Hubris 2.0: Five lessons of the Givewell Metafilter controversy

I thought that I'd spend tonight summing up what I said about social enterprise over the past few days, but instead I've spent my time back home absorbed in the unfolding Givewell controversy. The situation in a nutshell: after a high-profile publicity blitzkrieg touting Givewell as a revolution in charitable transparency and accountability, its founder was caught using false identities--i.e., sock puppets--to promote Givewell and to criticize other groups, including its main competitors. Ground zero for the scandal: this thread on MetaFilter.

The founder, Holden Karnofsky, has already admitted that what he did was wrong, and if all this story involved was a guy copping to sock puppetry I probably would have stopped reading the myriad blog posts and comments hours ago. What has made this incident particularly compelling for me has been the response of professionals in the charity community. I'll probably come back to this story later for a big-picture look, but for now, a few quick lessons:

• Doing good ain't hula hoops. To be blunt, Givewell director Lucy Bernholz' evident lack of familiarity with MetaFilter, the reputational dynamics of its online community and the ethics of sock puppetry and astroturfing make all the 2.0 lingo on Philanthropy 2173 seem little more than superficial trendhopping. Defending her tech savvy by saying that she uses Facebook does not help. The danger here goes way beyond technology: so-called nonprofit experts have a dismal track record of, to quote Bernholz's slogan, "remixing" their advice to fit the latest fads. Russia is an authoritarian country today in large part due to well-meaning but ignorant promoters of civil society; do we really want to base the future of philanthropy on a knack for Scrabulous?

• Don't attack the character of whistleblowers before you've checked out their claims. The same goes for the transparent technique of admit-the-confirmed-mistake-but--raise-oh-so-noble-questions-about-the-whistleblower. Not only is this likely to make you & your organization look even worse, as strategies they're ethically dubious at best--these responses are just a short jump away from the behavior seen in, say, Enron, the Catholic Church pedophilia cover-up and retaliation against reports of sexual harassment at Madison Square Garden. One of the persistent themes in scholarship on organizational dysfunction is the hidden danger of collective identity. The innate tendency to favor our own against others is not inherently benign; the same social glue that fosters loyalty can lead to violence and other forms of moral nihilism.

• Never forget that charities sell trust. Transparently trying to bribe online accusers with a "donation"--don't do this. An imprecise answer to a specific question won't silence your critics, nor will lame excuses. The occasional mistake is to be expected, even encouraged--after all, you can't break new ground without taking a risk. However, a sustained documentable pattern of lies and attacks followed by partial disclosure and defensive responses? If the folks at Givewell were trying to provide a case study of inflammatory and ineffective damage control, they succeeded. No matter how many times management may tout their ongoing commitment to corporate governance, they're toast.
  
  
• Which leads to the next point: karma's a bitch. While I agree in principle with the sacred virtue of forgiveness, Givewell is in a somewhat different position from your average sinner. Holden flew out of the gate loudly proclaiming his ethical superiority and judging other charities for not living up to his standards. His getting busted for fraud is a secular analog to discovering that Ted Haggard had gay sex or Jim Bakker covered up an affair. The issue isn't just a mistake--it's hypocrisy. If we're going to look to the Bible as our moral guide, perhaps a more relevant passage might be Matthew 7:3--"Why do you focus on the splinter in your brother's eye but ignore the log in your own?"
  
  
• In short, it all comes down to a lesson that we haven't seemed to learn from the earliest days of Greek drama: beware of hubris. Oedipus Rex was not about sex; it's a story about how pride can blind us to becoming what we despise. And as Plato observed in The Defense of Socrates, to confuse knowledge of one thing with a knowledge of everything is a systemic problem with specialized expertise. Still here we are, twenty-five-hundred years later, glibly proclaiming that a bit of experience with PR, tech or hedge funds makes one a master of the charitable universe. The only thing different about Givewell's hubris 2.0 is that instead taking a lifetime, Oedipus fell in a day.