“High-quality information” is key. Ben did not fact check basic things and we’ve provided evidence that a huge amount of the “witnesses testimony” was false or misleading.
If Ben had waited one week out of the 6 months he spent working on this, he would have known this and not trusted the sources. They said dozens of provably false things and we just wanted some time to share it all with him, since they’d accused us of so many things.
We didn’t want ages—we just wanted a week. And Ben had been working on it for 6 months, so it didn’t seem like that much to ask.
Paying people $10,000 to say untrue or misleading information seems bad. People should not be paid until their facts are checked, and if it’s shown that their facts were false, they should not be paid.
Agree that in as much as people were paid directly for propagating inaccurate information, then that seems sad and clearly sets the wrong incentives. I am not currently convinced of that after the initial reading of your evidence document, but I am still reading, and there really is a lot of stuff to process.
In this thread I am trying to have a locally valid discussion on the actual presence of norms against paying for information among investigative journalists. I would prefer if we can keep the discussion here more local since it seems like an interesting and somewhat important question, and I think it would be an important update for me if there were was a consensus among investigative journalists and similar professions that whistleblower prizes and paying for information is a bad idea.
“High-quality information” is key. Ben did not fact check basic things and we’ve provided evidence that a huge amount of the “witnesses testimony” was false or misleading.
If Ben had waited one week out of the 6 months he spent working on this, he would have known this and not trusted the sources. They said dozens of provably false things and we just wanted some time to share it all with him, since they’d accused us of so many things.
We didn’t want ages—we just wanted a week. And Ben had been working on it for 6 months, so it didn’t seem like that much to ask.
Paying people $10,000 to say untrue or misleading information seems bad. People should not be paid until their facts are checked, and if it’s shown that their facts were false, they should not be paid.
Agree that in as much as people were paid directly for propagating inaccurate information, then that seems sad and clearly sets the wrong incentives. I am not currently convinced of that after the initial reading of your evidence document, but I am still reading, and there really is a lot of stuff to process.
In this thread I am trying to have a locally valid discussion on the actual presence of norms against paying for information among investigative journalists. I would prefer if we can keep the discussion here more local since it seems like an interesting and somewhat important question, and I think it would be an important update for me if there were was a consensus among investigative journalists and similar professions that whistleblower prizes and paying for information is a bad idea.