My intuitive reaction is that you are following this rule more strictly than intended. If I held an event with Chatham house rules and someone’s wife accidentally saw the attendee list briefly this would not even register as a problem. I would expect the attendee to tell their wife not to talk about who was at the event. I also think its expected people will occasionally break the rules for the greater good (ex adding a trustworthy person to an email thread so they can work on a research problem). If someone asks whether you know someone just say ‘yes but the details are private’ (this is not breaking the rules imo).
When people chose to use Chatham house rules they are trying to prevent information becoming public and let people stay off the record. They usually do not expect the rules to be treated as sacred.
I agree that most people do not expect the rules to be treated as sacred. I still want the rules to be such that someone could (without great cost) treat them as sacred if they wanted to.
That or it should be explicitly stated that you are only expected to loosely follow the spirit of the rule.
That runs into the problem that if you say the rules are absolute many people will ‘follow their spirit’ and if you say ‘follow the spirit of the rules’ then people will be way too lax about the rules. Eliezer mentions this issue in his meta-honesty.
I feel like you might be appealing to consequences here a bit. Whether or not it is tractable in theory to follow the rule as an absolute (that is, to the letter) is a different problem from whether or not people will actually choose to do so.
It seems that Scott is more concerned about finding a formulation that can be followed to the letter in theory, while at the same time he has already conceded that most people will not choose to do so regardless of the formulation (and will thus follow the spirit instead).
My intuitive reaction is that you are following this rule more strictly than intended.
This is not my understanding, since the original context involves foreign policy issues where it might be highly important for someone to not have officially been at an event.
I also think it’s pretty horrible to have rules where people take them seriously to different degrees, in part because the rule is costly to follow and the benefit of following it rapidly falls off as other people don’t follow it. (Remember that the core goal of the rules is to allow people to say things that they don’t want attributed to them, even in a loose sense, but if you are half-following the rule that means people still pay the costs of being careful about what they say outside the event, and can’t trust that they can speak freely inside the event.) At one such event, someone made a claim of the form “okay, now we’ve established common knowledge about Chatham House Rules” which was obviously not true (and also made me worried about what that person thought common knowledge meant!).
A later comment suggests the Chatham house website is sympathetic to my interpretation:
Q. Can participants in a meeting be named as long as what is said is not attributed? A. It is important to think about the spirit of the Rule. For example, sometimes speakers need to be named when publicizing the meeting. The Rule is more about the dissemination of the information after the event—nothing should be done to identify, either explicitly or implicitly, who said what.
Even when it comes to high level foreign policy issues I wouldn’t expect that no content is shared with spouses. Sharing content in an attributed way with spouses doesn’t prevent attendees from speaking freely.
For what it’s worth, if I asked somebody to keep something secret and not tell anybody, and they said yes, I would consider it a breach of trust if they told their spouse.
My intuitive reaction is that you are following this rule more strictly than intended. If I held an event with Chatham house rules and someone’s wife accidentally saw the attendee list briefly this would not even register as a problem. I would expect the attendee to tell their wife not to talk about who was at the event. I also think its expected people will occasionally break the rules for the greater good (ex adding a trustworthy person to an email thread so they can work on a research problem). If someone asks whether you know someone just say ‘yes but the details are private’ (this is not breaking the rules imo).
When people chose to use Chatham house rules they are trying to prevent information becoming public and let people stay off the record. They usually do not expect the rules to be treated as sacred.
I agree that most people do not expect the rules to be treated as sacred. I still want the rules to be such that someone could (without great cost) treat them as sacred if they wanted to.
That or it should be explicitly stated that you are only expected to loosely follow the spirit of the rule.
That runs into the problem that if you say the rules are absolute many people will ‘follow their spirit’ and if you say ‘follow the spirit of the rules’ then people will be way too lax about the rules. Eliezer mentions this issue in his meta-honesty.
I feel like you might be appealing to consequences here a bit. Whether or not it is tractable in theory to follow the rule as an absolute (that is, to the letter) is a different problem from whether or not people will actually choose to do so.
It seems that Scott is more concerned about finding a formulation that can be followed to the letter in theory, while at the same time he has already conceded that most people will not choose to do so regardless of the formulation (and will thus follow the spirit instead).
This is not my understanding, since the original context involves foreign policy issues where it might be highly important for someone to not have officially been at an event.
I also think it’s pretty horrible to have rules where people take them seriously to different degrees, in part because the rule is costly to follow and the benefit of following it rapidly falls off as other people don’t follow it. (Remember that the core goal of the rules is to allow people to say things that they don’t want attributed to them, even in a loose sense, but if you are half-following the rule that means people still pay the costs of being careful about what they say outside the event, and can’t trust that they can speak freely inside the event.) At one such event, someone made a claim of the form “okay, now we’ve established common knowledge about Chatham House Rules” which was obviously not true (and also made me worried about what that person thought common knowledge meant!).
A later comment suggests the Chatham house website is sympathetic to my interpretation:
Q. Can participants in a meeting be named as long as what is said is not attributed?
A. It is important to think about the spirit of the Rule. For example, sometimes speakers need to be named when publicizing the meeting. The Rule is more about the dissemination of the information after the event—nothing should be done to identify, either explicitly or implicitly, who said what.
Even when it comes to high level foreign policy issues I wouldn’t expect that no content is shared with spouses. Sharing content in an attributed way with spouses doesn’t prevent attendees from speaking freely.
For what it’s worth, if I asked somebody to keep something secret and not tell anybody, and they said yes, I would consider it a breach of trust if they told their spouse.