There is a reason courtrooms give both sides equal chances to make their case before they ask the jury to decide.
It is very difficult for people to change their minds later, and most people assume that if you’re on trial, you must be guilty, which is why judges remind juries about “innocent before proven guilty”.
This is one of the foundations of our legal system, something we learned over thousands of years of trying to get better at justice. You’re just assuming I’m guilty and saying that justifies not giving me a chance to present my evidence.
Also, if we post another comment thread a week later, who will see it? EAF/LW don’t have sufficient ways to resurface old but important content.
Re: “my guess is Ben’s sources have received dozens of calls”—well, your guess is wrong, and you can ask them to confirm this.
You also took my email strategically out of context to fit the Emerson-is-a-horned-CEO-villain narrative. Here’s the full one:
Yep. Posts critical of Less Wrong are often highly upvoted on Less Wrong, so I’d say a good defense (one containing factual statements, not just “this is 100% wrong and I will sue you”) has like 80% chance to get 100 or more karma.
I didn’t understand the part about “resurfacing old content”, but one can simply link the old article from the new one, and ask moderators to link the new article from the old one. (The fact that the new article will be on the front page but the old one will no longer be there, seems to work in favor of the new article.) Even if moderators for some mysterious reason refused to make the link, a comment under the old article saying “there is a response from Nonlinear” with a link would probably be highly upvoted.
Oli’s comment is a good summary of my relevant concerns! And I’m definitely happy to link prominently to any response by Nonlinear, and make edits if things are shown to be false.
As well as a bunch of other reasons already mentioned (and some not), another one is that most of the things they proposed to show me didn’t seem that cruxy to me? Maybe a few of stories are wrong, but I believe the people were really very hurt by their time at Nonlinear, and I believe both were quite credibly intimidated, and I’m pretty sure a lot of folks in the relevant ecosystems would like to know if I believe that. When we talked Nonlinear mostly wanted to say that Alice told lies about things like why she quit being vegan, but even if that’s true tons of my evidence doesn’t come from Alice or from her specific stories, so the delay request didn’t seem like it would likely change my mind. Maybe it will, but I think it’s more important to say when I believe that terrible behavior has occurred, so I didn’t feel beholden to delay for them.
Yes, we intend to. But given that our comments just asking for people to withhold judgment are getting downvoted, that doesn’t bode well for future posts getting enough upvotes to be seen.
It’s going to take us at least a week to gather all the evidence, then it will take a decent amount of time to write up.
In the meantime, people have heard terrible things about us and nobody’s a perfect rationalist who will simply update. Once you’ve made up your mind about somebody, it can be really hard to change.
Additionally, once things are on the internet, they’re usually there for good. Now it might be that the first thing people find when looking up Nonlinear is this post, even if we do disprove the claims.
A post that would most likely have been substantially different if he’d seen all of our evidence first. He already made multiple updates to the post based on the things we shared, and he would have made far more if he had given us the chance to actually present our evidence.
Not to mention that now that he’s published this and sent them money, it’s psychologically difficult for him to update.
I think a comment “just asking for people to withhold judgement” would not be especially downvoted. I think the comments in which you’ve asked people to withhold judgement include other incredibly toxic behavior.
You could possibly do a more incremental version of this, e.g. link to a Google Drive where you upload the pieces of evidence as you find them? That way people could start updating right away rather than waiting until everything’s been put together. And then you could add a comment linking to the write-up when it’s done.
I want to note a specific pattern that I’ve noticed. I am not commenting on this particular matter overall; the events with Nonlinear may or may not be an instance of the pattern. It goes like this:
Fred does something unethical / immoral.
People start talking about how Fred did something bad.
Fred complains that people should not be talking the way they are talking, and Fred specifically invokes the standard of the court system, saying stuff like “there’s a reason courts presume innocence / allow the accused to face the accuser / give a right to a defense attorney / have discovery / have the right to remain silent / right to avoid incriminating oneself / etc. etc.”.
Fred’s implication is that people shouldn’t be talking the way they’re talking because it’s unjust.
… Of course, this pattern could also happen when step 1 is Fred not doing something bad; and either way, maybe Fred is right… But I suspect that in reality, Fred uses this as a way of isolated demands for rigor.
You seem to be disregarding other considerations at play here.
Zooming out, if we forget about the specifics of this situation and instead think about the more general question of whether or not one should honor requests to delay such publications, one consideration is wanting to avoid unjustifiably harming someones reputation (in this case yours, Kat’s, and Nonlinear’s).
But I think habryka lists some other important considerations too in his comment:
Guarding against retaliation
Guarding against lost productivity
Guarding against reality-distortion fields
Personally, I don’t have strong feelings about where the equilibrium should be here. However, I do feel strongly that the discussion needs to look at the considerations on both sides.
Also, I raise my eyebrow a fair bit at those who do have strong feelings about where the equilibrium should be. At least if they haven’t thought about it for many hours. It strikes me as a genuinely difficult task to enumerate and weigh the considerations at play.
If we want to look at general principles rather than specific cases, if the original post had not contained a bunch of serious misinformation (according to evidence that I have access to) then I would have been much more sympathetic to not delaying.
But the combination of serious misinformation + being unwilling to delay a short period to get the rest of the evidence I find to be a very bad combination.
I also don’t think the retaliation point is a very good one, as refusing to delay doesn’t actually prevent retaliation.
I don’t find the lost productivity point is particularly strong given that this was a major investigation already involving something like 150 hours of work. In that context, another 20 hours carefully reviewing evidence seems minimal (if it’s worth ~150 hours to investigate it’s worth 170 to ensure it’s accurate presumably)
Guarding against reality distortion fields is an interesting point I hadn’t thought of until Oliver brought it up. However, it doesn’t seem (correct me if I’m wrong) that Ben felt swayed away from posting after talking to nonlinear for 3 hours—if that’s true then it doesn’t seem like much of a concern here. I also think pre-committing to a release date helps a bit with that.
There is a reason courtrooms give both sides equal chances to make their case before they ask the jury to decide.
It is very difficult for people to change their minds later, and most people assume that if you’re on trial, you must be guilty, which is why judges remind juries about “innocent before proven guilty”.
This is one of the foundations of our legal system, something we learned over thousands of years of trying to get better at justice. You’re just assuming I’m guilty and saying that justifies not giving me a chance to present my evidence.
Also, if we post another comment thread a week later, who will see it? EAF/LW don’t have sufficient ways to resurface old but important content.
Re: “my guess is Ben’s sources have received dozens of calls”—well, your guess is wrong, and you can ask them to confirm this.
You also took my email strategically out of context to fit the Emerson-is-a-horned-CEO-villain narrative. Here’s the full one:
This doesn’t seem like an issue. You could instead write a separate post a week later which has a chance of gaining traction.
Yep. Posts critical of Less Wrong are often highly upvoted on Less Wrong, so I’d say a good defense (one containing factual statements, not just “this is 100% wrong and I will sue you”) has like 80% chance to get 100 or more karma.
I didn’t understand the part about “resurfacing old content”, but one can simply link the old article from the new one, and ask moderators to link the new article from the old one. (The fact that the new article will be on the front page but the old one will no longer be there, seems to work in favor of the new article.) Even if moderators for some mysterious reason refused to make the link, a comment under the old article saying “there is a response from Nonlinear” with a link would probably be highly upvoted.
Oli’s comment is a good summary of my relevant concerns! And I’m definitely happy to link prominently to any response by Nonlinear, and make edits if things are shown to be false.
As well as a bunch of other reasons already mentioned (and some not), another one is that most of the things they proposed to show me didn’t seem that cruxy to me? Maybe a few of stories are wrong, but I believe the people were really very hurt by their time at Nonlinear, and I believe both were quite credibly intimidated, and I’m pretty sure a lot of folks in the relevant ecosystems would like to know if I believe that. When we talked Nonlinear mostly wanted to say that Alice told lies about things like why she quit being vegan, but even if that’s true tons of my evidence doesn’t come from Alice or from her specific stories, so the delay request didn’t seem like it would likely change my mind. Maybe it will, but I think it’s more important to say when I believe that terrible behavior has occurred, so I didn’t feel beholden to delay for them.
Yes, we intend to. But given that our comments just asking for people to withhold judgment are getting downvoted, that doesn’t bode well for future posts getting enough upvotes to be seen.
It’s going to take us at least a week to gather all the evidence, then it will take a decent amount of time to write up.
In the meantime, people have heard terrible things about us and nobody’s a perfect rationalist who will simply update. Once you’ve made up your mind about somebody, it can be really hard to change.
Additionally, once things are on the internet, they’re usually there for good. Now it might be that the first thing people find when looking up Nonlinear is this post, even if we do disprove the claims.
A post that would most likely have been substantially different if he’d seen all of our evidence first. He already made multiple updates to the post based on the things we shared, and he would have made far more if he had given us the chance to actually present our evidence.
Not to mention that now that he’s published this and sent them money, it’s psychologically difficult for him to update.
I think a comment “just asking for people to withhold judgement” would not be especially downvoted. I think the comments in which you’ve asked people to withhold judgement include other incredibly toxic behavior.
You could possibly do a more incremental version of this, e.g. link to a Google Drive where you upload the pieces of evidence as you find them? That way people could start updating right away rather than waiting until everything’s been put together. And then you could add a comment linking to the write-up when it’s done.
I want to note a specific pattern that I’ve noticed. I am not commenting on this particular matter overall; the events with Nonlinear may or may not be an instance of the pattern. It goes like this:
Fred does something unethical / immoral.
People start talking about how Fred did something bad.
Fred complains that people should not be talking the way they are talking, and Fred specifically invokes the standard of the court system, saying stuff like “there’s a reason courts presume innocence / allow the accused to face the accuser / give a right to a defense attorney / have discovery / have the right to remain silent / right to avoid incriminating oneself / etc. etc.”.
Fred’s implication is that people shouldn’t be talking the way they’re talking because it’s unjust.
… Of course, this pattern could also happen when step 1 is Fred not doing something bad; and either way, maybe Fred is right… But I suspect that in reality, Fred uses this as a way of isolated demands for rigor.
I don’t get that impression. Nothing in the full one stands out to me as important context that would really change anything non-trivially.
You seem to be disregarding other considerations at play here.
Zooming out, if we forget about the specifics of this situation and instead think about the more general question of whether or not one should honor requests to delay such publications, one consideration is wanting to avoid unjustifiably harming someones reputation (in this case yours, Kat’s, and Nonlinear’s).
But I think habryka lists some other important considerations too in his comment:
Guarding against retaliation
Guarding against lost productivity
Guarding against reality-distortion fields
Personally, I don’t have strong feelings about where the equilibrium should be here. However, I do feel strongly that the discussion needs to look at the considerations on both sides.
Also, I raise my eyebrow a fair bit at those who do have strong feelings about where the equilibrium should be. At least if they haven’t thought about it for many hours. It strikes me as a genuinely difficult task to enumerate and weigh the considerations at play.
If we want to look at general principles rather than specific cases, if the original post had not contained a bunch of serious misinformation (according to evidence that I have access to) then I would have been much more sympathetic to not delaying.
But the combination of serious misinformation + being unwilling to delay a short period to get the rest of the evidence I find to be a very bad combination.
I also don’t think the retaliation point is a very good one, as refusing to delay doesn’t actually prevent retaliation.
I don’t find the lost productivity point is particularly strong given that this was a major investigation already involving something like 150 hours of work. In that context, another 20 hours carefully reviewing evidence seems minimal (if it’s worth ~150 hours to investigate it’s worth 170 to ensure it’s accurate presumably)
Guarding against reality distortion fields is an interesting point I hadn’t thought of until Oliver brought it up. However, it doesn’t seem (correct me if I’m wrong) that Ben felt swayed away from posting after talking to nonlinear for 3 hours—if that’s true then it doesn’t seem like much of a concern here. I also think pre-committing to a release date helps a bit with that.