I agree there are some circumstances under which libel suits are justified, but the net-effect on the availability of libel suits strikes me as extremely negative for communities like ours, and I think it’s very reasonable to have very strong norms against threatening or going through with these kinds of suits. Just because an option is legally available, doesn’t mean that a community has to be fine with that option being pursued.
That is the whole point and function of defamation law: to promote especially high standards of research, accuracy, and care when making severe negative comments. This helps promote better epistemics, when reputations are on the line.
This, in-particular, strikes me as completely unsupported. The law does not strike me as particularly well-calibrated about what promotes good communal epistemics, and I do not see how preventing negative evidence from being spread, which is usually the most undersupplied type of evidence already, helps “promote better epistemics”. Naively the prior should be that when you suppress information, you worsen the accuracy of people’s models of the world.
As a concrete illustration of this, libel law in the U.S. and the U.K. function very differently. It seems to me that the U.S. law has a much better effects on public discourse, by being substantially harder actually make happen. It is also very hard to sue someone in a foreign court for libel (i.e. a US citizen suing a german citizen is very hard).
This means we can’t have a norm that generically permits libel suits, since U.K. libel suits follow a very different standard than U.S. ones, and we have to decide for ourselves where our standards for information control like this is.
IMO, both U.S. and UK libel suits should both be very strongly discouraged, since I know of dozens of cases where organizations and individuals have successfully used them to prevent highly important information from being propagated, and I think approximately no case where they did something good (instead organizations that frequently have to deal with libel suits mostly just leverage loopholes in libel law that give them approximate immunity, even when making very strong and false accusations, usually with the clarity of the arguments and the transparency of the evidence taking a large hit).
I agree there are some circumstances under which libel suits are justified, but the net-effect on the availability of libel suits strikes me as extremely negative for communities like ours, and I think it’s very reasonable to have very strong norms against threatening or going through with these kinds of suits. Just because an option is legally available, doesn’t mean that a community has to be fine with that option being pursued.
This, in-particular, strikes me as completely unsupported. The law does not strike me as particularly well-calibrated about what promotes good communal epistemics, and I do not see how preventing negative evidence from being spread, which is usually the most undersupplied type of evidence already, helps “promote better epistemics”. Naively the prior should be that when you suppress information, you worsen the accuracy of people’s models of the world.
As a concrete illustration of this, libel law in the U.S. and the U.K. function very differently. It seems to me that the U.S. law has a much better effects on public discourse, by being substantially harder actually make happen. It is also very hard to sue someone in a foreign court for libel (i.e. a US citizen suing a german citizen is very hard).
This means we can’t have a norm that generically permits libel suits, since U.K. libel suits follow a very different standard than U.S. ones, and we have to decide for ourselves where our standards for information control like this is.
IMO, both U.S. and UK libel suits should both be very strongly discouraged, since I know of dozens of cases where organizations and individuals have successfully used them to prevent highly important information from being propagated, and I think approximately no case where they did something good (instead organizations that frequently have to deal with libel suits mostly just leverage loopholes in libel law that give them approximate immunity, even when making very strong and false accusations, usually with the clarity of the arguments and the transparency of the evidence taking a large hit).
Naive idea (not trying to resolve anything that already happened) :
Have people declare publicly if they want, for themselves, a norm where you don’t say bad things about them and they don’t say bad things about you.
If they say yes then you could take it into account with how you filter evidence about them.