That’s how it looks like from your perspective. From a reader’s perspective, it looks like someone who isn’t a notable community figure on LessWrong (At least, I assume this, based on your karma scores and the fact that I have never heard of you. If I’m wrong, I apologise.) has suddenly made a claim with a significant burden of proof on it, and not provided any concrete evidence, despite apparently sitting on some. “I have evidence but am not going to include this in this post, nor will I explain why I cannot include the evidence in this post.” is an immediate red flag.
Additionally, I refer to Michaelos’s point, who puts it better than I can. You’re accusing someone of being insane, but your post comes off as not being all that serious, with the “lol”s interspersed.
Lastly, you claim that your story is easily verified, but some Google searches have turned up absolutely nothing even tangenitally related to your claim except for this thread. If it’s easily verified by external sources, I haven’t been able to see it.
So, if it never occurred to you that your story would be doubted, you’ve obviously made a mistake somewhere. Your evidence in favor of you telling the truth (You’ve been on LW for a while, you’re opening yourself up to falsification, you have no known reasons to start attacking this person) is simply nowhere near sufficient.
That said, you can still fix this. Clearly, you were wrong about the likelihood of people doubting you, but everyone makes mistakes. So post your evidence, link us to somewhere that verifies your story, and I expect the problem will be solved.
I don’t want to, say, “name the victims”, unless someone genuinely wants more evidence if this is real or not, so I can run it by them first. “Serious inquiries only.” I’ve already explained below about not wanting to be “too serious” in my tone in the email. The fact that Google returns no results is a sad testament to the fact that nobody else apparently thought it worth telling about (and Cairn Idun’s bizarre, cryptic snail mail packages of paper don’t exactly facilitate an online presence. If you knew anything about this you’d know what I mean.)
But the main point is that you’re not actually responding to what I said. What possible evidence could you have to think I’m making this up? I’m not not giving out my evidence, I’m actually telling you that I can provide it if asked for.
If you seriously don’t care one way or another about why it’s true, then I really don’t know why you care so much about why everything is not instantly transparent, when you can easily think of reasons why I would want to keep some details private in making the claim.
I never actually claimed you were making this up, merely that the likelihood of your story being true was low. You inventing the story is only one possible reason why your story might be false. You could also simply be mistaken, have witnessed actions that looked much worse out of context (For example, maybe your friends did something to deserve their treatment, but didn’t tell you because it would make them look bad) or some other reason I haven’t thought of.
In addition, you ask why I care so much about lack of transparency when I can think of reasons why you’d want to keep information private. You gave none of this information in the original post, so if I were to come up with potential reasons why you might want to keep the information secret, I’d be rationalising.
With that in mind, evidence that your story is false:
The prior probability of your claim is low. Not extremely low, but as when making any claim that isn’t obvious, the “burden of proof” is upon you. (Naturally, I don’t expect PROOF, hence the inverted commas, but you do need to provide sufficient evidence to overcome the initial low probability.)
You claim to have references, yet don’t provide them in the initial post or explain in the initial post why you won’t publicly provide them. (Yes, you’ve given me an explanation now, which reduces the strength of this evidence, but does not eliminate it.)
I have been unable to find any collaborating evidence for your story.
The reaction on LessWrong, a site where the average member tends to be at least somewhat rational and probably at least as rational as myself, if not more so, is nearly universally negative.
You’ve failed to provide verification. You claimed your story was easily verified, yet there’s a conspicuous absence of any verification. Unlike your references, if your story is “easily verified”, that means it’s verifiable using public knowledge, and you haven’t provided that knowledge. (If the story is verifiable by asking you, that does not count. You’re asking us to verify the trustability of a source by asking that same source.)
Evidence that your story is true:
You said it is. (Let’s start with the obvious here.)
Lack of discernable motivation for lying.
Consquences if you’re wrong, which you seem to care about. (Loss of karma/status in the group.)
You’ve been around for a while.
Decent chance people on LW would call you out on it if you were lying. (Thus making you less likely to try and fool people.)
In the end, the evidence for it being false is simply stronger. You’ve failed to overcome the burden of probability you’ve shouldered by making the claim. In order to overcome this burden, more evidence is required. Hence why I asked you to show the easy verification you claim exists, and post your references. If you have a good reason to not do the latter, at least do the former, and if you have a good reason not to do THAT as well, you’ll just have to resign yourself to not being believed here.
I’m sorry, I didn’t realize “easily verified” was a technical term. It seems perfectly easy to just ask me and receive what you want. How is that any different than getting results from a google search, except that you’d have to confirm that the evidence is real, which at that point would be a significantly higher probability (or lower probability, I suppose, depending on what you saw) belief anyway (and a requirement that the results of your search would be subject to anyway)?
Thank you. I apologise for not asking you for verification sooner. My downvote is revoked and I’ve upvoted your post.
I learnt that I should have asked for verification sooner, either immediately, or as soon as you informed me you had reasons for wishing to keep said verification private. I also learnt that I should assign a higher initial probability to claims made by LessWrong members I don’t know, which is a lesson I’m very glad to have learnt, since I do enjoy trusting people.
man now I feel bad about cussing when you took it so elegantly, lol. and yeah, on your last point, I seemed to be much more confident than the average Less Wronger about Kim Souzzi for example. Not really sure if that’s related but it at least seems like another data point.
The question is not precisely whether you are making this up, but whether your judgment of who is in the wrong is correct. I believe that a conference organizer offered to let someone attend for free, then midway through the conference, revoked that offer.
I am not certain whether the conference organizer or attendee is in the wrong. In short, your story has a perspective—and there is nothing wrong with that. But the tone of your essay is not internally consistent, or consistent with the message of the essay.
To put it differently, the organizer might say:
Running this conference is very expensive. I desire that everyone be able to attend for free, but I don’t have the ability to do that. Instead, I offer free admittance to worthy folks that I select. It is very important to me that attendees at the conference participate fully. Thus, the people I admit for free are required to attend all the essential sessions. I’m sorry if I didn’t communicate the attendance requirement or essential session list with sufficiently clarity that everyone understood my position, but that’s the way things are. If you think you can run a conference on this topic better than I, you are welcome to set up your own, with your own rules.
Such an organizer might be legally liable for some costs (on a breach of contract or other legal theory). Such organizer might be morally wrong, or a very stiff necked jerk. But such a person would not be delusional or mentally ill.
Tim, the distinction is moot from the point of view of the poor bastard getting screwed in all this. Anyone with a shred of empathy can see that. It’s especially bad since these are explicitly young people, most of whom are not going to be economically well off, which is why they needed the scholarship so much in the first place!
I don’t think our mutual friends to whom this email was sent would agree that it’s ok to screw them with an enormous, unexpected bill because your contract was garbage and it would hurt the program’s budget to treat them fairly (in some crazy scenario you’re suggesting may be possible). I don’t know of any reason why the cases last year couldn’t be taken to court except that nobody tried or it wasn’t worth it. But you’re a lawyer so maybe you can answer that...
That’s how it looks like from your perspective. From a reader’s perspective, it looks like someone who isn’t a notable community figure on LessWrong (At least, I assume this, based on your karma scores and the fact that I have never heard of you. If I’m wrong, I apologise.) has suddenly made a claim with a significant burden of proof on it, and not provided any concrete evidence, despite apparently sitting on some. “I have evidence but am not going to include this in this post, nor will I explain why I cannot include the evidence in this post.” is an immediate red flag.
Additionally, I refer to Michaelos’s point, who puts it better than I can. You’re accusing someone of being insane, but your post comes off as not being all that serious, with the “lol”s interspersed.
Lastly, you claim that your story is easily verified, but some Google searches have turned up absolutely nothing even tangenitally related to your claim except for this thread. If it’s easily verified by external sources, I haven’t been able to see it.
So, if it never occurred to you that your story would be doubted, you’ve obviously made a mistake somewhere. Your evidence in favor of you telling the truth (You’ve been on LW for a while, you’re opening yourself up to falsification, you have no known reasons to start attacking this person) is simply nowhere near sufficient.
That said, you can still fix this. Clearly, you were wrong about the likelihood of people doubting you, but everyone makes mistakes. So post your evidence, link us to somewhere that verifies your story, and I expect the problem will be solved.
well, you’re systematically wrong.
I don’t want to, say, “name the victims”, unless someone genuinely wants more evidence if this is real or not, so I can run it by them first. “Serious inquiries only.” I’ve already explained below about not wanting to be “too serious” in my tone in the email. The fact that Google returns no results is a sad testament to the fact that nobody else apparently thought it worth telling about (and Cairn Idun’s bizarre, cryptic snail mail packages of paper don’t exactly facilitate an online presence. If you knew anything about this you’d know what I mean.)
But the main point is that you’re not actually responding to what I said. What possible evidence could you have to think I’m making this up? I’m not not giving out my evidence, I’m actually telling you that I can provide it if asked for.
If you seriously don’t care one way or another about why it’s true, then I really don’t know why you care so much about why everything is not instantly transparent, when you can easily think of reasons why I would want to keep some details private in making the claim.
I never actually claimed you were making this up, merely that the likelihood of your story being true was low. You inventing the story is only one possible reason why your story might be false. You could also simply be mistaken, have witnessed actions that looked much worse out of context (For example, maybe your friends did something to deserve their treatment, but didn’t tell you because it would make them look bad) or some other reason I haven’t thought of.
In addition, you ask why I care so much about lack of transparency when I can think of reasons why you’d want to keep information private. You gave none of this information in the original post, so if I were to come up with potential reasons why you might want to keep the information secret, I’d be rationalising.
With that in mind, evidence that your story is false:
The prior probability of your claim is low. Not extremely low, but as when making any claim that isn’t obvious, the “burden of proof” is upon you. (Naturally, I don’t expect PROOF, hence the inverted commas, but you do need to provide sufficient evidence to overcome the initial low probability.)
You claim to have references, yet don’t provide them in the initial post or explain in the initial post why you won’t publicly provide them. (Yes, you’ve given me an explanation now, which reduces the strength of this evidence, but does not eliminate it.)
I have been unable to find any collaborating evidence for your story.
The reaction on LessWrong, a site where the average member tends to be at least somewhat rational and probably at least as rational as myself, if not more so, is nearly universally negative.
You’ve failed to provide verification. You claimed your story was easily verified, yet there’s a conspicuous absence of any verification. Unlike your references, if your story is “easily verified”, that means it’s verifiable using public knowledge, and you haven’t provided that knowledge. (If the story is verifiable by asking you, that does not count. You’re asking us to verify the trustability of a source by asking that same source.)
Evidence that your story is true:
You said it is. (Let’s start with the obvious here.)
Lack of discernable motivation for lying.
Consquences if you’re wrong, which you seem to care about. (Loss of karma/status in the group.)
You’ve been around for a while.
Decent chance people on LW would call you out on it if you were lying. (Thus making you less likely to try and fool people.)
In the end, the evidence for it being false is simply stronger. You’ve failed to overcome the burden of probability you’ve shouldered by making the claim. In order to overcome this burden, more evidence is required. Hence why I asked you to show the easy verification you claim exists, and post your references. If you have a good reason to not do the latter, at least do the former, and if you have a good reason not to do THAT as well, you’ll just have to resign yourself to not being believed here.
silly question.
I’m sorry, I didn’t realize “easily verified” was a technical term. It seems perfectly easy to just ask me and receive what you want. How is that any different than getting results from a google search, except that you’d have to confirm that the evidence is real, which at that point would be a significantly higher probability (or lower probability, I suppose, depending on what you saw) belief anyway (and a requirement that the results of your search would be subject to anyway)?
Okay, I’ve sent a PM asking you for verification.
You’re too fucking late you idiot
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gys/young_cryonicist_gathering_warning/8lok
Now let’s learn from this and not make the same mistake when it counts, shall we? :)
Thank you. I apologise for not asking you for verification sooner. My downvote is revoked and I’ve upvoted your post.
I learnt that I should have asked for verification sooner, either immediately, or as soon as you informed me you had reasons for wishing to keep said verification private. I also learnt that I should assign a higher initial probability to claims made by LessWrong members I don’t know, which is a lesson I’m very glad to have learnt, since I do enjoy trusting people.
man now I feel bad about cussing when you took it so elegantly, lol. and yeah, on your last point, I seemed to be much more confident than the average Less Wronger about Kim Souzzi for example. Not really sure if that’s related but it at least seems like another data point.
The question is not precisely whether you are making this up, but whether your judgment of who is in the wrong is correct. I believe that a conference organizer offered to let someone attend for free, then midway through the conference, revoked that offer.
I am not certain whether the conference organizer or attendee is in the wrong. In short, your story has a perspective—and there is nothing wrong with that. But the tone of your essay is not internally consistent, or consistent with the message of the essay.
To put it differently, the organizer might say:
Such an organizer might be legally liable for some costs (on a breach of contract or other legal theory). Such organizer might be morally wrong, or a very stiff necked jerk. But such a person would not be delusional or mentally ill.
Tim, the distinction is moot from the point of view of the poor bastard getting screwed in all this. Anyone with a shred of empathy can see that. It’s especially bad since these are explicitly young people, most of whom are not going to be economically well off, which is why they needed the scholarship so much in the first place!
I don’t think our mutual friends to whom this email was sent would agree that it’s ok to screw them with an enormous, unexpected bill because your contract was garbage and it would hurt the program’s budget to treat them fairly (in some crazy scenario you’re suggesting may be possible). I don’t know of any reason why the cases last year couldn’t be taken to court except that nobody tried or it wasn’t worth it. But you’re a lawyer so maybe you can answer that...