Places I think people messed up and where improvement is needed
The Nonlinear Team
The Nonlinear team should have gotten their replies up sooner, even if in pieces. In the court of public opinion, time/speed matters. Muzzling up and taking ~3 months to release their side of the story comes across as too polished and buttoned up.
Not being selective enough about who they took into a very unorthodox work/living environment. I don’t think this type of work/living arrangement is always bad (though I do think that NL shouldn’t try it again, nor do I think a nomadic lifestyle is the most effective one generally). Still, I do think it needs to grow a lot more organically and have lower commitment tests that build up to this arrangement. Taking in a new employee to this environment is ill-advised. I’m happy to see that Nonlinear no longer lives with or travels with their employees.
I think Emerson’s threat of a libel lawsuit encourages a bad norm. He went to it far too fast and it escalated things too quickly.
Ben Pace
I think it is pretty reasonable to assume that ~1000-10000 hours and possibly more were spent by the community due to his original post (I am including all the reading and all the commenting in both posts) and a lot more time by all those doing the investigating and debunking. I also think it’s reasonable to assume that at least 10% of this time was likely to be spent and thus Ben should have put a lot more effort into fact-checking, waiting for evidence, etc.
I think Ben really messed up with not letting Nonlinear respond. I think it would have been reasonable for Ben to give Nonlinear, say, exactly one week to provide the evidence they wanted with a promise to read/review it and decide if he felt it was worthwhile to edit the post before publishing. A “search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders, not from a search to give a balanced picture of its overall costs and benefits.” definitely seems to be the wrong way to approach this.
The EA Forum comment section
There is far too much “I haven’t read the post or the evidence but the vibes/tone feel off so I am not going to bother reading what they wrote and I will continue to have my negative opinions” going on and not nearly enough grappling with the substance of what they wrote.
People should spend more time reading/reflecting than trying to comment right away.
People seem to really gravitate towards drama. These posts have some of the highest number of comments on any forum posts on the forum.
The EA community/the Community Health team
How could this not have been sent to the Community Health team for them to perform a private and thorough investigation with a conclusion at the end? It would have saved a lot of people a lot of time and reputational damage.
The Nonlinear team should have gotten their replies up sooner, even if in pieces. In the court of public opinion, time/speed matters. Muzzling up and taking ~3 months to release their side of the story comes across as too polished and buttoned up.
Strong disagree.
A) Sure, all else equal speed would have been better. But if you take the hypothesis that NL is mostly innocent as true for a moment. Getting such a post written about you must be absolutely terrible. If it was me, I’d probably not be in a good shape to write anything in response very quickly.
B) Taking their time to write one long thorough rebuttal is probably better for everyone involved than several rushed responses. I think this reduces the total time me and every other concerned observer will spend on this drama.
I think Ben really messed up with not letting Nonlinear respond. I think it would have been reasonable for Ben to give Nonlinear, say, exactly one week to provide the evidence they wanted with a promise to read/review it and decide if he felt it was worthwhile to edit the post before publishing.
I will again link to my original comments on this issue:
I don’t have all the context of Ben’s investigation here, but as someone who has done investigations like this in the past, here are some thoughts on why I don’t feel super sympathetic to requests to delay publication:
In this case, it seems to me that there is a large and substantial threat of retaliation. My guess is Ben’s sources were worried about Emerson hiring stalkers, calling their family, trying to get them fired from their job, or threatening legal action. Having things be out in the public can provide a defense because it is much easier to ask for help if the conflict happens in the open.
As a concrete example, Emerson has just sent me an email saying:
Given the irreversible damage that would occur by publishing, it simply is inexcusable to not give us a bit of time to correct the libelous falsehoods in this document, and if published as is we intend to pursue legal action for libel against Ben Pace personally and Lightcone for the maximum damages permitted by law. The legal case is unambiguous and publishing it now would both be unethical and gross negligence, causing irreversible damage.
For the record, the threat of libel suit and use of statements like “maximum damages permitted by law” seem to me to be attempts at intimidation. Also, as someone who has looked quite a lot into libel law (having been threatened with libel suits many times over the years), describing the legal case as “unambiguous” seems inaccurate and a further attempt at intimidation.
My guess is Ben’s sources have also received dozens of calls (as have I received many in the last few hours), and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Emerson called up my board, or would otherwise try to find some other piece of leverage against Lightcone, Ben, or Ben’s sources if he had more time.
While I am not that worried about Emerson, I think many other people are in a much more vulnerable position and I can really resonate with not wanting to give someone an opportunity to gather their forces (and in that case I think it’s reasonable to force the conflict out in the open, which is far from an ideal arena, but does provide protection against many types of threats and adversarial action).
Separately, the time investment for things like this is really quite enormous and I have found it extremely hard to do work of this type in parallel to other kinds of work, especially towards the end of a project like this, when the information is ready for sharing, and lots of people have strong opinions and try to pressure you in various ways. Delaying by “just a week” probably translates into roughly 40 hours of productive time lost, even if there isn’t much to do, because it’s so hard to focus on other things. That’s just a lot of additional time, and so it’s not actually a very cheap ask.
Lastly, I have also found that the standard way that abuse in the extended EA community has been successfully prevented from being discovered is by forcing everyone who wants to publicize or share any information about it to jump through a large number of hoops. Calls for “just wait a week” and “just run your posts by the party you are criticizing” might sound reasonable in isolation, but very quickly multiply the cost of any information sharing, and have huge chilling effects that prevent the publishing of most information and accusations. Asking the other party to just keep doing a lot of due diligence is easy and successful and keeps most people away from doing investigations like this.
As I have written about before, I myself ended up being intimidated by this for the case of FTX and chose not to share my concerns about FTX more widely, which I continue to consider one of the worst mistakes of my career.
My current guess is that if it is indeed the case that Emerson and Kat have clear proof that a lot of the information in this post is false, then I think they should share that information publicly. Maybe on their own blog, or maybe here on LessWrong or on the EA Forum. It is also the case that rumors about people having had very bad experiences working with Nonlinear are already circulating around the community and this is already having a large effect on Nonlinear, and as such, being able to have clear false accusations to respond against should help them clear their name, if they are indeed false.
I agree that this kind of post can be costly, and I don’t want to ignore the potential costs of false accusations, but at least to me it seems like I want an equilibrium of substantially more information sharing, and to put more trust in people’s ability to update their models of what is going on, and less paternalistic “people are incapable of updating if we present proof that the accusations are false”, especially given what happened with FTX and the costs we have observed from failing to share observations like this.
A final point that feels a bit harder to communicate is that in my experience, some people are just really good at manipulation, throwing you off-balance, and distorting your view of reality, and this is a strong reason to not commit to run everything by the people you are sharing information on. A common theme that I remember hearing from people who had concerns about SBF is that people intended to warn other people, or share information, then they talked to SBF, and somehow during that conversation he disarmed them, without really responding to the essence of their concerns. This can take the form of threats and intimidation, or the form of just being really charismatic and making you forget what your concerns were, or more deeply ripping away your grounding and making you think that your concerns aren’t real, and that actually everyone is doing the thing that seems wrong to you, and you are going to out yourself as naive and gullible by sharing your perspective.
[Edit: The closest post we have to setting norms on when to share information with orgs you are criticizing is Jeff Kauffman’s post on the matter. While I don’t fully agree with the reasoning within it, in there he says:
Sometimes orgs will respond with requests for changes, or try to engage you in private back-and forth. While you’re welcome to make edits in response to what you learn from them, you don’t have an obligation to: it’s fine to just say “I’m planning to publish this as-is, and I’d be happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments.”
[EDIT: I’m not advocating this for cases where you’re worried that the org will retaliate or otherwise behave badly if you give them advance warning, or for cases where you’ve had a bad experience with an org and don’t want any further interaction. For example, I expect Curzi didn’t give Leverage an opportunity to prepare a response to My Experience with Leverage Research, and that’s fine.]
This case seems to me to be fairly clearly covered by the second paragraph, and also, Nonlinear’s response to “I am happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments” was to respond with “I will sue you if you publish these concerns”, to which IMO the reasonable response is to just go ahead and publish before things escalate further. Separately, my sense is Ben’s sources really didn’t want any further interaction and really preferred having this over with, which I resonate with, and is also explicitly covered by Jeff’s post.
So in as much as you are trying to enforce some kind of existing norm that demands running posts like this by the org, I don’t think that norm currently has widespread buy-in, as the most popular and widely-quoted post on the topic does not demand that standard (I separately think the post is still slightly too much in favor of running posts by the organizations they are criticizing, but that’s for a different debate).]
I think there are a few different types of updates to make from this post, but I don’t think Nonlinear has provided any evidence that they are unlikely to retaliate (and indeed, the degree to which past employees seemed threatened into not sharing any negative information about Nonlinear was my biggest warning flag about the organization). I think one of the central criticisms of this post in the comments is the degree to which it does seem optimized to retaliate.
The threats of retaliation were straightforwardly the central reason why we didn’t delay publishing, and I still stand by that decision. If you want me or Ben to do something else in the future, please give me an alternative that prevents undue threats of retaliation. We had talked to Nonlinear and did try to integrate the things they said as best as we can into the post, which like, included a whole section that did indeed argue against various parts that Alice and Chloe said.
How about you email them something like “We are afraid of undue retaliation but also think it would be good for you guys to provide some counter-evidence for us to include. Therefore, we are going to delay publishing the post by 168 hours from the time of this email to give you time to collect evidence and send to us before we post. We don’t commit to updating the post based on your evidence but will consider it to make the post as truthful as possible. However, if we get the sense that you are spending this time threatening people and preparing retaliation instead of gathering evidence/screenshots, we will post immediately”
I also want to add that it’s not like Lightcone is some feeble powerless organization. Lightcone (and by extension, you + Ben) have a decent amount of power/status in EA. What exactly are you afraid of Emerson/Nonlinear doing?
As i said, I think Emerson threatening the libel lawsuit was dumb.
I don’t think we were in a position to reliably find out about them retaliating and threatening people. A lot of our sources were very afraid and IMO had decent evidence to back up why they were afraid.
Also, to be clear, we did share most of our evidence with them before publication, and we did give them a round to respond, which is what like half of Ben’s post consists of (the whole summary of Nonlinear’s response to the evidence we were presenting was unsurprisingly the result of us sharing the evidence with them). We didn’t share the full post, since that included some information that seemed too risky to share, and some of our sources only wanted shared directly publicly and not to Nonlinear first.
I don’t understand how the thing that you are asking us to do is that different from what we did. At least in my Slack I have an email we were planning to send out 7 days before publishing (Ben can confirm whether indeed this email was sent out, but I am at 90% it happened):
I’d be interested in having a zoom call sometime in the next few days along with a Lightcone teammate of mine (Robert, CC’d) to understand your perspective on these things. We’re available basically 11am to 7pm Sat/Sun and weekdays, Pacific Time.
FYI I intend to write a post to LW/EAF about things I heard from people mid next-week, and it’d be good to include your perspective on things and share it with you before publishing.
We then had a long call with them 3 days later. Before that called we shared a redacted draft. We incorporated the things they said into the post directly, in the relevant section.
We sent them the summary, to which they replied with:
This is a good summary! Some points still require clarification, but thanks for writing it up and sending it over so quickly.
We’ve been gathering the evidence today and realized it was going to take longer than expected. To save you time and having to hop on many long rambly calls, let’s do this: in the next week we will prepare a detailed doc of claims and evidence which should be thorough enough to answer all your questions in a single call. In the meantime, feel free to add any more questions that you’d like answered that weren’t in your original list. Sound good?
(to be clear, I am just copying from Slack logs here, so don’t have access to the exact dates and originals, which are in Ben’s email inbox)
We then responded saying “No, sorry, we are still planning to publish this week”:
[...]
Can we fit in a half hour call today sometime in the next 2 hours? I’d find it quite helpful.
Also I [still] intend to write a public update this week on me looking into this [with the information I shared]
At this point Emerson and Kat escalated, sent us many emails, called everyone on my team on their phones, and threatened a libel suit. They also cancelled another call they had scheduled with us before publication.
As you can see, we didn’t blind ourselves to evidence from Nonlinear, and I think we gave reasonable warning. Maybe you think we should have given another 1-week extension?
I don’t see a super principled argument for giving two weeks instead of one week. Maybe you think we should have shared the full post with them before publishing, even though many of our sources explicitly requested that we please not do that? I think that would have been a bad idea. I think sharing what we did was roughly the right call, though I do think it would have been better to give Nonlinear more direct access to more of the full post (though again, preferences from our sources, which importantly were many more than Alice and Chloe, made that hard).
It feels really cruxy to me whether you or Ben received any actual evidence of whether Alice or Chloe had lied or misrepresented anything in that 1 week.
Because to me the actual thing I felt from reading the original post’s “Response from Nonlinear” was largely them engaging in some kind of justification or alternative narrative for the overall practices of Nonlinear… but I didn’t care about that, and honestly it felt like it kind of did worse for them because it almost seemed like they were deflecting from the actual claims of abuse.
To me, if you received 0 evidence that there were any inaccuracies in the accusations against Nonlinear in that 1 week, then I think they really dropped the ball in not prioritizing at least something to show that you shouldn’t trust the original sources. Maybe they just thought they had enough time to talk it out, and maybe it really was just like, woah, we need to dig through records from years ago, this is going to take longer than we expected.
But if you did receive some evidence that maybe Alice and Chloe had lied or exaggerated at all… to me that would absolutely justify waiting another week for more evidence, and being much more cautious about everything else you had heard. And if you didn’t, that’s where I personally would be like “You need to show me something that makes me doubt these reports ASAP.”
I get that worries about retaliation can be scary, particularly if the person in question is being described as effectively a ruthless sociopath who will do anything to crush opposition, including hiring stalkers(?!) and such. But in that situation, my take is not “if this happens at least our public post will be out,” it’s “if this happens it’s time to publish and call the police.”
What feels weird to me is the middle-ground area of “These people are dangerous and might retaliate” and “But as long as we post this soon we’re all safe.” It feels like something people facing the mafia might think, like people would break into homes and wipe hard drives or kidnap people before they could publish.
And if that’s the level of Evil that Alice and Chloe described them as… well, at the very least I’m sympathetic to being “manipulated” if that turns out not to be true. But as a “figuring out how to deal with these situations going forward as a community,” I think it makes sense to treat that as “we were emotionally manipulated” and not “we did due diligence,” unless again Nonlinear did nothing to prove any falsehoods in that first week.
It feels really cruxy to me whether you or Ben received any actual evidence of whether Alice or Chloe had lied or misrepresented anything in that 1 week.
Ben had a call with Kat in which they disputed lots of things, which indeed Ben summarized in the final post and included. I don’t think there was anything substantial that Ben knew that didn’t make it into the post when the post was written.
I did not (and continue not to) take Kat and Emerson’s character judgement of Chloe and Alice at face value, and I don’t think them claiming that things were inaccurate was appropriate reason to delay publication (I think in basically all of my hypotheses they would claim that, so it’s really very little bayesian evidence).
Ben summarized his epistemic state on the trustworthiness of various parties reasonably well in the post:
My Level of Trust in These Reports
Most of the dynamics were described to me as accurate by multiple different people (low pay, no legal structure, isolation, some elements of social manipulation, intimidation), leading me to have high confidence in them, and Nonlinear themselves confirmed various parts of these accounts.
People whose word I would meaningfully update on about this sort of thing have vouched for Chloe’s word as reliable.
The Nonlinear staff and a small number of other people who visited during Alice and Chloe’s employment have strongly questioned Alice’s trustworthiness and suggested she has told outright lies. Nonlinear showed me texts where people who had spoken with Alice came away with the impression that she was paid $0 or $500, which is inaccurate (she was paid ~$8k on net, as she told me).
That said, I personally found Alice very willing and ready to share primary sources with me upon request (texts, bank info, etc), so I don’t believe her to be acting in bad faith.
In my first conversation with her, Kat claimed that Alice had many catastrophic miscommunications, but that Chloe was (quote) “fine”. In general nobody questioned Chloe’s word and broadly the people who told me they questioned Alice’s word said they trusted Chloe’s.
Ben was really extremely exceptionally transparent about his epistemic state in this situation, including in the trustworthiness of the reports. So you can judge for yourself whether publishing given that epistemic state was reasonable (with the alternative I think not really being a delay, but likely substantial retaliation towards our sources, and us running out of time we had budgeted for this project, which I think should be treated as a high-likelihood of the original post never being published at all)
It’s misleading to frame the argument as “them claiming things were inaccurate was appropriate reason to delay publication.” The appropriate reason to delay publication was their evident willingness to compile specific counter-evidence within a week. Of course subjects of hostile articles will always claim inaccuracies, but it matters whether they can credibly claim ability to provide contrary information. “Very last-minute screenshots” simply should not be a thing when working on an investigative piece of this magnitude—if you’re doing investigative work, you have a duty to do it right, not call it short based on the “time [you] had budgeted” and publish whatever you have.
Here’s my standard: epistemic disclaimers do not matter much when it comes to articles impugning reputations. What matters is presenting all available information accurately to the best of your ability. Your claim that the alternative was not a delay simply does not hold water: whether the alternative was a delay or no publication at all was fully within your control. There’s no reason to suspect any retaliation would be greater without publication than with publication; your time budget is nobody’s concern but your own. If the post contained a single meaningful falsehood at publication that could have been prevented by reviewing the information the subject of the article was actively preparing for you, publication at the chosen time was unreasonable no matter how many disclaimers Ben included.
If the post contained a single meaningful falsehood at publication that could have been prevented by reviewing the information the subject of the article was actively preparing for you, publication at the chosen time was unreasonable no matter how many disclaimers Ben included.
This is a universal statements that’s clearly inaccurate. The relevance of the falsehoods to the central case really matters (if it turns out that a source got a number off by a single irrelevant digit, or it go the name of a city wrong that could have just been omitted, etc.). Any article of this size will have some inaccuracies in them. I agree that there should still be a pretty harsh tradeoff towards accuracy, though in situations like this with very credible evidence that information was being heavily suppressed from being shared (which I still believe), it is also a high priority to get anything out.
It would be terrible if someone had evidence of fraud at FTX, but didn’t have the time to publish it because in order to make their case they had to spend thousands of hours getting each individual detail of their story exactly right.
Separately, it is totally normal, and I don’t see an alternative, that sometimes the thing you do is directly and accurately report what a source has told you. You don’t endorse what the source said, but you just directly state it.
Journalists aren’t responsible for the accuracy of every single thing their sources say, they are responsible for accurately citing reporting what their sources say. If you have another source disputing your first source, you accurately summarize that contradicting source too. Sometimes people say wrong things. Sometimes the fact that they say wrong things is even materially relevant to the story.
It clearly must be possible to write an article that includes the sentence “this source says X” even if X is wrong, or if you think there is only a 50% chance that X is true.
“Meaningful” covers cases like the ones you mentioned. I stand by my words.
Journalists are responsible, to the best of my understanding, for the accuracy of every single thing they say, which includes the things their sources say. If a source says something a journalist knows to be false and the journalist reports that claim, knowing it to be false, they are not fulfilling their duty. As far as I can observe, this aligns with the legal standard (as I discuss here) as well as the ethical standard.
When you amplify someone’s claims, you take responsibility for those claims. When you amplify false claims where contradictory evidence is available to you and you decline to investigate that contradictory evidence, you take responsibility for that.
If someone had evidence of fraud at FTX, they should have published specifically the limited set of evidence they were confident in and could independently verify. If they lacked the time to build a more cohesive, complete story, they should have found someone who had that time.
People live and die on their reputations, and spreading falsehoods that damage someone’s reputation is and should be seen as more than just a minor faux pas. I understand the environment that makes EAs want to overcorrect on this right now, but due diligence is not optional when whistleblowing.
I don’t think a norm that if you quote someone or try to comment on something someone said, you have to take full responsibility for the accuracy of their statements is a recipe for good public communication.
When I write on LessWrong, or the EA Forum, or when I talk to my friends in Slack and large chat rooms, I would absolutely not hold people responsible for the content of things they are commenting on. Indeed, I think it would be impossible for me to have almost any of the conversations I routinely have, if I did try that.
This kind of relationship to publication seems to me to have enormous chilling effects on information propagation and communication, and I don’t really see its merits.
Yes, of course I will sometimes cite and refer sources that I can’t fully verify as reliable. In those cases I will state that I don’t think they are fully reliable. This seems so much better than being unable to express my epistemic state at all.
If I believe something, I try to give a detailed account of what evidence has convinced me of that belief. This of course will often include sources that aren’t fully reliable (as practically no source is). And the end state of my belief is often one of uncertainty, and it seems crucial to be able to express this uncertainty.
I am planning to continue going around and share many concerns I have about people, even if I can’t definitely prove them beyond the shadow of a doubt. I think it’s OK for other people to operate on a different philosophy, but I really don’t feel very beholden or resonate much with the standard you outline here.
It’s a category error, in my estimation, to lump casual commentary in with published articles. You and Ben published a thorough, detailed article that mixed hundreds of hours of investigative reporting and opinion with a very specific goal: Destroy the reputation of a group within your community. It is currently the sixth-most popular post of the year, which I believe is a significant decline from its peak, and had massive impacts on your community and subculture.
That is something altogether different from an offhand comment deep in a thread. It is a massive undertaking with potentially massive ramifications in the lives of other people and as such entails a massive duty to those people. What are the merits of this kind of relationship to publication—a kind, I want to emphasize, that every journalistic institution in the United States claims? Very simple: if you have that kind of relationship to publication, you do not cause damage to others via propagation of false rumors about them.
Journalists don’t have a very good reputation right now, and not without reason, but a responsibility for accuracy is core to the first, second, and third principles in their code of ethics. “They were simply too loyal to truth, and too cautious about publishing things that later turned out to be false” is not a criticism I have ever heard leveled at a journalistic institution.
The standard is not “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” but a minimum standard is absolutely “wait to review immediately forthcoming contradictory evidence before publishing falsehood.”
I admire the first-principles thinking of rationalists and effective altruists. In many ways, it resonates with me. But the standards of common law and of broader ethics are written in blood, and outright dismissing those standards due to confidence that your own first-principles thinking is superior not only leaves you open to liability any time your actions clash with those standards, it leaves you in a position to cause much of the same damage those standards were written to prevent.
You and Ben published a thorough, detailed article that mixed hundreds of hours of investigative reporting and opinion with a very specific goal: Destroy the reputation of a group within your community. It is currently the sixth-most popular post of the year, which I believe is a significant decline from its peak, and had massive impacts on your community and subculture.
Just for the record, this is inaccurate in a bunch of different ways.
Our goal was not to destroy the reputation of that group within our community. Our primary goal was to investigate some bad things we heard about, with honestly my primary motivation being to figure out ways to somehow allow the very extensive rumors and warnings from many dozens of people that I’ve heard about in the case of FTX, to translate into further investigation and scrutiny.
In the case of FTX, there were similarly an enormous number of rumors and flags that people had raised, but nobody felt comfortable publishing those, which played a major role in the damage that FTX was able to cause. At least my primary goal in allocating resources to this was to try very concretely to apply those lessons to the Nonlinear case and see whether it’s possible to somehow get information from the rumor level into a more fact-checkable and verifiable level.
It is currently the sixth-most popular post of the year, which I believe is a significant decline from its peak
I think this is also false. The post lost about 20 karma in the last few days, not really changing its relative ranking at all.
At the time of publication, I struggle to differentiate between “destroy the reputation” and “allow the very extensive rumors and warnings from many dozens of people … to translate into further investigation and scrutiny [comparable to the case of FTX, the biggest scandal in your community]”. I respect that you perceive a difference but the one seems like an expansion of the other. Raising serious red flags about an organization has straightforward and predictable reputational effects.
I’ll strikethrough the other claim—I must have misinterpreted some of what I remembered reading about it.
At the time of publication, I struggle to differentiate between “destroy the reputation” and “allow the very extensive rumors and warnings from many dozens of people … to translate into further investigation and scrutiny [comparable to the case of FTX, the biggest scandal in your community]”. I respect that you perceive a difference but the one seems like an expansion of the other. Raising serious red flags about an organization has straightforward and predictable reputational effects.
Hmm, I feel like what I am trying to say here is not that weird. My current model is that if you want to be able to catch things like FTX early, before they explode as badly as they did and cause enormous harms, you need some better ways of propagating information than we had at the time. Information about sketchiness and wrongdoing was present, but definitive proof of fraud was not present.
Of course most of the time when the community notices flags like this it will not turn out to be as big as we found out FTX was after it exploded. If I had definitive knowledge that FTX was defrauding billions of customer deposits I would have taken very different actions. But there must be some way to propagate my concerns about FTX pre-collapse which maybe could have reduced the size of the fallout, or sparked an investigation that uncovered the full extend of the fraud. If you have better ways for doing that than the kind of investigation we tried to do here, I would be very interested in hearing them.
It’s not weird, it’s just that there might be a disconnect in tone. “Destroy reputation” has negative connotations; “raise red flags” has responsible connotations. It can be correct to damage someone’s reputation if they do things incompatible with that reputation, and raising red flags has a way of doing that.
I think I’ve been clear and consistent in terms of “better ways.” When people raise concerns, they should be investigated. When you’re looking to publish those concerns, you should make reasonable efforts to verify their specifics, which matter a great deal and cannot be handwaved away. If you are reporting secondhand and not from direct experience, you should either receive primary source documents that let you see evidence directly or check to see whether the accused can provide contrary evidence on every claim in dispute.
In this case, every claim that was important enough to be included in the document was important enough to verify with either direct primary evidence or against Nonlinear’s word and evidence. There are multiple unambiguous instances in the article where you relayed false information that was contradicted by evidence Nonlinear was volunteering to make available to you. You excuse those by claiming that pressure meant you had a duty to release. It did not. Pressure is the correct response to imminent publication of falsehoods and is only inappropriate against truth. The greater the pressure, the more it matters whether you wind up presenting the truth on every particular in your report.
In numbered format:
If Alice or Chloe had wanted to share their direct personal experience, they could have done so without using you as an intermediary, taking personal responsibility for the truth or falsehood of their claims.
Once you elected to be intermediary, you should have relied on primary source documents and gathered as much of it as possible to support or contradict various claims. You should not have turned down a request to send you detailed primary source documents, nor should you have neglected to update your story on receiving new ones even two hours before publication.
In the absence of primary source documents for or against a given claim, you would be free to share it as a claim from an involved party reliant on their word.
The only appropriate time to publish is when the report is complete—when every claim you want to publish has been vetted and is good to go. External and internal pressure, even threats of lawsuits, matter massively less than whether you have given a complete and accurate accounting of what you were aiming to investigate.
I think you’ve both raised good points. Way upthread @Habryka said “I don’t see a super principled argument for giving two weeks instead of one week”, but if I were unfairly accused I’d certainly want a full two weeks! So Kat’s request for a full week to gather evidence seems reasonable [ed: under the principle of due process], and I don’t see what sort of opportunities would’ve existed for retribution from K&E in the two-week case that didn’t exist in the one-week case.
However, when I read Ben’s post (like TW, I did this “fresh” about two days ago; I didn’t see Ben’s post until Kat’s post was up) it sounds like there was more evidence behind it than he specifically detailed (e.g. “I talked to many people who interacted with Emerson and Kat who had many active ethical concerns about them and strongly negative opinions”). Given this, plus concerning aspects of Kat’s response, I think Ben’s post is probably broadly accurate―perhaps overbiased against NL based on the evidence I’ve seen, but perhaps that’s compensated by evidence I haven’t seen, that was only alluded to.
(Edit: but it also seems like the wording of Ben’s piece would’ve softened if they’d waited a bit longer, so… basically I lean more toward TW’s position. But also, I don’t expect the wording to have softened that much. This is all so damn nuanced! Also, I actually think even a partial softening of Ben’s post would’ve been important and might have materially changed Kat’s response and increased community cohesion. K&E likely have personality flaws, but are also likely EAs and rationalists at heart. I respect that, and I respect the apparently substantial funds they put into trying to do good, and so it seems like it would’ve been worth spending more time to get Ben’s initial post right. I’m sad about this situation, I guess because I feel that both Ben and Kat’s posts were worded in somewhat unfair ways, and I’m unconvinced that quite so much acrimony was necessary.)
I am not an effective altruist, but I am broadly adjacent and I work on stories about sensitive and complex situations with competing information from various parties regularly. I am coming to this fresh, not having heard of Nonlinear or Lightcone prior to yesterday.
Of all responses in this saga, I confess this is the one I’m least sympathetic to. Lawsuit threats are distinctly unfriendly. Here’s another thing that’s distinctly unfriendly: publishing libelous information likely to do irreparable damage to an organization without giving them the opportunity to proactively correct falsehoods. The legal system is a way of systematizing responses to that sort of unfriendliness; it is not kind, it is not pleasant, but it is a legitimate response to a calculated decision to inflict enormous reputational harm.
So you would have lost 40 hours of productive time? Respectfully: so what? You have sources actively claiming you are about to publish directly false information about them and asking for time to provide evidence that information is directly false. A lot of time, when people do that, they provide a different gloss on the same substantive information, and your original story can go ahead without serious issue. But it’s vital to at least see what they’re talking about!
As of right now, I am persuaded that at least some of the claims in the original article—claims, again, used to inflict serious reputational harm—were substantively false in a way that could and should have been corrected by checking the evidence provided by the accused parties. I am persuaded that you published those claims without due diligence, that those claims materially contributed to damaging the reputation of an organization in the community where its reputation mattered most, and that you received warning in advance that there was evidence available to indicate the falsehood of those claims.
I’m an outsider to this situation proceeding on the limited information in these two posts and comment sections, but given that information, I think the decision to publish potentially materially false information without waiting for available hard evidence to counter it was a poor one to which “threats of retaliation” (libel suits) were a proportionate response, not an unreasonable escalation.
So you would have lost 40 hours of productive time? Respectfully: so what? You have sources actively claiming you are about to publish directly false information about them and asking for time to provide evidence that information is directly false.
Also, I think it is worth Oli/Ben estimating how many productive hours were lost to the decision to not delay; it would not surprise me if much of the benefit here was illusory.
I think it’s a bit messy, but my guess is indeed the additional time cost of this has been greater. Though to be clear, I never argued anywhere that this was the primary reason for making this decision, and wouldn’t want someone to walk away with that impression (and don’t think anyone is claiming that here, but not sure).
Places I think people messed up and where improvement is needed
The Nonlinear Team
The Nonlinear team should have gotten their replies up sooner, even if in pieces. In the court of public opinion, time/speed matters. Muzzling up and taking ~3 months to release their side of the story comes across as too polished and buttoned up.
Not being selective enough about who they took into a very unorthodox work/living environment. I don’t think this type of work/living arrangement is always bad (though I do think that NL shouldn’t try it again, nor do I think a nomadic lifestyle is the most effective one generally). Still, I do think it needs to grow a lot more organically and have lower commitment tests that build up to this arrangement. Taking in a new employee to this environment is ill-advised. I’m happy to see that Nonlinear no longer lives with or travels with their employees.
I think Emerson’s threat of a libel lawsuit encourages a bad norm. He went to it far too fast and it escalated things too quickly.
Ben Pace
I think it is pretty reasonable to assume that ~1000-10000 hours and possibly more were spent by the community due to his original post (I am including all the reading and all the commenting in both posts) and a lot more time by all those doing the investigating and debunking. I also think it’s reasonable to assume that at least 10% of this time was likely to be spent and thus Ben should have put a lot more effort into fact-checking, waiting for evidence, etc.
I think Ben really messed up with not letting Nonlinear respond. I think it would have been reasonable for Ben to give Nonlinear, say, exactly one week to provide the evidence they wanted with a promise to read/review it and decide if he felt it was worthwhile to edit the post before publishing. A “search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders, not from a search to give a balanced picture of its overall costs and benefits.” definitely seems to be the wrong way to approach this.
The EA Forum comment section
There is far too much “I haven’t read the post or the evidence but the vibes/tone feel off so I am not going to bother reading what they wrote and I will continue to have my negative opinions” going on and not nearly enough grappling with the substance of what they wrote.
People should spend more time reading/reflecting than trying to comment right away.
People seem to really gravitate towards drama. These posts have some of the highest number of comments on any forum posts on the forum.
The EA community/the Community Health team
How could this not have been sent to the Community Health team for them to perform a private and thorough investigation with a conclusion at the end? It would have saved a lot of people a lot of time and reputational damage.
Strong disagree.
A) Sure, all else equal speed would have been better. But if you take the hypothesis that NL is mostly innocent as true for a moment. Getting such a post written about you must be absolutely terrible. If it was me, I’d probably not be in a good shape to write anything in response very quickly.
B) Taking their time to write one long thorough rebuttal is probably better for everyone involved than several rushed responses. I think this reduces the total time me and every other concerned observer will spend on this drama.
Good point
I will again link to my original comments on this issue:
I think there are a few different types of updates to make from this post, but I don’t think Nonlinear has provided any evidence that they are unlikely to retaliate (and indeed, the degree to which past employees seemed threatened into not sharing any negative information about Nonlinear was my biggest warning flag about the organization). I think one of the central criticisms of this post in the comments is the degree to which it does seem optimized to retaliate.
The threats of retaliation were straightforwardly the central reason why we didn’t delay publishing, and I still stand by that decision. If you want me or Ben to do something else in the future, please give me an alternative that prevents undue threats of retaliation. We had talked to Nonlinear and did try to integrate the things they said as best as we can into the post, which like, included a whole section that did indeed argue against various parts that Alice and Chloe said.
How about you email them something like
“We are afraid of undue retaliation but also think it would be good for you guys to provide some counter-evidence for us to include. Therefore, we are going to delay publishing the post by 168 hours from the time of this email to give you time to collect evidence and send to us before we post. We don’t commit to updating the post based on your evidence but will consider it to make the post as truthful as possible. However, if we get the sense that you are spending this time threatening people and preparing retaliation instead of gathering evidence/screenshots, we will post immediately”
I also want to add that it’s not like Lightcone is some feeble powerless organization. Lightcone (and by extension, you + Ben) have a decent amount of power/status in EA. What exactly are you afraid of Emerson/Nonlinear doing?
As i said, I think Emerson threatening the libel lawsuit was dumb.
I don’t think we were in a position to reliably find out about them retaliating and threatening people. A lot of our sources were very afraid and IMO had decent evidence to back up why they were afraid.
Also, to be clear, we did share most of our evidence with them before publication, and we did give them a round to respond, which is what like half of Ben’s post consists of (the whole summary of Nonlinear’s response to the evidence we were presenting was unsurprisingly the result of us sharing the evidence with them). We didn’t share the full post, since that included some information that seemed too risky to share, and some of our sources only wanted shared directly publicly and not to Nonlinear first.
I don’t understand how the thing that you are asking us to do is that different from what we did. At least in my Slack I have an email we were planning to send out 7 days before publishing (Ben can confirm whether indeed this email was sent out, but I am at 90% it happened):
We then had a long call with them 3 days later. Before that called we shared a redacted draft. We incorporated the things they said into the post directly, in the relevant section.
We sent them the summary, to which they replied with:
(to be clear, I am just copying from Slack logs here, so don’t have access to the exact dates and originals, which are in Ben’s email inbox)
We then responded saying “No, sorry, we are still planning to publish this week”:
At this point Emerson and Kat escalated, sent us many emails, called everyone on my team on their phones, and threatened a libel suit. They also cancelled another call they had scheduled with us before publication.
As you can see, we didn’t blind ourselves to evidence from Nonlinear, and I think we gave reasonable warning. Maybe you think we should have given another 1-week extension?
I don’t see a super principled argument for giving two weeks instead of one week. Maybe you think we should have shared the full post with them before publishing, even though many of our sources explicitly requested that we please not do that? I think that would have been a bad idea. I think sharing what we did was roughly the right call, though I do think it would have been better to give Nonlinear more direct access to more of the full post (though again, preferences from our sources, which importantly were many more than Alice and Chloe, made that hard).
It feels really cruxy to me whether you or Ben received any actual evidence of whether Alice or Chloe had lied or misrepresented anything in that 1 week.
Because to me the actual thing I felt from reading the original post’s “Response from Nonlinear” was largely them engaging in some kind of justification or alternative narrative for the overall practices of Nonlinear… but I didn’t care about that, and honestly it felt like it kind of did worse for them because it almost seemed like they were deflecting from the actual claims of abuse.
To me, if you received 0 evidence that there were any inaccuracies in the accusations against Nonlinear in that 1 week, then I think they really dropped the ball in not prioritizing at least something to show that you shouldn’t trust the original sources. Maybe they just thought they had enough time to talk it out, and maybe it really was just like, woah, we need to dig through records from years ago, this is going to take longer than we expected.
But if you did receive some evidence that maybe Alice and Chloe had lied or exaggerated at all… to me that would absolutely justify waiting another week for more evidence, and being much more cautious about everything else you had heard. And if you didn’t, that’s where I personally would be like “You need to show me something that makes me doubt these reports ASAP.”
I get that worries about retaliation can be scary, particularly if the person in question is being described as effectively a ruthless sociopath who will do anything to crush opposition, including hiring stalkers(?!) and such. But in that situation, my take is not “if this happens at least our public post will be out,” it’s “if this happens it’s time to publish and call the police.”
What feels weird to me is the middle-ground area of “These people are dangerous and might retaliate” and “But as long as we post this soon we’re all safe.” It feels like something people facing the mafia might think, like people would break into homes and wipe hard drives or kidnap people before they could publish.
And if that’s the level of Evil that Alice and Chloe described them as… well, at the very least I’m sympathetic to being “manipulated” if that turns out not to be true. But as a “figuring out how to deal with these situations going forward as a community,” I think it makes sense to treat that as “we were emotionally manipulated” and not “we did due diligence,” unless again Nonlinear did nothing to prove any falsehoods in that first week.
Ben had a call with Kat in which they disputed lots of things, which indeed Ben summarized in the final post and included. I don’t think there was anything substantial that Ben knew that didn’t make it into the post when the post was written.
I did not (and continue not to) take Kat and Emerson’s character judgement of Chloe and Alice at face value, and I don’t think them claiming that things were inaccurate was appropriate reason to delay publication (I think in basically all of my hypotheses they would claim that, so it’s really very little bayesian evidence).
Ben summarized his epistemic state on the trustworthiness of various parties reasonably well in the post:
Ben was really extremely exceptionally transparent about his epistemic state in this situation, including in the trustworthiness of the reports. So you can judge for yourself whether publishing given that epistemic state was reasonable (with the alternative I think not really being a delay, but likely substantial retaliation towards our sources, and us running out of time we had budgeted for this project, which I think should be treated as a high-likelihood of the original post never being published at all)
It’s misleading to frame the argument as “them claiming things were inaccurate was appropriate reason to delay publication.” The appropriate reason to delay publication was their evident willingness to compile specific counter-evidence within a week. Of course subjects of hostile articles will always claim inaccuracies, but it matters whether they can credibly claim ability to provide contrary information. “Very last-minute screenshots” simply should not be a thing when working on an investigative piece of this magnitude—if you’re doing investigative work, you have a duty to do it right, not call it short based on the “time [you] had budgeted” and publish whatever you have.
Here’s my standard: epistemic disclaimers do not matter much when it comes to articles impugning reputations. What matters is presenting all available information accurately to the best of your ability. Your claim that the alternative was not a delay simply does not hold water: whether the alternative was a delay or no publication at all was fully within your control. There’s no reason to suspect any retaliation would be greater without publication than with publication; your time budget is nobody’s concern but your own. If the post contained a single meaningful falsehood at publication that could have been prevented by reviewing the information the subject of the article was actively preparing for you, publication at the chosen time was unreasonable no matter how many disclaimers Ben included.
This is a universal statements that’s clearly inaccurate. The relevance of the falsehoods to the central case really matters (if it turns out that a source got a number off by a single irrelevant digit, or it go the name of a city wrong that could have just been omitted, etc.). Any article of this size will have some inaccuracies in them. I agree that there should still be a pretty harsh tradeoff towards accuracy, though in situations like this with very credible evidence that information was being heavily suppressed from being shared (which I still believe), it is also a high priority to get anything out.
It would be terrible if someone had evidence of fraud at FTX, but didn’t have the time to publish it because in order to make their case they had to spend thousands of hours getting each individual detail of their story exactly right.
Separately, it is totally normal, and I don’t see an alternative, that sometimes the thing you do is directly and accurately report what a source has told you. You don’t endorse what the source said, but you just directly state it.
Journalists aren’t responsible for the accuracy of every single thing their sources say, they are responsible for accurately citing reporting what their sources say. If you have another source disputing your first source, you accurately summarize that contradicting source too. Sometimes people say wrong things. Sometimes the fact that they say wrong things is even materially relevant to the story.
It clearly must be possible to write an article that includes the sentence “this source says X” even if X is wrong, or if you think there is only a 50% chance that X is true.
“Meaningful” covers cases like the ones you mentioned. I stand by my words.
Journalists are responsible, to the best of my understanding, for the accuracy of every single thing they say, which includes the things their sources say. If a source says something a journalist knows to be false and the journalist reports that claim, knowing it to be false, they are not fulfilling their duty. As far as I can observe, this aligns with the legal standard (as I discuss here) as well as the ethical standard.
When you amplify someone’s claims, you take responsibility for those claims. When you amplify false claims where contradictory evidence is available to you and you decline to investigate that contradictory evidence, you take responsibility for that.
If someone had evidence of fraud at FTX, they should have published specifically the limited set of evidence they were confident in and could independently verify. If they lacked the time to build a more cohesive, complete story, they should have found someone who had that time.
People live and die on their reputations, and spreading falsehoods that damage someone’s reputation is and should be seen as more than just a minor faux pas. I understand the environment that makes EAs want to overcorrect on this right now, but due diligence is not optional when whistleblowing.
I don’t think a norm that if you quote someone or try to comment on something someone said, you have to take full responsibility for the accuracy of their statements is a recipe for good public communication.
When I write on LessWrong, or the EA Forum, or when I talk to my friends in Slack and large chat rooms, I would absolutely not hold people responsible for the content of things they are commenting on. Indeed, I think it would be impossible for me to have almost any of the conversations I routinely have, if I did try that.
This kind of relationship to publication seems to me to have enormous chilling effects on information propagation and communication, and I don’t really see its merits.
Yes, of course I will sometimes cite and refer sources that I can’t fully verify as reliable. In those cases I will state that I don’t think they are fully reliable. This seems so much better than being unable to express my epistemic state at all.
If I believe something, I try to give a detailed account of what evidence has convinced me of that belief. This of course will often include sources that aren’t fully reliable (as practically no source is). And the end state of my belief is often one of uncertainty, and it seems crucial to be able to express this uncertainty.
I am planning to continue going around and share many concerns I have about people, even if I can’t definitely prove them beyond the shadow of a doubt. I think it’s OK for other people to operate on a different philosophy, but I really don’t feel very beholden or resonate much with the standard you outline here.
It’s a category error, in my estimation, to lump casual commentary in with published articles. You and Ben published a thorough, detailed article that mixed hundreds of hours of investigative reporting and opinion with a very specific goal: Destroy the reputation of a group within your community. It is currently the sixth-most popular post of the year
, which I believe is a significant decline from its peak,and had massive impacts on your community and subculture.That is something altogether different from an offhand comment deep in a thread. It is a massive undertaking with potentially massive ramifications in the lives of other people and as such entails a massive duty to those people. What are the merits of this kind of relationship to publication—a kind, I want to emphasize, that every journalistic institution in the United States claims? Very simple: if you have that kind of relationship to publication, you do not cause damage to others via propagation of false rumors about them.
Journalists don’t have a very good reputation right now, and not without reason, but a responsibility for accuracy is core to the first, second, and third principles in their code of ethics. “They were simply too loyal to truth, and too cautious about publishing things that later turned out to be false” is not a criticism I have ever heard leveled at a journalistic institution.
The standard is not “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” but a minimum standard is absolutely “wait to review immediately forthcoming contradictory evidence before publishing falsehood.”
I admire the first-principles thinking of rationalists and effective altruists. In many ways, it resonates with me. But the standards of common law and of broader ethics are written in blood, and outright dismissing those standards due to confidence that your own first-principles thinking is superior not only leaves you open to liability any time your actions clash with those standards, it leaves you in a position to cause much of the same damage those standards were written to prevent.
Just for the record, this is inaccurate in a bunch of different ways.
Our goal was not to destroy the reputation of that group within our community. Our primary goal was to investigate some bad things we heard about, with honestly my primary motivation being to figure out ways to somehow allow the very extensive rumors and warnings from many dozens of people that I’ve heard about in the case of FTX, to translate into further investigation and scrutiny.
In the case of FTX, there were similarly an enormous number of rumors and flags that people had raised, but nobody felt comfortable publishing those, which played a major role in the damage that FTX was able to cause. At least my primary goal in allocating resources to this was to try very concretely to apply those lessons to the Nonlinear case and see whether it’s possible to somehow get information from the rumor level into a more fact-checkable and verifiable level.
I think this is also false. The post lost about 20 karma in the last few days, not really changing its relative ranking at all.
At the time of publication, I struggle to differentiate between “destroy the reputation” and “allow the very extensive rumors and warnings from many dozens of people … to translate into further investigation and scrutiny [comparable to the case of FTX, the biggest scandal in your community]”. I respect that you perceive a difference but the one seems like an expansion of the other. Raising serious red flags about an organization has straightforward and predictable reputational effects.
I’ll strikethrough the other claim—I must have misinterpreted some of what I remembered reading about it.
Hmm, I feel like what I am trying to say here is not that weird. My current model is that if you want to be able to catch things like FTX early, before they explode as badly as they did and cause enormous harms, you need some better ways of propagating information than we had at the time. Information about sketchiness and wrongdoing was present, but definitive proof of fraud was not present.
Of course most of the time when the community notices flags like this it will not turn out to be as big as we found out FTX was after it exploded. If I had definitive knowledge that FTX was defrauding billions of customer deposits I would have taken very different actions. But there must be some way to propagate my concerns about FTX pre-collapse which maybe could have reduced the size of the fallout, or sparked an investigation that uncovered the full extend of the fraud. If you have better ways for doing that than the kind of investigation we tried to do here, I would be very interested in hearing them.
It’s not weird, it’s just that there might be a disconnect in tone. “Destroy reputation” has negative connotations; “raise red flags” has responsible connotations. It can be correct to damage someone’s reputation if they do things incompatible with that reputation, and raising red flags has a way of doing that.
I think I’ve been clear and consistent in terms of “better ways.” When people raise concerns, they should be investigated. When you’re looking to publish those concerns, you should make reasonable efforts to verify their specifics, which matter a great deal and cannot be handwaved away. If you are reporting secondhand and not from direct experience, you should either receive primary source documents that let you see evidence directly or check to see whether the accused can provide contrary evidence on every claim in dispute.
In this case, every claim that was important enough to be included in the document was important enough to verify with either direct primary evidence or against Nonlinear’s word and evidence. There are multiple unambiguous instances in the article where you relayed false information that was contradicted by evidence Nonlinear was volunteering to make available to you. You excuse those by claiming that pressure meant you had a duty to release. It did not. Pressure is the correct response to imminent publication of falsehoods and is only inappropriate against truth. The greater the pressure, the more it matters whether you wind up presenting the truth on every particular in your report.
In numbered format:
If Alice or Chloe had wanted to share their direct personal experience, they could have done so without using you as an intermediary, taking personal responsibility for the truth or falsehood of their claims.
Once you elected to be intermediary, you should have relied on primary source documents and gathered as much of it as possible to support or contradict various claims. You should not have turned down a request to send you detailed primary source documents, nor should you have neglected to update your story on receiving new ones even two hours before publication.
In the absence of primary source documents for or against a given claim, you would be free to share it as a claim from an involved party reliant on their word.
The only appropriate time to publish is when the report is complete—when every claim you want to publish has been vetted and is good to go. External and internal pressure, even threats of lawsuits, matter massively less than whether you have given a complete and accurate accounting of what you were aiming to investigate.
I think you’ve both raised good points. Way upthread @Habryka said “I don’t see a super principled argument for giving two weeks instead of one week”, but if I were unfairly accused I’d certainly want a full two weeks! So Kat’s request for a full week to gather evidence seems reasonable [ed: under the principle of due process], and I don’t see what sort of opportunities would’ve existed for retribution from K&E in the two-week case that didn’t exist in the one-week case.
However, when I read Ben’s post (like TW, I did this “fresh” about two days ago; I didn’t see Ben’s post until Kat’s post was up) it sounds like there was more evidence behind it than he specifically detailed (e.g. “I talked to many people who interacted with Emerson and Kat who had many active ethical concerns about them and strongly negative opinions”). Given this, plus concerning aspects of Kat’s response, I think Ben’s post is probably broadly accurate―perhaps overbiased against NL based on the evidence I’ve seen, but perhaps that’s compensated by evidence I haven’t seen, that was only alluded to.
(Edit: but it also seems like the wording of Ben’s piece would’ve softened if they’d waited a bit longer, so… basically I lean more toward TW’s position. But also, I don’t expect the wording to have softened that much. This is all so damn nuanced! Also, I actually think even a partial softening of Ben’s post would’ve been important and might have materially changed Kat’s response and increased community cohesion. K&E likely have personality flaws, but are also likely EAs and rationalists at heart. I respect that, and I respect the apparently substantial funds they put into trying to do good, and so it seems like it would’ve been worth spending more time to get Ben’s initial post right. I’m sad about this situation, I guess because I feel that both Ben and Kat’s posts were worded in somewhat unfair ways, and I’m unconvinced that quite so much acrimony was necessary.)
I am not an effective altruist, but I am broadly adjacent and I work on stories about sensitive and complex situations with competing information from various parties regularly. I am coming to this fresh, not having heard of Nonlinear or Lightcone prior to yesterday.
Of all responses in this saga, I confess this is the one I’m least sympathetic to. Lawsuit threats are distinctly unfriendly. Here’s another thing that’s distinctly unfriendly: publishing libelous information likely to do irreparable damage to an organization without giving them the opportunity to proactively correct falsehoods. The legal system is a way of systematizing responses to that sort of unfriendliness; it is not kind, it is not pleasant, but it is a legitimate response to a calculated decision to inflict enormous reputational harm.
So you would have lost 40 hours of productive time? Respectfully: so what? You have sources actively claiming you are about to publish directly false information about them and asking for time to provide evidence that information is directly false. A lot of time, when people do that, they provide a different gloss on the same substantive information, and your original story can go ahead without serious issue. But it’s vital to at least see what they’re talking about!
As of right now, I am persuaded that at least some of the claims in the original article—claims, again, used to inflict serious reputational harm—were substantively false in a way that could and should have been corrected by checking the evidence provided by the accused parties. I am persuaded that you published those claims without due diligence, that those claims materially contributed to damaging the reputation of an organization in the community where its reputation mattered most, and that you received warning in advance that there was evidence available to indicate the falsehood of those claims.
I’m an outsider to this situation proceeding on the limited information in these two posts and comment sections, but given that information, I think the decision to publish potentially materially false information without waiting for available hard evidence to counter it was a poor one to which “threats of retaliation” (libel suits) were a proportionate response, not an unreasonable escalation.
Also, I think it is worth Oli/Ben estimating how many productive hours were lost to the decision to not delay; it would not surprise me if much of the benefit here was illusory.
I think it’s a bit messy, but my guess is indeed the additional time cost of this has been greater. Though to be clear, I never argued anywhere that this was the primary reason for making this decision, and wouldn’t want someone to walk away with that impression (and don’t think anyone is claiming that here, but not sure).