I agree with this being weird / a low blow in general, but not in this particular case. The crux with your footnote may be that I see this as more than a continuum.
I think someone’s interest in private communications becomes significantly weaker as they assume a position of great power over others, conditioned on the subject matter of the communication being a matter of meaningful public interest. Here, I think an AI executive’s perspective on EA is a matter of significant public interest.
Second, I do not find a wedding website to be a particularly private form of communication compared to (e.g.) a private conversation with a romantic partner. Audience in the hundreds, no strong confidentiality commitment, no precautions to prevent public access.
The more power the individual has over others, the wider the scope of topics that are of legitimate public interest for the others to bring up and the narrower the scope of communications that citing would be a weird / low. So what applies to major corporate CEOs with significant influence over the future would not generally apply to most people.
Compare this to paparazzi, who hound celebrities (who do not possess CEO-level power) for material that is not of legitimate public interest, and often under circumstances in which society recognizes particularly strong privacy rights.
I’m reminded of the NBA basketball-team owner who made some racist basketball-related comments to his affair partner, who leaked them. My recollection is that people threw shade on the affair partner (who arguably betrayed his confidences), but few people complained about showering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax consequences on the owner by forcing the sale of his team against his will. Unlike comments to a medium-size audience on a website, the owner’s comments were particularly private (to an intimate figure, 1:1, protected from non-consensual recording by criminal law).
I agree with this being weird / a low blow in general, but not in this particular case. The crux with your footnote may be that I see this as more than a continuum.
I think someone’s interest in private communications becomes significantly weaker as they assume a position of great power over others, conditioned on the subject matter of the communication being a matter of meaningful public interest. Here, I think an AI executive’s perspective on EA is a matter of significant public interest.
Second, I do not find a wedding website to be a particularly private form of communication compared to (e.g.) a private conversation with a romantic partner. Audience in the hundreds, no strong confidentiality commitment, no precautions to prevent public access.
The more power the individual has over others, the wider the scope of topics that are of legitimate public interest for the others to bring up and the narrower the scope of communications that citing would be a weird / low. So what applies to major corporate CEOs with significant influence over the future would not generally apply to most people.
Compare this to paparazzi, who hound celebrities (who do not possess CEO-level power) for material that is not of legitimate public interest, and often under circumstances in which society recognizes particularly strong privacy rights.
I’m reminded of the NBA basketball-team owner who made some racist basketball-related comments to his affair partner, who leaked them. My recollection is that people threw shade on the affair partner (who arguably betrayed his confidences), but few people complained about showering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax consequences on the owner by forcing the sale of his team against his will. Unlike comments to a medium-size audience on a website, the owner’s comments were particularly private (to an intimate figure, 1:1, protected from non-consensual recording by criminal law).