Copy-pasting a followup to this with Robin Hanson via DM (with permission).
Robin: You can of course suspect people of many things using many weak clues. But you should hold higher standards of evidence when making public accusations that you say orgs should use to fire people, cancel speeches, etc.
Me: My instinct is to support/agree with this, but (1) it’s not an obvious interpretation of what you tweeted and (2) I think we need to understand why the standards of evidence for making public accusations and for actual firing/canceling have fallen so low (which my own comment didn’t address either) and what the leverage points are for changing that, otherwise we might just be tilting at windmills when we exhort people to raise those standards (or worse, making suicide charges, if we get lumped with “public enemies”).
Copy-pasting a followup to this with Robin Hanson via DM (with permission).
Robin: You can of course suspect people of many things using many weak clues. But you should hold higher standards of evidence when making public accusations that you say orgs should use to fire people, cancel speeches, etc.
Me: My instinct is to support/agree with this, but (1) it’s not an obvious interpretation of what you tweeted and (2) I think we need to understand why the standards of evidence for making public accusations and for actual firing/canceling have fallen so low (which my own comment didn’t address either) and what the leverage points are for changing that, otherwise we might just be tilting at windmills when we exhort people to raise those standards (or worse, making suicide charges, if we get lumped with “public enemies”).