I think this is unacceptable, and unless serious evidence appears that Ben behaved dishonestly in a way nobody seems to currently be claiming (e.g. if he had personally doctored the texts from Kat to add incriminating phrases), I think filing this kind of lawsuit would be cause for the EA community to permanently cut all ties with Nonlinear and with Emerson in particular. I believe this even if it turns out Nonlinear has evidence that the main claims in the post are false.
[Edit 12/15/23 -- Nonlinear’s update makes stronger claims about Ben’s actions than I’d seen anyone make when I wrote this, so I’m crossing out “in a way nobody seems to currently be claiming” because it’s no longer accurate. So the applicability of this argument hinges a lot more on the “unless” clause now. ]
Reasoning: I think the question of whether Ben should have waited a week is difficult, and I have felt differently about it at different times over the past few days. But the question of whether the choice he made was justifiable is easy: the people he spoke to seem to be terrified of retaliation, and he has at least two strong pieces of direct evidence (Kat’s text, Emerson’s lawsuit threat) and several pieces of indirect evidence (Emerson’s stories about behavior that while legal strike me as highly unethical, Kat offering a very vulnerable Alice housing only under the condition that she not say mean things about Nonlinear, some of the Glassdoor comments) that these fears of retaliation are well-founded. The fear of that Emerson or Nonlinear might retaliate in some way in the intervening week to stop the post from being posted seems very reasonable to me, and acting on this fear is justifiable even if it overall turned out to be the wrong choice.
Even if you think Ben made the wrong decision (I currently think maybe he did?), the question is not whether he was correct but whether his choice was so unacceptable that it’s appropriate to respond in a way that has a high risk of direct financially ruining him (defamation lawsuits are notoriously a tool used by abusers to silence their critics because the costs of defense are so high, and based on Emerson’s business experience I am unwilling to believe he doesn’t know this.) It clearly wasn’t, and I think it’s imperative we make clear that using expensive lawsuits to win arguments is utterly unacceptable in a community like this one.
I think Habryka has mentioned that Lightcone could withstand a defamation suit, so there’s not a high chance of financially ruining him. I am tentatively in agreement otherwise though.
True! But for the record I definitely don’t have remotely enough personal wealth to cover such a suit. So if libel suits are permissible then you may only hear about credible accusations from people on teams who are willing to back the financial cost, the number of which in my estimation is currently close to 1.
Added: I don’t mean to be more pessimistic than is accurate. I am genuinely uncertain to what extent people will have my back if a lawsuit comes up (Manifold has it at 13%), and my uncertainty range does include “actually quite a lot of people are willing to spend their money to defend my and others’ ability to openly share info like this”.
Surely this would depend on what evidence is revealed in a week? It seems kind of strange to me to see how confident people are in their opinions without knowing what this evidence is (I say this as someone who has already stated that they don’t see any way that Nonlinear leadership comes out of this looking good given what they have already admitted).
Disclaimer: I previously interned at Nonlinear. This comment previously said that I didn’t have knowledge of what information Nonlinear is yet to release, but then I just realised that I actually do know a few things.
I don’t think this is right—whether it’s okay to sue Ben surely depends on the information Ben had at the time of making his decision, not information he didn’t have access to?
It doesn’t seem accurate to characterise Ben as not having access to information if they promise to send it over as soon as they can and a) they don’t unduly delay b) there is no urgent need to publish.
I guess I see Ben as making a bet that the yet-to-revealed information ends up being underwhelming and it feels to me that if he ends up being wrong then some of the downside should accrue to him.
That said, I would really rather not see anyone sue anyone here as it’d be rather damaging to the community.
At the same time, it feels a bit inconsistent to simultaneously be like “you can’t sue me, this is a high-trust community” and “I can’t be bothered waiting a week to see your evidence”. Part of the reason why this is a high-trust community is that people agree to reasonable requests when they are able to.
I would feel differently if Alice or Chloe had written the post themselves as they have direct experience of what happened, but as a third party, I think that Ben probably should have waited.
Before I agree-voted here, this comment had three disagree votes and no agree votes. Are the people who disagree-voted missing the fact that Ben had a 3h conversation with Emerson(? I think, otherwise Kat) about all the allegations? Surely, if you think something about Ben’s summary of his findings is so massively wrong that it warrants a libel lawsuit threat, it would have come up in that 3h conversation. Besides, Ben’s post already makes it clear that Emerson and Kat dispute Alice’s judgment, so it’s not like he’s knowingly lying about things with intent to do harm (requirement for a libel lawsuit to be justified). Instead, he’s just recounting things his sources said with some IMO pretty sane-seeming caveats about what seems more contentious or less contentious. Even if some of that turns out to be more misleading than the average reader would expect before Nonlinear provides more info from their side of things, that doesn’t seem anywhere close to something that warrants this sort of escalation. So, I’m taken aback by what I perceive to be some community members being taken in by cheap tactics. To think that a lawsuit threat has even just a shred of legitimacy here strikes me as totally insane. That lawsuit threat is such an obvious red flag in my view.
Quick thing to re-emphasize. It was not saying we’d sue if they posted. It was saying if they posted without giving us a week to send them the evidence that we thought would largely update the post they wrote.
Ben’s post has already been changed in many ways based on our conversation and the information we showed him on the call. It seems like basic truth-seeking behavior to hear the other side and see counter-evidence.
He sent us the draft on a day he knew we were traveling and had sketchy internet, and that one of our members was sick. He’d had months and hundreds of hours to gather evidence for and write a >10k word post and he gave us a day to respond on a day he knew we were unable to respond well.
We were traveling that entire day (which he knew) and when we asked why there was a rush, couldn’t he wait a week for more information that might sizeably update him, he said he couldn’t wait and wouldn’t tell us why.
We were not asking him not to post. We were asking him to see our evidence before posting.
I think this is a really important distinction.
We were not suppressing evidence, but trying to share it.
And they were refusing to look at it and did not care at all about the effects this would have on our ability to do good in the future. And also despite the fact that after they posted and paid the ex-employees (before they saw our evidence), this would make it psychologically impossible for them to update.
“Alice worked there from November 2021 to June 2022” became “Alice travelled with Nonlinear from November 2021 to June 2022 and started working for the org from around February”
“using Lightcone funds” became “using personal funds”
Your claim
Importantly, his original post (he’s quietly redacted a lot of points since publishing) had a lot of falsehoods that he knew were not true. He has since removed some of them after the fact, but those have still been causing us damage.
seems false. Possibly I made a mistake, or Ben made edits and you saw them and then Ben reverted them—if so, I encourage you/anyone to point to another specific edit, possibly on other archive.org versions.
Update: Kat guesses she was thinking of changes from a near-final draft rather than changes from the first published version.
Those do seem like significant differences, and at least the 1st one is something that the Nonlinear team were asking to be corrected as very relevant to the sick Alice situation. It is an update for me that they were correct.
The email is contradictory as to whether the desire to sue is based on the content of the post or the duration before posting, with I belief the former appearing first in the email.
The line I’m referring to is “if published as is we intend to pursue legal action”. That is consistent with being fine with him publishing at all, but not consistent with being fine if he decides to not change anything in the post after getting all the facts in a week.
Combining this line with the ones you mentioned gives the impression that the message you’re trying to convey is ‘what Ben has written is false and libellous, we have asked him to wait a week so he can correct his post before publishing, after getting all the facts. If he doesn’t do boththese things, we intend to sue’, and I think it’s reasonable for anyone to have interpreted it this way, even if that’s not what you intended.
As has been said elsewhere by William Bradshaw, this threat makes me a lot (perhaps even something near his 98%) less likely to sympathize and want to support them with where they’re at.
Oliver seems to be handling the threat super well, but as he mentions, those who made this complaint likely don’t have the resources to fend off such an attack, seeming to prove Ben’s point that he had to do it, because how could anyone expect them to if Emerson is still willing to lash out and attack a respected EA org?
But I’m also biased perhaps, because I agree with Rockwell’s plea that we don’t turn into a group that uses litigation to settle our differences. Prove Ben was wrong and said this to hurt Nonlinear in a forum post, or in argument, and I’ll happily come to your cause. Use the money that you have to sue him and Lightcone “to the maximum legal amount” and you’ve given me nearly no pathway to believe in you or your cause.
Geoffrey Miller does point out that the law exists to keep good norms around sharing negative information widely, but I’m apt to agree with Oliver that this more often likely has a chilling effect, and that those norms should be incorporated at the level of the community, in the court of EA public opinion.
One thing I’m confused about: Emerson is the one making threats, so how do I update on the rest of the Nonlinear team? The negative view is that they are moving in different ways in lockstep, hoping if they attack the issue from all sides (from being nice to threatening legal action) it will be more likely to go away. The charitable view is that both Drew and Kat have gotten involved with someone who has some deep personal issues, but who likely has done much positive and good in their lives and has played a big part of it for awhile now, thus wanting to support him is a behavior any good family would undertake, working privately to reign in the more negative outbursts.
Yeah I agree. One update for me: Ben’s new post seems to imply that Drew is not implicated in most of this, and that seems in line with some of the comments, so I’m really tentative in updating at all on him and where he’s at.
Poll: Was Emerson threatening legal action (suing for defamation) against Ben and his employer (Lightcone) for this being posted a good choice?
(agreevote if you think so, disagreevote if you don’t, comment with your reasoning if you’d like)
I think this is unacceptable, and unless serious evidence appears that Ben behaved dishonestly
in a way nobody seems to currently be claiming(e.g. if he had personally doctored the texts from Kat to add incriminating phrases), I think filing this kind of lawsuit would be cause for the EA community to permanently cut all ties with Nonlinear and with Emerson in particular. I believe this even if it turns out Nonlinear has evidence that the main claims in the post are false.[Edit 12/15/23 -- Nonlinear’s update makes stronger claims about Ben’s actions than I’d seen anyone make when I wrote this, so I’m crossing out “in a way nobody seems to currently be claiming” because it’s no longer accurate. So the applicability of this argument hinges a lot more on the “unless” clause now. ]
Reasoning: I think the question of whether Ben should have waited a week is difficult, and I have felt differently about it at different times over the past few days. But the question of whether the choice he made was justifiable is easy: the people he spoke to seem to be terrified of retaliation, and he has at least two strong pieces of direct evidence (Kat’s text, Emerson’s lawsuit threat) and several pieces of indirect evidence (Emerson’s stories about behavior that while legal strike me as highly unethical, Kat offering a very vulnerable Alice housing only under the condition that she not say mean things about Nonlinear, some of the Glassdoor comments) that these fears of retaliation are well-founded. The fear of that Emerson or Nonlinear might retaliate in some way in the intervening week to stop the post from being posted seems very reasonable to me, and acting on this fear is justifiable even if it overall turned out to be the wrong choice.
Even if you think Ben made the wrong decision (I currently think maybe he did?), the question is not whether he was correct but whether his choice was so unacceptable that it’s appropriate to respond in a way that has a high risk of direct financially ruining him (defamation lawsuits are notoriously a tool used by abusers to silence their critics because the costs of defense are so high, and based on Emerson’s business experience I am unwilling to believe he doesn’t know this.) It clearly wasn’t, and I think it’s imperative we make clear that using expensive lawsuits to win arguments is utterly unacceptable in a community like this one.
I think Habryka has mentioned that Lightcone could withstand a defamation suit, so there’s not a high chance of financially ruining him. I am tentatively in agreement otherwise though.
True! But for the record I definitely don’t have remotely enough personal wealth to cover such a suit. So if libel suits are permissible then you may only hear about credible accusations from people on teams who are willing to back the financial cost, the number of which in my estimation is currently close to 1.
Added: I don’t mean to be more pessimistic than is accurate. I am genuinely uncertain to what extent people will have my back if a lawsuit comes up (Manifold has it at 13%), and my uncertainty range does include “actually quite a lot of people are willing to spend their money to defend my and others’ ability to openly share info like this”.
Surely this would depend on what evidence is revealed in a week? It seems kind of strange to me to see how confident people are in their opinions without knowing what this evidence is (I say this as someone who has already stated that they don’t see any way that Nonlinear leadership comes out of this looking good given what they have already admitted).
Disclaimer: I previously interned at Nonlinear. This comment previously said that I didn’t have knowledge of what information Nonlinear is yet to release, but then I just realised that I actually do know a few things.
I don’t think this is right—whether it’s okay to sue Ben surely depends on the information Ben had at the time of making his decision, not information he didn’t have access to?
It doesn’t seem accurate to characterise Ben as not having access to information if they promise to send it over as soon as they can and a) they don’t unduly delay b) there is no urgent need to publish.
I guess I see Ben as making a bet that the yet-to-revealed information ends up being underwhelming and it feels to me that if he ends up being wrong then some of the downside should accrue to him.
That said, I would really rather not see anyone sue anyone here as it’d be rather damaging to the community.
At the same time, it feels a bit inconsistent to simultaneously be like “you can’t sue me, this is a high-trust community” and “I can’t be bothered waiting a week to see your evidence”. Part of the reason why this is a high-trust community is that people agree to reasonable requests when they are able to.
I would feel differently if Alice or Chloe had written the post themselves as they have direct experience of what happened, but as a third party, I think that Ben probably should have waited.
Before I agree-voted here, this comment had three disagree votes and no agree votes. Are the people who disagree-voted missing the fact that Ben had a 3h conversation with Emerson(? I think, otherwise Kat) about all the allegations? Surely, if you think something about Ben’s summary of his findings is so massively wrong that it warrants a libel lawsuit threat, it would have come up in that 3h conversation. Besides, Ben’s post already makes it clear that Emerson and Kat dispute Alice’s judgment, so it’s not like he’s knowingly lying about things with intent to do harm (requirement for a libel lawsuit to be justified). Instead, he’s just recounting things his sources said with some IMO pretty sane-seeming caveats about what seems more contentious or less contentious. Even if some of that turns out to be more misleading than the average reader would expect before Nonlinear provides more info from their side of things, that doesn’t seem anywhere close to something that warrants this sort of escalation. So, I’m taken aback by what I perceive to be some community members being taken in by cheap tactics. To think that a lawsuit threat has even just a shred of legitimacy here strikes me as totally insane. That lawsuit threat is such an obvious red flag in my view.
Quick thing to re-emphasize. It was not saying we’d sue if they posted. It was saying if they posted without giving us a week to send them the evidence that we thought would largely update the post they wrote.
Ben’s post has already been changed in many ways based on our conversation and the information we showed him on the call. It seems like basic truth-seeking behavior to hear the other side and see counter-evidence.
He sent us the draft on a day he knew we were traveling and had sketchy internet, and that one of our members was sick. He’d had months and hundreds of hours to gather evidence for and write a >10k word post and he gave us a day to respond on a day he knew we were unable to respond well.
We were traveling that entire day (which he knew) and when we asked why there was a rush, couldn’t he wait a week for more information that might sizeably update him, he said he couldn’t wait and wouldn’t tell us why.
We were not asking him not to post. We were asking him to see our evidence before posting.
I think this is a really important distinction.
We were not suppressing evidence, but trying to share it.
And they were refusing to look at it and did not care at all about the effects this would have on our ability to do good in the future. And also despite the fact that after they posted and paid the ex-employees (before they saw our evidence), this would make it psychologically impossible for them to update.
I used a diff checker to find the differences between the current post and the original post. There seem to be two:
“Alice worked there from November 2021 to June 2022” became “Alice travelled with Nonlinear from November 2021 to June 2022 and started working for the org from around February”
“using Lightcone funds” became “using personal funds”
Your claim
seems false. Possibly I made a mistake, or Ben made edits and you saw them and then Ben reverted them—if so, I encourage you/anyone to point to another specific edit, possibly on other archive.org versions.
Update: Kat guesses she was thinking of changes from a near-final draft rather than changes from the first published version.
Those do seem like significant differences, and at least the 1st one is something that the Nonlinear team were asking to be corrected as very relevant to the sick Alice situation. It is an update for me that they were correct.
The email is contradictory as to whether the desire to sue is based on the content of the post or the duration before posting, with I belief the former appearing first in the email.
We tried to make it crystal clear that it was about seeing the evidence first, rather than posting at all.
Here’s the full email.
“Importantly, we are not asking Ben to not publish, just to give until the end of next week to gather and share the evidence we have.”
The line I’m referring to is “if published as is we intend to pursue legal action”. That is consistent with being fine with him publishing at all, but not consistent with being fine if he decides to not change anything in the post after getting all the facts in a week.
Combining this line with the ones you mentioned gives the impression that the message you’re trying to convey is ‘what Ben has written is false and libellous, we have asked him to wait a week so he can correct his post before publishing, after getting all the facts. If he doesn’t do both these things, we intend to sue’, and I think it’s reasonable for anyone to have interpreted it this way, even if that’s not what you intended.
As has been said elsewhere by William Bradshaw, this threat makes me a lot (perhaps even something near his 98%) less likely to sympathize and want to support them with where they’re at.
Oliver seems to be handling the threat super well, but as he mentions, those who made this complaint likely don’t have the resources to fend off such an attack, seeming to prove Ben’s point that he had to do it, because how could anyone expect them to if Emerson is still willing to lash out and attack a respected EA org?
But I’m also biased perhaps, because I agree with Rockwell’s plea that we don’t turn into a group that uses litigation to settle our differences. Prove Ben was wrong and said this to hurt Nonlinear in a forum post, or in argument, and I’ll happily come to your cause. Use the money that you have to sue him and Lightcone “to the maximum legal amount” and you’ve given me nearly no pathway to believe in you or your cause.
Geoffrey Miller does point out that the law exists to keep good norms around sharing negative information widely, but I’m apt to agree with Oliver that this more often likely has a chilling effect, and that those norms should be incorporated at the level of the community, in the court of EA public opinion.
One thing I’m confused about: Emerson is the one making threats, so how do I update on the rest of the Nonlinear team? The negative view is that they are moving in different ways in lockstep, hoping if they attack the issue from all sides (from being nice to threatening legal action) it will be more likely to go away. The charitable view is that both Drew and Kat have gotten involved with someone who has some deep personal issues, but who likely has done much positive and good in their lives and has played a big part of it for awhile now, thus wanting to support him is a behavior any good family would undertake, working privately to reign in the more negative outbursts.
I was also uncertain about this, but Kat’s comment above seems to indicate (though not outright say) that she supports the threat to sue.
Yeah I agree. One update for me: Ben’s new post seems to imply that Drew is not implicated in most of this, and that seems in line with some of the comments, so I’m really tentative in updating at all on him and where he’s at.