I partially agree, but I think this must only be a small part of the issue.
- I think there’s a whole lot of key insights people could raise that aren’t info-hazards. - If secrecy were the main factor, I’d hope that there would be some access-controlled message boards or similar. I’d want the discussion to be intentionally happening somewhere. Right now I don’t really think that’s happening. I think a lot of tiny groups have their own personal ideas, but there’s surprisingly little systematic and private thinking between the power players. - I think that secrecy is often an excuse not to open ideas to feedback, and thus not be open to critique. Often, what what I see, this goes hand-in-hand with “our work just really isn’t that great, but we don’t want to admit it”
In the last 8 years or so, I’ve kept on hoping there would be some secret and brilliant “master plan” around EA, explaining the lack of public strategy. I have yet to find one. The closest I know of is some over-time discussion and slack threads with people at Constellation and similar—I think these are interesting in terms of understanding the perspectives of these (powerful) people, but I don’t get the impression that there’s all too much comprehensiveness of genius that’s being hidden.
That said, - I think that policy orgs need to be very secretive, so agree with you regarding why those orgs don’t write more big-picture things.
I partially agree, but I think this must only be a small part of the issue.
- I think there’s a whole lot of key insights people could raise that aren’t info-hazards.
- If secrecy were the main factor, I’d hope that there would be some access-controlled message boards or similar. I’d want the discussion to be intentionally happening somewhere. Right now I don’t really think that’s happening. I think a lot of tiny groups have their own personal ideas, but there’s surprisingly little systematic and private thinking between the power players.
- I think that secrecy is often an excuse not to open ideas to feedback, and thus not be open to critique. Often, what what I see, this goes hand-in-hand with “our work just really isn’t that great, but we don’t want to admit it”
In the last 8 years or so, I’ve kept on hoping there would be some secret and brilliant “master plan” around EA, explaining the lack of public strategy. I have yet to find one. The closest I know of is some over-time discussion and slack threads with people at Constellation and similar—I think these are interesting in terms of understanding the perspectives of these (powerful) people, but I don’t get the impression that there’s all too much comprehensiveness of genius that’s being hidden.
That said,
- I think that policy orgs need to be very secretive, so agree with you regarding why those orgs don’t write more big-picture things.