Yeah I agree with that perspective, but want to flag that I thought your original choice of words was unfortunate. It’s very much a cost to be wrong when you voice strong criticism of someone’s character or call their reputation into question in other ways (even if you flag uncertainty) – just that it’s sometimes (often?) worse to do nothing when you’re right.
There’s some room to discuss exact percentages. IMO, placing a 25% probability on someone (or some group) being a malefactor* is more than enough to start digging/gossip selectively with the intent of gathering more evidence, but not always enough to go public? Sure, it’s usually the case that “malefactors” cause harm to lots of people around them or otherwise distort epistemics and derail things, so there’s a sense in which 25% probability might seem like it’s enough from a utilitarian perspective of justice.** At the same time, in practice, I’d guess it’s almost always quite easy (if you’re correct!) to go from 25% to >50% with some proactive, diligent gathering of evidence (which IMO you’ve done very well), so, in practice, it seems good to have a norm that requires something more like >50% confidence.
Of course, the people who write as though they want you to have >95% confidence before making serious accusations, they probably haven’t thought this through very well, because it seems to provide terrible incentives and lets bad actors get away with things way too easily.
*It seems worth flagging that people can be malefactors in some social contexts but not others. For instance, someone could be a bad influence on their environment when they’re gullibly backing up a charismatic narcissistic leader, but not when they’re in a different social group or out on their own.
**In practice, I suspect that a norm where everyone airs serious accusations with only 25% confidence (and no further “hurdles to clear”) would be worse than what we have currently, even on a utilitarian perspective of justice. I’d expect something like an autoimmune overreaction from the time sink issues of social drama and paranoia where people become too protective or insecure about their reputation (worsened by bad actors or malefactors using accusations as one of their weapons). So, the autoimmune reaction could become overall worse than what one is trying to protect the community from, if one is too trigger-happy.
Practically, third parties who learn about an accusation will often have significant uncertainty about its accuracy. So, as a third party seeing Ben (or anyone else) make a highly critical post, I guess I could remain agnostic until the truth comes out one way or another, and reward/punish Ben at that point. That’s certainly an option. Or, I could try to have some kind of bar of “how reasonable/unreasonable does an accusation need to seem to be defensible, praiseworthy, or out of line?” It’s a tough continuum and you’ll have communities that are too susceptible to witch hunts but also ones where people tend to play things down/placate over disharmony.
Yeah I agree with that perspective, but want to flag that I thought your original choice of words was unfortunate. It’s very much a cost to be wrong when you voice strong criticism of someone’s character or call their reputation into question in other ways (even if you flag uncertainty) – just that it’s sometimes (often?) worse to do nothing when you’re right.
There’s some room to discuss exact percentages. IMO, placing a 25% probability on someone (or some group) being a malefactor* is more than enough to start digging/gossip selectively with the intent of gathering more evidence, but not always enough to go public? Sure, it’s usually the case that “malefactors” cause harm to lots of people around them or otherwise distort epistemics and derail things, so there’s a sense in which 25% probability might seem like it’s enough from a utilitarian perspective of justice.** At the same time, in practice, I’d guess it’s almost always quite easy (if you’re correct!) to go from 25% to >50% with some proactive, diligent gathering of evidence (which IMO you’ve done very well), so, in practice, it seems good to have a norm that requires something more like >50% confidence.
Of course, the people who write as though they want you to have >95% confidence before making serious accusations, they probably haven’t thought this through very well, because it seems to provide terrible incentives and lets bad actors get away with things way too easily.
*It seems worth flagging that people can be malefactors in some social contexts but not others. For instance, someone could be a bad influence on their environment when they’re gullibly backing up a charismatic narcissistic leader, but not when they’re in a different social group or out on their own.
**In practice, I suspect that a norm where everyone airs serious accusations with only 25% confidence (and no further “hurdles to clear”) would be worse than what we have currently, even on a utilitarian perspective of justice. I’d expect something like an autoimmune overreaction from the time sink issues of social drama and paranoia where people become too protective or insecure about their reputation (worsened by bad actors or malefactors using accusations as one of their weapons). So, the autoimmune reaction could become overall worse than what one is trying to protect the community from, if one is too trigger-happy.
Punish transgressions; reward true accusations; punish false accusations. The probabilities will then attend to themselves.
...only when there are no externalities and utilities from accusations and inflicted damage are symmetric. Neither of these is the case.
The scale of the two punishments and the reward don’t have to be the same, which can account for that.
Practically, third parties who learn about an accusation will often have significant uncertainty about its accuracy. So, as a third party seeing Ben (or anyone else) make a highly critical post, I guess I could remain agnostic until the truth comes out one way or another, and reward/punish Ben at that point. That’s certainly an option. Or, I could try to have some kind of bar of “how reasonable/unreasonable does an accusation need to seem to be defensible, praiseworthy, or out of line?” It’s a tough continuum and you’ll have communities that are too susceptible to witch hunts but also ones where people tend to play things down/placate over disharmony.