I don't feel great about my donations to a nonprofit funding their "hotel/event venue business" (as I would call it)
The nice thing about Lighthaven is that it mostly funds itself! Our current expected net-spending on Lighthaven is about 10% of our budget, largely as a result of subsidizing events and projects here that couldn't otherwise exist. I think looking at that marginal expenditure Lighthaven is wildly cost-effective if you consider any of the organizations that run events here that we subsidize to be cost-effective.
because if, e.g., someone was considering whether it's important to harm the third party now rather than later and telling them the information that I shared would've moved them towards harming the third party earlier, Oliver would want to share information with that someone so that they could harm the third party.
No, I didn't say anything remotely like this! I have no such policy! I don't think I ever said anything that might imply such a policy. I only again clarified that I am not making promises about not doing these things to you. I would definitely not randomly hand out information to anyone who wants to harm the third party.
At this point I am just going to stop commenting every time you summarize me inaccurately, since I don't want to spend all day doing this, but please, future readers, do not assume these summaries are accurate.
Then, after hearing Oliver wouldn't agree to confidentiality given that I haven't asked him for it in advance
I have clarified like 5 times that this isn't because you didn't ask in advance. If you had asked in advance I would have rejected your request as well, it's just that you would have never told me in the first place.
don't try to tell people specifically for the purpose of harming the third party
This is also not what you asked for! You said "I just ask you to not use this information in a way designed to hurt [third party]", which is much broader. "Not telling people" and "not using information" are drastically different. I have approximately no idea how to commit to "not use information for purpose X". Information propagates throughout my world model. If I end up in conflict with a third party I might want to compete with them and consider the information as part of my plans. I couldn't blind myself to that information when making strategic decisions.
I think you could have totally written a post that focused on communicating that, and it could have been a great post! Like, I do think the cost of keeping secrets is high. Both me and other people at Lightcone have written quite a bit about that. See for example "Can you keep this confidential? How do you know?"
Many words followed only after I expressed surprise and started the discussion ("about 3000 words of explanation, and a 1-2 hour chat conversation" is false, there were fewer than 2k words from your side in the entire conversation, many of which were about the third party, unrelated to your explanations of your decision procedures etc., a discussion of making a bet that you ended up not taking, some facts that you got wrong, etc.)
When I just extracted my messages from the thread I was referencing and threw them into a wordcounter I got 2,370 words in my part of the conversation (across three parallel threads), which is close enough to 3,000 that I feel good about my estimate. I do now realize that about 500 of those were a few weeks later (but still like a month ago), so I would have now said more like 2000 words to refer to that specific 1-2 hour conversation (do appreciate the correction, though I think in this context the conversation a few weeks later makes sense to include).
Among the almost 2000 words, you did not describe this procedure even once.
I brought it up as a consideration a few times. (Example: "Like, to be clear, I definitely rather you not have told me instead of demanding that [I] 'only use the information to coordinate' afterwards"). I agree I didn't outline my whole decision-making procedure, but I did explain .
that you think it is insane to expect people to use information in ways that align with important preferences.
Sorry, I am not parsing this. My guess is you meant to say something else than "important preferences" here?
I think you're misrepresenting what I asked; I asked you to not use it adversarially towards the third party, as it seemed to me as a less strong demand than confidentiality
It's plausible I am still not understanding what you are asking. To be clear, what you asked for seemed to me substantially costlier than confidentiality (as I communicated pretty early on after you made your request). I have hopefully clarified my policies sufficiently now.
This kind of stuff is hard and we are evidently not on the same page about many of the basics, and that's part of why I don't feel comfortable promising things here, since my feeling is that you feel pretty upset already about me having violated something you consider an important norm, and I would like to calibrate expectations.
This is great!
1Don't make my helping you have been a bad idea for me
Yeah, I think this is a good baseline to aspire to, but of course the "my helping you" is the contentious point here. If you hurt me, and then also demand that I make you whole, then that's not a particularly reasonable request. Why should I make you whole, I am already not whole myself!
Sometimes interactions are just negative-sum. That's the whole reason why it does usually make sense to check-in beforehand before doing things that could easily turn out to be negative sum, which this situation clearly turned out to be!
I mostly just want people to become calibrated about the cost of sharing information with strings attached. It is quite substantial! It's OK for that coordination to happen based on people's predictions of each other, without needing to be explicitly negotiated each time.
I would like it to be normalized and OK for someone to signal pretty heavily that they consider the cost of accepting secrets, or even more intensely, the cost of accepting information that can only be used to the benefit of another party, to be very high. People should therefore model that kind of request as likely to be rejected, and so if you just spew information onto the other party, and also expect them to keep it secret or to only be used for your benefit, that the other party is likely to stop engaging with you, or to tell you that they aren't planning to meet your expectations.
I think marginally the most important thing to do is to just tell people who demand constraints on information, without wanting to pay any kind of social cost for it, to pound sand.
Like, with all this new information I now am a tiny bit more wary of talking in front of Habryka.
Feel free to update on "Oliver had one interaction ever with Mikhail in which Oliver refused to make a promise that Mikhail thought reasonable", but I really don't think you should update beyond that. Again, the summaries in this post of my position are very far away from how I would describe them.
There is a real thing here, which if you don't know you should know, which is that I do really think confidentiality and information-flow constraints are very bad for society. They are the cause of as far as I can tell a majority of major failures in my ecosystem in the last few years, and mismanagement of e.g. confidentiality norms was catastrophic in many ways, so I do have strong opinions about this topic! But the summary of my positions on this topic is really very far from my actual opinions.
and that you replied “lol, no" after a week.
No, what I did is reply with "lol, no" followed by about 3000 words of explanation across a 1-2 hour chat conversation, detailing my decision procedures, and what I am and am not happy to do. Like, I really went into a huge amount of detail, gave concrete specific examples, and elaborated what I would do. Much of this involved Mikhail insisting on a very specific interpretation of what reasonable conduct is and clarifying multiple times that yes, he wouldn't want me to use information like this under any circumstance in any kind of way adversarial to the third party the information is about, and that it would be unreasonable for me to reject such a request.
As an interested third party who generally would like to to work with LightConeInfra and you, unrelated to Mikhail's specific asks, I'm curious for if you broadly agree to put some non trivial decision weight on not using info people give you in ways they strongly disagree with, even if they didn't ask you to precomit to that, even if they were mistaken in some assumptions. (If you later get that info from other places you're ~released from the first obligations, tho this shouldn't be gamed)
Of course! See my general process described above. If you tell me something in secret, or ask me to put some kind of constraint on information, I will check whether I would have accepted that information with that constraint in advance. If I would have, I am happy to agree to it afterwards. Similarly, if I think you have some important preference, but you just forgot to ask me explicitly, or we didn't have time to discuss it, or it's just kind of obvious that you have this preference, I will do the same.
I have a bunch more thoughts, but I don't super want to prop up this comment section by writing stuff that I actually think is worth reading in general. I'll post my more cleaned-up thoughts somewhere else and link them.
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Yeah, I honestly think the above is pretty clear?
I do not think it at all describes a policy of "if someone was trying to harm the third party, and having this information would cause them to do it sooner, then I would give them the information". Indeed, it seems really very far away from that! In the above story nobody is trying to actively harm anyone else as far as I can tell? I certainly would not describe "CEA Comm Health team is working on a project to do a bunch of investigations, and I tell them information that is relevant to how highly they should prioritize those investigations" as being anything close to "trying to harm someone directly"!
No, I literally said "Like, to be clear, I definitely rather you not have told me". And then later "Even if I would have preferred knowing the information packaged with the request". And my first response to your request said "You can ask in-advance if I want to accept confidentiality on something, and I'll usually say no".
Sure, but I also wouldn't have done that! The closest deal we might have had would have been a "man, please actually ask in advance next time, this is costly and makes me regret having that whole conversation in the first place. If you recognize that as a cost and owe me a really small favor or something, I can keep it private, but please don't take this as a given", but I did not (and continue to not) have the sense that this would actually work.
Maybe I am being dense here, and on first read this sounded like maybe a thing I could do, but after thinking more about it I do not know what I am promising if I promise I "won't actively try to use [this information] outside of coordinating with the third party". Like, am I allowed to write it in my private notes? Am I allowed to write it in our weekly memos as a consideration for Lightcone's future plans? Am I not allowed to think the explicit thought "oh, this piece of information is really important for this plan that puts me in competition with this third party, better make sure to not forget it, and add it to my Anki deck?
Like, I am not saying there isn't any distinction between "information passively propagating" and "actively using information", but man, it feels like a very tricky distinction, and I do not generally want to be in the business of adding constraints to my private planning and thought-processes that would limit how I can operate here, and relies on this distinction being clear to other people. Maybe other people have factored their mind and processes in ways they find this easy, but I do not.