Comments
crossposting from LessWrong since I think this is more common on EA Forum
Errors are my own
At first blush, I find this common caveat amusing.
1. If there are errors, we can infer that those providing feedback were unable to identify them.
2. If the author was fallible enough to have made errors, perhaps they are are fallible enough to miss errors in input sourced from others.
What purpose does it serve? Given its often paired with "credit goes to..<list of names> it seems like an attempt that people providing feedback/input to a post are only exposed to upside from doing so, and the author takes all the downside reputation risk if the post is received poorly or exposed as flawed.
Maybe this works? It seems that as a capable reviewer/feedback haver, I might agree to offer feedback on a poor post written by a poor author, perhaps pointing out flaws, and my having given feedback on it might reflect poorly on my time allocation, but the bad output shouldn't be assigned to me. Whereas if my name is attached to something quite good, it's plausible that I contributed to that. I think because it's easier to help a good post be great than to save a bad post.
But these inferences seem like they're there to be made and aren't changed by what an author might caveat at the start. I suppose the author might want to remind the reader of them rather than make them true through an utterance.
Upon reflection, I think (1) doesn't hold. The reviewers/input makers might be aware of the errors but be unable to save the author from them. (2) That the reviewers made mistakes that have flowed into the piece seems all the more likely the worse the piece is overall, since we can update that the author wasn't likely to catch them.
On the whole, I think I buy the premise that we can't update too much negatively on reviewers and feedback givers from them having deigned to give feedback on something bad, though their time allocation is suspect. Maybe they're bad at saying no, maybe they're bad at dismissing people's ideas aren't that good, maybe they have hope for this person. Unclear. Upside I'm more willing to attribute.
Perhaps I would replace the "errors are my my own[, credit goes to]" with a reminder or pointer that these are the correct inferences to make. The words themselves don't change them? Not sure, haven't thought about this much.
Edited To Add: I do think "errors are my own" is a very weird kind of social move that's being performed in an epistemic contexts and I don't like.
Just a thought: there's the common advice that fighting all out with the utmost desperation makes sense for very brief periods, a few weeks or months, but doing so for longer leads to burnout. So you get sayings like "it's a marathon, not a sprint." But I wonder if length of the "fight"/"war" isn't the only variable in sustainable effort. Other key ones might be the degree of ongoing feedback and certainty about the cause.
Though I expect a multiyear war which is an existential threat to your home and family to be extremely taxing, I imagine soldiers experiencing less burnout than people investing similar effort for a far-mode cause, let's say global warming which might be happening, but is slow and your contributions to preventing it unclear. (Actual soldiers may correct me on this, and I can believe war is very traumatizing, though I will still ask how much they believed in the war they were fighting.)
(Perhaps the relevant variables here are something like Hanson's Near vs Far mode thinking, where hard effort for far-mode thinking more readily leads to burnout than near-mode thinking even when sustained for long periods.)
Then of course there's generally EA and X-risk where burnout is common. Is this just because of the time scales involved, or is it because trying to work on x-risk is subject to so much uncertainty and paucity of feedback? Who knows if you're making a positive difference? Contrast with a Mario character toiling for years to rescue the princess he is certain is locked in a castle waiting. Fighting enemy after enemy, sleeping on cold stone night after night, eating scraps. I suspect Mario, with his certainty and much more concrete sense of progress, might be able expend much more effort and endure much more hardship for much longer than is sustainable in the EA/X-risk space.
Related: On Doing the Improbable
It seems to me that many jobs that involve more immediate concerns have high rates of burnouts. I would guess that's the case for, e.g. nurses (though I haven't found statistics comparing different occupations). Thus I'm not sure that jobs whose impact is more distant and uncertain generally have higher rates of burnout. That means that if the EA and X-risk community have higher rates of burnout, that may not be due to that factor, or at least not to that alone.
Ruby can ask his former ICU nurse wife about that. My impression from having Miranda as a coworker is that yes, ICU nurses did have high rates of burnout.