Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area
sfstandard.com135 points by mrry 3 months ago
135 points by mrry 3 months ago
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.
Agreed - This article is wrong at the beginning, Chatham House Rules are not a gag, they allow everyone to talk FREELY. I have been to many classes and forums under this rule, not least at Chatham House in St James Square, and it means that the speakers can speak freely, name names, without hedging or fudging or perambulating around the shrubbery. You can report whatever you like, but not who said it. I have heard so many truths in these discussions that were 15 years before their time - the behaviour of Mohammed Al-Fayed, for example - which carry much more weight when you hear them from an eyewitness, even if they do not wish to be named.
I like how the parent points out that it was a similar rule and not explicitly stated as "Chatham House Rules".
>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.
Anecdotally, I believe this rule was followed implicitly and often subconsciously and probably through some of the peak blogosphere era, despite blogs being accessible by the general public at the time. People were still looking for their tribe to escape the intellectual, creative, or censored dullness of their local surroundings.
The concept of ratting out people who were looking for the same thing would not occur to most people. They prized the discussion they couldn't have elsewhere more than the specific points being made. It'd be like the pilgrims going back to England and complaining to the English about all the other crazy heretics in the new world.
The whole thing started disapearing when going "viral" on social media started becoming a thing.
> Agreed - This article is wrong at the beginning, Chatham House Rules are not a gag
FYI gag as in "gag order" not gag as in a joke.
In case anyone else was confused about this as I was :)
I didn't mean gag as joke, it was a direct reference to the article, but I see that people might be confused.
Yeah, I wasn't criticizing or anything, that's why I wrote it as clarification. I assumed other people like me might read your comment without having read the article.
Chatham House Rule goes back to 1927, a pre-transistor era.
It seems that already back then, during the early radio era, it was recognized that people dwell on "shocking sound bites" too much, at the cost of thinking things through.
> Many of the mailing lists that dominated the discourse of the early Internet in the 1990s operated under a similar rule.
What lists are you referring to? I don't remember this ever coming up.
Denunciations of the Chatham House Rule seem underdeveloped. According to the history on Wikipedia, it was invented to let members of post-WW1 English civic society discuss and debate potential reforms, and then get as much of that discussion into the public record as desired without having individual members pilloried for things they said during the discussion, even if the rest of the group disagreed with them.
This doesn’t even seem unique. Newspaper editorial boards don’t assign individual names to editorials or sentences thereof. Individual members of Congressional commissions aren’t cited for the sentences they (or their staff) committed to reports.
Chatham House Rule, meet Chesterton’s Fence.
The easy solution to this in my state is to just wear a recording device.
I live in a one party consent state for the recording of conversations [1,2], whether on the phone or in person. I don't know how y'all get away without it in California. It pairs really well with free speech, and it feels wrong to not have this legal feature available.
[1] https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-call...
If you don’t plan on following the rule, you don’t need a recording device.
Rules like this are an agreement among friends or attendants at an even. If you go in to such an event with an awareness of the rules but an intent to go against them, that’s bad faith. If you go in to such an event with an intent to secretly record people and release recordings of them that’s just terrible behavior, regardless of what the law says.
This was a response to Chatham House Rule becoming widespread at public-at-large community events.
Inviting the public and then putting them under a gag order isn't something we should be excited about. It feels like a slide into censorship.
If you want to publish ideas with anonymity, there are forums for that: social media, journalists with anonymous sources, anonymous editorial pieces, to name just a few. Some of these channels even let you lean on titles or authority, eg. "editorial by an anonymous tech CEO".
Chatham House Rule doesn't really work in practice, and it's a bizarre new social construct that stands in the way of fostering an open society.
We shouldn't be ashamed of free speech. Rather than bending over backwards to create artificial safe spaces where we can say controversial things, we should normalize speaking plainly and openly with one another. This is a weird retreat and it makes society more reclusive and less open. It handicaps us and makes us less authentic.
"Chatham House Rules" is not a problem that needs solving. I've only seen it used as a courtesy extended by peers to each other out of mutual respect.
"We will have conversations and share information and we agree we can act on the information but would all prefer not to be directly quoted or have the information we shared be shared with others outside the meeting."
It's not legal, it's social.
Break trust with a wiretap (really?) and you'll just find yourself no longer invited to the fun places.
> "We will have conversations and share information and we agree we can act on the information but would all prefer not to be directly quoted or have the information we shared be shared with others outside the meeting."
My understanding is that the Chatham House rule specifically permits sharing the information shared in the meeting as long as it is not attributed to any specific attendee.
IANAL but it would seem to me that one party consent just means you can record it. It does not automatically mean you can divulge.
And since you agreed to the chatham rules not to (i.e. you entered into a contract) you can still be liable for breach of contract in a civil court, with potential penalties and damages if those were part of the contract.
Of course anything you record can still be used in criminal or civil proceedings (e.g. if your interlocutor admits to a crime or utters illegal or tortuous speech, such as fraud, harassment, or verbal abuse).
This rule isn't a problem to be solved. It is a voluntary contract among many people. Why break it if you just don't have to associate with them.
It pairs really well with free speech
How does it pair well with free speech? If I think that you might be recording me without telling me, I'll stop talking.
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.
The Chatham House Rule is not a legal principle. If you violate it by recording a meeting in a one-party consent state, the most likely consequence is that you wouldn’t be invited back. (Someone else posited legal consequences under contract law, but I’m not a lawyer.)
And for the record, California is not the only two-party consent state. There are twelve others.
It is code of honour - those that break it have no honour and lose any standing in these places.
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.
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.
A glitch that can be fixed by inserting a clause into the other solution mentioned: an NDA contract
are you sure that is a solution? one party consent sounds like a default if the parties have not negotiated something else. but i wonder if it still stands if you have agreed to a different set of rules that would bar recording or at least bar the release of such recordings. for example the default rule is i can share what i want with a conversation i have with someone but if prior to the conversation i sign an NDA then i may face a civil tort if i share information barred by the NDA.
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 only times I've seen Chatham House rules used explicitly is when multiple companies have come together to discuss serious security concerns that affect all of them urgently (e.g. widespread 0-days, etc).
It makes sense that you want to have candid and open discussions, and those discussions will have to leak back to the respective companies for any concerted action to be taken, but you don't want your company's security specifics to be identifiable.
There are a number of different situations where I can see this being useful, but:
> “In corporate culture, there’s a liberating and freeing quality to the idea that this is a safe space for me to say unpopular things and not get labeled as a conservative or racist”
is really not one of them. I fully agree with Ocean's take that "maybe it’s just a bad solution to a worse problem," and I think there we can tease out two separate social problems:
1. People looking for safe spaces to say racist or other discriminatory things (generally identified as a politically-right problem)
2. The 0-strikes political climate we now (believe we) live in (generally identified as a politically-left problem)
(Both feel like symptoms of High Conflict: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55711592-high-conflic...)
I think these are actually the same problem: they are both about convincing yourself that "others" are "bad" and "we" are good, and looking for every conceivable way to do so. Not just in the specific instance, but permanently and unchangeably.
Somewhere along the way (my belief is that it was around the time social media took off, but I don't have proof for that), we forgot that we're more alike than we are different, and that people can grow and learn and change, and that both of those things are good, actually. It's not like there's some fictional past where we all agreed more than we do now, but it's how we relate to or exclude others that has changed.
> Somewhere along the way (my belief is that it was around the time social media took off, but I don't have proof for that), we forgot that we're more alike than we are different, and that people can grow and learn and change, and that both of those things are good, actually.
The difference between The Before Times and now is that it was historically hard to curate and communicate with a group of people who exclusively agreed with you. This had two primary consequences:
(1) You were constantly exposed to nice people who nonetheless disagreed with you about something / everything.
(2) It made you realize that you're the asshole, if you couldn't at least be polite to someone with different views than you.
Now, living in a bubble is trivial. It's also the subtle default on a lot of social platforms.
> Now, living in a bubble is trivial. It's also the subtle default on a lot of social platforms.
Indeed. IMO, social media should have very limited facilities for blocking/muting (e.g., maximum number of accounts to block, no blocking accounts that have never previously interacted with you, and no import functionality), so that it could only be used to stop true harassment, and not to intentionally live in such a bubble. That's one of my biggest criticisms of Bluesky: the whole design of their blocklist system seems to be to intentionally encourage this sort of thing.
This assumes that mass social media is some kind of idealized “meeting of the minds” rather than like…the digital equivalent of a loud and raucous bar.
The ability to block obnoxious and hateful people is fundamentally far, far less of causative factor of information bubbles than the pervasive engagement-driven algorithmic feeds are.
True harassment is VERY easy if you can create infinite amount of new accounts and each new account can harass the person and cant be blocked. True harassment is very easy if you are someone with many followers who will target whoever you choose to.
What you suggests is setup designed so that large scale harassment is easy. Alex Jones will love it, psychopaths will love it.
uhm, hard disagree. Harassment is the #1 problem blocking helps with but... I block anything the platform suggests to me as a form of protest against it shoving click bait triggering channels in my face. I see this as resisting getting forced into a bubble by the platform.
I can't not use social media because it is the only way to get local info and it is a terrible way when you consider that for every post from someone i subscribe to, there are 6 ads and 6 channel suggestions specially chosen to entice me to join in a flame war of comments. I'd just give up if i didn't have the hope of at least from time to time catching a break because i blocked all the things the platform thought to suggest for a few weeks. My hope is to one day achieve a whitelist of local posts which is driven by geography, not agreement/alignment on politics or ideaology. since that's not an option, i'll blacklist the entire world if i must...
Yes. I've noticed a similar pattern online that I fucking hate. It goes "Group X is bad, so anyone who shares any belief with Group X is bad."
Like you, I believe that we're more alike than we are different, but that mindset focuses on the small differences over the many similarities.
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.
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.
I think that reality check is that in many social groups and in many workplaces, guys who say and do "things like Donald Trump" are rewarded again and again and again.
To claim otherwise is just a lie designed to make it so it stays that way.
You are probably getting downvoted for being too recently-political, but I noticed the same paradox.
Speech that can get one elected to presidency with a comfortable margin in the Electoral College can get another fired.
We truly live in a polarized world.
Isn’t there a danger that if the rule is selectively enforced, for whatever reasons, that it will actually decrease the credibility of the participants/organizers?
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.
Well, there is a matter of safety, and not wanting to be harassed for your opinions. Some debates are so heated that an opinion stated either way is going to expose you to potential violence if not, just verbal abuse through various channels. I think even though you should be honest about your opinion, it’s obviously better to avoid that harm so why not be anonymous?
Personally, I’ve also found that stating your opinion, and having it recorded and known to everyone, makes it very hard for you to change your mind. We’re very harsh to people who do change their mind in such circumstances because the first thing we see is a record of them saying the opposite, and then we ask them to explain themselves and judge them like it’s some kind of fault in their character. There are opinions I had when I was 18 years old that I think abhorrent. I don’t want to be associated with them. I’m very happy there’s no record of me having these opinions. I don’t want to have to explain my past like that just to hold the opinions I have in the present. I have found that process never really ends — i’m regularly changing my opinions on beliefs overtime . I wonder what opinions I have now I will look back on with shame. so I try to make sure that I don’t have anything recorded for the end of times under my name just in case I want to distance myself.
Yea. The "What's going to be taboo in 30 years" question is a good one. I don't know and I don't have a good answer to that. I personally don't worry about it because it's never occurred to me to walk up close to the line of what's acceptable. I have pretty vanilla opinions.
But, for today, I always wonder when someone says they are going to be harassed for their opinions. Just what opinions are we talking about, here? That's what these discussions always seem to lack: Specific examples of what opinions you want to share that you are afraid to share.
I've always liked Stephen Fry's retort to the old "You can't say anything anymore!" line. If a friend tells you that, pull them aside in private and ask them "What exactly are these things you'd like to say but can't? We're in private now, and I'll give you a judgment-free chance to say what you think you're being prevented from saying. Go ahead!" Nine times out of ten, they still won't say it, because they know it's terrible. They just want to complain that they're somehow the victim of censorship.
If you’re an Ivy League college professor, it is extremely risky to say that Palestine has a legitimate grievance against Israel. If you’re a small town high school coach, it would be smart to be careful about advocating for trans girls to be able to play on the girls team. You can be punished for opinions on various sides of the political spectrum.
If you're coaching a girls' team and you advocate that boys who say they are girls should be allowed to play on the team too, then that should be grounds for dismissal from the coaching role, as you'd be disadvantaging the girls on the team that you're supposed to be supporting.
This would be an entirely warranted "punishment for opinions" because of your failure to adequately safeguard young female athletes.
See? It's just wrong-think, based on appeals to emotion.
No, in that case it would be a demonstration of how unsuitable that person is for the job.
Appreciate the demonstration of why Chatham House Rule can protect opinions on the left side of the spectrum. Just to be clear, this is a real live example of someone saying that an individual should be punished for their opinions, separate from their actions.