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Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area

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Re: Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area

#171

Post by jjulius »

bawolff wrote: post #7

Seems pretty obvious why in a world where if you misspeak or say something ill considered it can be all over twitter and have serious personal and professional ramifications. Regardless of how well meaning people are in their desire to hold people to account for bad views, it does have a chilling effect, and you can't learn if you don't have a safe place to make mistakes.

The context in this article is far more corporate and far less personal than what you describe. It's corporations and wealthy people within them hoping to not have their feet held to the fire for decisions that they know might not be appreciated by, or may actually negatively impact, the broader populace.

That's my cynical take.

Re: Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area

#172

Post by Aurornis »

echelon wrote: post #148
dcrazy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easy solution to what? I’m saying lack of like individual line-item attribution is a feature.

It feels incompatible with how the rest of the legal framework works. You can be recorded in public. In most of the US states you can be recorded in private so long as the one recording is a party to the conversation. Why does California do this separate weird thing? It doesn't feel like my rights should go away when I cross into your state. It feels like a glitch.

It’s not a legal thing at all. It’s a social agreement that people opt into at an event.

Legally you can go to an event and act in bad faith without breaking the law. That’s not cool, but you’re not getting arrested for it.

If (or when) word gets out that you’re breaking the rules, or worse, secretly recording people against their wishes then you’d find yourself excluded from those groups and private events.

Re: Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area

#173

Post by jandrewrogers »

This is not new. Many of the mailing lists that dominated the discourse of the early Internet in the 1990s operated under a similar rule. The novelty is that it disappeared almost entirely for decades.

The original purpose (on the Internet) was to create a space where complex ethical and moral questions could be explored and discussed in depth without risk of someone taking a hypothetical statement out of context to slander you, as people are wont to do. It would be orders of magnitude worse in this current age of people obsessed with generating click-bait for engagement, which wasn’t a thing back then. I personally found that environment to be intellectually stimulating and rigorous, I miss the standard of discourse of those days.

Chatham House Rule is going back to the old Internet, which valued novel insight and reasoned discourse highly, before the masses took over the Internet. The purpose was not to enable edgelords. Rational defense of ideas, statements, and hypotheses was expected and table stakes. Related rules of that era, such as Crocker’s Rule[0], placed responsibility on the reader to address uncomfortable or offensive feedback in the most dispassionate way possible.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881288

Re: Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area

#174

Post by AlexandrB »

throw112312 wrote: post #137
cmdli wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, it’s a way for bad faith actors to spread their beliefs while not having to worry about their reputation. Many people with power are only hurt through public opinion, so this is the way they try to gain control over that.

This is not what I observed in the last 8 years. People with power (both D and R) get away with anything while individuals suffer for the slightest infractions. Any given senate hearing or political speech would lead to dozens of expulsions in a standard censored software company. It is the small people who need protection.

Yup. The most obvious example is Donald Trump himself. Instead of suffering consequences for any of the things he's said, he has been elected to president of the United States. Twice! Meanwhile if you repeated what he says verbatim in your workplace you might find yourself gone by next week.

Re: Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area

#175

Post by ryukoposting »

michaelt wrote: post #15

> [At] an intimate dinner party in Los Altos Hills, Brex Supper Club salons, [...] the rules of the house are increasingly Chatham. What a strange comment. If after attending a dinner party people are repeating everything they heard, in public, with attribution - then that dinner party absolutely was not intimate.

I agree with you. I've never lived in SV, and after interacting with a lot of folks in the bay, I'd prefer to never live there. It's seems like a weird Twilight Zone place where everyone is a business contact and nobody is just a friend. Even the concept of "intimacy" can be tacitly warped around that social framework.

Re: Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area

#176

Post by groby_b »

Having attended conferences under Chatham House Rule: It's invaluable if the event includes speakers that must maintain a specific public stance - politicians, people in highly visible roles/organizations, etc.

There's no top secret lore handed out, it's not a secret society taking over the world. It addresses the issue that any public statement will be cut up into sound bites, and the public discussion will only focus on one or two sentences, drowning out any nuance. And, if you misspoke, the public discussion will portray you as "not being aligned with your organizations values".

This allows people to set aside speechifying and talk about the actual problems. With lots of nuance. Acknowledging shared ground. Hashing out what the _actual_ disagreements are. We need more opportunities like that, not less.

And the rule only works if you're running the iterated version, and it's a high-value meeting. Because losing access to that forum is the penalty for violating the social compact.

Re: Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area

#177

Post by mmooss »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #115
mmooss wrote: post #62

It's nothing impressive. It's secrecy and corruption; it's the modern trend of power grabs and exclusivity (withholding information) over efficiency, productivity, intelligence, and all the benefits of an open, free society. It just has a fancy British name to give it legitimacy. You want liquidity and lots of exposure in any marketplace, including the one of ideas. Ideas without sunshine tend to rot and fester. That…

> Ideas without sunshine tend to rot and fester. That might be why there are so many obviously stupid ones these days. This was the thesis behind e.g. Twitter. I’m not sure it’s panned out. Ideas need sunshine, but a seedling also does better in a nursery.

Interesting point. While I agree that the outcome has been bad or really catastrophic, I'm not sure it's the same cause.

Certainly ideas from positions of power need openeness and sunshine, speaking very generally. The problem on social media is the flood of crap that buries everything else, and nobody can keep up - the sunshine effect is overwhelmed.

Re: Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area

#179

Post by thatcat »

echelon wrote: post #148
dcrazy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easy solution to what? I’m saying lack of like individual line-item attribution is a feature.

It feels incompatible with how the rest of the legal framework works. You can be recorded in public. In most of the US states you can be recorded in private so long as the one recording is a party to the conversation. Why does California do this separate weird thing? It doesn't feel like my rights should go away when I cross into your state. It feels like a glitch.

how is state law differing a glitch? privacy law is under developed federally considering the changes in scale distribution, storage, and capture tech. recording people without their awareness is a lie of omission that many would consider rude and manipulative.

Re: Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area

#180

Post by echelon »

ryandrake wrote: post #69
bawolff wrote: post #7

Seems pretty obvious why in a world where if you misspeak or say something ill considered it can be all over twitter and have serious personal and professional ramifications. Regardless of how well meaning people are in their desire to hold people to account for bad views, it does have a chilling effect, and you can't learn if you don't have a safe place to make mistakes.

If you really believe something, say it loudly and proudly and sign your name to it. If you're not willing to have it attributed to you because it will make you look bad, then maybe you should take a moment to think about where those beliefs come from.

> If you really believe something, say it loudly and proudly and sign your name to it.

Anonymity should be lauded and protected, BUT if you're expecting to benefit from the use of your subject matter authority or credentials, then it needs to have your name attached.

Without an identity, there is no authority.

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