I continue to think that our concerns about retaliation were well-placed. Ben did talk to you multiple times, which I think clears the basic bar for due-diligence.
Sadly due to the track record of retaliation that you do seem to have displayed, I continue to endorse not engaging with you further during the investigation, though maybe I will change my mind on that after reading more of the evidence document.
I really wish things were different and we could have collaboratively investigated the accusations, but man, yeah, the libel threat was really bad, as were a bunch of other things that we heard about you and you said to us directly, and also of course we were concerned about retaliation to our sources and didn’t see a way to avoid exposing them to more risk from you without having things public.
There isn’t a track record of retaliation. We didn’t retaliate against your sources. We know who almost all of them are and what they said and nothing happened to them.
Alice’s messages simply show me saying that if she continued sharing her side, I would share mine. Sharing your side is not unethical.
For the libel, Ben knowingly said multiple things that were false and damaging, and he said dozens of things that he could have easily known were false if he’d just waited a week out of 6 months.
But we never wanted to sue Ben. We just wanted Ben to give us time to look at the evidence we were more than willing to share with him. I really recommend reading this section, because I think it gets across very well what was happening.
Here’s a quick excerpt:
However, saying it’s wrong to threaten a lawsuit with Lightcone would be like if somebody drew a gun on you and you tried to knock the gun out of their hands. If the gun-wielder then goes around saying that “you hit them” they’re missing a critical detail in the story.
Ben knowingly published numerous falsehoods that were extremely damaging to us. He published dozens more libelous falsehoods from Alice and Chloe which he could have easily avoided if he’d just looked at the evidence. He knew he was about to wreck our ability to do good and cause immense personal suffering to us.
He heard somebody—who has a reputation for dishonesty—yell “thief!” and shot us in the stomach before he could check and see if we were actually thieves. He was unwise and reckless. You shouldn’t shoot people that easily. Especially when you know that the person yelling it has told you lies before. But he was well-intentioned nonetheless.
And even as Ben proudly says he’d shoot us again, we’re saying that the real villain is unaligned AI and let’s focus on that. We should not be fighting each other. We don’t want to fight.
Ben, we’re on the same side. We all want to make AI go well.
You were misled. By women who need help and compassion, no doubt. But the way to help them isn’t to shoot us. It’s to actually try to understand the situation, then go from there.
Remember: the way that good people do bad things is to demonize the other. So even if some of you might be very mad at Ben for doing this, I call on everybody to try to be their best selves. To set off an upward spiral. To remember that Ben had good intentions. His methods were bad and the outcomes disastrous, but the way to solve that is not to shoot him. The way to solve it is to creatively problem-solve, assume good intent, and remember the bigger picture.
To always remember:
Almost nobody is evil
Almost everything is broken
Almost everything is fixable
And the accusation of threatening to hire stalkers is just a really weird accusation. That should be an indicator that somebody is not mentally alright.
I’m really sad too that we couldn’t just talk too. I hope we still might be able to, once you’ve read the document and see that the retaliation reputation was unwarranted. I would really love to talk. I think trying to do conflict resolution in a high stakes, hostile, and public venue is less likely to work than if we can talk face-to-face and have a higher bandwidth conversation.
Honestly, I wish we’d already invented mind reading technology, because I’d just let you read my mind, unfiltered. I know that if you could, you’d see that I really have no negative intentions and I’m really just trying to figure out how to make everybody happy and reduce suffering. This situation is complicated and I certainly can sometimes unintentially cause harm, and I hate that, and I’m always working on trying to prevent that. But I really do just want everybody to be happy, including you. Anyways, for now we don’t have mind-reading technology that’s accurate or cheap enough, so we’ll have to make do with me trying to convey through text that I really am not retaliatory. If you hurt me, I will try to understand you, try to help you understand me, then try to collaboratively problem-solve.
I continue to think that our concerns about retaliation were well-placed. Ben did talk to you multiple times, which I think clears the basic bar for due-diligence.
Sadly due to the track record of retaliation that you do seem to have displayed, I continue to endorse not engaging with you further during the investigation, though maybe I will change my mind on that after reading more of the evidence document.
I really wish things were different and we could have collaboratively investigated the accusations, but man, yeah, the libel threat was really bad, as were a bunch of other things that we heard about you and you said to us directly, and also of course we were concerned about retaliation to our sources and didn’t see a way to avoid exposing them to more risk from you without having things public.
There isn’t a track record of retaliation. We didn’t retaliate against your sources. We know who almost all of them are and what they said and nothing happened to them.
Alice’s messages simply show me saying that if she continued sharing her side, I would share mine. Sharing your side is not unethical.
And the examples that people gave of retaliation for Emerson were of him being sued and people sharing their side online, and him replying saying he’s countersue and he’d share his side (which he hadn’t done yet). This isn’t unethical, but a very reasonable thing to do.
For the libel, Ben knowingly said multiple things that were false and damaging, and he said dozens of things that he could have easily known were false if he’d just waited a week out of 6 months.
But we never wanted to sue Ben. We just wanted Ben to give us time to look at the evidence we were more than willing to share with him. I really recommend reading this section, because I think it gets across very well what was happening.
Here’s a quick excerpt:
And the accusation of threatening to hire stalkers is just a really weird accusation. That should be an indicator that somebody is not mentally alright.
I’m really sad too that we couldn’t just talk too. I hope we still might be able to, once you’ve read the document and see that the retaliation reputation was unwarranted. I would really love to talk. I think trying to do conflict resolution in a high stakes, hostile, and public venue is less likely to work than if we can talk face-to-face and have a higher bandwidth conversation.
Honestly, I wish we’d already invented mind reading technology, because I’d just let you read my mind, unfiltered. I know that if you could, you’d see that I really have no negative intentions and I’m really just trying to figure out how to make everybody happy and reduce suffering. This situation is complicated and I certainly can sometimes unintentially cause harm, and I hate that, and I’m always working on trying to prevent that. But I really do just want everybody to be happy, including you. Anyways, for now we don’t have mind-reading technology that’s accurate or cheap enough, so we’ll have to make do with me trying to convey through text that I really am not retaliatory. If you hurt me, I will try to understand you, try to help you understand me, then try to collaboratively problem-solve.