I think this section is really quite clear. We have one report from Alice saying that she quit being vegan. We directly include, in the next paragraph, the fact that Nonlinear disputes this. I really don’t think we misled anyone.
I strongly disagree. Alice’s and Nonlinear’s perspectives are portrayed with very different implicit levels of confidence in those paragraphs. Alice’s perspective is stated as a fact—“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food,” not “Alice says nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food.” In contrast, Nonlinear’s perspective is shared as “[Nonlinear] says [x].”
I think most readers who trust Ben to be truthful would assume, from the way those paragraphs were worded, that Alice had much better evidence to support her claims, and that Nonlinear was doing some slightly deceitful reputational management by countering them. But that isn’t what turned out to be the case:
Nonlinear has evidence that on December 15, they had oatmeal, peanuts, almonds, prunes, tomatoes, cereal, an orange, mixed nuts, and quinoa (which Kat offered to cook) in the house.
At some point, Emerson went out and tried to purchase Alice more food despite his knee injury, but he couldn’t find the very specific items she requested.
Then, on December 18, it looks like Alice’s first non-vegan meal was a vegetarian pizza she ordered (rather than non-vegan food already in the house). It looks like she ordered it right after Kat reminded her that they already had vegan noodles in the fridge.
On top of all of this, apparently everybody in the house was either sick or injured, but Ben’s post only mentions that Alice was sick.
It seems that Alice/Ben have no evidence to counter any of the points above.
So the original claim that was stated as fact (“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food”) seems very wrong. Which is sad, because it’s a very serious accusation that most people would assume was not made lightly.
Yeah, sorry, I think I was too strong in my language above, though my sense is you are also interpreting my answer to be about a somewhat different question than the one I perceived Larks as asking. To clarify where I think we are on the same page: I am pretty unhappy about that section, and wouldn’t ask Ben to write something different given what I believe today.
The thing I was responding to was whether we misrepresented the evidence that we did have at the time.
On that topic, I do think it was a mistake to omit as many of the “Alice/Chloe claims that X” in the post as we did, and fall back into a neutral third-party way of summarizing the claims, and given that we did, I think it makes sense to hold Ben and Lightcone more responsible for the veracity of statements that did not include an explicit “Alice/Chloe alleges X”.
I also think that there is a pretty reasonable case to be made that we should have waited longer on getting more evidence from Nonlinear. I felt conflicted on this topic then, and feel conflicted now. I really hate that the situation we were in made it quite hard for us to wait longer for Nonlinear to respond to us. I am still not fully sure whether I would wait if I was in this situation again, since the considerations against waiting were also quite strong, though overall I am leaning slightly that waiting would have been the better option (I do not think this forgives or excuses Nonlinear’s attempts at intimidation and threats of retaliation).
However, overall on the question of “did we accurately summarize the evidence available to us”, I think Ben’s post and this section is doing pretty well.
I agree that we frame Alice and Chloe’s evidence as more trustworthy, and in-aggregate, across the whole post, I stand behind that framing, in that I think Alice and Chloe are substantially more reliable sources of evidence than Kat and Emerson. I agree that in this situation I think this went the wrong way around and it looks to me like the vegan food situation seems like it was represented to us in a substantially misleading way, and I am still hoping for me or Ben to follow up with Alice on this topic and figure out whether I am missing something. However, I think on-average the framing of the post was not misleading about the balance of evidence that we had received to that point (including accounting for expected future evidence Nonlinear that we expected Nonlinear might provide).
Some smaller nitpicks on your comment:
In contrast, Nonlinear’s perspective is shared as “[Nonlinear] says [x].”
It’s true that we don’t share Nonlinear’s perspective with the same authority as Alice and Chloe’s. We did also include a summary directly written from their perspective, which I do think helps:
This seems also straightforwardly inaccurate, we brought her potatoes, vegan burgers, and had vegan food in the house. We had been advising her to 80⁄20 being a vegan and this probably also weighed on her decision.
Another quick comment:
It seems that Alice/Ben have no evidence to counter any of the points above.
I would give people some time before concluding that. While Ben (and I) are trying really hard to not be dragged into a full-on follow-up investigation of this, I do expect there will be some kind of response to this which includes procuring more evidence. I personally do feel pretty convinced on this point, but I am not updating on Alice or Ben not providing more evidence in coming to that conclusion, since they haven’t responded to anything so far, and I do know that many of the claims in the OP and associated appendix are inaccurate, and those also haven’t been responded to yet (it includes many claims about what Ben believes or what the process of writing Ben’s original post was like, which I am very confident are inaccurate).
I am substantially less confident in that claim, though yeah, I would still overall say I believe it (it’s not super well-operationalized so not super clear what a probability would mean, but like, I guess I am at ~80% that if I knew all the facts and had arbitrary insight into Alice’s, Kat’s and Emersons’ life that I would overall expect Alice to be reporting more accurately than Kat and Emerson)
I strongly disagree. Alice’s and Nonlinear’s perspectives are portrayed with very different implicit levels of confidence in those paragraphs. Alice’s perspective is stated as a fact—“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food,” not “Alice says nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food.” In contrast, Nonlinear’s perspective is shared as “[Nonlinear] says [x].”
I think most readers who trust Ben to be truthful would assume, from the way those paragraphs were worded, that Alice had much better evidence to support her claims, and that Nonlinear was doing some slightly deceitful reputational management by countering them. But that isn’t what turned out to be the case:
Nonlinear has evidence that on December 15, they had oatmeal, peanuts, almonds, prunes, tomatoes, cereal, an orange, mixed nuts, and quinoa (which Kat offered to cook) in the house.
On the same day, Kat had successfully purchased mashed potatoes for Alice.
On the next day, they apparently went out and purchased both Panda Express vegan noodles and vegan burgers for Alice.
At some point, Emerson went out and tried to purchase Alice more food despite his knee injury, but he couldn’t find the very specific items she requested.
Then, on December 18, it looks like Alice’s first non-vegan meal was a vegetarian pizza she ordered (rather than non-vegan food already in the house). It looks like she ordered it right after Kat reminded her that they already had vegan noodles in the fridge.
On top of all of this, apparently everybody in the house was either sick or injured, but Ben’s post only mentions that Alice was sick.
It seems that Alice/Ben have no evidence to counter any of the points above.
So the original claim that was stated as fact (“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food”) seems very wrong. Which is sad, because it’s a very serious accusation that most people would assume was not made lightly.
Yeah, sorry, I think I was too strong in my language above, though my sense is you are also interpreting my answer to be about a somewhat different question than the one I perceived Larks as asking. To clarify where I think we are on the same page: I am pretty unhappy about that section, and wouldn’t ask Ben to write something different given what I believe today.
The thing I was responding to was whether we misrepresented the evidence that we did have at the time.
On that topic, I do think it was a mistake to omit as many of the “Alice/Chloe claims that X” in the post as we did, and fall back into a neutral third-party way of summarizing the claims, and given that we did, I think it makes sense to hold Ben and Lightcone more responsible for the veracity of statements that did not include an explicit “Alice/Chloe alleges X”.
I also think that there is a pretty reasonable case to be made that we should have waited longer on getting more evidence from Nonlinear. I felt conflicted on this topic then, and feel conflicted now. I really hate that the situation we were in made it quite hard for us to wait longer for Nonlinear to respond to us. I am still not fully sure whether I would wait if I was in this situation again, since the considerations against waiting were also quite strong, though overall I am leaning slightly that waiting would have been the better option (I do not think this forgives or excuses Nonlinear’s attempts at intimidation and threats of retaliation).
However, overall on the question of “did we accurately summarize the evidence available to us”, I think Ben’s post and this section is doing pretty well.
I agree that we frame Alice and Chloe’s evidence as more trustworthy, and in-aggregate, across the whole post, I stand behind that framing, in that I think Alice and Chloe are substantially more reliable sources of evidence than Kat and Emerson. I agree that in this situation I think this went the wrong way around and it looks to me like the vegan food situation seems like it was represented to us in a substantially misleading way, and I am still hoping for me or Ben to follow up with Alice on this topic and figure out whether I am missing something. However, I think on-average the framing of the post was not misleading about the balance of evidence that we had received to that point (including accounting for expected future evidence Nonlinear that we expected Nonlinear might provide).
Some smaller nitpicks on your comment:
It’s true that we don’t share Nonlinear’s perspective with the same authority as Alice and Chloe’s. We did also include a summary directly written from their perspective, which I do think helps:
Another quick comment:
I would give people some time before concluding that. While Ben (and I) are trying really hard to not be dragged into a full-on follow-up investigation of this, I do expect there will be some kind of response to this which includes procuring more evidence. I personally do feel pretty convinced on this point, but I am not updating on Alice or Ben not providing more evidence in coming to that conclusion, since they haven’t responded to anything so far, and I do know that many of the claims in the OP and associated appendix are inaccurate, and those also haven’t been responded to yet (it includes many claims about what Ben believes or what the process of writing Ben’s original post was like, which I am very confident are inaccurate).
Given Chloe is not involved in this claim, do you also stand behind the framing that Alice is more reliable than Kat/Emerson?
I am substantially less confident in that claim, though yeah, I would still overall say I believe it (it’s not super well-operationalized so not super clear what a probability would mean, but like, I guess I am at ~80% that if I knew all the facts and had arbitrary insight into Alice’s, Kat’s and Emersons’ life that I would overall expect Alice to be reporting more accurately than Kat and Emerson)