You're definitely right that most grant-making organisations do not make much use of such disclaimers. However, I think this mainly because it just doesn't come up - most grantmaking occurs between people who do not know each other much socially, and are often older and married anyway.

In contrast the EA community, especially in the bay area, is extremely tight socially, and also exhibits a high level of promiscuity. As such the risk for decisions being unduly influenced by personal relationships is significantly higher. For example, back in 2016 OpenPhil revealed that they had advisors living with people they were evaluating, and evaluatees in relationships with OpenPhil staff (source). OpenPhil no longer seem to publish their conflicts of interest, but I suspect similar issues still occur. Separately, I have been told that some people in the bay area community explicitly use sexual relationships to make connections and influence the flow of funds from donors to workers and projects, which seems to raise severe concerns about objectivity and bias, as well as the potential for abuse (in both directions). I would be very concerned by either of these in the private sector, and see little reason to hold EAs to a lower standard.

Donors in general are subject to a significant information asymmetry and have few defenses against improper behaviour from organisations, especially in areas where concrete outputs are scarce. Explicit declarations that specific suspect conduct has not taken place represents a minimum level of such protection.

With regard your bullet points, I think a good analogy would be disclaimers in financial research. Every piece of financial research comes with multiple pages of disclaimers at the end, including a promise from the authors that the piece represents their true opinions and various sections about financial conflicts of interest. Perhaps the first analysts subject to these requirements found them intrusive - however by now they are a totally automated and unremarked-upon part of the process. I would expect the same to apply here, partly because every disclosure should ideally say the same thing: "None of the judges were in a relationship with anyone they evaluated."

Indeed, the disclosure requirements in the financial sector cover cases like these quite directly. For example the CFA's Ethical and Professional Standards (2016):

"... requires members and candidates to fully disclose to clients, potential clients and employers all actual and potential conflicts of interest"

and from 2014:

"Members and Candidates must make full and fair disclosure of all matters that could reasonably be expected to impair their independence and objectivity or interfere with respective duties to their clients, prospective clients, and employer. Members and Candidates must ensure that such disclosures are prominent, are delivered in plain language, and communicate the relevant information effectively.

In this case, donors and potential donors to an EA organisation are the equivalent of clients and potential clients of an investment firm, and I think a personal relationship with a grantee could reasonably be expected to impair judgement.

A case I personally came across involved two flatmates who both worked for different divisions in the same bank (Research and Sales&Trading). Because the bank (rightfully) took the separation of these two functions very seriously, HR applied a lot of pressure to them and they found alternative living arrangements.

Another example is lotteries, where the family members of employees are not allowed to participate at all, because their winning would risk bringing the lottery into disrepute:

In most cases the employee's immediate family and employees of lottery suppliers are also not allowed to play. In practice, there is no way that employees could alter the outcome of a game in their favor, but lottery officials generally believe that public confidence would be damaged should an employee win a large prize. (source)

This is perhaps slightly unfair, as they did not choose the employment of their family members, but this seems to be a small cost. The number of lottery family members is very small compared to the lottery-ticket-buying public, and there are other forms of gambling open to them. And the costs here should be smaller still, as all I am suggesting is disclosure, a much milder policy than prohibition.

I did appreciate that the fund's most recent write-up does take note of potential conflicts of interest, along with a wealth of other details. I could not find the sort of conflict of interest policy you suggested on their website however.

Hey John,

For some (most?) of these opinions, there isn't any social pressure not to air them. Indeed, as several people have already noted, some of these topics are already the subject of extensive public debate by people who like EA.

First: Many positions in the public discourse are still strongly silenced. To borrow an idea from Scott Alexander, the measure of how silenced something is is not how many people talk publicly about it, but the ratio of people who talk publicly about it to the people who believe it. If a lot of people in a form say they believe something but are afraid to talk about it, I think it's a straightforward sign that they do feel silenced. I think you should indeed update that, to borrow some of your examples, when someone makes an argument for negative utilitarianism, or human enhancement, or abortion, or mental health, that several people are feeling grateful that the person is stepping out and watching with worry to see whether the person gets attacked/dismissed/laughed at. I'm pretty sure I personally have experienced seeing people lose points socially for almost every single example you listed, to varying degrees.

Second: Even for social and political movements, it's crucial to know what people actually believe but don't want to say publicly. The conservative right in the US of the last few decades would probably have liked to know that many people felt silenced about how much they liked gay marriage, given the very sudden swing in public opinion on that topic; they could then have chosen not to build major political infrastructure around the belief that their constituents would stand by that policy position. More recently I think the progressive left of many countries in Europe, Australia and the US would appreciate knowing when people are secretly more supportive of right wing policies, as there has been (IIRC) a series of elections and votes where the polls predicted a strong left-wing victory and in reality there was a slight right-wing victory.

Third: I think the public evidence of the quality of the character of people working on important EA projects is very strong and not easily overcome. You explain that it's important to you that folks at your org saw it and they felt worried that EA contains lots of bad people, or people who believe unsavoury things, or something. I guess my sense here is that there is a lot of strong, public evidence about the quality of people who are working on EA problems, about the insights that many public figures in the community have, and about the integrity of many of the individuals and organisation.

• You can see how Holden Karnofsky went around being brutally honest yet rigorous in his analysis of charities in the global health space.
• You can see how Toby Ord and many others have committed to giving a substantial portion of their lifetime resources to altruistic causes instead of personal ones.
• You can see how Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom spent several decades of their lives attempting to lay out a coherent philosophy and argument that allowed people to identify a key under-explored problem for humanity.
• You can read the writings of Scott Alexander and see how carefully he thinks about ethics, morality and community.
• You can listen to the podcast of and read the public writings by Julia Galef and see how carefully she thinks about complex and controversial topics and the level of charity she gives to people on both sides of debates.
• You can read the extensive writing of The Unit Of Caring by Kelsey Piper and see how much she cares about both people and principles, and how she will spend a great deal of her time trying to help people figure out their personal and ethical problems.
• I could keep listing examples, but I hope the above gets my point across.

I am interested in being part of a network of people who build trust through costly (yet worthwhile) acts of ethics, integrity, and work on important problems, and I do not think the above public Form is a risk to the connections of that network.

Fourth: It's true that many social movements have been able to muster a lot of people and political power behind solving important problems, and that this required them to care a lot about PR and hold very tight constraints on what they can be publicly associated with (and thus what they're allowed to say publicly). I think however, that these social movements are not capable of making scientific and conceptual progress on difficult high-level questions like cause prioritisation and the discovery of crucial considerations.

They're very inflexible; by this I don't merely mean that they're hard to control and can take on negative affect (e.g. new atheism is often considered aggressive or unkind), but that they often cannot course correct or change their minds (e.g. environmentalism on nuclear energy, I think) in a way that entirely prohibits intellectual progress. Like, I don't think you can get 'environmentalism, but for cause prioritisation' or 'feminism, but for crucial considerations'. I think the thing we actually want here is something much closer to 'science', or 'an intellectual movement'. And I think your points are much less applicable to a healthy scientific community.

I hope this helps to communicate where I'm coming from.

Just as a sign of social support: I am grateful to whoever organized this poll, and would be deeply saddened to be part of a community where we punish people who organize polls like this. Obviously it's fine for Halstead to have his perspective, but it seemed valuable to provide a counterpoint to communicate that I would be happy to defend anyone who organizes polls like this, and put a significant fraction of my social capital behind our collective ability to do things like this.

This post has been shared within the organisation I work for and I think could do very large damage to the reputation of EA within my org.

Would you mind sharing, at least in general terms, which organisation you work for? I confess that if I knew I have forgotten.

I agree with you; I just want to point clearly toward the end of the spectrum that is "a healthy intellectual community" rather than "a unified voting block that doesn't allow its members to step out of line".