It is hard to gauge, for obvious reasons, but the situation is asymmetric: even if Spartz-Nonlinear and Lightcone have similar annual budgets or assets or however you want to try to equate them, they are not the same. Lightcone is under constraints, like fulltime employees for maintaining & running these websites and renovating Rose Garden (which I recall them soliciting donations for because their budget wasn’t going to cover it),* whereas Spartz-Nonlinear seems like it could halt its minimal activities/expenses if necessary without anything crashing to the ground, and devote his full cashflow to a lawsuit (with the benefit of contingency financing, as the plaintiff, paid out of damages). In addition, even if they are equal… how does one know that? Or willingness to be vindictive?
* As finance types know, cash(flow) is king. Since we’re on the topic of libel lawsuits, this reminds me of the Oberlin bakery lawsuit, one of the rare bright spots where libel lawsuits seem to have done what they were supposed to, eventually—where Oberlin tried to destroy a private bakery maliciously by organized protests & repeated statements they knew were false, to score political points about ‘fighting racism’. As I recall, the financial penalties, years later after the trial, were painful for Oberlin, despite it being on paper extremely wealthy, because it had so many restrictions by donors on assets and so many fixed expenses, that when its insurer bailed on covering the liability, it had a liquidity problem. (I think they had to… take out a loan to actually pay it off? I wonder what happened with that.)
gwern—The situation is indeed quite asymmetric, insofar as some people at Lightcone seem to have launched a poorly-researched slander attack on another EA organization, Nonlinear, which has been suffering serious reputational harm as a result. Whereas Nonlinear did not attack Lightcone or its people, except insofar as necessary to defend themselves.
Treating Nonlinear as a disposable organization, and treating its leaders as having disposable careers, seems ethically very bad.
Do Nonlinear and Lightcone in fact have vastly different financial resources?
My impression is that they do not, in which case this line of criticism is moot here
It is hard to gauge, for obvious reasons, but the situation is asymmetric: even if Spartz-Nonlinear and Lightcone have similar annual budgets or assets or however you want to try to equate them, they are not the same. Lightcone is under constraints, like fulltime employees for maintaining & running these websites and renovating Rose Garden (which I recall them soliciting donations for because their budget wasn’t going to cover it),* whereas Spartz-Nonlinear seems like it could halt its minimal activities/expenses if necessary without anything crashing to the ground, and devote his full cashflow to a lawsuit (with the benefit of contingency financing, as the plaintiff, paid out of damages). In addition, even if they are equal… how does one know that? Or willingness to be vindictive?
* As finance types know, cash(flow) is king. Since we’re on the topic of libel lawsuits, this reminds me of the Oberlin bakery lawsuit, one of the rare bright spots where libel lawsuits seem to have done what they were supposed to, eventually—where Oberlin tried to destroy a private bakery maliciously by organized protests & repeated statements they knew were false, to score political points about ‘fighting racism’. As I recall, the financial penalties, years later after the trial, were painful for Oberlin, despite it being on paper extremely wealthy, because it had so many restrictions by donors on assets and so many fixed expenses, that when its insurer bailed on covering the liability, it had a liquidity problem. (I think they had to… take out a loan to actually pay it off? I wonder what happened with that.)
gwern—The situation is indeed quite asymmetric, insofar as some people at Lightcone seem to have launched a poorly-researched slander attack on another EA organization, Nonlinear, which has been suffering serious reputational harm as a result. Whereas Nonlinear did not attack Lightcone or its people, except insofar as necessary to defend themselves.
Treating Nonlinear as a disposable organization, and treating its leaders as having disposable careers, seems ethically very bad.