, I realize that these suspicions and fears may not be well-grounded, so I'm curious to learn what others think. I welcome answers from everyone, but especially from those who do regularly add such disclaimers to their comments (feel free to use an anonymous account if you aren't comfortable discussing your reasons publicly).
I add short disclosure statements when posting about Ought.
I do this because I want to reduce the likelihood of conflict-of-interest stuff coming up. (Feels very unlikely, but could be super messy to deal with if it did happen.)
I've probably been influenced here by GiveWell's early astroturfing controversy (which almost killed the org).
I agree with this. But my sense is that only a small fraction of the comments which include a disclaimer are also comments which include or should include a disclosure. So the fact that it's not more distracting to have both than only a disclaimer doesn't influence my general thinking about disclaimers much.
There's also the separate argument that adding disclaimers runs the risk of changing expectations about what can be inferred fro... (read more)