I feel like I've heard this position a lot before, and I have some sympathy for it, but I feel like it implicitly overlooks a lot of what I find valuable about writing EA Forum comments, and it sets an overly high bar.
When one writes academic papers, one is expected to cite relevant previous work. Credit assignation is an important mechanism for tracing the evidence for claims and for assigning credit. Even in academic spheres, I think this is perhaps taken pathologically far (to the point where it probably sometimes is unduly burdensome and vaguely implies that pretty obvious ideas or hypotheses had to have come from someone else as opposed to being generated by the author), but the reasons why it's important to cite your claims seem a lot stronger in academia.
The EA Forum is partly intended, I believe, to be a place where people are encouraged to say things more quickly and speculatively after having done less research, and where people are more encouraged to share their own overall judgments and thinking process without necessarily fully defending all their positions. You might think it's bad to have such a place and that people should mostly just rely on the academic literature. I disagree with that, but trying to make the EA Forum use the same standards that academia uses seems counterproductive. We can just use academia for that.
And at least in my mind, a big part of the point of writing things like what Linch wrote is about trying to practice my critical thinking skills and appling them to new areas, for the eventual purpose of use in areas where there's not already a lot of scholarship. So I value approaching an area I don't know much about, like the topic of war crimes, and trying to understand it on my own and seeing how far I can get and forming my own view rather than necessarily seeing this as strictly an opportunity to practice building on existing literature on war crimes (or worse, just regurgitating that literature undiscerningly)
Two, raising a complaint does not give someone the right to comment on a colleague's rape or on her mental health. If Riley had concerns about Frances, those concerns were potentially valid only to the extent they related to specific work-related behaviors.
So, for instance, it would be relevant for one employee to write that another employee was producing only 50 widgets an hour instead of 60. Speculating that the employee's reduced performance was due to age, tendonitis, or sadness that they lost their dog would be unwarranted.[1] None of those things are the co-worker's business
I want to separate what people have a legally protected right to do and what I feel like they have a commonsense right to do. I have approximately no information other than what's here about what actually went down between Riley, CEA, and Fran. But there are versions of "speculating about a coworker's mental health" that I think are commonsense-reasonable, and to which I'm morally sympathetic, even if they might be imprudent and legally forbidden.
For example, I think that noticing that a co-worker is underperforming and speculating that the co-worker might be struggling and need extra support because you heard that their dog died recently and they seemed upset about it, can be the result of normal human sympathy and desire to raise relevant information. For example, it's the kind of thing that I think a normal and well-intentioned person might raise if they noticed a friend of a friend or a cousin struggling.
I'm not saying that you should treat co-workers exactly the same, and there are no risks to doing so. Obviously there are. And I'm not saying anything about Riley-in-particular's intentions here. I just think that having this kind of condemnatory attitude towards the entire class of behavior that involves ever raising information about potential causes of another's struggles in a workplace feels like a really harsh and cold attitude towards workplace relationships, and I don't like it.
I think the basic argument that there's a good chance that OpenAI creates an ASI, and so it's important that they have a good safety team, remains very strong. I think for a long time the case for working at OpenAI has not been that we ought to trust the company or agree with most of its policy decisions. It's that they might create the most powerful entity that has ever existed, and making that go better is high EV.
I see that you've now made an edit noting that your comment was specifically about small organizations. While I agree that the concerns about asking out colleagues and flirting with them are larger in a smaller organization than in a huge organization, I still definitely don't think it's obvious that such behavior should be disallowed (in fact, I believe it should generally be allowed, as long as people aren't in one another's reporting lines).
I disagree-voted with your claim. I wouldn't say it's actively professional, but I don't think it's inherently unprofessional either to flirt with, hit on, and ask out a colleague if neither of you is in each other's reporting chain, and your company has no policy against it. My sense is that this is pretty accepted in most of the large organizations that I know of as a matter of course and not considered bad behavior, nor should it be. Of course, given that you work together ongoingly, it's probably prudent to be especially receptive to any signs that it's making them uncomfortable and stop right away if so.
I also thought the tone of your comment was snide and unpleasant, and also just overconfident: most large companies I know don't have a policy against their employees asking each other out (e.g. here's an old discussion of Google and Facebook's policies), so I don't know why you would think would or consider it so obvious.
This is completely separate from the matter Frances is discussing about having a document discussing her rape shared among her colleagues, which sounds exceedingly distressing, and I have a hard time thinking of a reasonable justification for.
I think (1) is just very false for people who might seriously consider entering government, and irresponsible advice. I've spoken to people who currently work in government, who concur that the Trump administration is illegally checking on people's track record of support for Democrats. And it seems plausible to me that that kind of thing will intensify. I think that there's quite a lot of evidence that Trump is very interested in loyalty and rooting out figures who are not loyal to him, and doing background checks, of certain kinds at least, is literally the legal responsibility of people doing hiring in various parts of government (though checking donations to political candidates is not supposed to be part of that).
I'll also say that I am personally a person who has looked up where individuals have donated (not in a hiring context), and so am existence proof of that kind of behavior. It's a matter of public record, and I think it is often interesting to know what political candidates different powerful figures in the spaces I care about are supporting.
If you haven't already, you might want to take a look at this post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6o7B3Fxj55gbcmNQN/considerations-around-career-costs-of-political-donations
I upvoted this because I like the passion, and I too feel a desire to passionately defend EA and the disempowered beneficiaries EAs seek to protect, who are indirectly harmed by this kind of sloppy coverage. I do hope people respond, and I think EAs err towards being too passive about media coverage.
But I think important parts of this take are quite wrong.
Most people just aren't basically sympathetic to EA, let alone EAs-waiting-to-happen; they have a tangle of different moral intuitions and aren't very well-informed or thoughtful about it. Sure, they'll say they want more effective charity, but they also want to give back to their local community and follow fads and do what makes them feel good and support things that helped them in particular and keep the money for themselves and all kindsa stuff. So, I don't think this is surprising, and I think it's important for EAs to be clear-eyed about how they're different from other people.
I don't think that means EAs could never be a dominant force in philanthropy or whatever; most people throughout history didn't care about anti-racism or demoncracy but they're popular now; caring about what your ancestors has declined a lot; things can change, I just don't think it's inevitable or foregone (or couldn't reverse).
If someone wrote an article about a minority group and described them with a few nasty racist stereotypes, there would be massive protests, retractions, apologies and a real effort to ensure that people were well informed about the reality.
People would do this for some kinds of minorities (racial or sex/gender minorities), and for racist stereotypes. I don't think they would for people with unusual hobbies or lifestyle choices or belief sets, with stereotypes related to those things. "not being racist" or discriminating against some kinds of minorities is a sacred value for much of liberal elite society, but many kinds of minorities aren't covered by that.
Crappy stereotypes are always bad, but I don't think that means that just because you're a minority you shouldn't be potentially subject to serious criticism (of course, unfortunately this criticism isn't intellectually serious).
I believe calling is generally thought to be much more effective than emailing
It was easy to get Claude to make a state-specific version, by the way.
I feel like I've heard this position a lot before, and I have some sympathy for it, but I feel like it implicitly overlooks a lot of what I find valuable about writing EA Forum comments, and it sets an overly high bar.
When one writes academic papers, one is expected to cite relevant previous work. Credit assignation is an important mechanism for tracing the evidence for claims and for assigning credit. Even in academic spheres, I think this is perhaps taken pathologically far (to the point where it probably sometimes is unduly burdensome and vaguely implies that pretty obvious ideas or hypotheses had to have come from someone else as opposed to being generated by the author), but the reasons why it's important to cite your claims seem a lot stronger in academia.
The EA Forum is partly intended, I believe, to be a place where people are encouraged to say things more quickly and speculatively after having done less research, and where people are more encouraged to share their own overall judgments and thinking process without necessarily fully defending all their positions. You might think it's bad to have such a place and that people should mostly just rely on the academic literature. I disagree with that, but trying to make the EA Forum use the same standards that academia uses seems counterproductive. We can just use academia for that.
And at least in my mind, a big part of the point of writing things like what Linch wrote is about trying to practice my critical thinking skills and appling them to new areas, for the eventual purpose of use in areas where there's not already a lot of scholarship. So I value approaching an area I don't know much about, like the topic of war crimes, and trying to understand it on my own and seeing how far I can get and forming my own view rather than necessarily seeing this as strictly an opportunity to practice building on existing literature on war crimes (or worse, just regurgitating that literature undiscerningly)
I want to separate what people have a legally protected right to do and what I feel like they have a commonsense right to do. I have approximately no information other than what's here about what actually went down between Riley, CEA, and Fran. But there are versions of "speculating about a coworker's mental health" that I think are commonsense-reasonable, and to which I'm morally sympathetic, even if they might be imprudent and legally forbidden.
For example, I think that noticing that a co-worker is underperforming and speculating that the co-worker might be struggling and need extra support because you heard that their dog died recently and they seemed upset about it, can be the result of normal human sympathy and desire to raise relevant information. For example, it's the kind of thing that I think a normal and well-intentioned person might raise if they noticed a friend of a friend or a cousin struggling.
I'm not saying that you should treat co-workers exactly the same, and there are no risks to doing so. Obviously there are. And I'm not saying anything about Riley-in-particular's intentions here. I just think that having this kind of condemnatory attitude towards the entire class of behavior that involves ever raising information about potential causes of another's struggles in a workplace feels like a really harsh and cold attitude towards workplace relationships, and I don't like it.
I think the basic argument that there's a good chance that OpenAI creates an ASI, and so it's important that they have a good safety team, remains very strong. I think for a long time the case for working at OpenAI has not been that we ought to trust the company or agree with most of its policy decisions. It's that they might create the most powerful entity that has ever existed, and making that go better is high EV.
I see that you've now made an edit noting that your comment was specifically about small organizations. While I agree that the concerns about asking out colleagues and flirting with them are larger in a smaller organization than in a huge organization, I still definitely don't think it's obvious that such behavior should be disallowed (in fact, I believe it should generally be allowed, as long as people aren't in one another's reporting lines).
I disagree-voted with your claim. I wouldn't say it's actively professional, but I don't think it's inherently unprofessional either to flirt with, hit on, and ask out a colleague if neither of you is in each other's reporting chain, and your company has no policy against it. My sense is that this is pretty accepted in most of the large organizations that I know of as a matter of course and not considered bad behavior, nor should it be. Of course, given that you work together ongoingly, it's probably prudent to be especially receptive to any signs that it's making them uncomfortable and stop right away if so.
I also thought the tone of your comment was snide and unpleasant, and also just overconfident: most large companies I know don't have a policy against their employees asking each other out (e.g. here's an old discussion of Google and Facebook's policies), so I don't know why you would think would or consider it so obvious.
This is completely separate from the matter Frances is discussing about having a document discussing her rape shared among her colleagues, which sounds exceedingly distressing, and I have a hard time thinking of a reasonable justification for.
I think (1) is just very false for people who might seriously consider entering government, and irresponsible advice. I've spoken to people who currently work in government, who concur that the Trump administration is illegally checking on people's track record of support for Democrats. And it seems plausible to me that that kind of thing will intensify. I think that there's quite a lot of evidence that Trump is very interested in loyalty and rooting out figures who are not loyal to him, and doing background checks, of certain kinds at least, is literally the legal responsibility of people doing hiring in various parts of government (though checking donations to political candidates is not supposed to be part of that).
I'll also say that I am personally a person who has looked up where individuals have donated (not in a hiring context), and so am existence proof of that kind of behavior. It's a matter of public record, and I think it is often interesting to know what political candidates different powerful figures in the spaces I care about are supporting.
If you haven't already, you might want to take a look at this post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6o7B3Fxj55gbcmNQN/considerations-around-career-costs-of-political-donations
I heard someone from Kevin Esvelt's lab talking about this + pain-free lab mice once
I upvoted this because I like the passion, and I too feel a desire to passionately defend EA and the disempowered beneficiaries EAs seek to protect, who are indirectly harmed by this kind of sloppy coverage. I do hope people respond, and I think EAs err towards being too passive about media coverage.
But I think important parts of this take are quite wrong.
Most people just aren't basically sympathetic to EA, let alone EAs-waiting-to-happen; they have a tangle of different moral intuitions and aren't very well-informed or thoughtful about it. Sure, they'll say they want more effective charity, but they also want to give back to their local community and follow fads and do what makes them feel good and support things that helped them in particular and keep the money for themselves and all kindsa stuff. So, I don't think this is surprising, and I think it's important for EAs to be clear-eyed about how they're different from other people.
I don't think that means EAs could never be a dominant force in philanthropy or whatever; most people throughout history didn't care about anti-racism or demoncracy but they're popular now; caring about what your ancestors has declined a lot; things can change, I just don't think it's inevitable or foregone (or couldn't reverse).
People would do this for some kinds of minorities (racial or sex/gender minorities), and for racist stereotypes. I don't think they would for people with unusual hobbies or lifestyle choices or belief sets, with stereotypes related to those things. "not being racist" or discriminating against some kinds of minorities is a sacred value for much of liberal elite society, but many kinds of minorities aren't covered by that.
Crappy stereotypes are always bad, but I don't think that means that just because you're a minority you shouldn't be potentially subject to serious criticism (of course, unfortunately this criticism isn't intellectually serious).