I don’t have all the context of Ben’s investigation here, but as someone who has done investigations like this in the past, here are some thoughts on why I don’t feel super sympathetic to requests to delay publication:
In this case, it seems to me that there is a large and substantial threat of retaliation. My guess is Ben’s sources were worried about Emerson hiring stalkers, calling their family, trying to get them fired from their job, or threatening legal action. Having things be out in the public can provide a defense because it is much easier to ask for help if the conflict happens in the open.
As a concrete example, Emerson has just sent me an email saying:
Given the irreversible damage that would occur by publishing, it simply is inexcusable to not give us a bit of time to correct the libelous falsehoods in this document, and if published as is we intend to pursue legal action for libel against Ben Pace personally and Lightcone for the maximum damages permitted by law. The legal case is unambiguous and publishing it now would both be unethical and gross negligence, causing irreversible damage.
For the record, the threat of libel suit and use of statements like “maximum damages permitted by law” seem to me to be attempts at intimidation. Also, as someone who has looked quite a lot into libel law (having been threatened with libel suits many times over the years), describing the legal case as “unambiguous” seems inaccurate and a further attempt at intimidation.
My guess is Ben’s sources have also received dozens of calls (as have I have received many in the last few hours), and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Emerson called up my board, or would otherwise try to find some other piece of leverage against Lightcone, Ben, or Ben’s sources if he had more time. While I am not that worried about Emerson, I think many other people are in a much more vulnerable position and I can really resonate with not wanting to give someone an opportunity to gather their forces (and in that case I think it’s reasonable to force the conflict out in the open, which is far from an ideal arena, but does provide protection against many types of threats and adversarial action).
Separately, the time investment for things like this is really quite enormous and I have found it extremely hard to do work of this type in parallel to other kinds of work, especially towards the end of a project like this, when the information is ready for sharing, and lots of people have strong opinions and try to pressure you in various ways. Delaying by “just a week” probably translates into roughly 40 hours of productive time lost, even if there isn’t much to do, because it’s so hard to focus on other things. That’s just a lot of additional time, and so it’s not actually a very cheap ask.
Lastly, I have also found that the standard way that abuse in the extended EA community has been successfully prevented from being discovered is by forcing everyone who wants to publicize or share any information about it to jump through a large number of hoops. Calls for “just wait a week” and “just run your posts by the party you are criticizing” might sound reasonable in isolation, but very quickly multiply the cost of any information sharing, and have huge chilling effects that prevent the publishing of most information and accusations. Asking the other party to just keep doing a lot of due diligence is easy and successful and keeps most people away from doing investigations like this.
As I have written about before, I myself ended up being intimidated by this for the case of FTX and chose not to share my concerns about FTX more widely, which I continue to consider one of the worst mistakes of my career.
My current guess is that if it is indeed the case that Emerson and Kat have clear proof that a lot of the information in this post is false, then I think they should share that information publicly. Maybe on their own blog, or maybe here on LessWrong or on the EA Forum. It is also the case that rumors about people having had very bad experiences working with Nonlinear are already circulating around the community and this is already having a large effect on Nonlinear, and as such, being able to have clear false accusations to respond against should help them clear their name, if they are indeed false.
I agree that this kind of post can be costly, and I don’t want to ignore the potential costs of false accusations, but at least to me it seems like I want an equilibrium of substantially more information sharing, and to put more trust in people’s ability to update their models of what is going on, and less paternalistic “people are incapable of updating if we present proof that the accusations are false”, especially given what happened with FTX and the costs we have observed from failing to share observations like this.
A final point that feels a bit harder to communicate is that in my experience, some people are just really good at manipulation, throwing you off-balance, and distorting your view of reality, and this is a strong reason to not commit to run everything by the people you are sharing information on. A common theme that I remember hearing from people who had concerns about SBF is that people intended to warn other people, or share information, then they talked to SBF, and somehow during that conversation he disarmed them, without really responding to the essence of their concerns. This can take the form of threats and intimidation, or the form of just being really charismatic and making you forget what your concerns were, or more deeply ripping away your grounding and making you think that your concerns aren’t real, and that actually everyone is doing the thing that seems wrong to you, and you are going to out yourself as naive and gullible by sharing your perspective.
[Edit: The closest post we have to setting norms on when to share information with orgs you are criticizing is Jeff Kauffman’s post on the matter. While I don’t fully agree with the reasoning within it, in there he says:
Sometimes orgs will respond with requests for changes, or try to engage you in private back-and forth. While you’re welcome to make edits in response to what you learn from them, you don’t have an obligation to: it’s fine to just say “I’m planning to publish this as-is, and I’d be happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments.”
[EDIT: I’m not advocating this for cases where you’re worried that the org will retaliate or otherwise behave badly if you give them advance warning, or for cases where you’ve had a bad experience with an org and don’t want any further interaction. For example, I expect Curzi didn’t give Leverage an opportunity to prepare a response to My Experience with Leverage Research, and that’s fine.]
This case seems to me to be fairly clearly covered by the second paragraph, and also, Nonlinear’s response to “I am happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments” was to respond with “I will sue you if you publish these concerns”, to which IMO the reasonable response is to just go ahead and publish before things escalate further. Separately, my sense is Ben’s sources really didn’t want any further interaction and really preferred having this over with, which I resonate with, and is also explicitly covered by Jeff’s post.
So in as much as you are trying to enforce some kind of existing norm that demands running posts like this by the org, I don’t think that norm currently has widespread buy-in, as the most popular and widely-quoted post on the topic does not demand that standard (I separately think the post is still slightly too much in favor of running posts by the organizations they are criticizing, but that’s for a different debate).]
This case seems to me to be fairly clearly covered by the second paragraph, and also, Nonlinear’s response to “I am happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments” was to respond with “I will sue you if you publish these concerns”
The norm I’ve been pushing of sharing things with EA organizations ahead of time is only intended for cases where you have a neutral or better relationship with the organization, and not situations like this one where there are allegations of mistreatment, or you don’t trust them to behave cooperatively.
A threat to sue if changes are not made to the text of the post is not cooperative.
You say “if published as is”, not “if published now”. Is what you’re saying in the comment that, if Ben had waited a week and then published the same post, unedited, you would not want to sue? That is not what is conveyed in the email.
Yes, that is what I intended to communicate here, and I was worried people might think I was trying to suppress the article so I bolded this request to ensure people didn’t misunderstand:
For what it’s worth, I also interpreted the “if published as is” as “if you do not edit the post to no longer be libelous” and not “if you do not give us a week to prepare a contemporaneous rebuttal”.
I think if you wanted to reliably communicate that you were not asking for changes to the text of the post, you would have needed to be explicit about that?
Please don’t post screenshots of comments that include screenshots of comments. It is harder to read and to search and to reply. You can just quote the text, like habryka did above.
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.
I don’t have all the context of Ben’s investigation here, but as someone who has done investigations like this in the past, here are some thoughts on why I don’t feel super sympathetic to requests to delay publication:
In this case, it seems to me that there is a large and substantial threat of retaliation. My guess is Ben’s sources were worried about Emerson hiring stalkers, calling their family, trying to get them fired from their job, or threatening legal action. Having things be out in the public can provide a defense because it is much easier to ask for help if the conflict happens in the open.
As a concrete example, Emerson has just sent me an email saying:
For the record, the threat of libel suit and use of statements like “maximum damages permitted by law” seem to me to be attempts at intimidation. Also, as someone who has looked quite a lot into libel law (having been threatened with libel suits many times over the years), describing the legal case as “unambiguous” seems inaccurate and a further attempt at intimidation.
My guess is Ben’s sources have also received dozens of calls (as have I have received many in the last few hours), and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Emerson called up my board, or would otherwise try to find some other piece of leverage against Lightcone, Ben, or Ben’s sources if he had more time. While I am not that worried about Emerson, I think many other people are in a much more vulnerable position and I can really resonate with not wanting to give someone an opportunity to gather their forces (and in that case I think it’s reasonable to force the conflict out in the open, which is far from an ideal arena, but does provide protection against many types of threats and adversarial action).
Separately, the time investment for things like this is really quite enormous and I have found it extremely hard to do work of this type in parallel to other kinds of work, especially towards the end of a project like this, when the information is ready for sharing, and lots of people have strong opinions and try to pressure you in various ways. Delaying by “just a week” probably translates into roughly 40 hours of productive time lost, even if there isn’t much to do, because it’s so hard to focus on other things. That’s just a lot of additional time, and so it’s not actually a very cheap ask.
Lastly, I have also found that the standard way that abuse in the extended EA community has been successfully prevented from being discovered is by forcing everyone who wants to publicize or share any information about it to jump through a large number of hoops. Calls for “just wait a week” and “just run your posts by the party you are criticizing” might sound reasonable in isolation, but very quickly multiply the cost of any information sharing, and have huge chilling effects that prevent the publishing of most information and accusations. Asking the other party to just keep doing a lot of due diligence is easy and successful and keeps most people away from doing investigations like this.
As I have written about before, I myself ended up being intimidated by this for the case of FTX and chose not to share my concerns about FTX more widely, which I continue to consider one of the worst mistakes of my career.
My current guess is that if it is indeed the case that Emerson and Kat have clear proof that a lot of the information in this post is false, then I think they should share that information publicly. Maybe on their own blog, or maybe here on LessWrong or on the EA Forum. It is also the case that rumors about people having had very bad experiences working with Nonlinear are already circulating around the community and this is already having a large effect on Nonlinear, and as such, being able to have clear false accusations to respond against should help them clear their name, if they are indeed false.
I agree that this kind of post can be costly, and I don’t want to ignore the potential costs of false accusations, but at least to me it seems like I want an equilibrium of substantially more information sharing, and to put more trust in people’s ability to update their models of what is going on, and less paternalistic “people are incapable of updating if we present proof that the accusations are false”, especially given what happened with FTX and the costs we have observed from failing to share observations like this.
A final point that feels a bit harder to communicate is that in my experience, some people are just really good at manipulation, throwing you off-balance, and distorting your view of reality, and this is a strong reason to not commit to run everything by the people you are sharing information on. A common theme that I remember hearing from people who had concerns about SBF is that people intended to warn other people, or share information, then they talked to SBF, and somehow during that conversation he disarmed them, without really responding to the essence of their concerns. This can take the form of threats and intimidation, or the form of just being really charismatic and making you forget what your concerns were, or more deeply ripping away your grounding and making you think that your concerns aren’t real, and that actually everyone is doing the thing that seems wrong to you, and you are going to out yourself as naive and gullible by sharing your perspective.
[Edit: The closest post we have to setting norms on when to share information with orgs you are criticizing is Jeff Kauffman’s post on the matter. While I don’t fully agree with the reasoning within it, in there he says:
This case seems to me to be fairly clearly covered by the second paragraph, and also, Nonlinear’s response to “I am happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments” was to respond with “I will sue you if you publish these concerns”, to which IMO the reasonable response is to just go ahead and publish before things escalate further. Separately, my sense is Ben’s sources really didn’t want any further interaction and really preferred having this over with, which I resonate with, and is also explicitly covered by Jeff’s post.
So in as much as you are trying to enforce some kind of existing norm that demands running posts like this by the org, I don’t think that norm currently has widespread buy-in, as the most popular and widely-quoted post on the topic does not demand that standard (I separately think the post is still slightly too much in favor of running posts by the organizations they are criticizing, but that’s for a different debate).]
agreed
In case it wasn’t clear, we didn’t say ‘don’t publish’, we said ‘don’t publish until we’ve had a week to gather and share the evidence we have’:
I’m trying to support two complementary points:
The norm I’ve been pushing of sharing things with EA organizations ahead of time is only intended for cases where you have a neutral or better relationship with the organization, and not situations like this one where there are allegations of mistreatment, or you don’t trust them to behave cooperatively.
A threat to sue if changes are not made to the text of the post is not cooperative.
You say “if published as is”, not “if published now”. Is what you’re saying in the comment that, if Ben had waited a week and then published the same post, unedited, you would not want to sue? That is not what is conveyed in the email.
Yes, that is what I intended to communicate here, and I was worried people might think I was trying to suppress the article so I bolded this request to ensure people didn’t misunderstand:
For what it’s worth, I also interpreted the “if published as is” as “if you do not edit the post to no longer be libelous” and not “if you do not give us a week to prepare a contemporaneous rebuttal”.
I think if you wanted to reliably communicate that you were not asking for changes to the text of the post, you would have needed to be explicit about that?
Please don’t post screenshots of comments that include screenshots of comments. It is harder to read and to search and to reply. You can just quote the text, like habryka did above.
Consider that making it harder to search for the text may be the whole point of posting a screenshot.
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.