I haven’t looked into the evidence here at all, but fwiw the section on ‘sharing information on ben pace’ is deranged. I know you are using this as an example of how unfounded allegations can damage someone’s reputation. But in repeating them, you are also repeating unfounded allegations and damaging someone’s reputation. You are also obviously doing this in retaliation for him criticising you. You could have used an infinite number of examples of how unfair allegations can damage someone’s reputation, including eg known false allegations against celebrities or other people reported in the news, or hypotheticals.
Just share your counter-evidence, don’t in the process try to smear the person criticising you.
Edited to add: My objection to John’s comment in what I write below lies with the “deranged” part. If John had instead said something like “unnecessary” or “overly escalatory/ad hominem,” then I would not have responded. But “deranged” — dictionary definition: “completely unable to think clearly or behave in a controlled way, especially because of mental illness” (source) — which I take as John implying that the direction Kat has gone in is so completely nonsensical that there can’t possibly be a reasonable explanation, struck me as sufficiently inaccurate for the opening assertion in such a highly upvoted comment that I felt the need to weigh in.
I think Kat could reasonably claim that, from her perspective, Ben has opted out of the social convention around not damaging someone’s reputation through less-than-solid allegations, so she is now fighting fire with fire.
I’m not saying I agree with Kat’s move here [edited to add: and I would personally prefer it if Kat had focused solely on engaging, in a factual manner, with the evidence Ben put forward], but I think there’s a frame in which it makes sense, and therefore it seems unfair to label this move “deranged.”
People seem to be using “retaliation” in two different senses: (1) punishing someone merely in response to their having previously acted against the retaliator’s interests, and (2) defecting against someone who has previously defected in a social interaction analogous to a prisoner’s dilemma, or in a social context in which there is a reasonable expectation of reciprocity. I agree that retaliation is bad in the first sense, but Will appears to be using ‘retaliation’ in the second sense, and I do not agree that retaliation is bad in this sense.
(I haven’t followed this thread closely and I do not have object-level views about the Nonlinear dispute. Sharing just in case it helps clear unnecessary misunderstandings.)
So you endorse “always cooperate” over “tit-for-tat” in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
Seems to me there are 2 consistent positions here:
The thing is bad, in which case the person who did it first is worse. (They were the first to defect.)
The thing is OK, in which case the person who did it second did nothing wrong.
I don’t think it’s particularly blameworthy to both (a) participate in a defect/defect equilibrium, and (b) try to coordinate a move away from it.
EDIT: A couple other points
I know the payoff structure here might not be an actual Prisoner’s Dilemma, but I think my point still stands.
David’s consistent use of “doing X” seems important here. If someone does X (e.g. blows the whistle on unethical practices), and someone else does Y in response (e.g. fires the person who blew the whistle), that’s a different situation.
IIRC, Truman said something at the United Nations like “we need to keep the world free from war”, right after having fought one of the largest wars in history (WW2). Doesn’t seem that weird to me.
Exaggeration is fun, but not what this situation calls for. So for me, the only reason I didn’t upvote you was the word “deranged”. Naivety? Everybody’s got some, but I think EAs tend to be below average in that respect.
I’m not sure I would have used Ben as the example had I been writing it, but I think I understand why they did, and I certainly don’t blame them for it. There is no drama where everyone is on the same side, so any real life example would antagonize some readers. Hypothetical examples are always weaker because the reader might think they are unrealistic. And Ben is in no position to complain about people sharing negative one-sided stories on the EA forum.
This word “retaliation” seems to be doing a lot of work in your thinking, so I’d like to disect it a little bit. What exactly do you mean by “retaliation”? One could use retaliation to mean “any time Alice hurts Bob, and later Bob does something that hurts Alice, which he would not have done but for Alice’s initial hurtful action.” If that is your definition, then yes, sure, this is obvious retaliation. So what? Lots of things that are retaliation under this definition are fine, some are even optimal. Every time that a US military unit attacked a Japanese one during ww2 was retaliation for Pearl Harbor under this definition, yet clearly waging war on Japan was correct. I think when you use the word though, you mean it to carry some additional meaning. You seem to think that it is necessarily bad. And that requires a more constricted definition and an argument that nonlinear’s actions satisfy it.
I think the choice to use Ben in particular predictably sheds more heat than light. The fact that any example might have provoked disagreement doesn’t mean they would all have produced the same amount thereof, and I think the choice they made does not reflect an interest in minimizing drama.
I further think that it’s especially important to avoid controversy wherever one possibly can in posts like this, precisely because they’ll predictably antagonize people even when one does; intensity of feeling often motivates people to give the facts less consideration than would be appropriate, and I think the unavoidable level of antagonism is already higher than optimal for getting people to reason with their heads rather than their guts, so to speak.
I think this section illustrated something important, that I would not have properly understood without a real demonstration with real facts about a real person. It hits different emotionally when it’s real, and given how important this point is, and how emotionally charged everything else is, I think I needed this demonstration for the lesson to hit home for me.
I also don’t think this is retaliation. If that was the goal Kat could have just ended the section after making Ben look maximally bad, and not adding the clarifying context.
I also don’t think this is retaliation. If that was the goal Kat could have just ended the section after making Ben look maximally bad, and not adding the clarifying context.
This is not true. If Kat had just left in the section making Ben look bad, everyone would have been “what? Where is the evidence for this? This seems really bad?”.
The way it is written it still leaves many people with an impression, but alleviates any burden of proof that Kat would have had.
You might still think it’s a fine rhetorical tool to use, but I think it’s clear that Kat of course couldn’t have just put the accusations into the post without experiencing substantial backlash and scrutiny of her claims.
I strongly disagree. You logically have to either believe that the entire post of Ben was equally deranged, or that the section in this post is obviously worse than what Ben wrote, or both.
And yes, you could have used other examples to make the point. But it matters that you can do this with Ben in particular because people may have trusted the initial allegations because Ben wrote them. It seem to me to be a valid part of the argument, and one that Kat is morally justified in making.
‘You logically have to either believe that the entire post of Ben was equally deranged, or that the section in this post is obviously worse than what Ben wrote, or both.’
I don’t get the argument here. Surely there is obviously more reason to trust a report coming from someone who had no known prior beef with the people being accused of misconduct, then one from someone who has massive independent reason to (fairly or unfairly, doesn’t matter) detest the person the accusation is about.
Yeah, I mean that would be an argument for why the section is worse than what Ben did. If you do conclude that, then I think your original comment becomes reasonable. It doesn’t strike me as obvious though, which might be the crux.
Since the anecdotes in the section are real rather than made-up, it seems nontrivial to me that you can write a section like that even if you have prior reason to dislike the person. I agree with your other comment that it’s non-crazy to do some amount of updating based on the section despite Kat saying you shouldn’t update. But I don’t agree that Kat is therefore not “morally allowed” to write it.
So as I understand it, the principle in your comment is that if person X criticises an organisation it is sane/appropriate for someone representing that org to then write ‘we have been told that person X is a sexual predator. Don’t take this literally though, it’s unfair to say this in public, though i just did say it in public. But btw I think it is definitely true’
I think the principle is something like, “if X socially harms Y, then Y is morally justified to pull analogous moves on X to make a point as long as this clearly causes only a fraction of the harm, maybe at most 10% something”. Which I recognize isn’t obvious; you could argue that X harming Y doesn’t give Y any permission to be less than maximally ethical. But that is not how most people assess things most of the time. People are generally not expected to be maximally nice to people who mistreated them. And given how humans work, I think that’s a norm that makes sense.
Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be (even though, as I said, I agree that it doesn’t remove it entirely). This looks to me like a high enough ethical standard given the context.
‘Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be ’
I think this is maybe part of the disagreement. I don’t think that the framing gets rid of most of the harm. People already know sometimes rumors are false or unfair, so just reminding people of this is not really adding much extra new information to the bare accusation itself.
I agree it can be okay/excusable to give in to the urge of taking digs at people who you think have unfairly harmed you. At the same time, I think it can make a big difference whether someone is doing this because of (1) or (2) of the following:
(1) they perceive situations like this as a social game about who manages to get the audience on their side, within which tactics like making insinuations about others’ character or repeating hearsay is fair game as long as it works / if the audience will think it’s okay/excusable/justified, etc.
or whether it’s
(2) while they’re pissed off and tempted to retaliate, they also feel strongly bound to a code of fairness where it’s only really okay to make bad insinuations if you’re very likely to be right, so they’re worried about saying the wrong thing, being biased, etc. I.e., they genuinely consider the possibility that they’re too emotionally invested and in the wrong themselves in the sense of feeling too much negativity about the other party and giving a distorted impression of them.
I interpret John G. Halstead’s point along the lines of “if they were doing (2) instead of (1), why does it look like they’re trying to have their cake and eat it? Why does it look like they’re simultaneously saying that accusations like that (which they chose to repeat/air publicly) are often about things that aren’t actually too bad or shouldn’t be trusted, but also saying that they mostly trust them and think they’re actually bad?”
No, but I think she would be morally permitted to verbally insult him after that, especially if it’s the first time she gets to respond.
My point was you should make norms that ask realistic things of people. It’s not realistic to expect people to be completely emotionally detached toward someone who harmed them. But it is realistic to expect them to keep retaliation to a minimum, which again, I think is the norm that most people actually apply to situations most of the time. And yes, if you construct an example where the initial harm is extreme, then the 10% figure I postulated doesn’t work anymore.
I think some of your recent comments raised valuable points but, unfortunately, too many do not follow Forum norms. Specifically, norms around assuming good faith, staying on topic, not being unnecessarily rude or offensive, and avoiding deliberate flamebait.
Also noting that this is your 14th comment on this thread, in a very short span of time, and your comments appear to be becoming increasingly rude.
This is a warning. I’ll note that this is your third warning — please be more mindful in the future. In order to avoid breaking norms going forward, please phrase your contributions in a more collaborative manner. Further norm violations could lead to rate-limiting or a ban.
(This was written in reply to the comment above, before your most recent comments)
It seems good to me if the forum team took more action here against this post, for example removing the section on Ben Pace that can clearly be interpreted as retaliatory. I don’t see why we would assume good faith for that part of the post.
The reaction here of the moderation seems a bit unbalanced.
I want to express ambivalence (actual ambivalence, not code for dislike) about this kind of moderation. I take it that if the same points had been expressed using different language, the mods would not have objected. But in my view, the inflammatory tone has discursive value—it signals a level of frustration and anger that is arguably appropriate, given the circumstances, and is difficult to communicate using more staid language.
I also wonder about the value-add of moderators intervening on these kinds of comments, given they tend to get downvoted anyways. And if they don’t, should the mods really be sanctioning them? (Do mods on other websites do this? My impression was that, e.g., the NYT just censors profanity and spam, and allows voting to do the rest.)
To give a little context for this comment, I read the Forum before I was involved in EA, and when I saw comments that were not phrased in a, uh, collaborative manner, my reaction was usually “wow, I’m glad someone is expressing their true feelings about this situation.” It made EA seem a bit more real, honest, and normal. I still basically feel this way. We all have emotional responses—especially to community events—and these emotions usually linger just below the surface of our neatly worded essays. (This is part of what feels off to me about the original post—it’s couched in niceties and formal language, but reads as biting and furious. I think the kind of moderation on display here encourages this kind of tone.)
I am sympathetic to the worry that a lot of online spaces are too rude, mean, unproductive, and so on, but I don’t think the Forum is going to descend into madness if the mods just allow democracy to do its thing here (though I’m not sure!). Conversely, I do think that tone-policing is hard to do even-handedly, and can contribute to weird and disingenuous discussions that I’m not sure are always a good thing, particularly when strong emotions may well be warranted.
Sorry, I don’t think I got this quite right in my initial comment; let me try again:
I think something really messed up is going on here, in that both Ben and Kat’s posts include some serious allegations that are supported by very limited evidence (like “anonymous person said X”). (Other allegations in these posts are supported by good evidence, like screenshots.) These accusations have the potential to seriously harm people’s professional lives, relationships, and mental health. And in both cases, the general message of both posts could be relayed without relying on the anecdotes that aren’t supported by good evidence.
The forum moderators have allowed this mudslinging to occur more or less unchecked. To the extent mods have been involved, their involvement has been limited to telling bystanders not to lose our heads. I think this is very bad! The evidentiary standards these posts are being held to wouldn’t come close to passing muster on Wikipedia (let alone in a newspaper or court). And there’s a reason for that: baselessly smearing people is bad. It is especially bad when the most plausible explanation for the behavior is vengeance. For the mods to then issue a warning for a take saying as much (packaged in combative language) while allowing the libel (packaged in Forum-y language) to go unchecked strikes me as exactly backwards, especially when Forum users can readily police the former (through voting), but cannot police the latter. Given the stakes of these kinds of posts for people’s lives, I really hope this situation prompts some kind of post-mortem about the evidentiary standards posts should be held to.
I don’t view the toe and murder comments as violating forum norms. They are a reductio of what I take to be an absurd argument. I think the comment about preposterous naivety is correct. The post itself obviously violates forum norms and the moderators are defending the post
For the record, my other warnings were for
discussing how someone credibly accused by multiple people of sexual misconduct repeatedly lied and isn’t permanently banned from the forum
-sharing true information about how Emile Torres has harassed me without sharing the supporting evidence for privacy reasons. The comment confirming the warning was heavily downvoted.
It’s not clear the anecdotes in that section are real and not made-up. Kat is dodging questions about it, so for all we know, it could be the case that everyone referenced in that section was a Nonlinear employee who feels bad due to Ben’s post. Some people elsewhere in this thread theorized that it’s Kat describing herself, and strangely but conspicuously, she hasn’t denied it.
Edit: I misread what you were saying. I thought you were saying ‘Kat has dodged questions about whether it was true’, and ‘It’s not clear the anecdotes are being presentedas real’.
Kat is responding to other questions in this thread, but not ones about the “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” section.
It’s not clear that the anecdotes are from someone outside of Nonlinear who had some bad experience with Ben Pace other than Ben publishing the original post about Nonlinear.
It’s not clear whether Kat wants people to think that it’s about some unmotivated third party, or if it’s supposed to be obvious that it’s Kat writing her own experience in third person. She did write in the post that you shouldn’t update on it, but maybe she wants it to be ambiguous, which has the effect of discrediting Ben. She says that if the person it’s referring to said these things publicly, people would disagree 50⁄50 on whether Ben did something bad, which sure does sound a lot like it’s talking about this whole controversy.
Other people in this thread are saying it’s obvious, but I’m really confused.
If it is, in fact, based someone from Nonlinear, then I’d agree that the section is bad. At that point, it would no longer be a valid example of “look, you can do this to anyone”.
I do agree that Ben had less reason to say these things than we did.
However, Alice and Chloe also had a lot of reasons to say terrible things about us. Alice started her smear campaign against us right after she asked for $240,000 and we said no.
They were also incentivized to make everything sound maximally sad-sounding. Ben said if they did the emotional labor of sharing their sad stories, he’d give them $10,000. They knew that if their stories hadn’t been very sad (e.g. Alice said she did get food but it just wasn’t her first choice of food) they wouldn’t have received that money. Ben wouldn’t pay for emotional labor if there was no emotional labor to be found, and he wouldn’t write an article about how Alice wanted Burger King faster.
Imagine that you’ve heard some bad things about somebody (let’s call him Bob). But you didn’t update much because you didn’t hear both sides and you haven’t done any fact checking. Imagine Bob hears bad things about you and writes a hit piece about you, doing virtually no fact-checking, and destroying your mental health and ability to do good, potentially permanently.
Many people would say it’s completely within your rights to respond by sharing the things you’ve heard about Bob. However, we didn’t. We anonymized it and tried to use it as a way to illustrate how this methodology consistently leads to misleading and unethical outcomes.
He shared anonymous accusations and hearsay and said “update on Nonlinear. They are bad”
We shared anonymous accusations and hearsay and said “don’t update on Ben. You can make anything sound terrible and this methodology will consistently lead to inaccurate and unethical outcomes.”
We could indeed have used somebody else as an example, and if we had a time machine, maybe we’d do that. But I think it’s totally within our rights to use it as an example of how this methodology is deeply flawed and should not be used.
This is bordering on comical. I am going to use your framework to redescribe what you actually did.
“We have been told that Bob is a real predator, bad guy. however, it would be wrong to say that Bob is a real predator, bad guy. I know we just did that but we didn’t mean it. Btw we think it is true that Bob is a real predator.”
We are clearly trying to tell people that they shouldn’t update based on these allegations based on the things we explained in the post (e.g. it’s one-sided, emotionally loaded, etc).
I very much recommend not updating against him, for the reasons I explain in the post. If you do update, then I recommend you also update against Ben for doing this to us.
The thing is though that it is obviously not rational to do zero updating*. And you probably know this, since it is it obvious. So it’s hard not to conclude that you are doing it because at some (possibly not conscious) level you want people to think negatively about Ben, given that you believe he has treated you extremely unjustly and that this lead to the worst experience of your life.
*The problem with rumor is not that rumor is zero evidence, but that if everyone believes all rumors without question, things go very badly overall in predictable ways.
I also didn’t like that section at first, but if you read through it carefully you’ll notice that the language is very nebulous and that Kat doesn’t actually commit to very much. She only really claims that it is true that other people said bad things about Ben, not that she agrees that Ben is bad or that he did something bad. The fact that it sounds so bad I think makes Kat’s point pretty well. Her breakdown/defense of Ben afterwards also does a lot to diffuse the mud-slinging. (That said I would have chosen a different example.)
I think they are true but debatable about whether they are bad and the magnitude of the badness. I think most of the allegations would be scissor statements in the EA community about whether they’re bad and there’d be immense debate as to the magnitude of the badness.
I also know that for all of the accusations, either something is being done about it or the person does not want to do anything more about it, and I am respecting their wishes.
Ok so the allegations are true but might not be bad. I’m trying to picture what this might mean given that the victim regularly bursts into tears on the street. On a ten point badness magnitude scale, where are you pegging it?
I haven’t looked into the evidence here at all, but fwiw the section on ‘sharing information on ben pace’ is deranged. I know you are using this as an example of how unfounded allegations can damage someone’s reputation. But in repeating them, you are also repeating unfounded allegations and damaging someone’s reputation. You are also obviously doing this in retaliation for him criticising you. You could have used an infinite number of examples of how unfair allegations can damage someone’s reputation, including eg known false allegations against celebrities or other people reported in the news, or hypotheticals.
Just share your counter-evidence, don’t in the process try to smear the person criticising you.
For someone who seems to have made at least 20 comments on this post, why haven’t you bothered to at least look into the evidence they provided?
you are replying to John’s first comment on this article.
I think it is totally fine to comment on some of the things in a very long article, without reading the whole article and appendix.
Edited to add: My objection to John’s comment in what I write below lies with the “deranged” part. If John had instead said something like “unnecessary” or “overly escalatory/ad hominem,” then I would not have responded. But “deranged” — dictionary definition: “completely unable to think clearly or behave in a controlled way, especially because of mental illness” (source) — which I take as John implying that the direction Kat has gone in is so completely nonsensical that there can’t possibly be a reasonable explanation, struck me as sufficiently inaccurate for the opening assertion in such a highly upvoted comment that I felt the need to weigh in.
I think Kat could reasonably claim that, from her perspective, Ben has opted out of the social convention around not damaging someone’s reputation through less-than-solid allegations, so she is now fighting fire with fire.
I’m not saying I agree with Kat’s move here [edited to add: and I would personally prefer it if Kat had focused solely on engaging, in a factual manner, with the evidence Ben put forward], but I think there’s a frame in which it makes sense, and therefore it seems unfair to label this move “deranged.”
Retaliation is bad. If you think doing X is bad, then you shouldn’t do X, even if you’re ‘only doing it to make the point that doing X is bad’.
People seem to be using “retaliation” in two different senses: (1) punishing someone merely in response to their having previously acted against the retaliator’s interests, and (2) defecting against someone who has previously defected in a social interaction analogous to a prisoner’s dilemma, or in a social context in which there is a reasonable expectation of reciprocity. I agree that retaliation is bad in the first sense, but Will appears to be using ‘retaliation’ in the second sense, and I do not agree that retaliation is bad in this sense.
(I haven’t followed this thread closely and I do not have object-level views about the Nonlinear dispute. Sharing just in case it helps clear unnecessary misunderstandings.)
So you endorse “always cooperate” over “tit-for-tat” in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
Seems to me there are 2 consistent positions here:
The thing is bad, in which case the person who did it first is worse. (They were the first to defect.)
The thing is OK, in which case the person who did it second did nothing wrong.
I don’t think it’s particularly blameworthy to both (a) participate in a defect/defect equilibrium, and (b) try to coordinate a move away from it.
EDIT: A couple other points
I know the payoff structure here might not be an actual Prisoner’s Dilemma, but I think my point still stands.
David’s consistent use of “doing X” seems important here. If someone does X (e.g. blows the whistle on unethical practices), and someone else does Y in response (e.g. fires the person who blew the whistle), that’s a different situation.
I just mean one shouldn’t end up in a situation where you’re claiming nobody should do X, having just done X. That would be deeply weird of one.
IIRC, Truman said something at the United Nations like “we need to keep the world free from war”, right after having fought one of the largest wars in history (WW2). Doesn’t seem that weird to me.
The preposterous naivety on show in discussions like this make me think EA is not going to work as a thing
I don’t follow. Can you explain how Will Aldred’s comment was preposterously naive?
Exaggeration is fun, but not what this situation calls for. So for me, the only reason I didn’t upvote you was the word “deranged”. Naivety? Everybody’s got some, but I think EAs tend to be below average in that respect.
I’m not sure I would have used Ben as the example had I been writing it, but I think I understand why they did, and I certainly don’t blame them for it. There is no drama where everyone is on the same side, so any real life example would antagonize some readers. Hypothetical examples are always weaker because the reader might think they are unrealistic. And Ben is in no position to complain about people sharing negative one-sided stories on the EA forum.
It’s obvious retaliation for Ben criticising nonlinear in his post.
This word “retaliation” seems to be doing a lot of work in your thinking, so I’d like to disect it a little bit. What exactly do you mean by “retaliation”? One could use retaliation to mean “any time Alice hurts Bob, and later Bob does something that hurts Alice, which he would not have done but for Alice’s initial hurtful action.” If that is your definition, then yes, sure, this is obvious retaliation. So what? Lots of things that are retaliation under this definition are fine, some are even optimal. Every time that a US military unit attacked a Japanese one during ww2 was retaliation for Pearl Harbor under this definition, yet clearly waging war on Japan was correct. I think when you use the word though, you mean it to carry some additional meaning. You seem to think that it is necessarily bad. And that requires a more constricted definition and an argument that nonlinear’s actions satisfy it.
I think the choice to use Ben in particular predictably sheds more heat than light. The fact that any example might have provoked disagreement doesn’t mean they would all have produced the same amount thereof, and I think the choice they made does not reflect an interest in minimizing drama.
I further think that it’s especially important to avoid controversy wherever one possibly can in posts like this, precisely because they’ll predictably antagonize people even when one does; intensity of feeling often motivates people to give the facts less consideration than would be appropriate, and I think the unavoidable level of antagonism is already higher than optimal for getting people to reason with their heads rather than their guts, so to speak.
Disagree.
I think this section illustrated something important, that I would not have properly understood without a real demonstration with real facts about a real person. It hits different emotionally when it’s real, and given how important this point is, and how emotionally charged everything else is, I think I needed this demonstration for the lesson to hit home for me.
I also don’t think this is retaliation. If that was the goal Kat could have just ended the section after making Ben look maximally bad, and not adding the clarifying context.
This is not true. If Kat had just left in the section making Ben look bad, everyone would have been “what? Where is the evidence for this? This seems really bad?”.
The way it is written it still leaves many people with an impression, but alleviates any burden of proof that Kat would have had.
You might still think it’s a fine rhetorical tool to use, but I think it’s clear that Kat of course couldn’t have just put the accusations into the post without experiencing substantial backlash and scrutiny of her claims.
I strongly disagree. You logically have to either believe that the entire post of Ben was equally deranged, or that the section in this post is obviously worse than what Ben wrote, or both.
And yes, you could have used other examples to make the point. But it matters that you can do this with Ben in particular because people may have trusted the initial allegations because Ben wrote them. It seem to me to be a valid part of the argument, and one that Kat is morally justified in making.
‘You logically have to either believe that the entire post of Ben was equally deranged, or that the section in this post is obviously worse than what Ben wrote, or both.’
I don’t get the argument here. Surely there is obviously more reason to trust a report coming from someone who had no known prior beef with the people being accused of misconduct, then one from someone who has massive independent reason to (fairly or unfairly, doesn’t matter) detest the person the accusation is about.
Yeah, I mean that would be an argument for why the section is worse than what Ben did. If you do conclude that, then I think your original comment becomes reasonable. It doesn’t strike me as obvious though, which might be the crux.
Since the anecdotes in the section are real rather than made-up, it seems nontrivial to me that you can write a section like that even if you have prior reason to dislike the person. I agree with your other comment that it’s non-crazy to do some amount of updating based on the section despite Kat saying you shouldn’t update. But I don’t agree that Kat is therefore not “morally allowed” to write it.
So as I understand it, the principle in your comment is that if person X criticises an organisation it is sane/appropriate for someone representing that org to then write ‘we have been told that person X is a sexual predator. Don’t take this literally though, it’s unfair to say this in public, though i just did say it in public. But btw I think it is definitely true’
I think the principle is something like, “if X socially harms Y, then Y is morally justified to pull analogous moves on X to make a point as long as this clearly causes only a fraction of the harm, maybe at most 10% something”. Which I recognize isn’t obvious; you could argue that X harming Y doesn’t give Y any permission to be less than maximally ethical. But that is not how most people assess things most of the time. People are generally not expected to be maximally nice to people who mistreated them. And given how humans work, I think that’s a norm that makes sense.
Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be (even though, as I said, I agree that it doesn’t remove it entirely). This looks to me like a high enough ethical standard given the context.
‘Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be ’
I think this is maybe part of the disagreement. I don’t think that the framing gets rid of most of the harm. People already know sometimes rumors are false or unfair, so just reminding people of this is not really adding much extra new information to the bare accusation itself.
I agree it can be okay/excusable to give in to the urge of taking digs at people who you think have unfairly harmed you. At the same time, I think it can make a big difference whether someone is doing this because of (1) or (2) of the following:
(1) they perceive situations like this as a social game about who manages to get the audience on their side, within which tactics like making insinuations about others’ character or repeating hearsay is fair game as long as it works / if the audience will think it’s okay/excusable/justified, etc.
or whether it’s
(2) while they’re pissed off and tempted to retaliate, they also feel strongly bound to a code of fairness where it’s only really okay to make bad insinuations if you’re very likely to be right, so they’re worried about saying the wrong thing, being biased, etc. I.e., they genuinely consider the possibility that they’re too emotionally invested and in the wrong themselves in the sense of feeling too much negativity about the other party and giving a distorted impression of them.
I interpret John G. Halstead’s point along the lines of “if they were doing (2) instead of (1), why does it look like they’re trying to have their cake and eat it? Why does it look like they’re simultaneously saying that accusations like that (which they chose to repeat/air publicly) are often about things that aren’t actually too bad or shouldn’t be trusted, but also saying that they mostly trust them and think they’re actually bad?”
Right ok. So if Ben tried to murder kat, she would be permitted to cut off his arm?
No, but I think she would be morally permitted to verbally insult him after that, especially if it’s the first time she gets to respond.
My point was you should make norms that ask realistic things of people. It’s not realistic to expect people to be completely emotionally detached toward someone who harmed them. But it is realistic to expect them to keep retaliation to a minimum, which again, I think is the norm that most people actually apply to situations most of the time. And yes, if you construct an example where the initial harm is extreme, then the 10% figure I postulated doesn’t work anymore.
1 toe for ten toes?
I think some of your recent comments raised valuable points but, unfortunately, too many do not follow Forum norms. Specifically, norms around assuming good faith, staying on topic, not being unnecessarily rude or offensive, and avoiding deliberate flamebait.
Some examples:
Give. Me. A. Break.
if Ben tried to murder kat, she would be permitted to cut off his arm?
The preposterous naivety on show in discussions like this
Also noting that this is your 14th comment on this thread, in a very short span of time, and your comments appear to be becoming increasingly rude.
This is a warning. I’ll note that this is your third warning — please be more mindful in the future. In order to avoid breaking norms going forward, please phrase your contributions in a more collaborative manner. Further norm violations could lead to rate-limiting or a ban.
(This was written in reply to the comment above, before your most recent comments)
It seems good to me if the forum team took more action here against this post, for example removing the section on Ben Pace that can clearly be interpreted as retaliatory. I don’t see why we would assume good faith for that part of the post.
The reaction here of the moderation seems a bit unbalanced.
I want to express ambivalence (actual ambivalence, not code for dislike) about this kind of moderation. I take it that if the same points had been expressed using different language, the mods would not have objected. But in my view, the inflammatory tone has discursive value—it signals a level of frustration and anger that is arguably appropriate, given the circumstances, and is difficult to communicate using more staid language.
I also wonder about the value-add of moderators intervening on these kinds of comments, given they tend to get downvoted anyways. And if they don’t, should the mods really be sanctioning them? (Do mods on other websites do this? My impression was that, e.g., the NYT just censors profanity and spam, and allows voting to do the rest.)
To give a little context for this comment, I read the Forum before I was involved in EA, and when I saw comments that were not phrased in a, uh, collaborative manner, my reaction was usually “wow, I’m glad someone is expressing their true feelings about this situation.” It made EA seem a bit more real, honest, and normal. I still basically feel this way. We all have emotional responses—especially to community events—and these emotions usually linger just below the surface of our neatly worded essays. (This is part of what feels off to me about the original post—it’s couched in niceties and formal language, but reads as biting and furious. I think the kind of moderation on display here encourages this kind of tone.)
I am sympathetic to the worry that a lot of online spaces are too rude, mean, unproductive, and so on, but I don’t think the Forum is going to descend into madness if the mods just allow democracy to do its thing here (though I’m not sure!). Conversely, I do think that tone-policing is hard to do even-handedly, and can contribute to weird and disingenuous discussions that I’m not sure are always a good thing, particularly when strong emotions may well be warranted.
Sorry, I don’t think I got this quite right in my initial comment; let me try again:
I think something really messed up is going on here, in that both Ben and Kat’s posts include some serious allegations that are supported by very limited evidence (like “anonymous person said X”). (Other allegations in these posts are supported by good evidence, like screenshots.) These accusations have the potential to seriously harm people’s professional lives, relationships, and mental health. And in both cases, the general message of both posts could be relayed without relying on the anecdotes that aren’t supported by good evidence.
The forum moderators have allowed this mudslinging to occur more or less unchecked. To the extent mods have been involved, their involvement has been limited to telling bystanders not to lose our heads. I think this is very bad! The evidentiary standards these posts are being held to wouldn’t come close to passing muster on Wikipedia (let alone in a newspaper or court). And there’s a reason for that: baselessly smearing people is bad. It is especially bad when the most plausible explanation for the behavior is vengeance. For the mods to then issue a warning for a take saying as much (packaged in combative language) while allowing the libel (packaged in Forum-y language) to go unchecked strikes me as exactly backwards, especially when Forum users can readily police the former (through voting), but cannot police the latter. Given the stakes of these kinds of posts for people’s lives, I really hope this situation prompts some kind of post-mortem about the evidentiary standards posts should be held to.
I don’t view the toe and murder comments as violating forum norms. They are a reductio of what I take to be an absurd argument. I think the comment about preposterous naivety is correct. The post itself obviously violates forum norms and the moderators are defending the post
For the record, my other warnings were for
discussing how someone credibly accused by multiple people of sexual misconduct repeatedly lied and isn’t permanently banned from the forum
-sharing true information about how Emile Torres has harassed me without sharing the supporting evidence for privacy reasons. The comment confirming the warning was heavily downvoted.
Thanks for the feedback! I replied here since it’s unrelated to this post.
It’s not clear the anecdotes in that section are real and not made-up. Kat is dodging questions about it, so for all we know, it could be the case that everyone referenced in that section was a Nonlinear employee who feels bad due to Ben’s post. Some people elsewhere in this thread theorized that it’s Kat describing herself, and strangely but conspicuously, she hasn’t denied it.
Edit: I misread what you were saying. I thought you were saying ‘Kat has dodged questions about whether it was true’, and ‘It’s not clear the anecdotes are being presented as real’.
Actually, Katsaid it was true.Kat is responding to other questions in this thread, but not ones about the “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” section.
It’s not clear that the anecdotes are from someone outside of Nonlinear who had some bad experience with Ben Pace other than Ben publishing the original post about Nonlinear.
It’s not clear whether Kat wants people to think that it’s about some unmotivated third party, or if it’s supposed to be obvious that it’s Kat writing her own experience in third person. She did write in the post that you shouldn’t update on it, but maybe she wants it to be ambiguous, which has the effect of discrediting Ben. She says that if the person it’s referring to said these things publicly, people would disagree 50⁄50 on whether Ben did something bad, which sure does sound a lot like it’s talking about this whole controversy.
Other people in this thread are saying it’s obvious, but I’m really confused.
If it is, in fact, based someone from Nonlinear, then I’d agree that the section is bad. At that point, it would no longer be a valid example of “look, you can do this to anyone”.
I do agree that Ben had less reason to say these things than we did.
However, Alice and Chloe also had a lot of reasons to say terrible things about us. Alice started her smear campaign against us right after she asked for $240,000 and we said no.
They were also incentivized to make everything sound maximally sad-sounding. Ben said if they did the emotional labor of sharing their sad stories, he’d give them $10,000. They knew that if their stories hadn’t been very sad (e.g. Alice said she did get food but it just wasn’t her first choice of food) they wouldn’t have received that money. Ben wouldn’t pay for emotional labor if there was no emotional labor to be found, and he wouldn’t write an article about how Alice wanted Burger King faster.
So you thought it appropriate to in response do a hitpiece on the author of the critique? Is that correct?
Imagine that you’ve heard some bad things about somebody (let’s call him Bob). But you didn’t update much because you didn’t hear both sides and you haven’t done any fact checking. Imagine Bob hears bad things about you and writes a hit piece about you, doing virtually no fact-checking, and destroying your mental health and ability to do good, potentially permanently.
Many people would say it’s completely within your rights to respond by sharing the things you’ve heard about Bob. However, we didn’t. We anonymized it and tried to use it as a way to illustrate how this methodology consistently leads to misleading and unethical outcomes.
He shared anonymous accusations and hearsay and said “update on Nonlinear. They are bad”
We shared anonymous accusations and hearsay and said “don’t update on Ben. You can make anything sound terrible and this methodology will consistently lead to inaccurate and unethical outcomes.”
We could indeed have used somebody else as an example, and if we had a time machine, maybe we’d do that. But I think it’s totally within our rights to use it as an example of how this methodology is deeply flawed and should not be used.
This is bordering on comical. I am going to use your framework to redescribe what you actually did.
“We have been told that Bob is a real predator, bad guy. however, it would be wrong to say that Bob is a real predator, bad guy. I know we just did that but we didn’t mean it. Btw we think it is true that Bob is a real predator.”
We are clearly trying to tell people that they shouldn’t update based on these allegations based on the things we explained in the post (e.g. it’s one-sided, emotionally loaded, etc).
I very much recommend not updating against him, for the reasons I explain in the post. If you do update, then I recommend you also update against Ben for doing this to us.
The thing is though that it is obviously not rational to do zero updating*. And you probably know this, since it is it obvious. So it’s hard not to conclude that you are doing it because at some (possibly not conscious) level you want people to think negatively about Ben, given that you believe he has treated you extremely unjustly and that this lead to the worst experience of your life.
*The problem with rumor is not that rumor is zero evidence, but that if everyone believes all rumors without question, things go very badly overall in predictable ways.
Give. Me. A. Break.
In the comments below you say you personally think the allegations you allude to are true. You obviously thought they are worth sharing.
Tbh this alone basically updates me entirely to the position ‘kat woods is a bad actor’ without even reading the previous debate
I also didn’t like that section at first, but if you read through it carefully you’ll notice that the language is very nebulous and that Kat doesn’t actually commit to very much. She only really claims that it is true that other people said bad things about Ben, not that she agrees that Ben is bad or that he did something bad. The fact that it sounds so bad I think makes Kat’s point pretty well. Her breakdown/defense of Ben afterwards also does a lot to diffuse the mud-slinging. (That said I would have chosen a different example.)
I think they are true but debatable about whether they are bad and the magnitude of the badness. I think most of the allegations would be scissor statements in the EA community about whether they’re bad and there’d be immense debate as to the magnitude of the badness.
I also know that for all of the accusations, either something is being done about it or the person does not want to do anything more about it, and I am respecting their wishes.
Ok so the allegations are true but might not be bad. I’m trying to picture what this might mean given that the victim regularly bursts into tears on the street. On a ten point badness magnitude scale, where are you pegging it?