(Fyi, I probably won’t engage more here, due to not wanting to spend too much time on this)
Jonas’s comment is a high level assessment that is only useful insofar as you trust his judgment.
This is true, but I trust basically any random commenter a non-zero amount (unless their comment itself gives me reasons not to trust them). I agree you can get more trust if you know the person better. But even the amount of trust for “literally a random person I’ve never heard of” would be enough for the evidence to matter to me.
I’m only saying that I think large updates based on Jonas’s statement are a mistake for people who already know Owen was an EA leader in good standing for many years and had many highly placed friends.
SBF was an EA leader in good standing for many years and had many highly placed friends. It’s pretty notable to me that there weren’t many comments like Jonas’s for SBF, while there are for Owen.
In contrast, lyra’s comment contains a lot of details I can use to inform my own reasoning.
It seems so noisy to compare karma counts on two different counts. There are all sorts of things we could be failing to miss about why people voted the way they did. Maybe people are voting Jonas’s comment up more because they liked that it went more out of its way to acknowledge that the past behavior was bad and that a temporary ban is good.
It seems like a mistake to treat karma as “the community’s estimate of the evidence that the comment would provide to a new reader who knows that Owen was a leader in good standing but otherwise doesn’t know anything about what’s going on”. I agree you’ll find all sorts of ways that karma counts don’t reflect that.
SBF was an EA leader in good standing for many years and had many highly placed friends. It’s pretty notable to me that there weren’t many comments like Jonas’s for SBF, while there are for Owen.
I think these cases are too different for that comparison to hold.
One big difference is that SBF committed fraud, not sexual harassment. There’s a long history of people minimizing sexual harassment, especially when it’s as ambiguous. There’s also a long history of ignoring fraud when you’re benefiting from it, but by the time anyone had a chance to comment on SBF he had already incontrovertibly failed, in public, at an epic scale.
Additionally, even in the most generous interpretation of the overall situation, Owen seems extremely bad at assessing how his advances are received. Jonas’s comment doesn’t mention any source of information other than Owen himself, who even if he’s not actively lying, is not a reliable source of information. Maybe I’m wrong and Jonas has more sources, in which case I would love for him to give more details on that.
(Fyi, I probably won’t engage more here, due to not wanting to spend too much time on this)
This is true, but I trust basically any random commenter a non-zero amount (unless their comment itself gives me reasons not to trust them). I agree you can get more trust if you know the person better. But even the amount of trust for “literally a random person I’ve never heard of” would be enough for the evidence to matter to me.
SBF was an EA leader in good standing for many years and had many highly placed friends. It’s pretty notable to me that there weren’t many comments like Jonas’s for SBF, while there are for Owen.
It seems so noisy to compare karma counts on two different counts. There are all sorts of things we could be failing to miss about why people voted the way they did. Maybe people are voting Jonas’s comment up more because they liked that it went more out of its way to acknowledge that the past behavior was bad and that a temporary ban is good.
It seems like a mistake to treat karma as “the community’s estimate of the evidence that the comment would provide to a new reader who knows that Owen was a leader in good standing but otherwise doesn’t know anything about what’s going on”. I agree you’ll find all sorts of ways that karma counts don’t reflect that.
I think these cases are too different for that comparison to hold.
One big difference is that SBF committed fraud, not sexual harassment. There’s a long history of people minimizing sexual harassment, especially when it’s as ambiguous. There’s also a long history of ignoring fraud when you’re benefiting from it, but by the time anyone had a chance to comment on SBF he had already incontrovertibly failed, in public, at an epic scale.
Additionally, even in the most generous interpretation of the overall situation, Owen seems extremely bad at assessing how his advances are received. Jonas’s comment doesn’t mention any source of information other than Owen himself, who even if he’s not actively lying, is not a reliable source of information. Maybe I’m wrong and Jonas has more sources, in which case I would love for him to give more details on that.