I will talk about my own bit with Leverage later, but I don’t feel like it’s the right time to share it yet.
(But fwiw: I do have some scars, here. I have a little bit of skin in this one. But most of what I’m going to talk about, comes from analogizing this with a different incident.)
A lot of the position I naturally slide into around this, which I have… kind of just embraced, is of trying to relate hard to the people who:
WERE THERE
May have received a lot of good along with the bad
May have developed a very complicated and narratively-unsatisfying opinion because of that, which feels hard to defend
Are very sensitized to condemning mob-speak. Because they’ve been told, again and again, that anything good they got out of the above, will be swept out with the bathwater if the bad comes to light.
This sort of thing only stays covered up for this long, if there was a lot of pressure and plausible-sounding arguments pointing in the direction of “say nothing.” The particular forms of that, will vary.
Core Leverage seems pretty willing to resort to manipulation and threats? And despite me generally trying so hard to avoid this vibe: I want to condemn that outright.
Also, in any other circumstance: Most people are very happy to condemn people who break strong secrecy agreements that they’ve made. If you feel like you’ve made one, I recognize that this is not easy to defy.
(My own part in this story is small. The only reason I’m semi-comfortable with sharing it, is because I got all of my own “vaguely owning the fact that I broke a very substantial secrecy agreement, publicly, to all my friends” out of the way EARLY. It would be bogging me down like crazy, otherwise. I respect Zoe, and others, for defying comparable pulls, or even worse ones.)
If you’re stuck on this bit, I would like to say: This is an exceptional circumstance. You should maybe talk to somebody, eventually. Maybe only once your own processing has settled down. Publicly might not be the right call for you, and I won’t push for it. Please take care for yourself, and try to be careful to pick someone who is not especially prone to demonizing things.
People can feel their truth drowned out by mobs of uninvested people, condemning it from afar.
The people who know what happened here, are in the minority. They have the most knowledge of what actually happened, and the most skin in this. They are also the people with the most to fear, and the most to lose.
People often don’t appreciate, how much the sheer numbers game can weigh on you. It can come to feel like the chorus is looming over you, in this sort of circumstance; poised, always ready to condemn you and yours from afar. Each individual member is only “speaking-their-truth” once, but in aggregate, they can feel like an army.
It’s hard to keep appropriate sight of the fact that the weight of the people who were there, and their story, are probably worth 1000x as much as even the most coherent but distant and un-invested condemning statement. They will not get as many shares. It might not even qualify as a story! But their contributions are worth a lot more, at least in my mind. Because they were THERE.
And I… want to stick up for them where relevant? Because this one wasn’t my incident, but I know how hard it might be for them to do it for themselves. I can’t swear I will do a good job of it? But the desire is there.
I do think a more-private forum, that is enriched for people who were closer to the event, might be a more comfortable place for some people to recount. It’s part of why I tried to talk up that possibility, in another thread.
...it is unfortunately not my place to make this, though. For various reasons, which feel quite solid, to me.
(And after Ryan’s account? I honestly have some concerns about it getting infiltrated by one of the more manipulative people around Leverage. I don’t want to discount that fear! I still think it might be a good idea?)
I do think we could stand to have a clearer route for things to be shared anonymously, because I suspect at least some people would be more comfortable that way.
(Since “attempts at deanonymization” appears to be a known issue, it may be worth having a flag for “only share as numeric aggregations of >1, using my recounting as a data-point.”)
EDITEDIT: This press release names Anna Salamon, Eli Tyre, Matthew Graves, and Matt Falshaw as several somewhat-intermediary people who can be contacted. I feel fewer misgivings around contacting them, than I did around the proposal of contacting Geoff and Larissa to handle this internally.
I was once in a similar position, due to my proximity to a past (different) thing. I kinda ended up excruciatingly sensitive, to how some things might read or feel to someone who was close, got a lot of good out of it (with or without the bad), and mostly felt like there was no way their account wouldn’t be twisted into something unrecognizable. And who may be struggling, with processing an abrupt shift in their own personal narrative—although I sincerely hope the 2 years of processing helped to make this less of a thing? But if you are going through it anyway, I am sorry.
And… I want this to go right. It didn’t go right then; not entirely. I think I got yelled at by someone I respect, the first time I opened up about it. I’m not quite sure how to make this less scary for them? But I want it to be.
The people I know who got swept up in this includes some exceptionally nice people. There is at least one of them, who I would ordinarily call exceptionally sane. Please don’t feel like you’re obligated to identify as a bad person, or as a victim, because you were swept up in this. Just because some people might say it about you, doesn’t make it who you are.
While I realize I’ve kinda de-facto “taken a side” by this point (and probably limited who will talk to me as a result)? I was mispronouncing Geoff’s name, before this hit; this is pretty indicative of how little I knew him personally. I started out mostly caring about having the consequences-for-him be reached based off of some kind of reasonable assessment, and not caring too much about having it turn out one way or another. I still feel more invested in there being a good process, and in what will generate the best outcomes for the people who worked under him (or will ever work under him), than anything else.
Compared to Brent’s end-result of “homeless with health-problems in Hawaii” **? The things I’ve asked for have felt mild. But I also knew that if I wasn’t handling mentioning them, somebody else probably would. In my eyes, we probably needed someone outside of the Leverage ecosystem who knew a lot of the story (despite the substantial information-hiding efforts) to be handling this part of the response.
Pushing for people to publish the information-hiding agreement, and proposing that Geoff maybe shouldn’t have a position with a substantial amount of power over others (at least while we sort this out), felt to me like fairly weaksauce requests. I am still a bit surprised that Geoff may have taken this as a convincing audition for a “prosecutor” role? I am angry and clued-in enough to sincerely fill the role, if somebody has to and if nobody else will touch it. But it still surprised me, because it is not what I see as my primary responsibility here.
**Despite all his flaws and vices? I was close to Brent. I do care about Brent, and I wouldn’t have wished that for him.
An abstract note: putting stock in anonymous accounts potentially opens wider a niche for false accounts, because anonymity prevents doing induction about trustworthiness across accounts by one person. (I think anonymity is a great tool to have, and don’t know if this is practically a problem; I just want to track the possibility of this dynamic, and appreciate the additional value of a non-anonymous account.)
One tool here is for a non-anonymous person to vouch for the anonymous person (because they know the person, and/or can independently verify the account).
True. A maybe not-immediately-obvious possibility: someone playing Aella’s role of posting anonymous accounts could offer the following option: if you given an account and take this option, then if the poster later finds out that you seriously lied, then, they have the option to de-anonymize you. The point being, in the hypothetical where the account is egregiously false, the accounter’s reputation still takes a hit; and so, these accounts can be trusted more. If there’s no possibility of de-anonymization, then the account can only be trusted insofar as you trust the poster’s ability to track accounter’s trustworthiness. Which seems like a more complicated+difficult task. (This might be terrible thing to do, IDK.)
(Downvoted. I’d have strong downvoted but −5 seems too harsh. Sounds like you’re responding to something other than what I said, and if that’s right, I don’t like that you said “VERY creepy” about the proposal, rather than about whatever you took from it.)
I was very up-front about the role I am attempting to embody in this: Relating to, and trying to serve, people with complicated opinions who are finding it hard to talk about this.
I feel we needed someone to take this role. I wish someone had done it for me, when my stuff happened.
You seem to not understand that I am making this statement, from that place and in that capacity.
Try seeing it through through the lens of that, rather than thinking that I’m making confident statements about your epistemic creepiness.
Depends on the algorithm to determine whether “you seriously lied”.
Imagine a hypothetical situation where telling the truth puts you in danger, but you read this offer, think “well, I am telling the truth, so they will protect my anonymity”, and describe truthfully your version. Unluckily for you, your opponent lied, and was more convincing than you. Afterwards, because your story contradicts the accepted version of events, it seems that you were lying, accusing unfairly the people who are deemed innocent. As a punishment for “seriously lying”, your identity is exposed.
If people with sensitive information suspect that something like this could happen, then it defeats the purpose of the proposal.
Yeah, that seems like a big potential flaw. (Which could just mean, no one should stick their neck out like that.) I’m imagining that there’s only potential benefit here in cases where the accounter also has strong trust in the poster, such that they think the poster almost certainly won’t be falsely convinced that a truth is an egregious lie.
In particular, the agreement isn’t about whether the court of public opinion decides it was a lie, just the poster’s own opinion. (The poster can’t be held accountable to that by the public, unless the public changes its mind again, but the poster can at least be held accountable by the accounter.) (We could also worry that this option would only be taken by accounters with accounts that are infeasible to ever reveal as egregious lies, which would be a further selection bias, though this is sort of going down a hypothetical rabbit hole.)
I will talk about my own bit with Leverage later, but I don’t feel like it’s the right time to share it yet.
(But fwiw: I do have some scars, here. I have a little bit of skin in this one. But most of what I’m going to talk about, comes from analogizing this with a different incident.)
A lot of the position I naturally slide into around this, which I have… kind of just embraced, is of trying to relate hard to the people who:
WERE THERE
May have received a lot of good along with the bad
May have developed a very complicated and narratively-unsatisfying opinion because of that, which feels hard to defend
Are very sensitized to condemning mob-speak. Because they’ve been told, again and again, that anything good they got out of the above, will be swept out with the bathwater if the bad comes to light.
This sort of thing only stays covered up for this long, if there was a lot of pressure and plausible-sounding arguments pointing in the direction of “say nothing.” The particular forms of that, will vary.
Core Leverage seems pretty willing to resort to manipulation and threats? And despite me generally trying so hard to avoid this vibe: I want to condemn that outright.
Also, in any other circumstance: Most people are very happy to condemn people who break strong secrecy agreements that they’ve made. If you feel like you’ve made one, I recognize that this is not easy to defy.
(My own part in this story is small. The only reason I’m semi-comfortable with sharing it, is because I got all of my own “vaguely owning the fact that I broke a very substantial secrecy agreement, publicly, to all my friends” out of the way EARLY. It would be bogging me down like crazy, otherwise. I respect Zoe, and others, for defying comparable pulls, or even worse ones.)
If you’re stuck on this bit, I would like to say: This is an exceptional circumstance. You should maybe talk to somebody, eventually. Maybe only once your own processing has settled down. Publicly might not be the right call for you, and I won’t push for it. Please take care for yourself, and try to be careful to pick someone who is not especially prone to demonizing things.
People can feel their truth drowned out by mobs of uninvested people, condemning it from afar.
The people who know what happened here, are in the minority. They have the most knowledge of what actually happened, and the most skin in this. They are also the people with the most to fear, and the most to lose.
People often don’t appreciate, how much the sheer numbers game can weigh on you. It can come to feel like the chorus is looming over you, in this sort of circumstance; poised, always ready to condemn you and yours from afar. Each individual member is only “speaking-their-truth” once, but in aggregate, they can feel like an army.
It’s hard to keep appropriate sight of the fact that the weight of the people who were there, and their story, are probably worth 1000x as much as even the most coherent but distant and un-invested condemning statement. They will not get as many shares. It might not even qualify as a story! But their contributions are worth a lot more, at least in my mind. Because they were THERE.
And I… want to stick up for them where relevant? Because this one wasn’t my incident, but I know how hard it might be for them to do it for themselves. I can’t swear I will do a good job of it? But the desire is there.
I do think a more-private forum, that is enriched for people who were closer to the event, might be a more comfortable place for some people to recount. It’s part of why I tried to talk up that possibility, in another thread.
...it is unfortunately not my place to make this, though. For various reasons, which feel quite solid, to me.
(And after Ryan’s account? I honestly have some concerns about it getting infiltrated by one of the more manipulative people around Leverage. I don’t want to discount that fear! I still think it might be a good idea?)
I do think we could stand to have a clearer route for things to be shared anonymously, because I suspect at least some people would be more comfortable that way.
(Since “attempts at deanonymization” appears to be a known issue, it may be worth having a flag for “only share as numeric aggregations of >1, using my recounting as a data-point.”)
EDITEDIT: This press release names Anna Salamon, Eli Tyre, Matthew Graves, and Matt Falshaw as several somewhat-intermediary people who can be contacted. I feel fewer misgivings around contacting them, than I did around the proposal of contacting Geoff and Larissa to handle this internally.
I was once in a similar position, due to my proximity to a past (different) thing. I kinda ended up excruciatingly sensitive, to how some things might read or feel to someone who was close, got a lot of good out of it (with or without the bad), and mostly felt like there was no way their account wouldn’t be twisted into something unrecognizable. And who may be struggling, with processing an abrupt shift in their own personal narrative—although I sincerely hope the 2 years of processing helped to make this less of a thing? But if you are going through it anyway, I am sorry.
And… I want this to go right. It didn’t go right then; not entirely. I think I got yelled at by someone I respect, the first time I opened up about it. I’m not quite sure how to make this less scary for them? But I want it to be.
The people I know who got swept up in this includes some exceptionally nice people. There is at least one of them, who I would ordinarily call exceptionally sane. Please don’t feel like you’re obligated to identify as a bad person, or as a victim, because you were swept up in this. Just because some people might say it about you, doesn’t make it who you are.
While I realize I’ve kinda de-facto “taken a side” by this point (and probably limited who will talk to me as a result)? I was mispronouncing Geoff’s name, before this hit; this is pretty indicative of how little I knew him personally. I started out mostly caring about having the consequences-for-him be reached based off of some kind of reasonable assessment, and not caring too much about having it turn out one way or another. I still feel more invested in there being a good process, and in what will generate the best outcomes for the people who worked under him (or will ever work under him), than anything else.
Compared to Brent’s end-result of “homeless with health-problems in Hawaii” **? The things I’ve asked for have felt mild. But I also knew that if I wasn’t handling mentioning them, somebody else probably would. In my eyes, we probably needed someone outside of the Leverage ecosystem who knew a lot of the story (despite the substantial information-hiding efforts) to be handling this part of the response.
Pushing for people to publish the information-hiding agreement, and proposing that Geoff maybe shouldn’t have a position with a substantial amount of power over others (at least while we sort this out), felt to me like fairly weaksauce requests. I am still a bit surprised that Geoff may have taken this as a convincing audition for a “prosecutor” role? I am angry and clued-in enough to sincerely fill the role, if somebody has to and if nobody else will touch it. But it still surprised me, because it is not what I see as my primary responsibility here.
**Despite all his flaws and vices? I was close to Brent. I do care about Brent, and I wouldn’t have wished that for him.
An abstract note: putting stock in anonymous accounts potentially opens wider a niche for false accounts, because anonymity prevents doing induction about trustworthiness across accounts by one person. (I think anonymity is a great tool to have, and don’t know if this is practically a problem; I just want to track the possibility of this dynamic, and appreciate the additional value of a non-anonymous account.)
One tool here is for a non-anonymous person to vouch for the anonymous person (because they know the person, and/or can independently verify the account).
True. A maybe not-immediately-obvious possibility: someone playing Aella’s role of posting anonymous accounts could offer the following option: if you given an account and take this option, then if the poster later finds out that you seriously lied, then, they have the option to de-anonymize you. The point being, in the hypothetical where the account is egregiously false, the accounter’s reputation still takes a hit; and so, these accounts can be trusted more. If there’s no possibility of de-anonymization, then the account can only be trusted insofar as you trust the poster’s ability to track accounter’s trustworthiness. Which seems like a more complicated+difficult task. (This might be terrible thing to do, IDK.)
I get VERY creepy vibes from this proposal, and want to push back hard on it.
Although, hm… I think “lying” and “enemy action” are different?
Enemy action occasionally warrants breaking contracts back, after they didn’t respect yours.
Whereas if there is ZERO lying-through-negligence in accounts of PERSONAL EXPERIENCES, we can be certain we set the bar-of-entry far too high.
(Downvoted. I’d have strong downvoted but −5 seems too harsh. Sounds like you’re responding to something other than what I said, and if that’s right, I don’t like that you said “VERY creepy” about the proposal, rather than about whatever you took from it.)
I was very up-front about the role I am attempting to embody in this: Relating to, and trying to serve, people with complicated opinions who are finding it hard to talk about this.
I feel we needed someone to take this role. I wish someone had done it for me, when my stuff happened.
You seem to not understand that I am making this statement, from that place and in that capacity.
Try seeing it through through the lens of that, rather than thinking that I’m making confident statements about your epistemic creepiness.
Hopefully this helps to resolve your confusion.
Depends on the algorithm to determine whether “you seriously lied”.
Imagine a hypothetical situation where telling the truth puts you in danger, but you read this offer, think “well, I am telling the truth, so they will protect my anonymity”, and describe truthfully your version. Unluckily for you, your opponent lied, and was more convincing than you. Afterwards, because your story contradicts the accepted version of events, it seems that you were lying, accusing unfairly the people who are deemed innocent. As a punishment for “seriously lying”, your identity is exposed.
If people with sensitive information suspect that something like this could happen, then it defeats the purpose of the proposal.
Yeah, that seems like a big potential flaw. (Which could just mean, no one should stick their neck out like that.) I’m imagining that there’s only potential benefit here in cases where the accounter also has strong trust in the poster, such that they think the poster almost certainly won’t be falsely convinced that a truth is an egregious lie.
In particular, the agreement isn’t about whether the court of public opinion decides it was a lie, just the poster’s own opinion. (The poster can’t be held accountable to that by the public, unless the public changes its mind again, but the poster can at least be held accountable by the accounter.) (We could also worry that this option would only be taken by accounters with accounts that are infeasible to ever reveal as egregious lies, which would be a further selection bias, though this is sort of going down a hypothetical rabbit hole.)