EA - Who is Uncomfortable Critiquing Who, Around EA? by Ozzie Gooen

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Who is Uncomfortable Critiquing Who, Around EA?, published by Ozzie Gooen on February 24, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Summary and DisclaimersI think EA is made up of a bunch of different parties, many of whom find it at least somewhat uncomfortable to criticize or honestly evaluate each other for a wide variety of reasons.I think that this is a very standard challenge that most organizations and movements have. As I would also recommend to other parties, I think that investigation and improvement here could be very valuable to EA. This post continues on many of the ideas as Select Challenges with Criticism & Evaluation Around EA.One early reviewer critiqued this post saying that they didn't believe that discomfort was a problem. If you don't think it is, I don't aim in this post to convince you. My goal here is to do early exploration what the problem even seems to look like, not to argue that the problem is severe or not.Like with that previous post, I rely here mostly on anecdotal experiences, introspection, and recommendations from various management books. This comes from me working on QURI (trying to pursue better longtermist evaluation), being an employee and manager in multiple (EA and not EA) organizations, and hearing a whole lot of various rants and frustrations from EAs. I’d love to see further work to better understand where bottlenecks to valuable communication are most restrictive and then design and test solutions.Writing this has helped me find some insights on this problem. However, it is a messy problem, and as I explained before, I find the terminology lacking. Apologies in advance.IntroductionThere’s a massive difference between a group saying that it’s open to criticism, and a group that people actually feel comfortable criticizing.I think that many EA individuals and organizations advocate and promote feedback in ways unusual for the industry. However, I think there’s also a lot of work to do.In most communities, it takes a lot of iteration and trust-building to find ways for people to routinely and usefully give candid information or feedback to each other.In companies, for example, employees often don’t have much to personally gain by voicing their critiques to management, and a lot to potentially lose. Even if the management seems really nice, is an honest critique really worth the ~3% chance of resentment? Often you won’t ever know — management could just keep their dislike of you to themselves, and later take action accordingly. On the other side, it’s often uncomfortable for managers to convey candid feedback to their reports privately, let alone discuss department or employee failures to people throughout the organization.My impression is that many online social settings contain a bunch of social groups that are really afraid of being honest with each other, and this leads to problems immediate (important information not getting shared) and expansive (groups developing extended distrust and sometimes hatred with each other).Problems of communication and comfort happen within power hierarchies, and they also happen between peer communities. Really, they happen everywhere.To a first approximation, "Everyone is at least a little of afraid of everyone else."I think a lot of people's natural reaction to issues like this is to point fingers at groups they don't like and blame them. But really, I personally think that all of us are broadly responsible (at least a little), and also are broadly able to understand and improve things. I see these issues as systemic, not personal.Criticism Between Different GroupsAround effective altruism, I’ve noticed:Evaluation in Global WelfareGlobal poverty charity evaluation and criticism seem like fair game. When GiveWell started, they weren’t friends with the leaders of the organiza...