What is the optimal frontier for due diligence?
post by RobertM (T3t), Ruby · 2023-09-08T18:20:03.300Z · LW · GW · 1 commentsContents
1 comment
The title isn't quite right. My current take is that:
- There is a ~10k word post [LW · GW] sharing some damaging information about someone else.
- 3-4k words are describing accusations that are disputed.
- Those accusations generally sound pretty bad.
- The post doesn't explain why the (disputed) accusations are salient, if they aren't cruxy for the post author's major takeaways.
- The post author may not find those accusations cruxy, but I would be surprised if nobody else found them cruxy for deciding between "there's some bad stuff in here, but it seems possible that most of the harm was caused by some combination of large cultural differences and poor communication", and "nope nope nope".
- This is to say, our actions have effects beyond the EA ecosystem. I think it's wrong to decide that, because other people may update incorrectly based on evidence you've provided, the harm that comes from those updates doesn't matter much.
The thing I'm noticing is some kind of missing mood. I think that there's been a failure to inhabit the least convenient possible world [LW · GW], and the general distribution over possible outcomes, and correspondingly attempt to move to the pareto-frontier of outcomes assuming that distribution. This comment in particular seems to be operating in the frame of "You weren't behaving the way I'd update positively on if the accusations were true". In the world where the disputed accusations are in fact false, for the specific reasons they provided, I think it would be pretty strange to take the suggested course of action.
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comment by Quinn (quinn-dougherty) · 2023-10-07T18:18:21.736Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
i don't want to make claims about the particular case, but im worried if you infer a heuristic and apply it elsewhere it could fail
I think Nonlinear should be assigning enough credence to the possibility that they extremely harmed their employees with a degree of horror and remorse. Not laughter or dismissal.
Sometimes scrupulous/doormat people bend over backwards to twist the facts into some form to make an accuser reasonable or have a point. If you've done this, maybe eventually you talked to outside observers or noticed a set of three lies that you had previously been charitable about-- and you're like "hey wait a minute, I totally regret dwelling on feeling bad about this".
I talked about this with a friend who updated me toward thinking that the scrupulous doormat people are a small enough proportion of the population (or at least certainly they grow out of it) that this is true but a rounding error.
I've done this a few times, and I'd like to advocate for people of scrupulous doormat tendencies to have space to not be eternally signaling that they did due diligence before concluding that they dont have deep regrets or behavioral updates to do every time it comes up. People should feel allowed to express themselves aligned with very reasonable needs for catharsis or to reclaim their map of reality. Sometimes this will look like dismissiveness (especially if theyre still bitter about concessions having been extracted).
So if we were applying my point to this case (which, to be clear, we're not), it would look like "we were horrified and remorseful, went through and did an audit, when we concluded that everything was fine all along we ended up pretty annoyed that we were pressured into doing this unpleasant timesink audit process, and are trying to laugh it off now"--- I don't think it's necessarily a signal if they don't prioritize conveying that this process had occurred to you in particular.
(Again re the rounding error thing: very few cases are sufficiently black and white for this comment to apply).