I admire all of the time and effort that Ben put into writing this post. If the burden was where you suggested, then these kinds of posts would never end up being written.
I think he probably should have waited a week, but I suspect Nonlinear would have come out looking very bad regardless.
Time and effort invested in writing a post have little bearing on the objectivity of the post, when it comes to adjudicating what’s really true in ‘he said/she said’ (or ‘she said/she said’) cases.
If people have an agenda, they might invest large amounts of time and energy into writing something. But if they’re not consciously following principles of objective reporting (eg as crystallized in the highest ideals of investigative journalism), what they write might be very unbalanced.
We are all familiar with many, many cases of this in partisan news media from the Left and the Right. Writers with an agenda routinely invest hundreds of hours into writing pieces that end up being very biased.
It reveals a lot that you ‘suspect Nonlinear would have come out looking very bad regardless’. That suggests that Ben’s initial framing of this narrative will, in fact, tend to overwhelm any counter-evidence that Nonlinear can offer—and maybe he should have waited longer, and tried harder, to incorporate their counter-evidence before publishing this.
Note that I am NOT saying that Ben definitely had a hidden agenda, or definitely was biased, or was acting in bad faith. I’m simply saying that we, as outsiders, do not know the facts of the matter yet, and we should not confuse amount of time invested in writing something with the objectively of the result.
You seem to be setting the bar way too high.
I admire all of the time and effort that Ben put into writing this post. If the burden was where you suggested, then these kinds of posts would never end up being written.
I think he probably should have waited a week, but I suspect Nonlinear would have come out looking very bad regardless.
Disclaimer: Previously interned for Nonlinear.
Time and effort invested in writing a post have little bearing on the objectivity of the post, when it comes to adjudicating what’s really true in ‘he said/she said’ (or ‘she said/she said’) cases.
If people have an agenda, they might invest large amounts of time and energy into writing something. But if they’re not consciously following principles of objective reporting (eg as crystallized in the highest ideals of investigative journalism), what they write might be very unbalanced.
We are all familiar with many, many cases of this in partisan news media from the Left and the Right. Writers with an agenda routinely invest hundreds of hours into writing pieces that end up being very biased.
It reveals a lot that you ‘suspect Nonlinear would have come out looking very bad regardless’. That suggests that Ben’s initial framing of this narrative will, in fact, tend to overwhelm any counter-evidence that Nonlinear can offer—and maybe he should have waited longer, and tried harder, to incorporate their counter-evidence before publishing this.
Note that I am NOT saying that Ben definitely had a hidden agenda, or definitely was biased, or was acting in bad faith. I’m simply saying that we, as outsiders, do not know the facts of the matter yet, and we should not confuse amount of time invested in writing something with the objectively of the result.