Note that I didn’t go through all the pages of the appendix looking for something particularly worthy of critique. Instead, I remembered that Chloe’s comments in her own words seemed quite compelling to me three months ago, so I wanted to re-read it and compare it to what Nonlinear wrote about this incident. When I did so, I thought “wow this is worse than I thought; this warrants its own comment.” Note that this is one of the only times I went back to source material and compared it directly to Nonlinear’s appendix.
I feel the same way about what happened itself. [...] It also is completely normal. I would expect that you can find anecdotes like this one from people who are more considerate than average. Not if you meet them for a day, but if you’re with them for several months.
I doubt you can find anecdotes like this from people who are more considerate than average. (But also, I think this would be too high of a standard.)
In any case, I think the gist of your point is reasonable and I might interpret this evidence the same way you do if I had more favorable priors from other places of the discussion.
I just think “Why would you have more favorable priors from other places of the discussion, given that what I pointed out is probably more typical than outlier-y.”
And I’d say the same for this document. You shouldn’t ask “can I find serious errors with this document?” because the answer is bound to be yes, it should be “can I find really egregious errors?”
The following isn’t an “egregious error” exactly, but I think the whole document is outlier-y across the dimension of “how forcefully do they try to push a black-and-white narrative?” They tell us strong things about how to interpret Chloe’s motivations when it doesn’t even pass the test of representing her points accurately. I’m concerned about this and it’s one thing that goes into me having less favorable priors than you do when I then go on to evaluate individual anecdotes and their weight.
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.”
Note that I didn’t go through all the pages of the appendix looking for something particularly worthy of critique. Instead, I remembered that Chloe’s comments in her own words seemed quite compelling to me three months ago, so I wanted to re-read it and compare it to what Nonlinear wrote about this incident. When I did so, I thought “wow this is worse than I thought; this warrants its own comment.” Note that this is one of the only times I went back to source material and compared it directly to Nonlinear’s appendix.
I doubt you can find anecdotes like this from people who are more considerate than average. (But also, I think this would be too high of a standard.)
In any case, I think the gist of your point is reasonable and I might interpret this evidence the same way you do if I had more favorable priors from other places of the discussion.
I just think “Why would you have more favorable priors from other places of the discussion, given that what I pointed out is probably more typical than outlier-y.”
The following isn’t an “egregious error” exactly, but I think the whole document is outlier-y across the dimension of “how forcefully do they try to push a black-and-white narrative?” They tell us strong things about how to interpret Chloe’s motivations when it doesn’t even pass the test of representing her points accurately. I’m concerned about this and it’s one thing that goes into me having less favorable priors than you do when I then go on to evaluate individual anecdotes and their weight.
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.”