This comment on the LessWrong forums strikes me as a compelling rebuttal here. I don’t deny that the effects of defamation-focused civil litigation can be devastating, but the effects of defamation itself are often at least as bad. Before making this post, which caused enormous reputational damage to Nonlinear (a group I heard about only through this drama), Ben spent a total of three hours hearing their responses and refused to give them requested time to make more of their side clear in advance. Inasmuch as he got anything wrong in it, the errors are serious and have caused serious damage of precisely the sort that courts are a last-resort remedy for.
People should not feel like they have no recourse beyond submitting to the court of public opinion, with all its flaws and biases. I’m mostly an outsider to the EA community, and while I respect the people within it as clear thinkers, I don’t trust “keep it in the family” as the sole approach with EA more than I do in any other community. I believe that in a case like this, a threat of a defamation lawsuit should be seen not as a dramatic escalation, but as a predictable and proportionate response to a threat to destroy someone’s reputation within their own community, independent of the merits of either party’s claim. It’s not straightforwardly clear to me that one causes more devastation than the other.
This comment on the LessWrong forums strikes me as a compelling rebuttal here. I don’t deny that the effects of defamation-focused civil litigation can be devastating, but the effects of defamation itself are often at least as bad. Before making this post, which caused enormous reputational damage to Nonlinear (a group I heard about only through this drama), Ben spent a total of three hours hearing their responses and refused to give them requested time to make more of their side clear in advance. Inasmuch as he got anything wrong in it, the errors are serious and have caused serious damage of precisely the sort that courts are a last-resort remedy for.
People should not feel like they have no recourse beyond submitting to the court of public opinion, with all its flaws and biases. I’m mostly an outsider to the EA community, and while I respect the people within it as clear thinkers, I don’t trust “keep it in the family” as the sole approach with EA more than I do in any other community. I believe that in a case like this, a threat of a defamation lawsuit should be seen not as a dramatic escalation, but as a predictable and proportionate response to a threat to destroy someone’s reputation within their own community, independent of the merits of either party’s claim. It’s not straightforwardly clear to me that one causes more devastation than the other.