An EA used deceptive messaging to advance their project; we need mechanisms to avoid deontologically dubious plans

Commenting here, because I don't have an account at the EA forum.

Seems like we have two debates in parallel:

• whether the protest information was misleading (in a very important way)
• whether the misleading information was intentional.

From my perspective, the answer to the former question is "definitely yes". If I participated in a protest against OpenAI cooperating with Pentagon, I would feel really ashamed if I later learned that the cooperation was about veteran suicide prevention. That would go against... well, the things that make me want to be a rationalist.

(An argument could be made that the veteran suicide prevention is a "foot in the door". Today it is preventing veteran suicide; tomorrow it could be increasing the troops morale, effective propaganda, psychological terror, who knows what else. But even in that case, I would like to make it clear that I am protesting against crossing a line that potentially leads to bad things, rather than the bad things already happening today.)

The second question is tricky -- Mikhail feels justified at using stronger language, because he communicated his concerns to the organizers and was ignored. But maybe it was a honest mistake in the communication. So, even if the accusation is justified, it would have been better to make it more separated from the main point.

I find it baffling that the most upvoted comment as of now calls it "a massive storm in a teacup". I am just an outsider here, but this is exactly the kind of a thing that would make someone lose a lot of credibility in my eyes. If you wanted me to update towards "whatever EA people tell me is probably misinformation optimized for maximum outrage", this would be a good way to do it. And the priors for "activists exaggerate" are already high.