I do understand where people are coming from defending Nonlinear. Even if, like me, someone thinks there’s a lot about them that didn’t go well or that doesn’t look good in terms of their processing and reflection skills, it’s still important that the “flagship accusations” [edit: this was a poor choice of words, I should have said “smoking-gun, most outrageous-sounding examples of the accusations.” The original post by Ben – search for “summary of my epistemic state” here – listed four bullet points as the main concerns, and I think 3⁄4 of those still seem obviously strong to me, while the 3rd point is something I’m now more unsure of.] in the original post were mostly wrong, so I’m like, “Did they deserve to go through this public trial?,” maybe not! At the same time, it wouldn’t feel ideal either to pretend like I don’t now have significant concerns about them. And then, what creates additional pressure to keep arguing the point, is that it seems like they’ve succeeded at convincing quite a few people that Chloe might be a malefactor (lending some credibility to initial fears of retaliation), when my best guess is that this isn’t the case at all. To be fair, Chloe is currently protected by anonymity, so you could argue this is the smaller issue. However, some people contemplated de-anonymizing both Chloe and Alice, and I’m truly shocked by the suggestion to de-anonymize Chloe, especially since the message this would be sending is something like, “public judgment that the community considers her a bad actor.” For these reasons, I felt compelled to press the point that I think Nonlinear look bad to me in many ways both regarding initial events under discussion and related to how they now speak about Chloe, even though I’m also sympathetic to the viewpoint of “maybe let it be, they’ve gone through enough.”
Good reply. I’m back to feeling a lot of uncertainty about what to think.
I do understand where people are coming from defending Nonlinear. Even if, like me, someone thinks there’s a lot about them that didn’t go well or that doesn’t look good in terms of their processing and reflection skills, it’s still important that the “flagship accusations” [edit: this was a poor choice of words, I should have said “smoking-gun, most outrageous-sounding examples of the accusations.” The original post by Ben – search for “summary of my epistemic state” here – listed four bullet points as the main concerns, and I think 3⁄4 of those still seem obviously strong to me, while the 3rd point is something I’m now more unsure of.] in the original post were mostly wrong, so I’m like, “Did they deserve to go through this public trial?,” maybe not! At the same time, it wouldn’t feel ideal either to pretend like I don’t now have significant concerns about them. And then, what creates additional pressure to keep arguing the point, is that it seems like they’ve succeeded at convincing quite a few people that Chloe might be a malefactor (lending some credibility to initial fears of retaliation), when my best guess is that this isn’t the case at all. To be fair, Chloe is currently protected by anonymity, so you could argue this is the smaller issue. However, some people contemplated de-anonymizing both Chloe and Alice, and I’m truly shocked by the suggestion to de-anonymize Chloe, especially since the message this would be sending is something like, “public judgment that the community considers her a bad actor.” For these reasons, I felt compelled to press the point that I think Nonlinear look bad to me in many ways both regarding initial events under discussion and related to how they now speak about Chloe, even though I’m also sympathetic to the viewpoint of “maybe let it be, they’ve gone through enough.”