Given that Ben is working on a response, I think it’s clearly the right call to wait a week or two until we have another round of counter-evidence before jumping to conclusions.
This is a remarkable sentence given your prior statement from three months ago:
I don’t have all the context of Ben’s investigation here, but as someone who has done investigations like this in the past, here are some thoughts on why I don’t feel super sympathetic to requests to delay publication
Have you changed your mind since?
To be clear, the decision to delay publication will always be a judgement call subject to reasonable disagreement. As pointed out, sometimes the targets of an investigation will request a publication delay under false pretenses either as an indefinite delay tactic or to break the story themselves under much more favorable framing.
Even the question of whether to notify the targets of an investigation is subject to reasonable disagreement. To give an intentionally trivial example from a journalistic amateur, the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus published an expose a few months ago about what it saw as shoddy practices by Linus Tech Tips, a wildly popular tech review channel. GN’s video was very well received, but the most notable criticism was around their intentional choice not to contact LTT for comment prior to publication. They defended their decision, arguing it is not necessary when there’s either a pattern of misbehavior or a significant risk of a cover-up.
One of the criticisms against LTT was how they failed to return an expensive prototype they received for testing purposes from Billet Labs, opting instead to auction it off without notice to or permission from Billet. GN’s concerns about notifying LTT appears vindicated, because less than 3 hours after GN’s video was posted, Linus quickly sent an email to Billet asking for an invoice (after months of radio silence) and then publicly proclaimed “we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype” falsely implying that Billet was in agreement. This was solid evidence that had LTT been notified in advance, they would’ve scrambled towards similarly dishonest attempts at public relations damage control.
So yes, reasonable people can disagree on whether or not to delay publication or even notify the targets of an investigation. No denying that. What should guide our decisions here should be adherence to generally-applicable principles, and I struggle to discern what yours are in this area.
For example, @Ben Pace vaguely cited what he thought were credible threats of retaliation against Chloe and Alice for speaking out. You speculate on several other possibilities:
My guess is Ben’s sources were worried about Emerson hiring stalkers, calling their family, trying to get them fired from their job, or threatening legal action.
Just by your telling there are ample reasons to discount the fears in this instance (though not conclusively so). Ben wrote that Emerson “reportedly” had plans to hire stalkers, and though this allegation is not impossible it strikes me as too inherently absurd to take seriously (How does one find stalkers to hire? What instructions would these stalkers receive? Would this be in person or online? How would Emerson guard against being linked to these stalkers? etc). The other fears you outline fall under a similar penumbra in that had Emerson pursued the plans, it would only serve as the best confirmation of the allegations against him as a vindictive and vengeful character (but also what exactly would he even say to their families?).
I don’t know what evidence Ben saw (and apparently neither do you) but absent specific evidence, retaliation is a meaningless metric to consider because anyone saying anything negative about someone can plausibly cite retaliation as a potential risk. But assuming the threats are 100% legitimate, how exactly does hewing to a specific publication date mitigate against any of them? You say that having things out in the open provides a defense, I admit I don’t understand how that works exactly, nor do I understand why public disclosure would cease to be an option had Emerson actually followed through on his hypothetical retaliations before the post was published. We all know about the Streisand effect by now.
I believe you’re completely off-base in concluding malicious intent from Emerson threatening a libel suit, and I addressed that in a separate reply. The argument against publication delay I found the most shocking was this one:
Separately, the time investment for things like this is really quite enormous and I have found it extremely hard to do work of this type in parallel to other kinds of work, especially towards the end of a project like this, when the information is ready for sharing, and lots of people have strong opinions and try to pressure you in various ways. Delaying by “just a week” probably translates into roughly 40 hours of productive time lost, even if there isn’t much to do, because it’s so hard to focus on other things. That’s just a lot of additional time, and so it’s not actually a very cheap ask.
This was a giant blaring red alarm to me. When I heard about “40 hours of lost productive time” I initially parsed its meaning as “lost productivity because I was flooded with tons of irrelevant information that took 40 hours to sort through”. I never would have guessed that you were instead referring to a mental fixation so severe that it occupies nearly half your waking hours. I would like to think that this should serve as a warning, a caution that perhaps one is too psychologically invested to adequately pursue truth, not as a justification to further accelerate.
I will reiterate my response to a similar comment:
(I am aware of this seeming at least somewhat contradictory. I don’t particularly want to litigate that in this comment thread before we publish a response, though if people care a lot I can do that. At the moment I would like to focus on publishing a counter-response. I am in favor of revisiting this thread after we have done so, and hope we can have a productive conversation then about it.)
This is a remarkable sentence given your prior statement from three months ago:
Have you changed your mind since?
To be clear, the decision to delay publication will always be a judgement call subject to reasonable disagreement. As pointed out, sometimes the targets of an investigation will request a publication delay under false pretenses either as an indefinite delay tactic or to break the story themselves under much more favorable framing.
Even the question of whether to notify the targets of an investigation is subject to reasonable disagreement. To give an intentionally trivial example from a journalistic amateur, the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus published an expose a few months ago about what it saw as shoddy practices by Linus Tech Tips, a wildly popular tech review channel. GN’s video was very well received, but the most notable criticism was around their intentional choice not to contact LTT for comment prior to publication. They defended their decision, arguing it is not necessary when there’s either a pattern of misbehavior or a significant risk of a cover-up.
One of the criticisms against LTT was how they failed to return an expensive prototype they received for testing purposes from Billet Labs, opting instead to auction it off without notice to or permission from Billet. GN’s concerns about notifying LTT appears vindicated, because less than 3 hours after GN’s video was posted, Linus quickly sent an email to Billet asking for an invoice (after months of radio silence) and then publicly proclaimed “we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype” falsely implying that Billet was in agreement. This was solid evidence that had LTT been notified in advance, they would’ve scrambled towards similarly dishonest attempts at public relations damage control.
So yes, reasonable people can disagree on whether or not to delay publication or even notify the targets of an investigation. No denying that. What should guide our decisions here should be adherence to generally-applicable principles, and I struggle to discern what yours are in this area.
For example, @Ben Pace vaguely cited what he thought were credible threats of retaliation against Chloe and Alice for speaking out. You speculate on several other possibilities:
Just by your telling there are ample reasons to discount the fears in this instance (though not conclusively so). Ben wrote that Emerson “reportedly” had plans to hire stalkers, and though this allegation is not impossible it strikes me as too inherently absurd to take seriously (How does one find stalkers to hire? What instructions would these stalkers receive? Would this be in person or online? How would Emerson guard against being linked to these stalkers? etc). The other fears you outline fall under a similar penumbra in that had Emerson pursued the plans, it would only serve as the best confirmation of the allegations against him as a vindictive and vengeful character (but also what exactly would he even say to their families?).
I don’t know what evidence Ben saw (and apparently neither do you) but absent specific evidence, retaliation is a meaningless metric to consider because anyone saying anything negative about someone can plausibly cite retaliation as a potential risk. But assuming the threats are 100% legitimate, how exactly does hewing to a specific publication date mitigate against any of them? You say that having things out in the open provides a defense, I admit I don’t understand how that works exactly, nor do I understand why public disclosure would cease to be an option had Emerson actually followed through on his hypothetical retaliations before the post was published. We all know about the Streisand effect by now.
I believe you’re completely off-base in concluding malicious intent from Emerson threatening a libel suit, and I addressed that in a separate reply. The argument against publication delay I found the most shocking was this one:
This was a giant blaring red alarm to me. When I heard about “40 hours of lost productive time” I initially parsed its meaning as “lost productivity because I was flooded with tons of irrelevant information that took 40 hours to sort through”. I never would have guessed that you were instead referring to a mental fixation so severe that it occupies nearly half your waking hours. I would like to think that this should serve as a warning, a caution that perhaps one is too psychologically invested to adequately pursue truth, not as a justification to further accelerate.
I will reiterate my response to a similar comment: