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 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”.