This is not true. This is obviously not true. A successful and important libel case (against Giuliani) was literally headline news this week. You can exceed five such cases just looking at similar cases: Dominion v Fox; Smartmatic v Fox; Coomer v Newsmax; Khalil v Fox; Andrews v D’Souza; and Weisenbach v Project Veritas. This is extremely unreasonable for you to say.
Those were in fact some of the cases I had in mind, yes, thank you—I read the news too. And what one learns from reading about them is how those are exceptional cases, newsworthy precisely because they reached any verdict rather than settling, driven by external politics and often third-party funding, and highly unusual until recently post-2016/Trump. It is certainly the case that sometimes villains like Alex Jones get smacked down properly by libel lawsuits; but note how wildly incomparable these cases are to the blog post that Spartz is threatening to sue over. Look, for example, at Jones’s malicious behavior even during the trial, or to take the most recent case, Giuliani, his repeated affirmation of the libelous and blatantly false claims. Look at the kinds of claims being punished in these lawsuits, like claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was completely fake and the victims’ relatives are fabricating their entire existence. (You’re going to analogize this to Pace saying ‘Nonlinear may not have treated some employees very well’? Really?) Look at how many of the plaintiffs are private citizens, who are in no way public figures. That this rash of victories for the good guys involves lawsuits does not redeem the general abuse of lawsuits.
None of which Ben Pace has done, and which is part of why I say he would have excellent odds: it’s unclear what damage has been done to Nonlinear, he had good grounds for his claims, has not said anything which would rise to the level of ‘actual malice’ against a public figure like Spartz, and was “well-intentioned”.
Nonlinear certainly doesn’t have more money than the EA community.
This is a double bait and switch: Nonlinear is just Spartz who can spend his money on whatever he likes, while the ‘EA community’ is not the one being specifically threatened, and even comparing Nonlinear and Lightcone is misleading, because Lightcone has many other ongoing responsibilities (such as spending money to maintain the website this is being written on or renovate buildings) and it would presumably be Pace personally being sued as well.
In the most blandly literal sense possible, lawsuits are arguments.
Wow. In any case, no, not even in the ‘literal sense’ is a lawsuit an ‘argument’, as lawsuits are speech-acts and binding actions. Lawsuits are acts of power and coercion; they are not arguments, even if arguments may be used in parts; saying that they ‘literally are arguments’ is like saying that lawsuits ‘literally are pieces of paper’. And if you simply exchange views or state views or refuse to take actions ordered by the judge (I encourage you to look up a dictionary definition of ‘argument’ if you really want to waste time taking this tack) that would constitute various kinds of fraud or perjury or contempt of court or violations of gag orders or disclosure of confidential information.
You have again not given any argument for this.
This is core to many of the Sequences in explaining things like why ‘burden of proof’ or ‘innocent until proven guilty’ are not how one should reason, and, for example, why adversarial norms of reasoning like simply denying claims and not substituting steelmen may be useful in law but not in LessWrong.
The rules under which lawsuits proceed are deliberately setup in an attempt to get at the truth.
No, they are not. Truth is only one of many concerns of lawsuits, under all prevailing legal philosophies, whether legal realism or law & economics; major concerns include economic efficiency, second-order incentives, predictability of rulings and precedent, and so on. Lawsuits, and criminal cases, are overturned routinely on grounds that have nothing to do with ‘getting at the truth’ and parties in lawsuits often stipulate to facts that no one believes for reasons of pragmatism. (And I’m leaving out historical examples like compurgation.) You do not use lawsuits to try to decide whether the sun goes around the earth, because lawsuits are not good ways to get at truths.
“My ingroup’s internet discussions are so great that they’re not only better than the outside society’s way of determining contested questions, they invalidate their use” is a dangerously culty belief
That does sound a bit culty but good thing I never said that. I would be just as angry about it if Spartz had instead threatened to sue a subreddit moderator on a subreddit I used, or someone who sent a spicy email to a mailing list, or tweeted about Spartz. This is an civil-society-wide norm, not a LW-only thing: arguments get arguments, not lawsuits. And when someone publishes some stuff about you that you don’t like, and you choose to break that norm by lawsuits...
from the prohibition on hearsay; to the requirement of a neutral and unbiased jury; to the requirement that both sides be able to examine and respond to evidence and arguments- are both truthseeking and not generally followed outside of the court system.
That’s all entirely wrong. A prohibition on hearsay is not ‘truthseeking’, obviously (much of history is based on things which would be thrown out as hearsay) but is related to the pragmatics. Juries are not required in lawsuits and parties often prefer a bench trial because they believe juries will be too ignorant or easily swayed rather than ‘truthseeking’ (and how do you explain how different systems make wildly different uses of bench trials if courts are so truthseeking? is truth found in lawsuits by jury trials in the USA but then truth works differently in the UK with almost all bench lawsuits?). Parties only examine and respond to a limited range of evidence and arguments, chosen for incentive reasons. And ‘not generally followed outside the court system’ is an argument against your claims: as if courts were the only place that anyone cared about truth? How does, say, science work since they don’t do… any of that?
you really ought to say specifically why/how the courts would be unreliable in this case.
As I already said, quite clearly, I thought, the point is not what the jury or judge would rule; I think were Pace sued and it was taken that far, he would win, for the obvious reasons related to his criticisms being entirely reasonable, often true (an absolute defense), and not made with actual malice, against a public figure, where the financial harms are minuscule at best—which make it quite hard to lose a libel lawsuit on its merits. But that’s largely irrelevant because it would probably never even get to the point of a jury or judge verdict. The point of lawfare is to harass and impoverish and censor, which is why Spartz dropped the threat when it didn’t look like it would work.
BTW, you think if lawsuits are so great for finding the truth, why isn’t Nonlinear suing now? If you feel that it wouldn’t work to sue now, you really ought to say specifically why/how the courts would be unreliable in this case.
Those were in fact some of the cases I had in mind, yes, thank you—I read the news too. And what one learns from reading about them is how those are exceptional cases, newsworthy precisely because they reached any verdict rather than settling, driven by external politics and often third-party funding, and highly unusual until recently post-2016/Trump. It is certainly the case that sometimes villains like Alex Jones get smacked down properly by libel lawsuits; but note how wildly incomparable these cases are to the blog post that Spartz is threatening to sue over. Look, for example, at Jones’s malicious behavior even during the trial, or to take the most recent case, Giuliani, his repeated affirmation of the libelous and blatantly false claims. Look at the kinds of claims being punished in these lawsuits, like claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was completely fake and the victims’ relatives are fabricating their entire existence. (You’re going to analogize this to Pace saying ‘Nonlinear may not have treated some employees very well’? Really?) Look at how many of the plaintiffs are private citizens, who are in no way public figures. That this rash of victories for the good guys involves lawsuits does not redeem the general abuse of lawsuit
(1) This is a response to you writing “you can count on one hand the sort of libel lawsuit which follows this beautiful fantasy”. Sarcastically stating “I read the news too” doesn’t help you- how obvious these are just makes it worse! You now seem to have entirely abandoned that standard without changing your mind. I can very easily start listing more libel cases that match the new distinctions you’re drawing, to the extent that they are clear enough; is there any point to me doing so? What is the evidence that would convince you that you’re wrong?
(2) One reason I’m confident that you don’t care about the distinctions you’re drawing is that the cases I cited already meet some of the standards you’ve now proposed, and you didn’t care enough to check. In particular, you wrote that “those are exceptional cases, newsworthy precisely because they reached any verdict rather than settling”. This is false, and you provided no justification or evidence for it. I cited six cases; none of them have reached verdicts. Dominion v. Fox, Khalil v. Fox, and Coomer v. Newsmax all did settle; Smartmatic v. Fox and Andrews v. D’Souza are still outstanding and so hasn’t reached a verdict. Weisenbach v. Project Veritas doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2022, but there has been no verdict that I can find. (Given that I’ve already presented you with cases satisfying one of the distinctions you drew above, are you now convinced that you were wrong?)
***
None of which Ben Pace has done, and which is part of why I say he would have excellent odds: it’s unclear what damage has been done to Nonlinear, he had good grounds for his claims, has not said anything which would rise to the level of ‘actual malice’ against a public figure like Spartz, and was “well-intentioned”.
it’s unclear what damage has been done to Nonlinear
Do you believe that unclear damages mean that you can’t win a lawsuit? If so, that’s untrue; damages are often also in dispute. (Did you mean to claim that there was zero damage done? That is different from what you wrote, and is false.)
he had good grounds for his claims
The legal term relevant here is “negligence”; “good grounds” is not the relevant legal terminology. He was negligent in publishing without giving Nonlinear time to reply or updating based on Spencer Greenberg’s evidence; in particular, Habryka stated that they had received evidence that claims in the post were false before they published. [ETA: Habrya comments on this here.] Why do you believe that this wasn’t negligent, if that’s what you meant by writing “had good grounds for his claims”? Or did you mean something else?
has not said anything which would rise to the level of ‘actual malice’ against a public figure like Spartz, and was “well-intentioned”.
You haven’t explained why you think that Spartz is a public figure; again, I find your lack of clear reasoning frustrating to deal with. In this specific case, searching for comments on ‘public figure’ by you in an attempt to figure out what you were thinking, I found a comment by you which did explain your reasoning:
He [Emerson Spartz] very obviously is one [a public figure]. As habryka points out, he has a WP entry backed by quite a few sources about him, specifically. He has an entire 5400-word New Yorker profile about him, which is just one of several you can grab from the WP entry (eg. Bloomberg). For comparison, I don’t think even Eliezer has gotten an entire New Yorker profile yet! If this is not a ‘public figure’, please do explain what you think it would take. Does he need a New York Times profile as well? (I regret to report that he only has 1 or 2 paragraphs thus far.)
Now, I am no particular fan of decreeing people ‘public figures’ who have not particularly sought out fame (and would not appreciate becoming a ‘public figure’ myself); however, most people would say that by the time you have been giving speeches to universities or agreeing to let a New Yorker journalist trail you around for a few months for a profile to boost your fame even further, it is safe to say that you have probably long since crossed whatever nebulous line divides ‘private’ from ‘public figure’.
Even in that comment, you never actually stated what you believe the standard for being a public figure is, or gave any legal citations to support that standard.[1] However, there’s at least enough detail to say that your claim is wrong; it’s absolutely not true that having a magazine profile is the level of fame required to make you a public figure. Waldbaum v. Fairchild Publications describes the standard for general public figures[2] as follows:
a person can be a general public figure only if he is a “celebrity”—his name a “household word”—whose ideas and actions the public in fact follows with great interest
To give a concrete example, musician Dr. Luke owns two publishing companies, has been nominated for numerous Grammys, and has had plenty of magazine articles written about him, including one specifically in the New Yorker; courts have also repeatedlyheld that he isn’t a general public figure.
***
This is a double bait and switch: Nonlinear is just Spartz who can spend his money on whatever he likes, while the ‘EA community’ is not the one being specifically threatened, and even comparing Nonlinear and Lightcone is misleading, because Lightcone has many other ongoing responsibilities (such as spending money to maintain the website this is being written on or renovate buildings) and it would presumably be Pace personally being sued as well.
My comment was not misleading. I was explicitly responding to a quote, which I directly quoted in my comment right above what you responded to, where you stated that “[lawsuits] are cynically used to burn money based on the fact that rich people have a lot more money than poor people”. This is about “rich” vs. “poor”. The rest of the quote is “money has log utility, so when they burn $10k+ to burn your $10k+, they come out way ahead in punishing you, and the goal is not even to win the lawsuit, it’s to force you to a settlement when you run out of money. Which you will before they do, and in the case of Spartz suing Lightcone, it’s not like Lightcone has a ton of idle cash they can burn on a defense of their claims”.[3]
Some libel threats fall under your analysis; others do not. I have already given many examples of lawsuits that do not- Fox News, for example, is not likely to simply run out of money, nor is it poorer than its various legal opponents. Your analysis of this specific case is wrong; Habryka has explicitly stated that Lightcone has enough money to defend a libel suit. He also said that Lightcone would probably be able to fundraise from the EA community for a defense.
***
I found this extremely frustrating to reply to. I personally regard most of the concrete claims you made in the original comment as being not just wrong, but both obviously wrong and unsupported. You seem to have abandoned actually defending them, and indeed even noted how obvious my counterarguments were- “yes, thank you—I read the news too”. (You didn’t change your mind in response, though!)
Judging by the timestamps, you wrote your long response very quickly. It’s taken me much, much longer to write this reply, and I’m only a small fraction through replying so far. (I’ll reply to the rest later, I guess, ugh ugh ugh.) There’s a very obvious reason why you were so much faster: you didn’t bother to defend your specific previous claims or to check if the new stuff you tossed out was actually right. It would have taken you ~10 seconds to verify if any of the lawsuits named reached a verdict, instead of wrongly making up that they all had; it’s taken me much longer to check all of them and write up a reply. It would have taken you ~5 minutes[4] to find the legal definition of public figure, instead of making up your own. It’s taken me far longer to find a different comment that actually explained what you were talking about, and to then lookup and write a response myself, including even finding a specific person who was both the subject of a New Yorker article and had been determined to not be a public figure. This is a gish gallop.
The linked comment is in response to a comment by an attorney who correctly stated the standard for being a public figure and correctly stated that Spartz isn’t a public figure… which you ignored when you made up your own uncited standard for what a public figure is. (It’s also a pretty devastating indictment of LW that the attorney commenting with a correct definition and application of “public figure” received considerably less karma/agreement than you making up your own incorrect standard, which gave a more popular answer.)
There’s also the category of “limited purpose public figure”. Spartz also probably (but not definitely) isn’t one; all of the citations you gave- and probably almost all of his publicity, judging by his Wikipedia page- don’t relate to Nonlinear or AI broadly, or their treatment of interns specifically.
The new argument that you’ve made here might or might not be true; you’ve tossed it out without sufficient justification. Nonlinear would also like to spend money on other things, and I don’t know how to compare their resources, preferences, and alternative expenditures vs. Lightcone; you haven’t even tried. (Note that your argument requires a significant difference.)
I haven’t read this whole comment, though expect I will. Just making a quick clarification:
Habryka stated that they had received evidence that claims in the post were false before they published.
I don’t think that’s an accurate summary of the linked comment (though it’s also not like totally unrelated). Here it is in full:
Ok, I pinged Spencer. He sent me screenshots of text messages he sent Ben that he sent ~2 hours before publication of the post (in the middle of the barrage of comms that Nonlinear was firing off at the time, which included the libel threats), and which Kat posted to the comment thread less than 48 hours after the messages were sent to Ben.
I stand by my summary that everything Ben knew at the time of writing the post, made it into the post. Of course if you send something 2 hours before the post is published, late at night, it’s not going to make it into the post (but it might very well make it into a comment, which it did).
I agree that this comment confirms that Spencer sent us evidence that related to some claims in the post. It does not speak on my epistemic state with regards to the relevance of that evidence.
(To take an object-level stance on the issue, though I was more responding to the fact that I expect people will interpret that sentence as me saying something I am not saying, I do think that Spencer’s messages were evidence, though really not very much evidence, and I would object to my epistemic state being summarized in this context as being interpreted as Spencer’s screenshots falsifying anything about Ben’s original post, though I agree that they are bayesian evidence against the hypothesis. I do think for the argument at hand to have force it needs to meet a higher standard than “some bayesian evidence”, and I don’t currently think it meets that threshold by my own lights)
I would be just as angry about it if Spartz had instead threatened to sue a subreddit moderator on a subreddit I used, or someone who sent a spicy email to a mailing list, or tweeted about Spartz. This is an civil-society-wide norm, not a LW-only thing: arguments get arguments, not lawsuits. And when someone publishes some stuff about you that you don’t like, and you choose to break that norm by lawsuits.
I don’t think that’s the civil-society-wide norm? Using the threat of defamation lawsuits to keep people from saying true things, especially when the person threatening is richer or otherwise more powerful, that I agree there’s a norm against. But using the threat to keep someone from doing something they’re already not supposed to be doing [1], that I don’t see a norm against? This looks to me like a threat to bring in the legal system to keep the dispute within bounds.
(I was initially really negative on NL for threatening a suit, but I’ve reversed on this after coming to understand the situation better.)
[1] In this case, saying damaging things some of which they expect will be shown to be false. He published after saying to NL that “I do expect you’ll be able to show a bunch of the things you said.” And should have expected to be publishing some false claims just based on how many claims there were and how little time he allocated to checking the final claims with NL.
In this case, saying damaging things some of which they expect will be shown to be false. He published after saying to NL that “I do expect you’ll be able to show a bunch of the things you said.”
I don’t think this means very much without specifying which things, and how relevant to the overall question they are. I would say this both in worlds where I expect something substantial or something minor to be inaccurate. I also don’t expect Ben would have said something different if he had waited longer for adversarial fact-checking. Reaching an epistemic status of “I don’t expect you’ll be able to show any of the things you said” seems extremely hard and unlikely.
I think it’s reasonable to criticize not waiting longer. But I object to using a sentence like this as really any evidence about the degree to which that was a mistake, or about the degree to which there are material errors in the post. Of course in any post like this, in a situation as adversarial like this, will there be some things that the post gets wrong. That’s true in any domain of this complexity. I think admitting to potential error helps in situations like this and interpreting things as adversarially as this undermines people’s ability to be honest and open to new evidence in situations like this.
I included Ben’s quote because it seems relevant, but I think I’d be saying pretty much the same thing without it (or if it turned out NL used Ben’s quote out of context). The “should have expected to be publishing some false claims just based on how many claims there were and how little time he allocated to checking the final claims with NL” is sufficient.
Those were in fact some of the cases I had in mind, yes, thank you—I read the news too. And what one learns from reading about them is how those are exceptional cases, newsworthy precisely because they reached any verdict rather than settling, driven by external politics and often third-party funding, and highly unusual until recently post-2016/Trump. It is certainly the case that sometimes villains like Alex Jones get smacked down properly by libel lawsuits; but note how wildly incomparable these cases are to the blog post that Spartz is threatening to sue over. Look, for example, at Jones’s malicious behavior even during the trial, or to take the most recent case, Giuliani, his repeated affirmation of the libelous and blatantly false claims. Look at the kinds of claims being punished in these lawsuits, like claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was completely fake and the victims’ relatives are fabricating their entire existence. (You’re going to analogize this to Pace saying ‘Nonlinear may not have treated some employees very well’? Really?) Look at how many of the plaintiffs are private citizens, who are in no way public figures. That this rash of victories for the good guys involves lawsuits does not redeem the general abuse of lawsuits.
None of which Ben Pace has done, and which is part of why I say he would have excellent odds: it’s unclear what damage has been done to Nonlinear, he had good grounds for his claims, has not said anything which would rise to the level of ‘actual malice’ against a public figure like Spartz, and was “well-intentioned”.
This is a double bait and switch: Nonlinear is just Spartz who can spend his money on whatever he likes, while the ‘EA community’ is not the one being specifically threatened, and even comparing Nonlinear and Lightcone is misleading, because Lightcone has many other ongoing responsibilities (such as spending money to maintain the website this is being written on or renovate buildings) and it would presumably be Pace personally being sued as well.
Wow. In any case, no, not even in the ‘literal sense’ is a lawsuit an ‘argument’, as lawsuits are speech-acts and binding actions. Lawsuits are acts of power and coercion; they are not arguments, even if arguments may be used in parts; saying that they ‘literally are arguments’ is like saying that lawsuits ‘literally are pieces of paper’. And if you simply exchange views or state views or refuse to take actions ordered by the judge (I encourage you to look up a dictionary definition of ‘argument’ if you really want to waste time taking this tack) that would constitute various kinds of fraud or perjury or contempt of court or violations of gag orders or disclosure of confidential information.
This is core to many of the Sequences in explaining things like why ‘burden of proof’ or ‘innocent until proven guilty’ are not how one should reason, and, for example, why adversarial norms of reasoning like simply denying claims and not substituting steelmen may be useful in law but not in LessWrong.
No, they are not. Truth is only one of many concerns of lawsuits, under all prevailing legal philosophies, whether legal realism or law & economics; major concerns include economic efficiency, second-order incentives, predictability of rulings and precedent, and so on. Lawsuits, and criminal cases, are overturned routinely on grounds that have nothing to do with ‘getting at the truth’ and parties in lawsuits often stipulate to facts that no one believes for reasons of pragmatism. (And I’m leaving out historical examples like compurgation.) You do not use lawsuits to try to decide whether the sun goes around the earth, because lawsuits are not good ways to get at truths.
That does sound a bit culty but good thing I never said that. I would be just as angry about it if Spartz had instead threatened to sue a subreddit moderator on a subreddit I used, or someone who sent a spicy email to a mailing list, or tweeted about Spartz. This is an civil-society-wide norm, not a LW-only thing: arguments get arguments, not lawsuits. And when someone publishes some stuff about you that you don’t like, and you choose to break that norm by lawsuits...
That’s all entirely wrong. A prohibition on hearsay is not ‘truthseeking’, obviously (much of history is based on things which would be thrown out as hearsay) but is related to the pragmatics. Juries are not required in lawsuits and parties often prefer a bench trial because they believe juries will be too ignorant or easily swayed rather than ‘truthseeking’ (and how do you explain how different systems make wildly different uses of bench trials if courts are so truthseeking? is truth found in lawsuits by jury trials in the USA but then truth works differently in the UK with almost all bench lawsuits?). Parties only examine and respond to a limited range of evidence and arguments, chosen for incentive reasons. And ‘not generally followed outside the court system’ is an argument against your claims: as if courts were the only place that anyone cared about truth? How does, say, science work since they don’t do… any of that?
As I already said, quite clearly, I thought, the point is not what the jury or judge would rule; I think were Pace sued and it was taken that far, he would win, for the obvious reasons related to his criticisms being entirely reasonable, often true (an absolute defense), and not made with actual malice, against a public figure, where the financial harms are minuscule at best—which make it quite hard to lose a libel lawsuit on its merits. But that’s largely irrelevant because it would probably never even get to the point of a jury or judge verdict. The point of lawfare is to harass and impoverish and censor, which is why Spartz dropped the threat when it didn’t look like it would work.
BTW, you think if lawsuits are so great for finding the truth, why isn’t Nonlinear suing now? If you feel that it wouldn’t work to sue now, you really ought to say specifically why/how the courts would be unreliable in this case.
(1) This is a response to you writing “you can count on one hand the sort of libel lawsuit which follows this beautiful fantasy”. Sarcastically stating “I read the news too” doesn’t help you- how obvious these are just makes it worse! You now seem to have entirely abandoned that standard without changing your mind. I can very easily start listing more libel cases that match the new distinctions you’re drawing, to the extent that they are clear enough; is there any point to me doing so? What is the evidence that would convince you that you’re wrong?
(2) One reason I’m confident that you don’t care about the distinctions you’re drawing is that the cases I cited already meet some of the standards you’ve now proposed, and you didn’t care enough to check. In particular, you wrote that “those are exceptional cases, newsworthy precisely because they reached any verdict rather than settling”. This is false, and you provided no justification or evidence for it. I cited six cases; none of them have reached verdicts. Dominion v. Fox, Khalil v. Fox, and Coomer v. Newsmax all did settle; Smartmatic v. Fox and Andrews v. D’Souza are still outstanding and so hasn’t reached a verdict. Weisenbach v. Project Veritas doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2022, but there has been no verdict that I can find. (Given that I’ve already presented you with cases satisfying one of the distinctions you drew above, are you now convinced that you were wrong?)
***
Do you believe that unclear damages mean that you can’t win a lawsuit? If so, that’s untrue; damages are often also in dispute. (Did you mean to claim that there was zero damage done? That is different from what you wrote, and is false.)
The legal term relevant here is “negligence”; “good grounds” is not the relevant legal terminology. He was negligent in publishing without giving Nonlinear time to reply or updating based on Spencer Greenberg’s evidence; in particular, Habryka stated that they had received evidence that claims in the post were false before they published. [ETA: Habrya comments on this here.] Why do you believe that this wasn’t negligent, if that’s what you meant by writing “had good grounds for his claims”? Or did you mean something else?
You haven’t explained why you think that Spartz is a public figure; again, I find your lack of clear reasoning frustrating to deal with. In this specific case, searching for comments on ‘public figure’ by you in an attempt to figure out what you were thinking, I found a comment by you which did explain your reasoning:
Even in that comment, you never actually stated what you believe the standard for being a public figure is, or gave any legal citations to support that standard.[1] However, there’s at least enough detail to say that your claim is wrong; it’s absolutely not true that having a magazine profile is the level of fame required to make you a public figure. Waldbaum v. Fairchild Publications describes the standard for general public figures[2] as follows:
To give a concrete example, musician Dr. Luke owns two publishing companies, has been nominated for numerous Grammys, and has had plenty of magazine articles written about him, including one specifically in the New Yorker; courts have also repeatedly held that he isn’t a general public figure.
***
My comment was not misleading. I was explicitly responding to a quote, which I directly quoted in my comment right above what you responded to, where you stated that “[lawsuits] are cynically used to burn money based on the fact that rich people have a lot more money than poor people”. This is about “rich” vs. “poor”. The rest of the quote is “money has log utility, so when they burn $10k+ to burn your $10k+, they come out way ahead in punishing you, and the goal is not even to win the lawsuit, it’s to force you to a settlement when you run out of money. Which you will before they do, and in the case of Spartz suing Lightcone, it’s not like Lightcone has a ton of idle cash they can burn on a defense of their claims”.[3]
Some libel threats fall under your analysis; others do not. I have already given many examples of lawsuits that do not- Fox News, for example, is not likely to simply run out of money, nor is it poorer than its various legal opponents. Your analysis of this specific case is wrong; Habryka has explicitly stated that Lightcone has enough money to defend a libel suit. He also said that Lightcone would probably be able to fundraise from the EA community for a defense.
***
I found this extremely frustrating to reply to. I personally regard most of the concrete claims you made in the original comment as being not just wrong, but both obviously wrong and unsupported. You seem to have abandoned actually defending them, and indeed even noted how obvious my counterarguments were- “yes, thank you—I read the news too”. (You didn’t change your mind in response, though!)
Judging by the timestamps, you wrote your long response very quickly. It’s taken me much, much longer to write this reply, and I’m only a small fraction through replying so far. (I’ll reply to the rest later, I guess, ugh ugh ugh.) There’s a very obvious reason why you were so much faster: you didn’t bother to defend your specific previous claims or to check if the new stuff you tossed out was actually right. It would have taken you ~10 seconds to verify if any of the lawsuits named reached a verdict, instead of wrongly making up that they all had; it’s taken me much longer to check all of them and write up a reply. It would have taken you ~5 minutes[4] to find the legal definition of public figure, instead of making up your own. It’s taken me far longer to find a different comment that actually explained what you were talking about, and to then lookup and write a response myself, including even finding a specific person who was both the subject of a New Yorker article and had been determined to not be a public figure. This is a gish gallop.
The linked comment is in response to a comment by an attorney who correctly stated the standard for being a public figure and correctly stated that Spartz isn’t a public figure… which you ignored when you made up your own uncited standard for what a public figure is. (It’s also a pretty devastating indictment of LW that the attorney commenting with a correct definition and application of “public figure” received considerably less karma/agreement than you making up your own incorrect standard, which gave a more popular answer.)
There’s also the category of “limited purpose public figure”. Spartz also probably (but not definitely) isn’t one; all of the citations you gave- and probably almost all of his publicity, judging by his Wikipedia page- don’t relate to Nonlinear or AI broadly, or their treatment of interns specifically.
The new argument that you’ve made here might or might not be true; you’ve tossed it out without sufficient justification. Nonlinear would also like to spend money on other things, and I don’t know how to compare their resources, preferences, and alternative expenditures vs. Lightcone; you haven’t even tried. (Note that your argument requires a significant difference.)
Arguably, it would have taken you zero minutes; the comment I linked was a response to an attorney who told you the correct answer.
I haven’t read this whole comment, though expect I will. Just making a quick clarification:
I don’t think that’s an accurate summary of the linked comment (though it’s also not like totally unrelated). Here it is in full:
I agree that this comment confirms that Spencer sent us evidence that related to some claims in the post. It does not speak on my epistemic state with regards to the relevance of that evidence.
(To take an object-level stance on the issue, though I was more responding to the fact that I expect people will interpret that sentence as me saying something I am not saying, I do think that Spencer’s messages were evidence, though really not very much evidence, and I would object to my epistemic state being summarized in this context as being interpreted as Spencer’s screenshots falsifying anything about Ben’s original post, though I agree that they are bayesian evidence against the hypothesis. I do think for the argument at hand to have force it needs to meet a higher standard than “some bayesian evidence”, and I don’t currently think it meets that threshold by my own lights)
I don’t think that’s the civil-society-wide norm? Using the threat of defamation lawsuits to keep people from saying true things, especially when the person threatening is richer or otherwise more powerful, that I agree there’s a norm against. But using the threat to keep someone from doing something they’re already not supposed to be doing [1], that I don’t see a norm against? This looks to me like a threat to bring in the legal system to keep the dispute within bounds.
(I was initially really negative on NL for threatening a suit, but I’ve reversed on this after coming to understand the situation better.)
[1] In this case, saying damaging things some of which they expect will be shown to be false. He published after saying to NL that “I do expect you’ll be able to show a bunch of the things you said.” And should have expected to be publishing some false claims just based on how many claims there were and how little time he allocated to checking the final claims with NL.
I don’t think this means very much without specifying which things, and how relevant to the overall question they are. I would say this both in worlds where I expect something substantial or something minor to be inaccurate. I also don’t expect Ben would have said something different if he had waited longer for adversarial fact-checking. Reaching an epistemic status of “I don’t expect you’ll be able to show any of the things you said” seems extremely hard and unlikely.
I think it’s reasonable to criticize not waiting longer. But I object to using a sentence like this as really any evidence about the degree to which that was a mistake, or about the degree to which there are material errors in the post. Of course in any post like this, in a situation as adversarial like this, will there be some things that the post gets wrong. That’s true in any domain of this complexity. I think admitting to potential error helps in situations like this and interpreting things as adversarially as this undermines people’s ability to be honest and open to new evidence in situations like this.
I included Ben’s quote because it seems relevant, but I think I’d be saying pretty much the same thing without it (or if it turned out NL used Ben’s quote out of context). The “should have expected to be publishing some false claims just based on how many claims there were and how little time he allocated to checking the final claims with NL” is sufficient.