A note on EA posts as (amateur) investigative journalism:
When passions are running high, it can be helpful to take a step back and assess what’s going on here a little more objectively.
There are all different kinds of EA Forum posts that we evaluate using different criteria. Some posts announce new funding opportunities; we evaluate these in terms of brevity, clarity, relevance, and useful links for applicants. Some posts are introduce a new potential EA cause area; we evaluate them in terms of whether they make a good empirical case for the cause area being large-scope, neglected, and tractable. Some posts raise a theoretical issues in moral philosophy; we evaluate those in terms of technical philosophical criteria such as logical coherence.
This post by Ben Pace is very unusual, in that it’s basically investigative journalism, reporting the alleged problems with one particular organization and two of its leaders. The author doesn’t explicitly frame it this way, but in his discussion of how many people he talked to, how much time he spent working on it, and how important he believes the alleged problems are, it’s clearly a sort of investigative journalism.
So, let’s assess the post by the usual standards of investigative journalism. I don’t offer any answers to the questions below, but I’d like to raise some issues that might help us evaluate how good the post is, if taken seriously as a work of investigative journalism.
Does the author have any training, experience, or accountability as an investigative journalist, so they can avoid the most common pitfalls, in terms of journalist ethics, due diligence, appropriate degrees of skepticism about what sources say, etc?
Did the author have any appropriate oversight, in terms of an editor ensuring that they were fair and balanced, or a fact-checking team that reached out independently to verify empirical claims, quotes, and background context? Did they ‘run it by legal’, in terms of checking for potential libel issues?
Does the author have any personal relationship to any of their key sources? Any personal or professional conflicts of interest? Any personal agenda? Was their payment of money to anonymous sources appropriate and ethical?
Were the anonymous sources credible? Did they have any personal or professional incentives to make false allegations? Are they mentally healthy, stable, and responsible? Does the author have significant experience judging the relative merits of contradictory claims by different sources with different degrees of credibility and conflicts of interest?
Did the author give the key targets of their negative coverage sufficient time and opportunity to respond to their allegations, and were their responses fully incorporated into the resulting piece, such that the overall content and tone of the coverage was fair and balanced?
Does the piece offer a coherent narrative that’s clearly organized according to a timeline of events, interactions, claims, counter-claims, and outcomes? Does the piece show ‘scope-sensitivity’ in accurately judging the relative badness of different actions by different people and organizations, in terms of which things are actually trivial, which may have been unethical but not illegal, and which would be prosecutable in a court of law?
Does the piece conform to accepted journalist standards in terms of truth, balance, open-mindedness, context-sensitivity, newsworthiness, credibility of sources, and avoidance of libel? (Or is it a biased article that presupposed its negative conclusions, aka a ‘hit piece’, ‘takedown’, or ‘hatchet job’).
Would this post meet the standards of investigative journalism that’s typically published in mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Economist?
I don’t know the answers to some of these, although I have personal hunches about others. But that’s not what’s important here.
What’s important is that if we publish amateur investigative journalism in EA Forum, especially when there are very high stakes for the reputations of individuals and organizations, we should try to adhere, as closely as possible, to the standards of professional investigative journalism. Why? Because professional journalists have learned, from centuries of copious, bitter, hard-won experience, that it’s very hard to maintain good epistemic standards when writing these kinds of pieces, it’s very tempting to buy into the narratives of certain sources and informants, it’s very hard to course-correct when contradictory information comes to light, and it’s very important to be professionally accountable for truth and balance.
The answer to many of your questions is no, I have little former professional experience at this sort of investigation! (I had also never run an office before Lightcone Office, never run a web forum before LessWrong, and never run a conference before EAGxOxford 2016.)
My general attitude to doing new projects that I think should be done and nobody else is doing them is captured in this quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky that I think about often:
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that the important things are accomplished not by those best suited to do them, or by those who ought to be responsible for doing them, but by whoever actually shows up.
PS for those folks who disagree-voted with my post:
My key takeaway was ‘if we publish amateur investigative journalism in EA Forum, especially when there are very high stakes for the reputations of individuals and organizations, we should try to adhere, as closely as possible, to the standards of professional investigative journalism.’
Do you disagree with that conclusion?
Or with some other specific aspect of what I wrote?
I read your comment as applying insanely high quality requirements to what’s already an absolutely thankless task. The result of applying your standards would be that the OP would not get written. In a world where criticism is too expensive, it won’t get produced. This is good if the criticism is substance-less, but bad if it’s of substance.
Also, professional journalists are paid for their work. In case of posts like these, who is supposed to pay the wages and provide the manpower to fulfill requirements like “running it by legal”? Are we going to ask all EA organisations to pay into a whistleblower fund, or what?
Also, for many standards and codes of ethics, their main purpose is not to provide a public good, or to improve epistemics, but to protect the professionals themselves. (For example, I sure wish doctors would tell patients if any of their colleagues should be avoided, but this is just not done.) So unequivocally adhering to such professional standards is not the right goal to strive for.
I also read your comment as containing a bunch of leading questions that presupposed a negative conclusion. Over eight paragraphs of questions, you’re questioning the author and his sources, but the only time you question the source of the investigation is when it puts them in a positive light. Thus I found the following phrasing disingenious: “I don’t know the answers to some of these, although I have personal hunches about others. But that’s not what’s important here.”
Overall, I would be more sympathetic towards your perspective if the EA Forum was drowning in this kind of, as you call it, amateur investigative journalism. But I don’t think we suffer from an oversupply. To the contrary, we could’ve used a lot more of that before FTX blew up.
Finally, instead of the decision-making algorithm of judging by the standards of professional investigative journalism, I suggest an alternative algorithm more like “does this standard make outcomes like FTX more or less likely”. I think your suggestion makes it more likely.
Are we going to ask all EA organisations to pay into a whistleblower fund, or what?
This seems worth considering. Or, considering how concentrated EA funding is anyway, having an independent org funded by EA funders fulfilling this role.
I disagree with that conclusion. For example, I think it’s fine to investigate something and write up your conclusions without having training as an investigative journalist, even if your conclusions make someone else look bad.
So, you don’t think amateur investigative journalism should even try to adhere to the standards of professional investigative journalism? (That’s the crux of my argument—I’m obviously not saying that everybody needs to be a trained investigative journalist to publish these kinds of pieces on EA Forum)
So, you don’t think amateur investigative journalism should even try to adhere to the standards of professional investigative journalism?
That’s not what I said. I said “I think it’s fine to investigate something and write up your conclusions without having training as an investigative journalist” in response to the first thing you proposed as a way to evaluate the piece: “Does the author have any training, experience, or accountability as an investigative journalist, so they can avoid the most common pitfalls, in terms of journalist ethics, due diligence, appropriate degrees of skepticism about what sources say, etc?”
I don’t know what the standards of professional investigative journalism are, so I’m unable to say whether amateur investigative journalism should try to adhere to them.
[EDIT: I can say what I think about the standards you propose in replies to this comment]
Did they ‘run it by legal’, in terms of checking for potential libel issues?
If Ben wants to assume liability for libel lawsuits, I don’t see why he should be prevented from doing so. In the domain of professional investigative journalism, I can see why a company would have this standard, since the company may not want to be held liable for things an individual journalist rashly said, but that strikes me as inapplicable in this case.
(Incidentally, it seems like this is probably a standard of professional investigative journalism that I don’t think amateur investigative journalism should attempt to adhere to)
Does the author have any personal relationship to any of their key sources? Any personal or professional conflicts of interest? Any personal agenda? Was their payment of money to anonymous sources appropriate and ethical?
These seem like reasonable questions to ask. I whole-heartedly agree that such amateur journalists should only make payments that are appropriate and ethical—in fact, this strikes me as tautological.
Would this post meet the standards of investigative journalism that’s typically published in mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Economist?
I’m not exactly sure what this means, not being aware of what those standards are. It does strike me that IIUC those venues typically attempt to cover issues of national or international importance (or in the case of the NYT and WaPo, issues of importance to New York City or Washington, DC), and that’s probably the wrong bar for importance for whether someone should publish something on the EA forum or LessWrong.
Anyway, hope these responses satisfy your curiosity!
Definitely more plausible, but as a rule, “whenever you engage in some risky activity, you should do it to the standards of the top organizations who do it” doesn’t seem a priori plausible.
Were the anonymous sources credible? Did they have any personal or professional incentives to make false allegations? Are they mentally healthy, stable, and responsible?
I think the first two questions make sense as good criteria (altho criteria that are hard to judge externally). As for the last question, I think somebody could be depressed and routinely show up late to events while still being a good anonymous source, altho for some kinds of mental unhealth, instability, and irresponsibility, I see how they could be disqualifying.
Does the author have significant experience judging the relative merits of contradictory claims by different sources with different degrees of credibility and conflicts of interest?
I think most of us have been in situations where different people have told us different things about some topic, and those different people have had different degrees of credibility and conflict of interest? At any rate, I’m more interested in whether the piece is right than whether the author has had experience.
Does the piece offer a coherent narrative that’s clearly organized according to a timeline of events, interactions, claims, counter-claims, and outcomes?
I think organization is a virtue, but not a must for a piece to be accurate or worth reading.
Does the piece show ‘scope-sensitivity’ in accurately judging the relative badness of different actions by different people and organizations, in terms of which things are actually trivial, which may have been unethical but not illegal, and which would be prosecutable in a court of law?
Did the author have any appropriate oversight, in terms of an editor ensuring that they were fair and balanced, or a fact-checking team that reached out independently to verify empirical claims, quotes, and background context?
I think it’s fine to attempt to do these sorts of things yourself, as long as you don’t make serious errors, and as long as you correct errors that pop up along the way.
Does the piece conform to accepted journalist standards in terms of truth, balance, open-mindedness, context-sensitivity, newsworthiness, credibility of sources, and avoidance of libel? (Or is it a biased article that presupposed its negative conclusions, aka a ‘hit piece’, ‘takedown’, or ‘hatchet job’).
As a consumer of journalism, it strikes me that different venues have different such standards, so I’m not really sure what your first question is supposed to mean. Regarding your parenthetical, I think presupposing negative (or positive!) conclusions is to be avoided, and I endorse negatively judging pieces that do that.
Did the author give the key targets of their negative coverage sufficient time and opportunity to respond to their allegations, and were their responses fully incorporated into the resulting piece, such that the overall content and tone of the coverage was fair and balanced?
Given the prominence of the comments sections in the venues where this piece has been published, I’d say allowing the targets to comment satisfies the value expressed by this. At any rate, I do think it’s good to incorporate responses from the targets of the coverage (as was done here), and I think that the overall tone of the coverage should be fair. I don’t know what “balance” is supposed to convey beyond fairness: I think that responses from the targets would ideally be reported where relevant and accurate, but otherwise I don’t think that e.g. half the piece should have to be praising the targets.
I generally dislike “hew to The Established Code of This Profession”, as opposed to “this group thought about this a lot and underwent a lot of trial by fire and came up with these specific guidelines, and I can articulate the costs of benefits of individual rules.”
Investigative journalism doesn’t strike me as particularly ethical, so their code doesn’t seem to be working that well.
″ When passions are running high, it can be helpful to take a step back and assess what’s going on here a little more objectively” is a strong frame you haven’t earned. I would always object to “I’m the cool objective one” as a reason to believe someone absent evidence, but I especially dislike that you made such a claim implicitly.
Does the author have any personal relationship to any of their key sources? Any personal or professional conflicts of interest? Any personal agenda? Was their payment of money to anonymous sources appropriate and ethical?
I had never heard Alice or Chloe’s names before Kat told me them the first time. I have a fairly strong second-degree connection with Chloe. I had met Kat once before she visited the Lightcone Offices, having one ~20 min conversation with her at Palmcone, an event Lightcone ran in the Bahamas. I had never met Emerson or Drew. I interviewed many people, for most of them we’d never spoken before and for some of them we had a bit. A few of them had spent time at the Lightcone Offices. Wishing them all well, I wouldn’t have described any of the interviewees as “my friend” before the call. Some chance I am forgetting someone here.
Also later on in the investigation I noticed that one friend of mine had been somewhat close to being hired at Nonlinear, and at the time I had given them some small recommendation to accept the job. I kind of wish I had done this in some valiant defense of my friend’s honor and potential harm, but I have to say I basically didn’t think about that aspect at all and had mostly forgotten that it happened.
I appreciate the frame of this post and the question it proposes, it’s worth considering. The questions I’d want to address before fully buying though is: 1) Are the standard of investigative journalism actually good for their purpose? Or they did get distorted along the way for the same reason lots of regulated/standardized things do (e.g. building codes) 2) Supposing they’re good for their purpose, does that really apply not in mainstream media, but rather a smaller community.
I think answering (2), we really do have a tricky false positive/false negative tradeoff. If you raise the bar for sharing critical information, you increase the likelihood of important info not getting shared. If you lower the bar, you increase the likelihood of false things getting out.
Currently, I think we should likely lower the bar, anyone (not saying you actually are) advocating higher levels of rigor before sharing are mistaken. EA has limited infrastructure for investigating and dealing with complaints like this (I doubt Ben/Lightcone colllectively would have consciously upfront thought it was worth 150 hours of Ben’s time, it kind of more happened/snowballed). We don’t have good mean of soliciting and propagating or getting things adjudicated. Given that, I think someone writes a blog post is pretty good, and pretty valuable.
If I’d been the one investigating and writing, I think I’d have published something much less thoroughly researched after 10-15 hours to say “I have some bad critical info I’m pretty sure of that’s worth people knowing, and I have no better way to get the right communal updates than just sharing”.
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.
A note on EA posts as (amateur) investigative journalism:
When passions are running high, it can be helpful to take a step back and assess what’s going on here a little more objectively.
There are all different kinds of EA Forum posts that we evaluate using different criteria. Some posts announce new funding opportunities; we evaluate these in terms of brevity, clarity, relevance, and useful links for applicants. Some posts are introduce a new potential EA cause area; we evaluate them in terms of whether they make a good empirical case for the cause area being large-scope, neglected, and tractable. Some posts raise a theoretical issues in moral philosophy; we evaluate those in terms of technical philosophical criteria such as logical coherence.
This post by Ben Pace is very unusual, in that it’s basically investigative journalism, reporting the alleged problems with one particular organization and two of its leaders. The author doesn’t explicitly frame it this way, but in his discussion of how many people he talked to, how much time he spent working on it, and how important he believes the alleged problems are, it’s clearly a sort of investigative journalism.
So, let’s assess the post by the usual standards of investigative journalism. I don’t offer any answers to the questions below, but I’d like to raise some issues that might help us evaluate how good the post is, if taken seriously as a work of investigative journalism.
Does the author have any training, experience, or accountability as an investigative journalist, so they can avoid the most common pitfalls, in terms of journalist ethics, due diligence, appropriate degrees of skepticism about what sources say, etc?
Did the author have any appropriate oversight, in terms of an editor ensuring that they were fair and balanced, or a fact-checking team that reached out independently to verify empirical claims, quotes, and background context? Did they ‘run it by legal’, in terms of checking for potential libel issues?
Does the author have any personal relationship to any of their key sources? Any personal or professional conflicts of interest? Any personal agenda? Was their payment of money to anonymous sources appropriate and ethical?
Were the anonymous sources credible? Did they have any personal or professional incentives to make false allegations? Are they mentally healthy, stable, and responsible? Does the author have significant experience judging the relative merits of contradictory claims by different sources with different degrees of credibility and conflicts of interest?
Did the author give the key targets of their negative coverage sufficient time and opportunity to respond to their allegations, and were their responses fully incorporated into the resulting piece, such that the overall content and tone of the coverage was fair and balanced?
Does the piece offer a coherent narrative that’s clearly organized according to a timeline of events, interactions, claims, counter-claims, and outcomes? Does the piece show ‘scope-sensitivity’ in accurately judging the relative badness of different actions by different people and organizations, in terms of which things are actually trivial, which may have been unethical but not illegal, and which would be prosecutable in a court of law?
Does the piece conform to accepted journalist standards in terms of truth, balance, open-mindedness, context-sensitivity, newsworthiness, credibility of sources, and avoidance of libel? (Or is it a biased article that presupposed its negative conclusions, aka a ‘hit piece’, ‘takedown’, or ‘hatchet job’).
Would this post meet the standards of investigative journalism that’s typically published in mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Economist?
I don’t know the answers to some of these, although I have personal hunches about others. But that’s not what’s important here.
What’s important is that if we publish amateur investigative journalism in EA Forum, especially when there are very high stakes for the reputations of individuals and organizations, we should try to adhere, as closely as possible, to the standards of professional investigative journalism. Why? Because professional journalists have learned, from centuries of copious, bitter, hard-won experience, that it’s very hard to maintain good epistemic standards when writing these kinds of pieces, it’s very tempting to buy into the narratives of certain sources and informants, it’s very hard to course-correct when contradictory information comes to light, and it’s very important to be professionally accountable for truth and balance.
The answer to many of your questions is no, I have little former professional experience at this sort of investigation! (I had also never run an office before Lightcone Office, never run a web forum before LessWrong, and never run a conference before EAGxOxford 2016.)
My general attitude to doing new projects that I think should be done and nobody else is doing them is captured in this quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky that I think about often:
PS for those folks who disagree-voted with my post:
My key takeaway was ‘if we publish amateur investigative journalism in EA Forum, especially when there are very high stakes for the reputations of individuals and organizations, we should try to adhere, as closely as possible, to the standards of professional investigative journalism.’
Do you disagree with that conclusion?
Or with some other specific aspect of what I wrote?
Genuinely curious.
Let me justify my complete disagreement.
I read your comment as applying insanely high quality requirements to what’s already an absolutely thankless task. The result of applying your standards would be that the OP would not get written. In a world where criticism is too expensive, it won’t get produced. This is good if the criticism is substance-less, but bad if it’s of substance.
Also, professional journalists are paid for their work. In case of posts like these, who is supposed to pay the wages and provide the manpower to fulfill requirements like “running it by legal”? Are we going to ask all EA organisations to pay into a whistleblower fund, or what?
Also, for many standards and codes of ethics, their main purpose is not to provide a public good, or to improve epistemics, but to protect the professionals themselves. (For example, I sure wish doctors would tell patients if any of their colleagues should be avoided, but this is just not done.) So unequivocally adhering to such professional standards is not the right goal to strive for.
I also read your comment as containing a bunch of leading questions that presupposed a negative conclusion. Over eight paragraphs of questions, you’re questioning the author and his sources, but the only time you question the source of the investigation is when it puts them in a positive light. Thus I found the following phrasing disingenious: “I don’t know the answers to some of these, although I have personal hunches about others. But that’s not what’s important here.”
Overall, I would be more sympathetic towards your perspective if the EA Forum was drowning in this kind of, as you call it, amateur investigative journalism. But I don’t think we suffer from an oversupply. To the contrary, we could’ve used a lot more of that before FTX blew up.
Finally, instead of the decision-making algorithm of judging by the standards of professional investigative journalism, I suggest an alternative algorithm more like “does this standard make outcomes like FTX more or less likely”. I think your suggestion makes it more likely.
This seems worth considering. Or, considering how concentrated EA funding is anyway, having an independent org funded by EA funders fulfilling this role.
I disagree with that conclusion. For example, I think it’s fine to investigate something and write up your conclusions without having training as an investigative journalist, even if your conclusions make someone else look bad.
So, you don’t think amateur investigative journalism should even try to adhere to the standards of professional investigative journalism? (That’s the crux of my argument—I’m obviously not saying that everybody needs to be a trained investigative journalist to publish these kinds of pieces on EA Forum)
That’s not what I said. I said “I think it’s fine to investigate something and write up your conclusions without having training as an investigative journalist” in response to the first thing you proposed as a way to evaluate the piece: “Does the author have any training, experience, or accountability as an investigative journalist, so they can avoid the most common pitfalls, in terms of journalist ethics, due diligence, appropriate degrees of skepticism about what sources say, etc?”
I don’t know what the standards of professional investigative journalism are, so I’m unable to say whether amateur investigative journalism should try to adhere to them.
[EDIT: I can say what I think about the standards you propose in replies to this comment]
If Ben wants to assume liability for libel lawsuits, I don’t see why he should be prevented from doing so. In the domain of professional investigative journalism, I can see why a company would have this standard, since the company may not want to be held liable for things an individual journalist rashly said, but that strikes me as inapplicable in this case.
(Incidentally, it seems like this is probably a standard of professional investigative journalism that I don’t think amateur investigative journalism should attempt to adhere to)
These seem like reasonable questions to ask. I whole-heartedly agree that such amateur journalists should only make payments that are appropriate and ethical—in fact, this strikes me as tautological.
I’m not exactly sure what this means, not being aware of what those standards are. It does strike me that IIUC those venues typically attempt to cover issues of national or international importance (or in the case of the NYT and WaPo, issues of importance to New York City or Washington, DC), and that’s probably the wrong bar for importance for whether someone should publish something on the EA forum or LessWrong.
Anyway, hope these responses satisfy your curiosity!
A version of this focusing on reliability of the investigation, quality of the evidence, etc is a much more plausible version though.
Definitely more plausible, but as a rule, “whenever you engage in some risky activity, you should do it to the standards of the top organizations who do it” doesn’t seem a priori plausible.
I think the first two questions make sense as good criteria (altho criteria that are hard to judge externally). As for the last question, I think somebody could be depressed and routinely show up late to events while still being a good anonymous source, altho for some kinds of mental unhealth, instability, and irresponsibility, I see how they could be disqualifying.
I think most of us have been in situations where different people have told us different things about some topic, and those different people have had different degrees of credibility and conflict of interest? At any rate, I’m more interested in whether the piece is right than whether the author has had experience.
I think organization is a virtue, but not a must for a piece to be accurate or worth reading.
This strikes me as a good standard.
I think it’s fine to attempt to do these sorts of things yourself, as long as you don’t make serious errors, and as long as you correct errors that pop up along the way.
As a consumer of journalism, it strikes me that different venues have different such standards, so I’m not really sure what your first question is supposed to mean. Regarding your parenthetical, I think presupposing negative (or positive!) conclusions is to be avoided, and I endorse negatively judging pieces that do that.
Given the prominence of the comments sections in the venues where this piece has been published, I’d say allowing the targets to comment satisfies the value expressed by this. At any rate, I do think it’s good to incorporate responses from the targets of the coverage (as was done here), and I think that the overall tone of the coverage should be fair. I don’t know what “balance” is supposed to convey beyond fairness: I think that responses from the targets would ideally be reported where relevant and accurate, but otherwise I don’t think that e.g. half the piece should have to be praising the targets.
I disagree-voted because:
I generally dislike “hew to The Established Code of This Profession”, as opposed to “this group thought about this a lot and underwent a lot of trial by fire and came up with these specific guidelines, and I can articulate the costs of benefits of individual rules.”
Investigative journalism doesn’t strike me as particularly ethical, so their code doesn’t seem to be working that well.
″ When passions are running high, it can be helpful to take a step back and assess what’s going on here a little more objectively” is a strong frame you haven’t earned. I would always object to “I’m the cool objective one” as a reason to believe someone absent evidence, but I especially dislike that you made such a claim implicitly.
To answer this question:
I had never heard Alice or Chloe’s names before Kat told me them the first time. I have a fairly strong second-degree connection with Chloe. I had met Kat once before she visited the Lightcone Offices, having one ~20 min conversation with her at Palmcone, an event Lightcone ran in the Bahamas. I had never met Emerson or Drew. I interviewed many people, for most of them we’d never spoken before and for some of them we had a bit. A few of them had spent time at the Lightcone Offices. Wishing them all well, I wouldn’t have described any of the interviewees as “my friend” before the call. Some chance I am forgetting someone here.
Also later on in the investigation I noticed that one friend of mine had been somewhat close to being hired at Nonlinear, and at the time I had given them some small recommendation to accept the job. I kind of wish I had done this in some valiant defense of my friend’s honor and potential harm, but I have to say I basically didn’t think about that aspect at all and had mostly forgotten that it happened.
I appreciate the frame of this post and the question it proposes, it’s worth considering. The questions I’d want to address before fully buying though is:
1) Are the standard of investigative journalism actually good for their purpose? Or they did get distorted along the way for the same reason lots of regulated/standardized things do (e.g. building codes)
2) Supposing they’re good for their purpose, does that really apply not in mainstream media, but rather a smaller community.
I think answering (2), we really do have a tricky false positive/false negative tradeoff. If you raise the bar for sharing critical information, you increase the likelihood of important info not getting shared. If you lower the bar, you increase the likelihood of false things getting out.
Currently, I think we should likely lower the bar, anyone (not saying you actually are) advocating higher levels of rigor before sharing are mistaken. EA has limited infrastructure for investigating and dealing with complaints like this (I doubt Ben/Lightcone colllectively would have consciously upfront thought it was worth 150 hours of Ben’s time, it kind of more happened/snowballed). We don’t have good mean of soliciting and propagating or getting things adjudicated. Given that, I think someone writes a blog post is pretty good, and pretty valuable.
If I’d been the one investigating and writing, I think I’d have published something much less thoroughly researched after 10-15 hours to say “I have some bad critical info I’m pretty sure of that’s worth people knowing, and I have no better way to get the right communal updates than just sharing”.
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.