At the time of publication, I struggle to differentiate between “destroy the reputation” and “allow the very extensive rumors and warnings from many dozens of people … to translate into further investigation and scrutiny [comparable to the case of FTX, the biggest scandal in your community]”. I respect that you perceive a difference but the one seems like an expansion of the other. Raising serious red flags about an organization has straightforward and predictable reputational effects.
I’ll strikethrough the other claim—I must have misinterpreted some of what I remembered reading about it.
At the time of publication, I struggle to differentiate between “destroy the reputation” and “allow the very extensive rumors and warnings from many dozens of people … to translate into further investigation and scrutiny [comparable to the case of FTX, the biggest scandal in your community]”. I respect that you perceive a difference but the one seems like an expansion of the other. Raising serious red flags about an organization has straightforward and predictable reputational effects.
Hmm, I feel like what I am trying to say here is not that weird. My current model is that if you want to be able to catch things like FTX early, before they explode as badly as they did and cause enormous harms, you need some better ways of propagating information than we had at the time. Information about sketchiness and wrongdoing was present, but definitive proof of fraud was not present.
Of course most of the time when the community notices flags like this it will not turn out to be as big as we found out FTX was after it exploded. If I had definitive knowledge that FTX was defrauding billions of customer deposits I would have taken very different actions. But there must be some way to propagate my concerns about FTX pre-collapse which maybe could have reduced the size of the fallout, or sparked an investigation that uncovered the full extend of the fraud. If you have better ways for doing that than the kind of investigation we tried to do here, I would be very interested in hearing them.
It’s not weird, it’s just that there might be a disconnect in tone. “Destroy reputation” has negative connotations; “raise red flags” has responsible connotations. It can be correct to damage someone’s reputation if they do things incompatible with that reputation, and raising red flags has a way of doing that.
I think I’ve been clear and consistent in terms of “better ways.” When people raise concerns, they should be investigated. When you’re looking to publish those concerns, you should make reasonable efforts to verify their specifics, which matter a great deal and cannot be handwaved away. If you are reporting secondhand and not from direct experience, you should either receive primary source documents that let you see evidence directly or check to see whether the accused can provide contrary evidence on every claim in dispute.
In this case, every claim that was important enough to be included in the document was important enough to verify with either direct primary evidence or against Nonlinear’s word and evidence. There are multiple unambiguous instances in the article where you relayed false information that was contradicted by evidence Nonlinear was volunteering to make available to you. You excuse those by claiming that pressure meant you had a duty to release. It did not. Pressure is the correct response to imminent publication of falsehoods and is only inappropriate against truth. The greater the pressure, the more it matters whether you wind up presenting the truth on every particular in your report.
In numbered format:
If Alice or Chloe had wanted to share their direct personal experience, they could have done so without using you as an intermediary, taking personal responsibility for the truth or falsehood of their claims.
Once you elected to be intermediary, you should have relied on primary source documents and gathered as much of it as possible to support or contradict various claims. You should not have turned down a request to send you detailed primary source documents, nor should you have neglected to update your story on receiving new ones even two hours before publication.
In the absence of primary source documents for or against a given claim, you would be free to share it as a claim from an involved party reliant on their word.
The only appropriate time to publish is when the report is complete—when every claim you want to publish has been vetted and is good to go. External and internal pressure, even threats of lawsuits, matter massively less than whether you have given a complete and accurate accounting of what you were aiming to investigate.
I think you’ve both raised good points. Way upthread @Habryka said “I don’t see a super principled argument for giving two weeks instead of one week”, but if I were unfairly accused I’d certainly want a full two weeks! So Kat’s request for a full week to gather evidence seems reasonable [ed: under the principle of due process], and I don’t see what sort of opportunities would’ve existed for retribution from K&E in the two-week case that didn’t exist in the one-week case.
However, when I read Ben’s post (like TW, I did this “fresh” about two days ago; I didn’t see Ben’s post until Kat’s post was up) it sounds like there was more evidence behind it than he specifically detailed (e.g. “I talked to many people who interacted with Emerson and Kat who had many active ethical concerns about them and strongly negative opinions”). Given this, plus concerning aspects of Kat’s response, I think Ben’s post is probably broadly accurate―perhaps overbiased against NL based on the evidence I’ve seen, but perhaps that’s compensated by evidence I haven’t seen, that was only alluded to.
(Edit: but it also seems like the wording of Ben’s piece would’ve softened if they’d waited a bit longer, so… basically I lean more toward TW’s position. But also, I don’t expect the wording to have softened that much. This is all so damn nuanced! Also, I actually think even a partial softening of Ben’s post would’ve been important and might have materially changed Kat’s response and increased community cohesion. K&E likely have personality flaws, but are also likely EAs and rationalists at heart. I respect that, and I respect the apparently substantial funds they put into trying to do good, and so it seems like it would’ve been worth spending more time to get Ben’s initial post right. I’m sad about this situation, I guess because I feel that both Ben and Kat’s posts were worded in somewhat unfair ways, and I’m unconvinced that quite so much acrimony was necessary.)
At the time of publication, I struggle to differentiate between “destroy the reputation” and “allow the very extensive rumors and warnings from many dozens of people … to translate into further investigation and scrutiny [comparable to the case of FTX, the biggest scandal in your community]”. I respect that you perceive a difference but the one seems like an expansion of the other. Raising serious red flags about an organization has straightforward and predictable reputational effects.
I’ll strikethrough the other claim—I must have misinterpreted some of what I remembered reading about it.
Hmm, I feel like what I am trying to say here is not that weird. My current model is that if you want to be able to catch things like FTX early, before they explode as badly as they did and cause enormous harms, you need some better ways of propagating information than we had at the time. Information about sketchiness and wrongdoing was present, but definitive proof of fraud was not present.
Of course most of the time when the community notices flags like this it will not turn out to be as big as we found out FTX was after it exploded. If I had definitive knowledge that FTX was defrauding billions of customer deposits I would have taken very different actions. But there must be some way to propagate my concerns about FTX pre-collapse which maybe could have reduced the size of the fallout, or sparked an investigation that uncovered the full extend of the fraud. If you have better ways for doing that than the kind of investigation we tried to do here, I would be very interested in hearing them.
It’s not weird, it’s just that there might be a disconnect in tone. “Destroy reputation” has negative connotations; “raise red flags” has responsible connotations. It can be correct to damage someone’s reputation if they do things incompatible with that reputation, and raising red flags has a way of doing that.
I think I’ve been clear and consistent in terms of “better ways.” When people raise concerns, they should be investigated. When you’re looking to publish those concerns, you should make reasonable efforts to verify their specifics, which matter a great deal and cannot be handwaved away. If you are reporting secondhand and not from direct experience, you should either receive primary source documents that let you see evidence directly or check to see whether the accused can provide contrary evidence on every claim in dispute.
In this case, every claim that was important enough to be included in the document was important enough to verify with either direct primary evidence or against Nonlinear’s word and evidence. There are multiple unambiguous instances in the article where you relayed false information that was contradicted by evidence Nonlinear was volunteering to make available to you. You excuse those by claiming that pressure meant you had a duty to release. It did not. Pressure is the correct response to imminent publication of falsehoods and is only inappropriate against truth. The greater the pressure, the more it matters whether you wind up presenting the truth on every particular in your report.
In numbered format:
If Alice or Chloe had wanted to share their direct personal experience, they could have done so without using you as an intermediary, taking personal responsibility for the truth or falsehood of their claims.
Once you elected to be intermediary, you should have relied on primary source documents and gathered as much of it as possible to support or contradict various claims. You should not have turned down a request to send you detailed primary source documents, nor should you have neglected to update your story on receiving new ones even two hours before publication.
In the absence of primary source documents for or against a given claim, you would be free to share it as a claim from an involved party reliant on their word.
The only appropriate time to publish is when the report is complete—when every claim you want to publish has been vetted and is good to go. External and internal pressure, even threats of lawsuits, matter massively less than whether you have given a complete and accurate accounting of what you were aiming to investigate.
I think you’ve both raised good points. Way upthread @Habryka said “I don’t see a super principled argument for giving two weeks instead of one week”, but if I were unfairly accused I’d certainly want a full two weeks! So Kat’s request for a full week to gather evidence seems reasonable [ed: under the principle of due process], and I don’t see what sort of opportunities would’ve existed for retribution from K&E in the two-week case that didn’t exist in the one-week case.
However, when I read Ben’s post (like TW, I did this “fresh” about two days ago; I didn’t see Ben’s post until Kat’s post was up) it sounds like there was more evidence behind it than he specifically detailed (e.g. “I talked to many people who interacted with Emerson and Kat who had many active ethical concerns about them and strongly negative opinions”). Given this, plus concerning aspects of Kat’s response, I think Ben’s post is probably broadly accurate―perhaps overbiased against NL based on the evidence I’ve seen, but perhaps that’s compensated by evidence I haven’t seen, that was only alluded to.
(Edit: but it also seems like the wording of Ben’s piece would’ve softened if they’d waited a bit longer, so… basically I lean more toward TW’s position. But also, I don’t expect the wording to have softened that much. This is all so damn nuanced! Also, I actually think even a partial softening of Ben’s post would’ve been important and might have materially changed Kat’s response and increased community cohesion. K&E likely have personality flaws, but are also likely EAs and rationalists at heart. I respect that, and I respect the apparently substantial funds they put into trying to do good, and so it seems like it would’ve been worth spending more time to get Ben’s initial post right. I’m sad about this situation, I guess because I feel that both Ben and Kat’s posts were worded in somewhat unfair ways, and I’m unconvinced that quite so much acrimony was necessary.)