This squares very starkly in contrast with Nonlinear’s perception of things. It seems to me that all the work in your comment is being done by the “we did not believe them on” bit, which is very subjective and frankly would be ridiculous in something like fair trial—it would be like saying “the defense is not allowed to bring witnesses or make a case, because despite them claiming that they’ll make a strong case, we (the prosection) just don’t believe them”. You can argue about whether Nonlinear’s eventual response was satisfactory (though their evidence seems compelling to me), but I’m not seeing your case on this point in particular.
Hmm, I don’t think I am understanding this comment, so might be best to just clarify.
Ben’s goal with the post was really not to be judge, I hope he made that abundantly clear. The goal was to publish some evidence that had been extensively circulating around privately in the EA Community for a while, so that more people could take it into account, and also allow Nonlinear to publish a response or try to refute that evidence.
For that purpose, the question is whether Ben published anything that he knew was wrong. He did not do so, to the best of my knowledge. Nonlinear objected to a bunch of stuff, and we tried our best to summarize their objections in the post (in the section that is a summary of Nonlinear’s position). Lightcone did not (and continues to not) have the capacity to fully validate every claim given to us, though like, we did spend close to a thousand hours in terms of talking to sources and trying to validate and fact-check the things that were given to us. This included talking to Nonlinear and engaging with their evidence, though we were quite limited in what things our sources allowed us to share with them before publication.
Given this, I am not really sure what point you are making in this comment. I think it would have been bad for us to selectively fail to publish evidence that we did have, but we did not do so (though Nonlinear is accusing Ben of doing that, which is false, as far as I can tell). I agree we could have of course spent more time fact-checking things, but again we were limited in what we could share with Nonlinear before publication, and also had already spent hundreds of hours doing that kind of work, conducting interviews with over a dozen different people who had experiences with Nonlinear, cross-checking various details and facts to verify to the best of our ability that they added up.
Hm, a lot I disagree with here, but a crux is that I think you’re not really replying to TracingWoodgrain’s original point, which was that Ben knew there might be significant evidence contradicting much of his post but decided not to wait for it and published anyways (which TW considers to be a bad norm). Instead you seem to be changing frame to “did Ben publish anything which he knew for sure wasn’t true”, which is quite different, particularly in this case where evidence is deliberately not being looked at.
Ah, sorry, I did understand your question to be about the latter. That’s just a relatively straightforward misunderstanding. Might write more on the former.
This squares very starkly in contrast with Nonlinear’s perception of things. It seems to me that all the work in your comment is being done by the “we did not believe them on” bit, which is very subjective and frankly would be ridiculous in something like fair trial—it would be like saying “the defense is not allowed to bring witnesses or make a case, because despite them claiming that they’ll make a strong case, we (the prosection) just don’t believe them”. You can argue about whether Nonlinear’s eventual response was satisfactory (though their evidence seems compelling to me), but I’m not seeing your case on this point in particular.
Hmm, I don’t think I am understanding this comment, so might be best to just clarify.
Ben’s goal with the post was really not to be judge, I hope he made that abundantly clear. The goal was to publish some evidence that had been extensively circulating around privately in the EA Community for a while, so that more people could take it into account, and also allow Nonlinear to publish a response or try to refute that evidence.
For that purpose, the question is whether Ben published anything that he knew was wrong. He did not do so, to the best of my knowledge. Nonlinear objected to a bunch of stuff, and we tried our best to summarize their objections in the post (in the section that is a summary of Nonlinear’s position). Lightcone did not (and continues to not) have the capacity to fully validate every claim given to us, though like, we did spend close to a thousand hours in terms of talking to sources and trying to validate and fact-check the things that were given to us. This included talking to Nonlinear and engaging with their evidence, though we were quite limited in what things our sources allowed us to share with them before publication.
Given this, I am not really sure what point you are making in this comment. I think it would have been bad for us to selectively fail to publish evidence that we did have, but we did not do so (though Nonlinear is accusing Ben of doing that, which is false, as far as I can tell). I agree we could have of course spent more time fact-checking things, but again we were limited in what we could share with Nonlinear before publication, and also had already spent hundreds of hours doing that kind of work, conducting interviews with over a dozen different people who had experiences with Nonlinear, cross-checking various details and facts to verify to the best of our ability that they added up.
Hm, a lot I disagree with here, but a crux is that I think you’re not really replying to TracingWoodgrain’s original point, which was that Ben knew there might be significant evidence contradicting much of his post but decided not to wait for it and published anyways (which TW considers to be a bad norm). Instead you seem to be changing frame to “did Ben publish anything which he knew for sure wasn’t true”, which is quite different, particularly in this case where evidence is deliberately not being looked at.
Ah, sorry, I did understand your question to be about the latter. That’s just a relatively straightforward misunderstanding. Might write more on the former.