Contradicting myself to write comments that it wouldn’t be helpful for me to sit with...
At that hourly rate, he spent perhaps ~$130,000 of Lightcone donors’ money on this. But it’s more than that. When you factor in our time, plus hundreds/thousands of comments across all the posts, it’s plausible Ben’s negligence cost EA millions of dollars of lost productivity. If his accusations were true, that could have potentially been a worthwhile use of time—it’s just that they aren’t, and so that productivity is actually destroyed. And crucially, it was very easy for him to have not wasted everybody’s time—he just had to be willing to look at our evidence.
Posting a price at which you’re willing to do investigative work does not imply that this price is your current average wage.
The lost productivity claim somewhat rubs me the wrong way. It feels like this could be used as motivated reasoning to underinvest in community norm/safety enforcement.
That said, I totally agree that if someone does have cheap ways to spare the (very real) productivity costs, they should do so.
I think the crux might be whether or not Ben did have a cheap option. My memory (maybe misremembered) is that he and Habryka felt that engaging further with Nonlinear could come with a large delay. I’m not sure if you think Ben was right to think this but disagree about whether the large delay was cheap, or if you think that Ben was wrong to think this.
I even think that this reasoning can hold true in cases where you are 100% sure that the bad thing was bad. (If the badness is sufficiently low/productivity costs sufficiently high.)
Yeah, this was quick napkin math to illustrate the point. It was intended to be an intuition pump about how expensive it can be to spend this much time on something. I won’t stand by that particular math.
In terms of the delay, we only asked for a week and Ben had already been working on it for 6 months, so it felt like it wasn’t that much of an ask. He sent us the draft in the morning and said he was going to publish it that day. On a day he knew we were traveling and wouldn’t have the capacity to respond. He also knew that one of us was sick so couldn’t respond. It was the worst day of my life.
Also, I think the main point was that if he’d asked for our side and evidence sooner, he could have saved even more time. He spent over 6 months working on this and spent virtually none of the time talking to us or looking for disconfirming evidence. And according to his second post, he’d already written almost the entire post before he spoke to us and had already promised Alice and Chloe $10,000.
Totally agree that people should be willing to look into claims about somebody. I think the main thing I’d like to see different in the future is truth-seeking and trying to look for disconfirming evidence. Waiting to see the evidence of the other side before dropping a bomb on them that will cause permanent damage to them seems like basic ethics and epistemics.
Contradicting myself to write comments that it wouldn’t be helpful for me to sit with...
Posting a price at which you’re willing to do investigative work does not imply that this price is your current average wage.
The lost productivity claim somewhat rubs me the wrong way. It feels like this could be used as motivated reasoning to underinvest in community norm/safety enforcement.
That said, I totally agree that if someone does have cheap ways to spare the (very real) productivity costs, they should do so.
I think the crux might be whether or not Ben did have a cheap option. My memory (maybe misremembered) is that he and Habryka felt that engaging further with Nonlinear could come with a large delay. I’m not sure if you think Ben was right to think this but disagree about whether the large delay was cheap, or if you think that Ben was wrong to think this.
I even think that this reasoning can hold true in cases where you are 100% sure that the bad thing was bad. (If the badness is sufficiently low/productivity costs sufficiently high.)
Yeah, this was quick napkin math to illustrate the point. It was intended to be an intuition pump about how expensive it can be to spend this much time on something. I won’t stand by that particular math.
In terms of the delay, we only asked for a week and Ben had already been working on it for 6 months, so it felt like it wasn’t that much of an ask. He sent us the draft in the morning and said he was going to publish it that day. On a day he knew we were traveling and wouldn’t have the capacity to respond. He also knew that one of us was sick so couldn’t respond. It was the worst day of my life.
Also, I think the main point was that if he’d asked for our side and evidence sooner, he could have saved even more time. He spent over 6 months working on this and spent virtually none of the time talking to us or looking for disconfirming evidence. And according to his second post, he’d already written almost the entire post before he spoke to us and had already promised Alice and Chloe $10,000.
Totally agree that people should be willing to look into claims about somebody. I think the main thing I’d like to see different in the future is truth-seeking and trying to look for disconfirming evidence. Waiting to see the evidence of the other side before dropping a bomb on them that will cause permanent damage to them seems like basic ethics and epistemics.