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)
(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)