EA - Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles by RobertM

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: Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles, published by RobertM on January 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Epistemic status: Motivated by the feeling that there's something like a missing mood in the EA sphere. Informed by my personal experience, not by rigorous survey. Probably a bit scattershot, but it's already more than a month after I wanted to publish this. (Minus this parenthetical, this post was entirely written before the Bostrom thing. I just kept forgetting to post it.)The last half year - the time since I moved to Berkeley to work on LessWrong, and consequently found myself embedded in the broader Bay Area rationality & EA communities - have been surprisingly normal.The weeks following the FTX collapse, admittedly, a little less so.One thing has kept coming up, though. I keep hearing that people are reluctant to voice disagreements, criticisms, or concerns they have, and each time I do a double-take. (My consistent surprise is part of what prompted me to write this post: both those generating the surprise, and those who are surprised like me, might benefit from this perspective.)The type of issue where one person has an unpleasant interaction with another person is difficult to navigate. The current solution of discussing those things with the CEA Community Health team at least tries to balance both concerns of reducing false positive and false negatives; earlier and more public discussion of those concerns is not a Pareto-improvement.But most of them are other fears: that you will annoy an important funder, by criticizing ideas that they support, or by raising concerns about their honesty, given publicly-available evidence, or something similar. And the degree to which these fears have shaped the epistemic landscape makes me feel like I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a mirror universe.Having these fears - probably common! Discussing those fears in public - not crazy! Acting on those fears? (I keep running face-first into the fact that not everybody has read The Sequences, that not everybody who has read them has internalized them, and that not everybody who has internalized them has externalized that understanding through their actions.)My take is that acting on those fears, by not publishing that criticism, or raising those concerns, with receipts attached, is harmful. For simplicity's sake, let's consider the cartesian product of the options:to publicize a criticism, or notthe criticism being accurate, or notthe funder deciding to fund your work, or notThe set of possible outcomes:you publicize a criticism; the criticism is accurate; the funder funds your workyou publicize a criticism; the criticism is accurate; the funder doesn't fund your workyou publicize a criticism; the criticism is inaccurate; the funder funds your workyou publicize a criticism; the criticism is inaccurate; the funder doesn't fund your workyou don't publicize a criticism; the criticism is accurate; the funder funds your workyou don't publicize a criticism; the criticism is accurate; the funder doesn't fund your workyou don't publicize a criticism; the criticism is inaccurate; the funds your workyou don't publicize a criticism; the criticism is inaccurate; the funder doesn't fund your workWhat predicted outcomes are motivating these fears? 2 and 4 are the obvious candidates.I won't pretend that these are impossible, or that you would necessarily see another funder step in if such a thing happened. You could very well pay costs for saying things in public. I do think that people overestimate how likely those outcomes are, or how high the costs will be, and underestimate the damage that staying silent causes to community epistemics.But I will bite the bullet: assuming the worst, you should pay those costs. In the long run, you do not a...