I’d have thought “Emerson boasted about paying someone to stalk an enemy” was the most shocking claim. (Not that you said otherwise.) It surprises me how little the discussion has been focused on that. Whether or not it’s worse, it is way weirder than “threatened to get an employee blacklisted for saying bad things about them”.
I find the idea of doing that absolutely awful and I’ve never done anything like that. Unfortunately, it’s a lie there is no possibility of defending myself from, since it’s hearsay from an anonymous source.
To clarify, do you mean you have never asked/recruited someone to stalk, intimidate, or harass someone else, or do you mean you have never boasted about it?
I can tell you that someone was quite actively scared of you doing something like this, and believed you to have said it to them. I wasn’t there myself so I cannot confirm whether it’s a mishearing or whatever.
There’s a broader question that I am often confused about regarding whether it’s good or bad to think carefully about how to really deceive someone, or really hurt someone, even if it’s motivated defensively. Then people can be unsure about the boundaries of whether you’ll use it against them. If someone were to tell you that they know general skills to get people fired, or get people swatted, or get people on immigration black-lists for certain countries, this information inherently makes them a more worrying person to be in conflicts with. Even if they say they’d only do it when it was justified. It’s one reason why I find myself trying to avoid simple games of deception like Werewolf, I’d prefer to not have practiced lying in general, so that my friends and allies have less reason to think I’m good at deception.
My current guess is that you can wield some of these normally-unethical weapons if you also have sent pretty credible signals about what principles you use to decide whether to use them, and otherwise it’s not much good to figure out how you would really hurt someone, as it predictably leads to people being very scared and intimidated.
I’d have thought “Emerson boasted about paying someone to stalk an enemy” was the most shocking claim. (Not that you said otherwise.) It surprises me how little the discussion has been focused on that. Whether or not it’s worse, it is way weirder than “threatened to get an employee blacklisted for saying bad things about them”.
I find the idea of doing that absolutely awful and I’ve never done anything like that. Unfortunately, it’s a lie there is no possibility of defending myself from, since it’s hearsay from an anonymous source.
To clarify, do you mean you have never asked/recruited someone to stalk, intimidate, or harass someone else, or do you mean you have never boasted about it?
Neither!
I can tell you that someone was quite actively scared of you doing something like this, and believed you to have said it to them. I wasn’t there myself so I cannot confirm whether it’s a mishearing or whatever.
There’s a broader question that I am often confused about regarding whether it’s good or bad to think carefully about how to really deceive someone, or really hurt someone, even if it’s motivated defensively. Then people can be unsure about the boundaries of whether you’ll use it against them. If someone were to tell you that they know general skills to get people fired, or get people swatted, or get people on immigration black-lists for certain countries, this information inherently makes them a more worrying person to be in conflicts with. Even if they say they’d only do it when it was justified. It’s one reason why I find myself trying to avoid simple games of deception like Werewolf, I’d prefer to not have practiced lying in general, so that my friends and allies have less reason to think I’m good at deception.
My current guess is that you can wield some of these normally-unethical weapons if you also have sent pretty credible signals about what principles you use to decide whether to use them, and otherwise it’s not much good to figure out how you would really hurt someone, as it predictably leads to people being very scared and intimidated.
‘or get people swatted, or get people on immigration black-lists for certain countries,’
I find it pretty hard to come up with a realistic scenario where these would ever be justified.