Since the /r/slatestarcodex comment section is unlikely to get the long-term traffic this mirror is, I want to copy my reply there over here as well.
I’m honestly really frustrated by your response to this post. The incident I describe is not trivial and it is not tangential to the purposes of the rationalist community. It directly damages the community’s credibility towards its core goals in a major way. You are about as trusted as a public figure gets among the rationalists, and when you see this whole thing, you vote it down and rebuke me because I don’t hate libel lawsuits as much as I hate libel.
Rationalists spend a lot of time criticizing poor journalistic practices from outside the community. It should raise massive alarms that someone can spend six months digging up dirt on another community member, provide scant time to reply and flat-out refuse to look at exculpatory evidence, and be praised by the great majority of the community who noticed while those who pointed out the issues with what was going on were ignored.
If a prominent person in your community spends six months working to gather material to destroy your reputation, then flat-out refuses to look at your exculpatory evidence or to update his post in response to exculpatory evidence from another trusted community member—evidence he his collaborator now admits overturns an allegation in the article—there is nothing at all disproportionate or inappropriate about a desperate lawsuit threat—not a threat if the post goes live, but a threat if they won’t even look at hard evidence against their claims—minutes before the reputation-destroying post goes live. That’s not the strong crushing the weak whistleblower, that’s a desperate response to reputational kamikaze.
It is not an issue with my post that I accurately defend that libel lawsuit threat as a sane response to an insane situation. It is an issue with the rationalist community as a whole that they nodded along to that insane situation, and an issue with you that your major takeaway from my post is that I’m wrong about lawsuits.
A six-month campaign to gather negative info about someone is not a truth-seeking process, it is not a rational process, and it is not a process to which the community should respond by politely arguing about whether lawsuits could possibly be justified as a response. It is a repudiation of the principles the rationalist community espouses and demands an equally vehement response, a response that nobody within the community gave until I stumbled over the post by happenstance three months later.
You are wrong. Your takeaway from my article is wrong. What happened during that investigation was wrong, and sufficiently wrong that I see no cause to reply by coming out swinging about the horrors of the legal system. You should be extinguishing the fire in your own community’s house, and the people cheering you on for responding to someone trying to put that fire out with a rebuke are helping you burn down your own community’s credibility. You had no obligation to respond to the situation; having responded, though, you take on a duty to it which you are neglecting by responding in this way given your stature within this community and the gravity of the original error.
I really don’t want to get into a whole conversation here, just a quick comment so that people don’t make wrong updates:
evidence he now admits overturns an allegation in the article
I don’t think Ben has said anything that indicates that he believes evidence provided “overturns an allegation in the article”. I have, but I didn’t write the article. I have asked you a few times to please not attribute things that I said to Ben or generalize them confidently to statements about the whole process here. Ben knows much more about the details here than I do, and I would really appreciate if you distinguish between me and him here. It’s plausible to me that Ben also believes this, but I don’t think your summary here is accurate.
to update his post in response to exculpatory evidence from another trusted community member
I don’t think Ben has refused to update his post. Indeed he has many times offered to update the post and has pretty prominently linked to all relevant counter-evidence (and has also promised to update the post in response to the new evidence provided). I think there is some valid criticism here about not waiting to publish, but I don’t think there is a valid criticism about not being willing to update the post. AFAIK all requests that were made to update the post with links or references to relevant counter-evidence were fulfilled.
A six-month campaign to gather negative info about someone is not a truth-seeking process
I really don’t want to have a whole conversation here, but this does seem like an inaccurate summary of the process that occurred. The actual thing that happened is that Ben heard some specific accusations about Nonlinear which seemed very concerning, so he investigated those accusations. In the process of investigating those accusations he did not aim to make a full assessment of Nonlinear as an organization, but chose the limited scope of figuring out whether the accusations were accurate, and whether they were part of a larger pattern. This importantly is still a biased evidence-gathering process, because he did not also seek to find other good things that Nonlinear has done that might outweigh the harm indicated by these accusations. This seems like a totally normal thing to do. You hear some accusations, so you figure out how much truth there is to them, you don’t also do a search process for all the good things the organization might have done.
I think you are over-interpreting a single paragraph at the top of the post that was trying to help people realize that they were receiving biased evidence, which I think was good and wish was included in other posts. That paragraph was not aiming to give a summary of the whole process, it was just trying to clearly acknowledge a bias that is present in investigations like this.
If you want I am happy to get on a call or have a DM conversation, I could give you some pointers about the actual process that occurred. Or you could talk to Ben about it after more of the object-level response was written. I do think you are pretty mistaken about the actual thing that happened here.
I edited the original to “his collaborator.” My apologies for the imprecision; I’ll be more careful about attribution.
Ben refused to update his post at the time in dispute—the moment when the lawsuit threat was sent. That he was willing to update it after publishing false information, and remains willing to update it, is not material to that point. Spencer provided important context which, when seen in full, dramatically changed public understanding of one allegation in the final article. You and Ben refused to delay publication to update that allegation before the article went live. When considering whether a lawsuit threat was reasonable and whether the publication of that allegation as written was actionably defamatory, that moment of publication is the relevant one. Since I am responding to Gwern’s criticism of my defense of that moment, I figured the context for that was clear.
As for whether my summary of the process is fair, I recognize we disagree here but stand by it and would say the same whether or not he included that disclaimer. The final article and the process that led to it was not totally normal by any stretch, an argument I present extensively in my post and throughout our conversations here. It is not normal to spend six months and hundreds of hours investigating negative information about people in your community, then publicizing it with a condemnation of those people to your whole community. I would definitely be keen to hear more about the actual process via DM, though, and could certainly see it changing my understanding of that process in important ways.
Ben refused to update his post at the time in dispute—the moment when the lawsuit threat was sent. That he was willing to update it after publishing false information, and remains willing to update it, is not material to that point.
I think “refusing update” in this context would usually be understood to be about updating the published post for some ongoing period of time, at least that’s how I understood it. But seems fine, I now understand the point you are trying to make.
(Also, just to clarify for other readers, the lawsuit threat and the evidence Spencer sent over were separate events with two different groups of people who I think weren’t aware of the messages the other group was sending. Indeed Spencer requested secrecy about him talking to Ben at all about this).
Since the /r/slatestarcodex comment section is unlikely to get the long-term traffic this mirror is, I want to copy my reply there over here as well.
I’m honestly really frustrated by your response to this post. The incident I describe is not trivial and it is not tangential to the purposes of the rationalist community. It directly damages the community’s credibility towards its core goals in a major way. You are about as trusted as a public figure gets among the rationalists, and when you see this whole thing, you vote it down and rebuke me because I don’t hate libel lawsuits as much as I hate libel.
Rationalists spend a lot of time criticizing poor journalistic practices from outside the community. It should raise massive alarms that someone can spend six months digging up dirt on another community member, provide scant time to reply and flat-out refuse to look at exculpatory evidence, and be praised by the great majority of the community who noticed while those who pointed out the issues with what was going on were ignored.
If a prominent person in your community spends six months working to gather material to destroy your reputation, then flat-out refuses to look at your exculpatory evidence or to update his post in response to exculpatory evidence from another trusted community member—evidence
hehis collaborator now admits overturns an allegation in the article—there is nothing at all disproportionate or inappropriate about a desperate lawsuit threat—not a threat if the post goes live, but a threat if they won’t even look at hard evidence against their claims—minutes before the reputation-destroying post goes live. That’s not the strong crushing the weak whistleblower, that’s a desperate response to reputational kamikaze.It is not an issue with my post that I accurately defend that libel lawsuit threat as a sane response to an insane situation. It is an issue with the rationalist community as a whole that they nodded along to that insane situation, and an issue with you that your major takeaway from my post is that I’m wrong about lawsuits.
A six-month campaign to gather negative info about someone is not a truth-seeking process, it is not a rational process, and it is not a process to which the community should respond by politely arguing about whether lawsuits could possibly be justified as a response. It is a repudiation of the principles the rationalist community espouses and demands an equally vehement response, a response that nobody within the community gave until I stumbled over the post by happenstance three months later.
You are wrong. Your takeaway from my article is wrong. What happened during that investigation was wrong, and sufficiently wrong that I see no cause to reply by coming out swinging about the horrors of the legal system. You should be extinguishing the fire in your own community’s house, and the people cheering you on for responding to someone trying to put that fire out with a rebuke are helping you burn down your own community’s credibility. You had no obligation to respond to the situation; having responded, though, you take on a duty to it which you are neglecting by responding in this way given your stature within this community and the gravity of the original error.
I really don’t want to get into a whole conversation here, just a quick comment so that people don’t make wrong updates:
I don’t think Ben has said anything that indicates that he believes evidence provided “overturns an allegation in the article”. I have, but I didn’t write the article. I have asked you a few times to please not attribute things that I said to Ben or generalize them confidently to statements about the whole process here. Ben knows much more about the details here than I do, and I would really appreciate if you distinguish between me and him here. It’s plausible to me that Ben also believes this, but I don’t think your summary here is accurate.
I don’t think Ben has refused to update his post. Indeed he has many times offered to update the post and has pretty prominently linked to all relevant counter-evidence (and has also promised to update the post in response to the new evidence provided). I think there is some valid criticism here about not waiting to publish, but I don’t think there is a valid criticism about not being willing to update the post. AFAIK all requests that were made to update the post with links or references to relevant counter-evidence were fulfilled.
I really don’t want to have a whole conversation here, but this does seem like an inaccurate summary of the process that occurred. The actual thing that happened is that Ben heard some specific accusations about Nonlinear which seemed very concerning, so he investigated those accusations. In the process of investigating those accusations he did not aim to make a full assessment of Nonlinear as an organization, but chose the limited scope of figuring out whether the accusations were accurate, and whether they were part of a larger pattern. This importantly is still a biased evidence-gathering process, because he did not also seek to find other good things that Nonlinear has done that might outweigh the harm indicated by these accusations. This seems like a totally normal thing to do. You hear some accusations, so you figure out how much truth there is to them, you don’t also do a search process for all the good things the organization might have done.
I think you are over-interpreting a single paragraph at the top of the post that was trying to help people realize that they were receiving biased evidence, which I think was good and wish was included in other posts. That paragraph was not aiming to give a summary of the whole process, it was just trying to clearly acknowledge a bias that is present in investigations like this.
If you want I am happy to get on a call or have a DM conversation, I could give you some pointers about the actual process that occurred. Or you could talk to Ben about it after more of the object-level response was written. I do think you are pretty mistaken about the actual thing that happened here.
I edited the original to “his collaborator.” My apologies for the imprecision; I’ll be more careful about attribution.
Ben refused to update his post at the time in dispute—the moment when the lawsuit threat was sent. That he was willing to update it after publishing false information, and remains willing to update it, is not material to that point. Spencer provided important context which, when seen in full, dramatically changed public understanding of one allegation in the final article. You and Ben refused to delay publication to update that allegation before the article went live. When considering whether a lawsuit threat was reasonable and whether the publication of that allegation as written was actionably defamatory, that moment of publication is the relevant one. Since I am responding to Gwern’s criticism of my defense of that moment, I figured the context for that was clear.
As for whether my summary of the process is fair, I recognize we disagree here but stand by it and would say the same whether or not he included that disclaimer. The final article and the process that led to it was not totally normal by any stretch, an argument I present extensively in my post and throughout our conversations here. It is not normal to spend six months and hundreds of hours investigating negative information about people in your community, then publicizing it with a condemnation of those people to your whole community. I would definitely be keen to hear more about the actual process via DM, though, and could certainly see it changing my understanding of that process in important ways.
I think “refusing update” in this context would usually be understood to be about updating the published post for some ongoing period of time, at least that’s how I understood it. But seems fine, I now understand the point you are trying to make.
(Also, just to clarify for other readers, the lawsuit threat and the evidence Spencer sent over were separate events with two different groups of people who I think weren’t aware of the messages the other group was sending. Indeed Spencer requested secrecy about him talking to Ben at all about this).