Whatever its legitimate uses, defamation law is also an extremely useful cudgel that bad actors can, and very frequently do, use to protect their reputations from true accusations. The cost in money, time and risk of going through a defamation trial is such that threats of such can very easily intimidate would-be truth-tellers into silence, especially when the people making the threat have a history of retaliation. Making such threats even when the case for defamation seems highly dubious (as here), should shift us toward believing that we are in the defamation-as-unscrupulous-cudgel world, and update our beliefs about Nonlinear accordingly.
Whether or not we should be shocked epistemically that Nonlinear made such threats here, I claim that we should both condemn and punish them for doing so (within the extent of the law), and create a norm that you don’t do that here. I claim this even if Nonlinear’s upcoming rebuttal proves to be very convincing.
I don’t want a community where we need extremely high burdens of proof to publish true bad things about people. That’s bad for everyone (except the offenders), but especially for the vulnerable people who fall prey to the people doing the bad things because they happen not to have access to the relevant rumor mill. It’s also toxic to our overall epistemics as a community, as it predictably and dramatically skews the available evidence we have to form opinions about people.
Whatever its legitimate uses, defamation law is also an extremely useful cudgel that bad actors can, and very frequently do, use to protect their reputations from true accusations. The cost in money, time and risk of going through a defamation trial is such that threats of such can very easily intimidate would-be truth-tellers into silence, especially when the people making the threat have a history of retaliation. Making such threats even when the case for defamation seems highly dubious (as here), should shift us toward believing that we are in the defamation-as-unscrupulous-cudgel world, and update our beliefs about Nonlinear accordingly.
Whether or not we should be shocked epistemically that Nonlinear made such threats here, I claim that we should both condemn and punish them for doing so (within the extent of the law), and create a norm that you don’t do that here. I claim this even if Nonlinear’s upcoming rebuttal proves to be very convincing.
I don’t want a community where we need extremely high burdens of proof to publish true bad things about people. That’s bad for everyone (except the offenders), but especially for the vulnerable people who fall prey to the people doing the bad things because they happen not to have access to the relevant rumor mill. It’s also toxic to our overall epistemics as a community, as it predictably and dramatically skews the available evidence we have to form opinions about people.
Agreed on all counts.