âYou logically have to either believe that the entire post of Ben was equally deranged, or that the section in this post is obviously worse than what Ben wrote, or both.â
I donât get the argument here. Surely there is obviously more reason to trust a report coming from someone who had no known prior beef with the people being accused of misconduct, then one from someone who has massive independent reason to (fairly or unfairly, doesnât matter) detest the person the accusation is about.
Yeah, I mean that would be an argument for why the section is worse than what Ben did. If you do conclude that, then I think your original comment becomes reasonable. It doesnât strike me as obvious though, which might be the crux.
Since the anecdotes in the section are real rather than made-up, it seems nontrivial to me that you can write a section like that even if you have prior reason to dislike the person. I agree with your other comment that itâs non-crazy to do some amount of updating based on the section despite Kat saying you shouldnât update. But I donât agree that Kat is therefore not âmorally allowedâ to write it.
So as I understand it, the principle in your comment is that if person X criticises an organisation it is sane/âappropriate for someone representing that org to then write âwe have been told that person X is a sexual predator. Donât take this literally though, itâs unfair to say this in public, though i just did say it in public. But btw I think it is definitely trueâ
I think the principle is something like, âif X socially harms Y, then Y is morally justified to pull analogous moves on X to make a point as long as this clearly causes only a fraction of the harm, maybe at most 10% somethingâ. Which I recognize isnât obvious; you could argue that X harming Y doesnât give Y any permission to be less than maximally ethical. But that is not how most people assess things most of the time. People are generally not expected to be maximally nice to people who mistreated them. And given how humans work, I think thatâs a norm that makes sense.
Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be (even though, as I said, I agree that it doesnât remove it entirely). This looks to me like a high enough ethical standard given the context.
âKat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be â
I think this is maybe part of the disagreement. I donât think that the framing gets rid of most of the harm. People already know sometimes rumors are false or unfair, so just reminding people of this is not really adding much extra new information to the bare accusation itself.
I agree it can be okay/âexcusable to give in to the urge of taking digs at people who you think have unfairly harmed you. At the same time, I think it can make a big difference whether someone is doing this because of (1) or (2) of the following:
(1) they perceive situations like this as a social game about who manages to get the audience on their side, within which tactics like making insinuations about othersâ character or repeating hearsay is fair game as long as it works /â if the audience will think itâs okay/âexcusable/âjustified, etc.
or whether itâs
(2) while theyâre pissed off and tempted to retaliate, they also feel strongly bound to a code of fairness where itâs only really okay to make bad insinuations if youâre very likely to be right, so theyâre worried about saying the wrong thing, being biased, etc. I.e., they genuinely consider the possibility that theyâre too emotionally invested and in the wrong themselves in the sense of feeling too much negativity about the other party and giving a distorted impression of them.
I interpret John G. Halsteadâs point along the lines of âif they were doing (2) instead of (1), why does it look like theyâre trying to have their cake and eat it? Why does it look like theyâre simultaneously saying that accusations like that (which they chose to repeat/âair publicly) are often about things that arenât actually too bad or shouldnât be trusted, but also saying that they mostly trust them and think theyâre actually bad?â
No, but I think she would be morally permitted to verbally insult him after that, especially if itâs the first time she gets to respond.
My point was you should make norms that ask realistic things of people. Itâs not realistic to expect people to be completely emotionally detached toward someone who harmed them. But it is realistic to expect them to keep retaliation to a minimum, which again, I think is the norm that most people actually apply to situations most of the time. And yes, if you construct an example where the initial harm is extreme, then the 10% figure I postulated doesnât work anymore.
I think some of your recent comments raised valuable points but, unfortunately, too many do not follow Forum norms. Specifically, norms around assuming good faith, staying on topic, not being unnecessarily rude or offensive, and avoiding deliberate flamebait.
Also noting that this is your 14th comment on this thread, in a very short span of time, and your comments appear to be becoming increasingly rude.
This is a warning. Iâll note that this is your third warning â please be more mindful in the future. In order to avoid breaking norms going forward, please phrase your contributions in a more collaborative manner. Further norm violations could lead to rate-limiting or a ban.
(This was written in reply to the comment above, before your most recent comments)
It seems good to me if the forum team took more action here against this post, for example removing the section on Ben Pace that can clearly be interpreted as retaliatory. I donât see why we would assume good faith for that part of the post.
The reaction here of the moderation seems a bit unbalanced.
I want to express ambivalence (actual ambivalence, not code for dislike) about this kind of moderation. I take it that if the same points had been expressed using different language, the mods would not have objected. But in my view, the inflammatory tone has discursive valueâit signals a level of frustration and anger that is arguably appropriate, given the circumstances, and is difficult to communicate using more staid language.
I also wonder about the value-add of moderators intervening on these kinds of comments, given they tend to get downvoted anyways. And if they donât, should the mods really be sanctioning them? (Do mods on other websites do this? My impression was that, e.g., the NYT just censors profanity and spam, and allows voting to do the rest.)
To give a little context for this comment, I read the Forum before I was involved in EA, and when I saw comments that were not phrased in a, uh, collaborative manner, my reaction was usually âwow, Iâm glad someone is expressing their true feelings about this situation.â It made EA seem a bit more real, honest, and normal. I still basically feel this way. We all have emotional responsesâespecially to community eventsâand these emotions usually linger just below the surface of our neatly worded essays. (This is part of what feels off to me about the original postâitâs couched in niceties and formal language, but reads as biting and furious. I think the kind of moderation on display here encourages this kind of tone.)
I am sympathetic to the worry that a lot of online spaces are too rude, mean, unproductive, and so on, but I donât think the Forum is going to descend into madness if the mods just allow democracy to do its thing here (though Iâm not sure!). Conversely, I do think that tone-policing is hard to do even-handedly, and can contribute to weird and disingenuous discussions that Iâm not sure are always a good thing, particularly when strong emotions may well be warranted.
Sorry, I donât think I got this quite right in my initial comment; let me try again:
I think something really messed up is going on here, in that both Ben and Katâs posts include some serious allegations that are supported by very limited evidence (like âanonymous person said Xâ). (Other allegations in these posts are supported by good evidence, like screenshots.) These accusations have the potential to seriously harm peopleâs professional lives, relationships, and mental health. And in both cases, the general message of both posts could be relayed without relying on the anecdotes that arenât supported by good evidence.
The forum moderators have allowed this mudslinging to occur more or less unchecked. To the extent mods have been involved, their involvement has been limited to telling bystanders not to lose our heads. I think this is very bad! The evidentiary standards these posts are being held to wouldnât come close to passing muster on Wikipedia (let alone in a newspaper or court). And thereâs a reason for that: baselessly smearing people is bad. It is especially bad when the most plausible explanation for the behavior is vengeance. For the mods to then issue a warning for a take saying as much (packaged in combative language) while allowing the libel (packaged in Forum-y language) to go unchecked strikes me as exactly backwards, especially when Forum users can readily police the former (through voting), but cannot police the latter. Given the stakes of these kinds of posts for peopleâs lives, I really hope this situation prompts some kind of post-mortem about the evidentiary standards posts should be held to.
I donât view the toe and murder comments as violating forum norms. They are a reductio of what I take to be an absurd argument. I think the comment about preposterous naivety is correct. The post itself obviously violates forum norms and the moderators are defending the post
For the record, my other warnings were for
discussing how someone credibly accused by multiple people of sexual misconduct repeatedly lied and isnât permanently banned from the forum
-sharing true information about how Emile Torres has harassed me without sharing the supporting evidence for privacy reasons. The comment confirming the warning was heavily downvoted.
Itâs not clear the anecdotes in that section are real and not made-up. Kat is dodging questions about it, so for all we know, it could be the case that everyone referenced in that section was a Nonlinear employee who feels bad due to Benâs post. Some people elsewhere in this thread theorized that itâs Kat describing herself, and strangely but conspicuously, she hasnât denied it.
Edit: I misread what you were saying. I thought you were saying âKat has dodged questions about whether it was trueâ, and âItâs not clear the anecdotes are being presentedas realâ.
Kat is responding to other questions in this thread, but not ones about the âSharing Information on Ben Paceâ section.
Itâs not clear that the anecdotes are from someone outside of Nonlinear who had some bad experience with Ben Pace other than Ben publishing the original post about Nonlinear.
Itâs not clear whether Kat wants people to think that itâs about some unmotivated third party, or if itâs supposed to be obvious that itâs Kat writing her own experience in third person. She did write in the post that you shouldnât update on it, but maybe she wants it to be ambiguous, which has the effect of discrediting Ben. She says that if the person itâs referring to said these things publicly, people would disagree 50â50 on whether Ben did something bad, which sure does sound a lot like itâs talking about this whole controversy.
Other people in this thread are saying itâs obvious, but Iâm really confused.
If it is, in fact, based someone from Nonlinear, then Iâd agree that the section is bad. At that point, it would no longer be a valid example of âlook, you can do this to anyoneâ.
I do agree that Ben had less reason to say these things than we did.
However, Alice and Chloe also had a lot of reasons to say terrible things about us. Alice started her smear campaign against us right after she asked for $240,000 and we said no.
They were also incentivized to make everything sound maximally sad-sounding. Ben said if they did the emotional labor of sharing their sad stories, heâd give them $10,000. They knew that if their stories hadnât been very sad (e.g. Alice said she did get food but it just wasnât her first choice of food) they wouldnât have received that money. Ben wouldnât pay for emotional labor if there was no emotional labor to be found, and he wouldnât write an article about how Alice wanted Burger King faster.
âYou logically have to either believe that the entire post of Ben was equally deranged, or that the section in this post is obviously worse than what Ben wrote, or both.â
I donât get the argument here. Surely there is obviously more reason to trust a report coming from someone who had no known prior beef with the people being accused of misconduct, then one from someone who has massive independent reason to (fairly or unfairly, doesnât matter) detest the person the accusation is about.
Yeah, I mean that would be an argument for why the section is worse than what Ben did. If you do conclude that, then I think your original comment becomes reasonable. It doesnât strike me as obvious though, which might be the crux.
Since the anecdotes in the section are real rather than made-up, it seems nontrivial to me that you can write a section like that even if you have prior reason to dislike the person. I agree with your other comment that itâs non-crazy to do some amount of updating based on the section despite Kat saying you shouldnât update. But I donât agree that Kat is therefore not âmorally allowedâ to write it.
So as I understand it, the principle in your comment is that if person X criticises an organisation it is sane/âappropriate for someone representing that org to then write âwe have been told that person X is a sexual predator. Donât take this literally though, itâs unfair to say this in public, though i just did say it in public. But btw I think it is definitely trueâ
I think the principle is something like, âif X socially harms Y, then Y is morally justified to pull analogous moves on X to make a point as long as this clearly causes only a fraction of the harm, maybe at most 10% somethingâ. Which I recognize isnât obvious; you could argue that X harming Y doesnât give Y any permission to be less than maximally ethical. But that is not how most people assess things most of the time. People are generally not expected to be maximally nice to people who mistreated them. And given how humans work, I think thatâs a norm that makes sense.
Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be (even though, as I said, I agree that it doesnât remove it entirely). This looks to me like a high enough ethical standard given the context.
âKat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be â
I think this is maybe part of the disagreement. I donât think that the framing gets rid of most of the harm. People already know sometimes rumors are false or unfair, so just reminding people of this is not really adding much extra new information to the bare accusation itself.
I agree it can be okay/âexcusable to give in to the urge of taking digs at people who you think have unfairly harmed you. At the same time, I think it can make a big difference whether someone is doing this because of (1) or (2) of the following:
(1) they perceive situations like this as a social game about who manages to get the audience on their side, within which tactics like making insinuations about othersâ character or repeating hearsay is fair game as long as it works /â if the audience will think itâs okay/âexcusable/âjustified, etc.
or whether itâs
(2) while theyâre pissed off and tempted to retaliate, they also feel strongly bound to a code of fairness where itâs only really okay to make bad insinuations if youâre very likely to be right, so theyâre worried about saying the wrong thing, being biased, etc. I.e., they genuinely consider the possibility that theyâre too emotionally invested and in the wrong themselves in the sense of feeling too much negativity about the other party and giving a distorted impression of them.
I interpret John G. Halsteadâs point along the lines of âif they were doing (2) instead of (1), why does it look like theyâre trying to have their cake and eat it? Why does it look like theyâre simultaneously saying that accusations like that (which they chose to repeat/âair publicly) are often about things that arenât actually too bad or shouldnât be trusted, but also saying that they mostly trust them and think theyâre actually bad?â
Right ok. So if Ben tried to murder kat, she would be permitted to cut off his arm?
No, but I think she would be morally permitted to verbally insult him after that, especially if itâs the first time she gets to respond.
My point was you should make norms that ask realistic things of people. Itâs not realistic to expect people to be completely emotionally detached toward someone who harmed them. But it is realistic to expect them to keep retaliation to a minimum, which again, I think is the norm that most people actually apply to situations most of the time. And yes, if you construct an example where the initial harm is extreme, then the 10% figure I postulated doesnât work anymore.
1 toe for ten toes?
I think some of your recent comments raised valuable points but, unfortunately, too many do not follow Forum norms. Specifically, norms around assuming good faith, staying on topic, not being unnecessarily rude or offensive, and avoiding deliberate flamebait.
Some examples:
Give. Me. A. Break.
if Ben tried to murder kat, she would be permitted to cut off his arm?
The preposterous naivety on show in discussions like this
Also noting that this is your 14th comment on this thread, in a very short span of time, and your comments appear to be becoming increasingly rude.
This is a warning. Iâll note that this is your third warning â please be more mindful in the future. In order to avoid breaking norms going forward, please phrase your contributions in a more collaborative manner. Further norm violations could lead to rate-limiting or a ban.
(This was written in reply to the comment above, before your most recent comments)
It seems good to me if the forum team took more action here against this post, for example removing the section on Ben Pace that can clearly be interpreted as retaliatory. I donât see why we would assume good faith for that part of the post.
The reaction here of the moderation seems a bit unbalanced.
I want to express ambivalence (actual ambivalence, not code for dislike) about this kind of moderation. I take it that if the same points had been expressed using different language, the mods would not have objected. But in my view, the inflammatory tone has discursive valueâit signals a level of frustration and anger that is arguably appropriate, given the circumstances, and is difficult to communicate using more staid language.
I also wonder about the value-add of moderators intervening on these kinds of comments, given they tend to get downvoted anyways. And if they donât, should the mods really be sanctioning them? (Do mods on other websites do this? My impression was that, e.g., the NYT just censors profanity and spam, and allows voting to do the rest.)
To give a little context for this comment, I read the Forum before I was involved in EA, and when I saw comments that were not phrased in a, uh, collaborative manner, my reaction was usually âwow, Iâm glad someone is expressing their true feelings about this situation.â It made EA seem a bit more real, honest, and normal. I still basically feel this way. We all have emotional responsesâespecially to community eventsâand these emotions usually linger just below the surface of our neatly worded essays. (This is part of what feels off to me about the original postâitâs couched in niceties and formal language, but reads as biting and furious. I think the kind of moderation on display here encourages this kind of tone.)
I am sympathetic to the worry that a lot of online spaces are too rude, mean, unproductive, and so on, but I donât think the Forum is going to descend into madness if the mods just allow democracy to do its thing here (though Iâm not sure!). Conversely, I do think that tone-policing is hard to do even-handedly, and can contribute to weird and disingenuous discussions that Iâm not sure are always a good thing, particularly when strong emotions may well be warranted.
Sorry, I donât think I got this quite right in my initial comment; let me try again:
I think something really messed up is going on here, in that both Ben and Katâs posts include some serious allegations that are supported by very limited evidence (like âanonymous person said Xâ). (Other allegations in these posts are supported by good evidence, like screenshots.) These accusations have the potential to seriously harm peopleâs professional lives, relationships, and mental health. And in both cases, the general message of both posts could be relayed without relying on the anecdotes that arenât supported by good evidence.
The forum moderators have allowed this mudslinging to occur more or less unchecked. To the extent mods have been involved, their involvement has been limited to telling bystanders not to lose our heads. I think this is very bad! The evidentiary standards these posts are being held to wouldnât come close to passing muster on Wikipedia (let alone in a newspaper or court). And thereâs a reason for that: baselessly smearing people is bad. It is especially bad when the most plausible explanation for the behavior is vengeance. For the mods to then issue a warning for a take saying as much (packaged in combative language) while allowing the libel (packaged in Forum-y language) to go unchecked strikes me as exactly backwards, especially when Forum users can readily police the former (through voting), but cannot police the latter. Given the stakes of these kinds of posts for peopleâs lives, I really hope this situation prompts some kind of post-mortem about the evidentiary standards posts should be held to.
I donât view the toe and murder comments as violating forum norms. They are a reductio of what I take to be an absurd argument. I think the comment about preposterous naivety is correct. The post itself obviously violates forum norms and the moderators are defending the post
For the record, my other warnings were for
discussing how someone credibly accused by multiple people of sexual misconduct repeatedly lied and isnât permanently banned from the forum
-sharing true information about how Emile Torres has harassed me without sharing the supporting evidence for privacy reasons. The comment confirming the warning was heavily downvoted.
Thanks for the feedback! I replied here since itâs unrelated to this post.
Itâs not clear the anecdotes in that section are real and not made-up. Kat is dodging questions about it, so for all we know, it could be the case that everyone referenced in that section was a Nonlinear employee who feels bad due to Benâs post. Some people elsewhere in this thread theorized that itâs Kat describing herself, and strangely but conspicuously, she hasnât denied it.
Edit: I misread what you were saying. I thought you were saying âKat has dodged questions about whether it was trueâ, and âItâs not clear the anecdotes are being presented as realâ.
Actually, Katsaid it was true.Kat is responding to other questions in this thread, but not ones about the âSharing Information on Ben Paceâ section.
Itâs not clear that the anecdotes are from someone outside of Nonlinear who had some bad experience with Ben Pace other than Ben publishing the original post about Nonlinear.
Itâs not clear whether Kat wants people to think that itâs about some unmotivated third party, or if itâs supposed to be obvious that itâs Kat writing her own experience in third person. She did write in the post that you shouldnât update on it, but maybe she wants it to be ambiguous, which has the effect of discrediting Ben. She says that if the person itâs referring to said these things publicly, people would disagree 50â50 on whether Ben did something bad, which sure does sound a lot like itâs talking about this whole controversy.
Other people in this thread are saying itâs obvious, but Iâm really confused.
If it is, in fact, based someone from Nonlinear, then Iâd agree that the section is bad. At that point, it would no longer be a valid example of âlook, you can do this to anyoneâ.
I do agree that Ben had less reason to say these things than we did.
However, Alice and Chloe also had a lot of reasons to say terrible things about us. Alice started her smear campaign against us right after she asked for $240,000 and we said no.
They were also incentivized to make everything sound maximally sad-sounding. Ben said if they did the emotional labor of sharing their sad stories, heâd give them $10,000. They knew that if their stories hadnât been very sad (e.g. Alice said she did get food but it just wasnât her first choice of food) they wouldnât have received that money. Ben wouldnât pay for emotional labor if there was no emotional labor to be found, and he wouldnât write an article about how Alice wanted Burger King faster.
So you thought it appropriate to in response do a hitpiece on the author of the critique? Is that correct?