I have no personal insight on Nonlinear, but I want to chime in to say that I’ve been in other communities/movements where I both witnessed and directly experienced the effects of defamation-focused civil litigation. It was devastating. And I think the majority of the plaintiffs, including those arguably in the right, ultimately regretted initiating litigation. I sincerely hope this does not occur in the EA community. And I hope that threats of litigation are also discontinued. There are alternatives that are dramatically less monetarily and time-intensive, and more likely to lead to productive outcomes. I think normalizing (threats of) defmation-focused civil litigation is extremely detrimental to community functioning and community health.
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.
I have no personal insight on Nonlinear, but I want to chime in to say that I’ve been in other communities/movements where I both witnessed and directly experienced the effects of defamation-focused civil litigation. It was devastating. And I think the majority of the plaintiffs, including those arguably in the right, ultimately regretted initiating litigation. I sincerely hope this does not occur in the EA community. And I hope that threats of litigation are also discontinued. There are alternatives that are dramatically less monetarily and time-intensive, and more likely to lead to productive outcomes. I think normalizing (threats of) defmation-focused civil litigation is extremely detrimental to community functioning and community health.
Can you say anything more about what the effects of this litigation were?
Could you say more about the alternatives approaches?
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.