I took Aella’s post to be making a point about how EAs should read the article (“I’m mostly posting this because to me, it feels like there’s an imbalance in the models people are using to make sense of this. I don’t want EA to overcorrect, but I want it to reach a reasonable equilibrium”).
I agree that “most of the audience,” i.e., readers of TIME who largely aren’t familiar with EA, may well walk away from this article with an impression that’s inaccurate. But why shouldn’t EAs steelman it, especially when we have independent reasons to think many of the major claims in the article are true?
Trying to “steelman” the work of an experienced adversary who relies on, and is exploiting, your tendency to undercompensate and not realize how distorted these things actually are—which is the practical, hard-earned knowledge that Aella is trying to propagate—seems like a mistake.
(Actually, trying to “steelman” is a mistake in general and you should focus on passing Ideological Turing Tests instead, but that’s a much longer conversation.)
I admit that my desire to steelman this article stems from my personal experiences in EA, and my general sense—as a woman in EA, who is friends with other women in EA, and has heard stories from still other women in EA—that this article does get at something important about the Bay Area EA community, even if it makes some important mistakes, many of which Aella helpfully identifies.
To steelman your comment, I assume by “your” you mean the EA community’s (not my) “tendency to undercompensate and not realize how distorted these things actually are” (although I’m still not sure quite what this means), but as I said before, I have seen very little evidence that the community’s response to the TIME article has been uncritical or unreasonable. I’d be eager to hear specific examples of the mistakes you think the community has made since the article came out.
I mean the human tendency, not the EA tendency. TIME does it because it’s effective on their usual audience. EAs, evidently, have not risen above that.
If you think there’s an actual problem, I think the correct avenue is doing a real investigation and a real writeup. Trying to “steelman” a media version of it, that is going to be incredibly and deliberately warped, adversarially targeted at exploiting the audience’s underestimate of its warping by experienced adversaries, strikes me as a very wrong move. And it’s just legit hard to convey how very wrong of a move it is, if you’ve never been the subject of that kind of media misrepresentation in your personal direct experience, because you really do underestimate how bad it is until then. Aella did. I did.
Again, I would love for you to provide an example of something unreasonable the community has done in response to the TIME article. As far as I can tell, the community is trying to figure out what is going on, but people’s responses have generally been compassionate, open-minded, and reasonable.
If you think there’s an actual problem, I think the correct avenue is doing a real investigation and a real writeup.
This would not be a good use of my time, in part because others are much better positioned than I am to do this (and are). I also don’t think the bar for making the point in an EA Forum comment that “these kinds of claims are hard to substantiate with stories” should be that I myself have to go substantiate these claims with stories.
Notably: I think what happened to Aella is really bad. I don’t think we should steelman the claims made about Aella, which I have no reason to doubt are lies, and are cruel. I’m really sorry this happened; it shouldn’t have.
But I think steelmanning the TIME article is importantly different: among other things, this article is based on interviews with dozens of EAs who level critiques against a community of tens of thousands of people backed by billions of dollars in funding; this isn’t about a single individual being harassed and doxxed. And the article could be much more inflammatory than it is, I think. Many of the central claims in the article are true, and people don’t really seem to be contesting this; what seems to be under dispute is whether features of EA culture that are bad for women (uncontested) have led to higher rates of sexual misconduct against women (contested). This is a question the reporter gestures at herself (“The hard question for the Effective Altruism community is whether the case of the EA house in San Francisco is an isolated incident, with failures specific to the area and those involved, or whether it is an exemplar of a larger problem for the movement”). I hope the Community Health Team will get to the bottom of this.
Let’s be clear: the article in question was written by an internationally-renowned journalist in a major international publication. It went through all of the usual processes of careful research, writing, editing and fact-checking at the highest international standard. This article was written as a way to convey the experiences of women within the effective altruist community and to drive positive change in the way that women are treated within the movement.
This article is not the work of an “adversary” intent on taking someone down. They are not “exploiting” anyone, and the insinuation that readers of a major international publication fail to “realize how distorted these things actually are” and have a “tendency to undercompensate” from this distortedness lacks a credible basis in fact or reason.
I’ve had worse experiences with coverage from professional journalists than I have from random bloggers. My standard reply to a journalist who contacts me by email is “If you have something you actually want to know or understand, I will answer off-the-record; I am not providing any on-the-record quotes after past bad experiences.” Few ever follow up with actual questions.
A sincere-seeming online person with a blog can, any time they choose to, quote you accurately and in context, talk about the nuance, and just generally be truthful. Professional journalists exist in a much stranger context that would require much longer than this comment to describe.
If you want to insinuate that a major international publication is likely to be less reliable than a blog on issues of sexual harassment and abuse within the movement, it would be appropriate for you to write up the much longer description that you mention. This is a striking claim that is at odds with established views of what constitutes a trustworthy source. Most educated readers think that a publication such as TIME is among the most reliable sources that can be found on such a subject.
I don’t deny that journalists sometimes have trouble understanding academic research. Blogs written by professional academics are often in a much better position to understand academic research, because their authors have more relevant expertise. I would be highly skeptical of the claim that, in all but the most exceptional circumstances, blogs are better equipped than major media companies to conduct serious investigative journalism on sensitive issues. Publications such as TIME have been doing that kind of work successfully for many years.
If you do write this up, please be careful to respect the anonymity of those whose names were redacted in the TIME article.
The usual argument, which I think is entirely valid, and has been delivered by famouser and more famously reputable people if you don’t want to trust me about it, was named the “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect” by Richard Feynman. Find something that you are really, truly an expert on. Find an article in TIME Magazine about it. Really take note of everything they get wrong. Try finding somebody who isn’t an expert and see what their takeaways from the article were—what picture of reality they derive without your own expertise to guide them in interpretation.
Then go find what you think is a pretty average blog post by an Internet expert on the same topic.
It is, alas, not something you can condense into a single webpage, because everybody has their own area of really solid expertise, even if it’s something like “the history of Star Trek TOS” because their day job doesn’t lead them into the same level of enthusiasm. Maybe somebody should put together a set of three comparisons like that, from three different fields—but then the skeptics could worry it was all cherry-picked unusual bad examples, even if it hadn’t been.
I will note that I do think that the great scientists of recent past generations have earned more of our respect than internationally famous journalistic publications, and those scientists did not speak kindly of their coverage of science—and that was before the era of clickbait, back when the likes of the New York Times kept to notably higher editorial standards.
I think you can talk to any famous respectable person in private, and ask them if there should be a great burden of skepticism about insinuating that a “major international publication” like TIME Magazine might be skewing the truth the way that Aella describes, and the famous respectable person (if they are willing to answer you at all) will tell you that you should not hold that much trust towards TIME Magazine.
To be clear, at the risk of repetition, the question is not whether journalists should be considered reliable in their explanations of academic research. Although some journalists explain academic research quite well, others lack the training to do this as well as professional researchers. I would much rather turn to a colleague’s blog than to a TIME magazine article to understand issues in academic philosophy, and I suspect that academics in most other fields would say the same.
The question is whether a major international publication should be considered a reliable source of investigative journalism into issues of sexual harassment and abuse. Most educated readers would consider such a publication to be among the most reliable sources on such a topic. Most readers would express some skepticism about the ability of a typical blogger to conduct serious investigative journalism of the same calibre. These readers would cite the relatively stronger training that journalists have in the practice of investigative journalism, as well as the relatively stronger track record of successful investigative journalism at major international news outlets, when compared to blogs. They might also cite specific institutional features of news outlets, such as more time devoted to research, more people devoted to fact-checking, and a higher reputational and legal stake in getting things right.
Is there a reason why we should distrust TIME’s discussion of sexual harassment and abuse within effective altruism?
Uhhh no, I don’t trust them, and consider trusting them to be a pretty intense mistake. I’m friends with some very well-known people, where respected journal institutions (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) report about their lives. So I get to know them up close, and I get to directly see how the reporting misconstrues them. I’ve come away from this with intense distrust, to the degree that, similarly to Eliezer, I just don’t bother reading stuff they write about people anymore (unless it’s simply to track what news outlets are saying about people).
I’ll grant that fancy news outlets are more careful about being technically correct about facts (I’ve been interviewed by both high and low profile news outlets, and have in fact found the high profile ones are more dutiful in doublechecking concrete facts I tell them), but they are not trustworthy in terms of trying to present an accurate picture. It’s trivially easy to say only technically true things in a manner that leads people to a misleading conclusion.
My understanding from those links is that NYT’s actions here is a significant outlier in journalistic/editorial ethics, enough that both Kelsey and Matt thought it was relevant to comment on in those terms.
Kelsey:
I’d never heard anything like it[...]
For the record, Vox has never told me that my coverage of something must be ‘hard-hitting’ or must be critical or must be positive, and if they did, I would quit. Internal culture can happen in more subtle ways but the thing the NYT did is not normal.
Matt:
But what happened is that a few years ago the New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage.
[strong upvoted because this thread is currently condensed for a new reader, and this thread is the most noteworthy place to see OP’s further thoughts. I’m tryna make it expands so her comment is visible]
I wonder how people here would react if this article were about another social movement that had some enemies. For instance, I’m guessing there are lots of people in the press who despise the Latter Day Saint movement (LDS or Mormonism), for instance for its political stances against same-sex marriage. Would people going to bring this sort of skepticism to an article about sexual abuse within the LDS movement? Or any other controversial social movement?
Also, many of the alleged wrongdoers referenced in this article are somewhat to quite identifiable with some degree of effort (please don’t post names though!). They are likely private figures who could sue under ordinary libel standards if the statements were libelous, so it is reasonable to assume Time did its due dilligence on this one.
[Note: I am not a LDS person, pro-LDS, or anywhere adjacent to being LDS. That was just the first example that popped into my head of a group much of the media would dislike.]
I’d absolutely bring the same kind of skepticism. I would refuse to read a TIME expose of supposed abuses within LDS, because I would expect it to take way too much work to figure out what kind of remote reality would lie behind the epstemic abuses that I’d expect TIME (or the New York Times or whoever) would devise. If I thought I needed to know about it, I would poke around online until I found an essay written by somebody who sounded careful and evenhanded and didn’t use language like journalists use, and there would then be a possibility that I was reading something with a near enough relation to reality that I could end up closer to the truth after having tried to do my own mental corrections.
I want to be very clear that this is not my condescending advice to Other People who I think are stupider than I am. I think that I am not able to read coverage in the New York Times and successfully update in a more truthward direction, after compensating for what I think their biasing procedures are. I think I just can’t figure out the truth from that. I don’t think I’m that smart. I avoid clicking through, and if it’s an important matter I try to find a writeup elsewhere instead.
Would you trust a report from (say) the LDS church about the prevalence or non-prevalence of abuse in its ranks? [Continuing with example, not trying to say anything about the LDS church here.]
Organizations and movements certainly have an incentive to spin, minimize, and distort in their favor. And it’s arguably easier to distort on the defensive side.
The epistemic challenge is that, unless abuse allegations result in judicial proceedings or some other public airing of evidence, we cannot realistically evaluate the underlying evidence directly. So if journalists aren’t reliable on these matters, and organizations/movements aren’t reliable, where does that leave us? If one is being highly skeptical, there are few if any individuals who would have the resources and inclination to accurately probe into a question like this without some sort of stake in the question. If you’re deep inside the movement/organization, you may be able to figure out the answer for yourself—but if you’re that deep in, outsiders could reasonably conclude that you weren’t an unbiased reporter and discount your conclusions on that basis.
I mean, sometimes we just dont have very good information about a topic we’d like to know about.
Perhaps we need to accept that a garbage information source can be worse than nothing, even though it is the only source we have—I suspect there is not really any way for me to know if there is a serious sex abuse problem in the LDS.
Maybe adversarial attacks are useful though: if there was a really bad issue in the bay area EA scene, the TIME article ought to have found juicier stories than what I’ve seen.
Thanks, Tim. Your second paragraph is basically what I was trying to get at with my response—often, we are faced with the choice of using potentially biased information sources and de-biasing them as best we can, or just throwing our hands up in the air and admitting we can’t obtain any reliable information.
I’d suggest the latter approach is actually bad for EA: if saw some sources claim that EA is a dangerous place for people like me, saw some sources claim it isn’t, and concluded I couldn’t obtain reliable information because all the information was infected by bias—I would stay far away from EA. Ditto in the LDS hypothetical—I would not let my child attend an LDS camp if I didn’t feel confident it was safe. (I wouldn’t allow my child to attend such a camp in any event because my beliefs do not line up with LDS theology, but you get the point.)
To your second point: I think that kind of reasoning often has validity, but there are several reasons to exercise caution in deploying it here. First, finding survivors is not easy; most survivors don’t exactly talk about their experience in a way that is easy for a reporter to find. Second, many survivors do not want to talk to the media (which is fine). Finally, media organizations have seen their budgets eviscerated in the Internet age, so the depth of investigative reporting they can afford for an article like this has gone down significantly.
My overall impression is generally consistent with what the article says: “The hard question for the Effective Altruism community is whether the case of the EA house in San Francisco is an isolated incident, with failures specific to the area and those involved, or whether it is an exemplar of a larger problem for the movement.” I think the article tells us at least that we need surveys, better reporting mechanisms, and the like to develop a more accurate picture of the scope of the problem.
Sure, I think we agree, with the caveat that if the media says anything whatsoever is dangerous, without showing the statistics to establish that it is scarier than driving to work every day, I automatically disbelieve them.
It’s highly unlikely anyone could sue for libel in the United States. The Time doing even a little bit of fact checking would allow them to say they were not negligent and avoid liability. Which leaves you suing the individuals who spoke to the Time. Which will likely require getting the Time to reveal their sources which would be quite hard.
In addition, the vast majority of the claims in the article are not “factual” in a legal sense. People are reporting their impressions, opinions, etc… For instance, if you had dinner with someone and you say that they were “grooming” you, that’s protected opinion even if it’s an absurd description of what happened.
Then you would have to show that you suffered harm from the libel. Which will be pretty hard given the anonymity in the article.
Finally, the people you’re suing probably don’t have a lot of assets. After paying for their court fees and representation, you’ll be lucky if you get anything. You probably won’t even get enough to cover your own legal expenses. But you will draw attention to yourself and the statements in question so your reputation will likely suffer.
There are definite statements of fact, and identifiable people, in that article. Three have been identified already.
Opinion isn’t quite as clear cut as you imply—opinions that imply knowledge of undisclosed false facts can be defamatory. Here, the reason for the opinion was stated (a particular advocacy for age-gap relationships) so I agree “grooming” is likely protected opinion here.
Most of those figures are private, so the standard is mere negligence (but for Owen, likely actual malice).
I don’t see how Time could protect source identity from disclosure in a libel suit by a private individual. Without putting in evidence about their contacts with the person, they’d be hard pressed not to lose on negligence.
Some courts have allowed anonymity in cased like this, at least early on. Opinions differ, but if I were the judge, I’d allow it at early stages in the litigation here.
An opponent’s lack of money can go both ways—it can make litigation unattractive, but plaintiffs can often use the financial ruin that even “winning” would cause a poor defendant to get concessions.
It’s highly unlikely anyone could sue for libel in the United States.
This is incorrect. Firstly, you probably meant “successfully sue for libel”—anyone can sue for libel, in principle. Secondly, in the United States, people who are considered “public figures” have to prove actual malice, which means that establishing negligence had occurred would be insufficient to establish libel had occurred; however, this is not the case for people who are not public figures. In most cases, they only have to show negligence had occurred.
Then you would have to show that you suffered harm from the libel.
From what I have seen on social media from time to time, the world is suffering from an epidemic of entire political and social movements, such as Effective Altruism, being libelled periodically, with no real consequences. I am not saying this particular article is an example of that, I don’t know, but it could be in principle. If that sort of behaviour (again, I’m not speaking about the Time article) isn’t considered libel by the law, amounting to billions of dollars in damages from libelling thousands of individuals simultaneously, it ought to be, because it’s greviously immoral and sociopathic. Just my opinion, but fiercely-held.
Large group libel isn’t a thing. You can sometimes sue if the group is small enough—lying about someone with characteristic X could lead to a libel suit if the description would only match like a dozen identifiable people (e.g., someone who lives in that house).
The essay itself is the argument for why EAs shouldn’t steelman things like the TIME piece.
(I understand you’re disagreeing with the essay and that’s :thumbsup: but, like.)
If you set out to steelman things that were generated by a process antithetical to truth, what you end up with is something like [justifications for Christianity]; privileging-the-hypothesis is an unwise move.
If one has independent reasons to think that many of the major claims in the article are true, then I think the course most likely to not-mislead one is to follow thoseindependent reasons, and not spend a lot of time anchored on words coming from a source that’s pretty clearly not putting truth first on the priority list.
I took Aella’s post to be making a point about how EAs should read the article (“I’m mostly posting this because to me, it feels like there’s an imbalance in the models people are using to make sense of this. I don’t want EA to overcorrect, but I want it to reach a reasonable equilibrium”).
I agree that “most of the audience,” i.e., readers of TIME who largely aren’t familiar with EA, may well walk away from this article with an impression that’s inaccurate. But why shouldn’t EAs steelman it, especially when we have independent reasons to think many of the major claims in the article are true?
Trying to “steelman” the work of an experienced adversary who relies on, and is exploiting, your tendency to undercompensate and not realize how distorted these things actually are—which is the practical, hard-earned knowledge that Aella is trying to propagate—seems like a mistake.
(Actually, trying to “steelman” is a mistake in general and you should focus on passing Ideological Turing Tests instead, but that’s a much longer conversation.)
I admit that my desire to steelman this article stems from my personal experiences in EA, and my general sense—as a woman in EA, who is friends with other women in EA, and has heard stories from still other women in EA—that this article does get at something important about the Bay Area EA community, even if it makes some important mistakes, many of which Aella helpfully identifies.
To steelman your comment, I assume by “your” you mean the EA community’s (not my) “tendency to undercompensate and not realize how distorted these things actually are” (although I’m still not sure quite what this means), but as I said before, I have seen very little evidence that the community’s response to the TIME article has been uncritical or unreasonable. I’d be eager to hear specific examples of the mistakes you think the community has made since the article came out.
I mean the human tendency, not the EA tendency. TIME does it because it’s effective on their usual audience. EAs, evidently, have not risen above that.
If you think there’s an actual problem, I think the correct avenue is doing a real investigation and a real writeup. Trying to “steelman” a media version of it, that is going to be incredibly and deliberately warped, adversarially targeted at exploiting the audience’s underestimate of its warping by experienced adversaries, strikes me as a very wrong move. And it’s just legit hard to convey how very wrong of a move it is, if you’ve never been the subject of that kind of media misrepresentation in your personal direct experience, because you really do underestimate how bad it is until then. Aella did. I did.
Again, I would love for you to provide an example of something unreasonable the community has done in response to the TIME article. As far as I can tell, the community is trying to figure out what is going on, but people’s responses have generally been compassionate, open-minded, and reasonable.
This would not be a good use of my time, in part because others are much better positioned than I am to do this (and are). I also don’t think the bar for making the point in an EA Forum comment that “these kinds of claims are hard to substantiate with stories” should be that I myself have to go substantiate these claims with stories.
Notably: I think what happened to Aella is really bad. I don’t think we should steelman the claims made about Aella, which I have no reason to doubt are lies, and are cruel. I’m really sorry this happened; it shouldn’t have.
But I think steelmanning the TIME article is importantly different: among other things, this article is based on interviews with dozens of EAs who level critiques against a community of tens of thousands of people backed by billions of dollars in funding; this isn’t about a single individual being harassed and doxxed. And the article could be much more inflammatory than it is, I think. Many of the central claims in the article are true, and people don’t really seem to be contesting this; what seems to be under dispute is whether features of EA culture that are bad for women (uncontested) have led to higher rates of sexual misconduct against women (contested). This is a question the reporter gestures at herself (“The hard question for the Effective Altruism community is whether the case of the EA house in San Francisco is an isolated incident, with failures specific to the area and those involved, or whether it is an exemplar of a larger problem for the movement”). I hope the Community Health Team will get to the bottom of this.
Let’s be clear: the article in question was written by an internationally-renowned journalist in a major international publication. It went through all of the usual processes of careful research, writing, editing and fact-checking at the highest international standard. This article was written as a way to convey the experiences of women within the effective altruist community and to drive positive change in the way that women are treated within the movement.
This article is not the work of an “adversary” intent on taking someone down. They are not “exploiting” anyone, and the insinuation that readers of a major international publication fail to “realize how distorted these things actually are” and have a “tendency to undercompensate” from this distortedness lacks a credible basis in fact or reason.
I’ve had worse experiences with coverage from professional journalists than I have from random bloggers. My standard reply to a journalist who contacts me by email is “If you have something you actually want to know or understand, I will answer off-the-record; I am not providing any on-the-record quotes after past bad experiences.” Few ever follow up with actual questions.
A sincere-seeming online person with a blog can, any time they choose to, quote you accurately and in context, talk about the nuance, and just generally be truthful. Professional journalists exist in a much stranger context that would require much longer than this comment to describe.
If you want to insinuate that a major international publication is likely to be less reliable than a blog on issues of sexual harassment and abuse within the movement, it would be appropriate for you to write up the much longer description that you mention. This is a striking claim that is at odds with established views of what constitutes a trustworthy source. Most educated readers think that a publication such as TIME is among the most reliable sources that can be found on such a subject.
I don’t deny that journalists sometimes have trouble understanding academic research. Blogs written by professional academics are often in a much better position to understand academic research, because their authors have more relevant expertise. I would be highly skeptical of the claim that, in all but the most exceptional circumstances, blogs are better equipped than major media companies to conduct serious investigative journalism on sensitive issues. Publications such as TIME have been doing that kind of work successfully for many years.
If you do write this up, please be careful to respect the anonymity of those whose names were redacted in the TIME article.
The usual argument, which I think is entirely valid, and has been delivered by famouser and more famously reputable people if you don’t want to trust me about it, was named the “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect” by Richard Feynman. Find something that you are really, truly an expert on. Find an article in TIME Magazine about it. Really take note of everything they get wrong. Try finding somebody who isn’t an expert and see what their takeaways from the article were—what picture of reality they derive without your own expertise to guide them in interpretation.
Then go find what you think is a pretty average blog post by an Internet expert on the same topic.
It is, alas, not something you can condense into a single webpage, because everybody has their own area of really solid expertise, even if it’s something like “the history of Star Trek TOS” because their day job doesn’t lead them into the same level of enthusiasm. Maybe somebody should put together a set of three comparisons like that, from three different fields—but then the skeptics could worry it was all cherry-picked unusual bad examples, even if it hadn’t been.
I will note that I do think that the great scientists of recent past generations have earned more of our respect than internationally famous journalistic publications, and those scientists did not speak kindly of their coverage of science—and that was before the era of clickbait, back when the likes of the New York Times kept to notably higher editorial standards.
I think you can talk to any famous respectable person in private, and ask them if there should be a great burden of skepticism about insinuating that a “major international publication” like TIME Magazine might be skewing the truth the way that Aella describes, and the famous respectable person (if they are willing to answer you at all) will tell you that you should not hold that much trust towards TIME Magazine.
To be clear, at the risk of repetition, the question is not whether journalists should be considered reliable in their explanations of academic research. Although some journalists explain academic research quite well, others lack the training to do this as well as professional researchers. I would much rather turn to a colleague’s blog than to a TIME magazine article to understand issues in academic philosophy, and I suspect that academics in most other fields would say the same.
The question is whether a major international publication should be considered a reliable source of investigative journalism into issues of sexual harassment and abuse. Most educated readers would consider such a publication to be among the most reliable sources on such a topic. Most readers would express some skepticism about the ability of a typical blogger to conduct serious investigative journalism of the same calibre. These readers would cite the relatively stronger training that journalists have in the practice of investigative journalism, as well as the relatively stronger track record of successful investigative journalism at major international news outlets, when compared to blogs. They might also cite specific institutional features of news outlets, such as more time devoted to research, more people devoted to fact-checking, and a higher reputational and legal stake in getting things right.
Is there a reason why we should distrust TIME’s discussion of sexual harassment and abuse within effective altruism?
Uhhh no, I don’t trust them, and consider trusting them to be a pretty intense mistake. I’m friends with some very well-known people, where respected journal institutions (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) report about their lives. So I get to know them up close, and I get to directly see how the reporting misconstrues them. I’ve come away from this with intense distrust, to the degree that, similarly to Eliezer, I just don’t bother reading stuff they write about people anymore (unless it’s simply to track what news outlets are saying about people).
I’ll grant that fancy news outlets are more careful about being technically correct about facts (I’ve been interviewed by both high and low profile news outlets, and have in fact found the high profile ones are more dutiful in doublechecking concrete facts I tell them), but they are not trustworthy in terms of trying to present an accurate picture. It’s trivially easy to say only technically true things in a manner that leads people to a misleading conclusion.
One example is how the New York Times decided that they wouldn’t cover tech positively: https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
(Matt’s original tweet thread is saved here: https://web.archive.org/web/20221104004538/https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1588190763413868553 )
My understanding from those links is that NYT’s actions here is a significant outlier in journalistic/editorial ethics, enough that both Kelsey and Matt thought it was relevant to comment on in those terms.
Kelsey:
Matt:
The NYT may be an outlier among papers, but this instance is not an outlier of the NYT approach.
Yeah I’ve heard elsewhere that NYT is pretty unusual here, would trust them less than other media.
Aside, but that was Michael Crichton.
[strong upvoted because this thread is currently condensed for a new reader, and this thread is the most noteworthy place to see OP’s further thoughts. I’m tryna make it expands so her comment is visible]
I wonder how people here would react if this article were about another social movement that had some enemies. For instance, I’m guessing there are lots of people in the press who despise the Latter Day Saint movement (LDS or Mormonism), for instance for its political stances against same-sex marriage. Would people going to bring this sort of skepticism to an article about sexual abuse within the LDS movement? Or any other controversial social movement?
Also, many of the alleged wrongdoers referenced in this article are somewhat to quite identifiable with some degree of effort (please don’t post names though!). They are likely private figures who could sue under ordinary libel standards if the statements were libelous, so it is reasonable to assume Time did its due dilligence on this one.
[Note: I am not a LDS person, pro-LDS, or anywhere adjacent to being LDS. That was just the first example that popped into my head of a group much of the media would dislike.]
I’d absolutely bring the same kind of skepticism. I would refuse to read a TIME expose of supposed abuses within LDS, because I would expect it to take way too much work to figure out what kind of remote reality would lie behind the epstemic abuses that I’d expect TIME (or the New York Times or whoever) would devise. If I thought I needed to know about it, I would poke around online until I found an essay written by somebody who sounded careful and evenhanded and didn’t use language like journalists use, and there would then be a possibility that I was reading something with a near enough relation to reality that I could end up closer to the truth after having tried to do my own mental corrections.
I want to be very clear that this is not my condescending advice to Other People who I think are stupider than I am. I think that I am not able to read coverage in the New York Times and successfully update in a more truthward direction, after compensating for what I think their biasing procedures are. I think I just can’t figure out the truth from that. I don’t think I’m that smart. I avoid clicking through, and if it’s an important matter I try to find a writeup elsewhere instead.
Would you trust a report from (say) the LDS church about the prevalence or non-prevalence of abuse in its ranks? [Continuing with example, not trying to say anything about the LDS church here.]
Organizations and movements certainly have an incentive to spin, minimize, and distort in their favor. And it’s arguably easier to distort on the defensive side.
The epistemic challenge is that, unless abuse allegations result in judicial proceedings or some other public airing of evidence, we cannot realistically evaluate the underlying evidence directly. So if journalists aren’t reliable on these matters, and organizations/movements aren’t reliable, where does that leave us? If one is being highly skeptical, there are few if any individuals who would have the resources and inclination to accurately probe into a question like this without some sort of stake in the question. If you’re deep inside the movement/organization, you may be able to figure out the answer for yourself—but if you’re that deep in, outsiders could reasonably conclude that you weren’t an unbiased reporter and discount your conclusions on that basis.
I mean, sometimes we just dont have very good information about a topic we’d like to know about.
Perhaps we need to accept that a garbage information source can be worse than nothing, even though it is the only source we have—I suspect there is not really any way for me to know if there is a serious sex abuse problem in the LDS.
Maybe adversarial attacks are useful though: if there was a really bad issue in the bay area EA scene, the TIME article ought to have found juicier stories than what I’ve seen.
Thanks, Tim. Your second paragraph is basically what I was trying to get at with my response—often, we are faced with the choice of using potentially biased information sources and de-biasing them as best we can, or just throwing our hands up in the air and admitting we can’t obtain any reliable information.
I’d suggest the latter approach is actually bad for EA: if saw some sources claim that EA is a dangerous place for people like me, saw some sources claim it isn’t, and concluded I couldn’t obtain reliable information because all the information was infected by bias—I would stay far away from EA. Ditto in the LDS hypothetical—I would not let my child attend an LDS camp if I didn’t feel confident it was safe. (I wouldn’t allow my child to attend such a camp in any event because my beliefs do not line up with LDS theology, but you get the point.)
To your second point: I think that kind of reasoning often has validity, but there are several reasons to exercise caution in deploying it here. First, finding survivors is not easy; most survivors don’t exactly talk about their experience in a way that is easy for a reporter to find. Second, many survivors do not want to talk to the media (which is fine). Finally, media organizations have seen their budgets eviscerated in the Internet age, so the depth of investigative reporting they can afford for an article like this has gone down significantly.
My overall impression is generally consistent with what the article says: “The hard question for the Effective Altruism community is whether the case of the EA house in San Francisco is an isolated incident, with failures specific to the area and those involved, or whether it is an exemplar of a larger problem for the movement.” I think the article tells us at least that we need surveys, better reporting mechanisms, and the like to develop a more accurate picture of the scope of the problem.
Sure, I think we agree, with the caveat that if the media says anything whatsoever is dangerous, without showing the statistics to establish that it is scarier than driving to work every day, I automatically disbelieve them.
It’s highly unlikely anyone could sue for libel in the United States. The Time doing even a little bit of fact checking would allow them to say they were not negligent and avoid liability. Which leaves you suing the individuals who spoke to the Time. Which will likely require getting the Time to reveal their sources which would be quite hard.
In addition, the vast majority of the claims in the article are not “factual” in a legal sense. People are reporting their impressions, opinions, etc… For instance, if you had dinner with someone and you say that they were “grooming” you, that’s protected opinion even if it’s an absurd description of what happened.
Then you would have to show that you suffered harm from the libel. Which will be pretty hard given the anonymity in the article.
Finally, the people you’re suing probably don’t have a lot of assets. After paying for their court fees and representation, you’ll be lucky if you get anything. You probably won’t even get enough to cover your own legal expenses. But you will draw attention to yourself and the statements in question so your reputation will likely suffer.
(US perspective here)
There are definite statements of fact, and identifiable people, in that article. Three have been identified already.
Opinion isn’t quite as clear cut as you imply—opinions that imply knowledge of undisclosed false facts can be defamatory. Here, the reason for the opinion was stated (a particular advocacy for age-gap relationships) so I agree “grooming” is likely protected opinion here.
Most of those figures are private, so the standard is mere negligence (but for Owen, likely actual malice).
I don’t see how Time could protect source identity from disclosure in a libel suit by a private individual. Without putting in evidence about their contacts with the person, they’d be hard pressed not to lose on negligence.
Some courts have allowed anonymity in cased like this, at least early on. Opinions differ, but if I were the judge, I’d allow it at early stages in the litigation here.
An opponent’s lack of money can go both ways—it can make litigation unattractive, but plaintiffs can often use the financial ruin that even “winning” would cause a poor defendant to get concessions.
This is incorrect. Firstly, you probably meant “successfully sue for libel”—anyone can sue for libel, in principle. Secondly, in the United States, people who are considered “public figures” have to prove actual malice, which means that establishing negligence had occurred would be insufficient to establish libel had occurred; however, this is not the case for people who are not public figures. In most cases, they only have to show negligence had occurred.
From what I have seen on social media from time to time, the world is suffering from an epidemic of entire political and social movements, such as Effective Altruism, being libelled periodically, with no real consequences. I am not saying this particular article is an example of that, I don’t know, but it could be in principle. If that sort of behaviour (again, I’m not speaking about the Time article) isn’t considered libel by the law, amounting to billions of dollars in damages from libelling thousands of individuals simultaneously, it ought to be, because it’s greviously immoral and sociopathic. Just my opinion, but fiercely-held.
Large group libel isn’t a thing. You can sometimes sue if the group is small enough—lying about someone with characteristic X could lead to a libel suit if the description would only match like a dozen identifiable people (e.g., someone who lives in that house).
The essay itself is the argument for why EAs shouldn’t steelman things like the TIME piece.
(I understand you’re disagreeing with the essay and that’s :thumbsup: but, like.)
If you set out to steelman things that were generated by a process antithetical to truth, what you end up with is something like [justifications for Christianity]; privileging-the-hypothesis is an unwise move.
If one has independent reasons to think that many of the major claims in the article are true, then I think the course most likely to not-mislead one is to follow those independent reasons, and not spend a lot of time anchored on words coming from a source that’s pretty clearly not putting truth first on the priority list.