Originally posted on the EA Forum
A dynamic I keep seeing is that it feels hard to whistleblow or report concerns or make a bid for more EA attention on things that "everyone knows", because it feels like there's no one to tell who doesn't already know. It’s easy to think that surely this is priced in to everyone's decision making. Some reasons to do it anyway:
- You might be wrong about what “everyone” knows - maybe everyone in your social circle does, but not outside. I see this a lot in Bay gossip vs. London gossip - what "everyone knows" is very different in those two places
- You might be wrong about what "everyone knows" - sometimes people use a vague shorthand, like "the FTX stuff" and it could mean a million different things, and either double illusion of transparency (you both think you know what the other person is talking about but don’t) or the pressure to nod along in social situations means that it seems like you're all talking about the same thing but you're actually not
- Just because people know doesn't mean it's the right level of salient - people forget, are busy with other things, and so on.
- Bystander effect: People might all be looking around assuming someone else has the concern covered because surely everyone knows and is taking the right amount of action on it.
In short, if you're acting based on the belief that there’s a thing “everyone knows”, check that that’s true.
Relatedly: Everybody Knows, by Zvi Mowshowitz
[Caveat: There's an important balance to strike here between the value of public conversation about concerns and the energy that gets put into those public community conversations. There are reasons to take action on the above non-publicly, and not every concern will make it above people’s bar for spending the time and effort to get more engagement with it. Just wanted to point to some lenses that might get missed.]