Abstract issues raised by the Nonlinear accusations and counter-accusations
How do you handle the risk of witness tampering, in ways that still let innocent people prove themselves innocent? Letting people cut corners if they claim a risk of tampering sure sets up bad incentives, but it is a real problem the system needs to be able to deal with
How do you handle the fact that the process of providing counter-evidence can be hacked, in ways that still let innocent people prove themselves? People can string it out, or bury you in irrelevant data, or provide misleading data that then requires more time to drill into.
How do you handle the risk of true, negative things coming out about the alleged victim? My take is that the first and strongest complaints will come from people who are extra sensitive, fragile, or bad at boundaries regardless of the situation, because duh. If you put two people in the same situation, the more sensitive person will complain more regardless of the situation. That’s what sensitive means.
Probably the best thing for the community as a whole is for complete, accurate information to come out about both the victims and the org, but this has high costs for each of them. How do you get victims to share information if doing so leaves them worse off?
How do you handle requests or requirements from the victim to help them emotionally, but have epistemic consequences? Such as having a set publication date, or compensating for financial hardship from coming forward (which might be a lot, if accurate, employment-impairing information comes out).
How much do we hold people responsible for offering trades someone else hurt themselves with? How do we do that while preserving the ability to do weird things that are bad for most people but extremely good for a few? If 50% of employees regret working somewhere, that’s obviously too high. I tentatively feel that 10% is too high unless you’re giving a killer severance package. But I reject in my bones the idea that you can’t offer weird trades just because they’d be bad for most people.
On FB someone suggested a “challenging job” label, for which people would have to provide legible evidence they were informed and had good reason to believe they could handle it. Similar to the concept of accredited investor in the US, or professional investor in the UK. This has a lot of challenges in implementation, but I think is worth considering.
Right now you can’t casually share bits of negative information in public. You either say nothing or spend half a year’s man hours on an airtight legal case that allows no mistakes. That’s terrible for everyone. How do we make it okay to share bits of casual negative information?
Example: In a recent dialogue someone (Thomas Kwa?) had an aside about how working for Nate Soares was difficult. Two other people decided this was their moment to share how awful and abusive Nate was to them. I think it’s good all of that information came out but feel bad that it dominated Thomas’s Dialogue that he wanted to focus elsewhere. The comment thread was eventually moved to its own post but I expect that was still a bad experience for Thomas.
A bunch of low level negative information about SBF became much more public after the fraud did. It seems like it would have been good for a number of reasons for that come out earlier even if there was no fraud. It’s just good to know when someone is a jerk.
What are the costs of not being able to act (publicly) until you have high certainty? What are the costs of being of not doing that?
I think you are trying to reinvent law. I think all or at least most of these points have decent answers in a society with working rule of law. Granted, social media makes things more complicated, but the general dynamics are not new.
In ideal case we would like to have something better than law, because currently the law mostly works for people who have approximately the same amount of resources they can spend on law.
If you have lots of money for lawyers, you can threaten people so they will be silent even if you hurt them. If you have lots of money for lawyers, you can say anything you want about anyone with less money than you, and then let the lawyers solve the problem. The easiest strategy is to drag out the lawsuit indefinitely until the other side burns all their resources, then offer them a settlement they cannot refuse (a part of the settlement is them publicly admitting that they were wrong, even if factually they were not).
Law optimizes for a stable society, not for truth. Siding with the rich is a part of that goal.
If you have lots of money for lawyers, you can threaten people
That doesn’t sound like proper rule of law, and indeed, the US is abysmal in that area specifically. Not that the US would be a paragon of rule of law overall.
Abstract issues raised by the Nonlinear accusations and counter-accusations
How do you handle the risk of witness tampering, in ways that still let innocent people prove themselves innocent? Letting people cut corners if they claim a risk of tampering sure sets up bad incentives, but it is a real problem the system needs to be able to deal with
How do you handle the fact that the process of providing counter-evidence can be hacked, in ways that still let innocent people prove themselves? People can string it out, or bury you in irrelevant data, or provide misleading data that then requires more time to drill into.
How do you handle the risk of true, negative things coming out about the alleged victim? My take is that the first and strongest complaints will come from people who are extra sensitive, fragile, or bad at boundaries regardless of the situation, because duh. If you put two people in the same situation, the more sensitive person will complain more regardless of the situation. That’s what sensitive means.
Probably the best thing for the community as a whole is for complete, accurate information to come out about both the victims and the org, but this has high costs for each of them. How do you get victims to share information if doing so leaves them worse off?
How do you handle requests or requirements from the victim to help them emotionally, but have epistemic consequences? Such as having a set publication date, or compensating for financial hardship from coming forward (which might be a lot, if accurate, employment-impairing information comes out).
How much do we hold people responsible for offering trades someone else hurt themselves with? How do we do that while preserving the ability to do weird things that are bad for most people but extremely good for a few? If 50% of employees regret working somewhere, that’s obviously too high. I tentatively feel that 10% is too high unless you’re giving a killer severance package. But I reject in my bones the idea that you can’t offer weird trades just because they’d be bad for most people.
On FB someone suggested a “challenging job” label, for which people would have to provide legible evidence they were informed and had good reason to believe they could handle it. Similar to the concept of accredited investor in the US, or professional investor in the UK. This has a lot of challenges in implementation, but I think is worth considering.
Right now you can’t casually share bits of negative information in public. You either say nothing or spend half a year’s man hours on an airtight legal case that allows no mistakes. That’s terrible for everyone. How do we make it okay to share bits of casual negative information?
Example: In a recent dialogue someone (Thomas Kwa?) had an aside about how working for Nate Soares was difficult. Two other people decided this was their moment to share how awful and abusive Nate was to them. I think it’s good all of that information came out but feel bad that it dominated Thomas’s Dialogue that he wanted to focus elsewhere. The comment thread was eventually moved to its own post but I expect that was still a bad experience for Thomas.
A bunch of low level negative information about SBF became much more public after the fraud did. It seems like it would have been good for a number of reasons for that come out earlier even if there was no fraud. It’s just good to know when someone is a jerk.
What are the costs of not being able to act (publicly) until you have high certainty? What are the costs of being of not doing that?
Who gets anonymity?
I think you are trying to reinvent law. I think all or at least most of these points have decent answers in a society with working rule of law. Granted, social media makes things more complicated, but the general dynamics are not new.
In ideal case we would like to have something better than law, because currently the law mostly works for people who have approximately the same amount of resources they can spend on law.
If you have lots of money for lawyers, you can threaten people so they will be silent even if you hurt them. If you have lots of money for lawyers, you can say anything you want about anyone with less money than you, and then let the lawyers solve the problem. The easiest strategy is to drag out the lawsuit indefinitely until the other side burns all their resources, then offer them a settlement they cannot refuse (a part of the settlement is them publicly admitting that they were wrong, even if factually they were not).
Law optimizes for a stable society, not for truth. Siding with the rich is a part of that goal.
That doesn’t sound like proper rule of law, and indeed, the US is abysmal in that area specifically. Not that the US would be a paragon of rule of law overall.
Source:
https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/country/2023/United%20States/Civil%20Justice/
Maybe that is why people resort to alternate ways of dispute resolution...
Can one of the disagreers explain their reasoning?