Once I started actively looking into things, much of my information in the post below came about by a search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders, not from a search to give a balanced picture of its overall costs and benefits.
This is confusing (edit: and concerning) to me. Why not search for a balanced picture instead? Was this intentional? Or was it an unintended slip up that the author is merely admitting to?
It’s a very unusual disclaimer that speaks well of the post.
The default journalistic practice at many outlets is to do an asymmetric search once the journalist or editor decides which way the wind is blowing, but of course nobody says this in the finished piece.
Ben is explicitly telling the reader that he did not spend another hundred hours looking for positive information about Nonlinear, so that we understand that absence of exculpatory evidence in the post should not be treated as strong evidence of absence.
The default journalistic practice at many outlets is to do an asymmetric search once the journalist or editor decides which way the wind is blowing, but of course nobody says this in the finished piece.
The goal of journalism is to sell newspapers (or whatever) though. On the other hand, the goal here is to arrive at the truth.
This seems like kinda a nonsense double standard. The declared goal of journalism is usually not to sell newspapers, that is your observation of the incentive structure. And while the declared goal of LW is to arrive at truth (or something similar—hone the skills which will better allow people to arrive at truth, or something), there are comparable parallel incentive structures to journalism.
It seems better to compare declared purpose to declared purpose, or inferred goal to inferred goal, doesn’t it?
Yes, but in my judgement—and I suspect if you averaged out the judgement of reasonable others (not limited to LessWrongers) -- LW has an actual goal that is much, much closer to arriving at the truth than journalism.
Thinking about it more, I can imagine some good reasons for this and am not too concerned by it.
For example, certain instances of negative information can probably be considered “dealbreakers”, in which case if you find it you don’t have to look for more stuff in pursuit of a “balanced picture”. And here I believe 1) Ben had good reason to suspect that he’d find such dealbreakers and 2) he did in fact find numerous dealbreakers after searching.
This is confusing (edit: and concerning) to me. Why not search for a balanced picture instead? Was this intentional? Or was it an unintended slip up that the author is merely admitting to?
It’s a very unusual disclaimer that speaks well of the post.
The default journalistic practice at many outlets is to do an asymmetric search once the journalist or editor decides which way the wind is blowing, but of course nobody says this in the finished piece.
Ben is explicitly telling the reader that he did not spend another hundred hours looking for positive information about Nonlinear, so that we understand that absence of exculpatory evidence in the post should not be treated as strong evidence of absence.
The goal of journalism is to sell newspapers (or whatever) though. On the other hand, the goal here is to arrive at the truth.
This seems like kinda a nonsense double standard. The declared goal of journalism is usually not to sell newspapers, that is your observation of the incentive structure. And while the declared goal of LW is to arrive at truth (or something similar—hone the skills which will better allow people to arrive at truth, or something), there are comparable parallel incentive structures to journalism.
It seems better to compare declared purpose to declared purpose, or inferred goal to inferred goal, doesn’t it?
Yes, but in my judgement—and I suspect if you averaged out the judgement of reasonable others (not limited to LessWrongers) -- LW has an actual goal that is much, much closer to arriving at the truth than journalism.
Thinking about it more, I can imagine some good reasons for this and am not too concerned by it.
For example, certain instances of negative information can probably be considered “dealbreakers”, in which case if you find it you don’t have to look for more stuff in pursuit of a “balanced picture”. And here I believe 1) Ben had good reason to suspect that he’d find such dealbreakers and 2) he did in fact find numerous dealbreakers after searching.