This post seems premature to me (edit: which I recognize might seem in conflict with my defense of Ben not giving Nonlinear more time to respond before publication, and am happy to go into why I hold both of these positions after Ben published his response).
In-particular the section ‘Avoidable, Unambiguous Falsehoods’ contains mostly claims that are, to the best of my knowledge, not actually falsehoods, but are correct. And that section of the post seems quite load-bearing (given that the central case of the post relies on spreading false and/or misleading information about Nonlinear, and the case for an absence of due diligence).
Ben is working on a response, and given that I think it’s clearly the right call to wait a week or two until we have another round of counter-evidence before jumping to conclusions. If in a week or two people still think the section of “Avoidable, Unambiguous falsehoods” does indeed contain such things, then I think an analysis like this makes sense, and people can spend time thinking through the implications of that (I disagree with various other parts of the post, but I think mine and Ben’s time is best spent engaging with Nonlinear’s post and not getting distracted by discussion on this post).
I might also try to get some responses out earlier, but my current sense is people would like us to not rush out a response to reduce the risk of any errors introduced and to generally save people time and attention. Interested in people’s takes in the replies if they disagree. If people prefer we can post evidence more piecemeal and quickly, though my vague read is that people prefer us taking time and to publish something more comprehensive.
(I do also want to clarify that Me and Ben were not shared on this post in advance, and I would have left comments with evidence falsifying at least one or two of the claims)
in our direct messages about this post prior to publication, provided a snippet of a private conversation about the ACX meetup board decision where you took a maximally broad interpretation of something I had limited ways of verifying, pressured me to add it as context to this post in a way that would have led to a substantially false statement on my part, then admitted greater confusion to a board member while saying nothing to me about the same, after which I reconfirmed with the same board member that the wording I chose was accurate to his perception.
agreed that the claim about vegan food as written, which Spencer tried to correct prior to publication, was substantially incorrect.
I appreciate that you publicly update when you get things wrong, but the frequency with which you make these mistakes serves as strong evidence to me that I had sufficient information to make this post.
The specific falsehoods, while useful, are not the core of my point. The core of my point is that a process aimed at finding only the negative, in which a great majority of your time is spent gathering evidence from one side of a situation and sympathizing with one party to it, will necessarily lead to a post aimed at something other than truth-seeking and a trial in the court of public opinion without due process. The journalistic standard I advocate for and you disagree with stands independent of any subsequent factual claims. The primary source documents I include in this post stand as useful evidence independent of any new evidence that gets introduced, and would have materially changed the interpretation of every one of the points in the section you dispute.
I work for Habryka, so my opinion here should be discounted. (for what it’s worth I think I have disagreed with some of his other comments this week, and I think your post did update me on some other things, which I’m planning to write up). But re:
this seems egregiously inaccurate to me. Two of the three journalists said some flavor of “it’s complicated” on the topic of whether to delay publication, for very similar reasons to what Habryka has mentioned. It seems like at best it was a wash, and it felt pretty weird in the OP that you wrote them up as if they supported your thesis.
I think it’s worth pointing to the specifics of each, because I really don’t think it’s unreasonable to gloss as “all of whom disagreed.”
I would delay publication.
This goes without saying.
I think it depends a lot on the group’s ability to provide evidence the investigators’ claims are wrong. In a situation like that I would really press them on the specifics. They should be able to provide evidence fairly quickly. You don’t want a libel suit but you also don’t want to let them indefinitely delay the publication of an article that will be damaging to them. It is a tricky situation!
“I would really press them on the specifics. They should be able to provide evidence very quickly. You don’t want a libel suit...”
They were very clearly offering to provide specific, hard evidence in a short time span, not asking for an indefinite delay. Some of that specific, hard evidence came in two hours before publication. Ben and Oliver did not press them on the specifics, they said they had a hard deadline and that was that.
This feels like a good example of why you shouldn’t over-promise to your sources—you want a cordial relationship with them but you need boundaries too. I can definitely see a situation where you would agree to give a source a heads up once you’d decided to publish — if it was a story where they’d recounted a violent incident or sexual assault, or if they needed notice to stay somewhere else or watch out for hacking attempts. But I would be very wary of agreeing in advance when I would publish an investigation—it isn’t done until it’s done.
In the end the story is going out under your name, and you will face the legal and ethical consequences, so you can’t publish until you’re satisfied. If the sources are desperate to make the information public, they can make a statement on social media. Working with a journalist involves a trade-off: in exchange for total control, you get greater credibility, plausible deniability and institutional legal protection. If I wasn’t happy with a story against a ticking clock, I wouldn’t be pressured into publication. That’s a huge risk of libelling the subjects of the piece and trashing your professional reputation.
On the request for more time for right to reply, that’s a judgement call—is this a fair period for the allegations involved, or time wasting? It’s not unknown for journalists to put in a right to reply on serious allegations, and the subject ask for more time, and then try to get ahead of the story by breaking it themselves (by denying it).
I’ve bolded the parts that present the most emphatic disagreement. A lot of the problems around the deadline were created by promising sources a hard deadline, something that she would not do. As a result of that promised hard deadline, they got into a situation where, with two hours to go, they looked at new information they received that complicated things and said “Sorry, story goes up as-is.” This seems clearly incompatible with the advice in those two paragraphs. The third paragraph mentions a judgment call, and there of course my own judgment call would be different (a week to gather evidence against the results of six months of investigation seems like the minimum for a fair period, certainly not time-wasting) but I recognize there’s a bit more flex there. The rest, though? “Disagreed” is the most straightforward read by far.
You’re right that that’s useful context to include. It weakens the signal of that example (and I’ll edit accordingly) but, I would argue, not so much that the example is worth excluding altogether.
If it is ok, can you please clarify what you said here because I am not sure if I properly understand it: “in our direct messages about this post prior to publication, provided a snippet of a private conversation about the ACX meetup board decision where you took a maximally broad interpretation of while I had limited ways of verifying, pressured me to add it as context to this post in a way that would have led to a substantially false statement on my part, then admitted greater confusion to a board member while saying nothing to me about the same, after which I reconfirmed with the same board member that the wording I chose was accurate to his perception.”
After checking with Oliver, my impression is that to properly detail that section would require sharing non-public information we would need another party’s permission to share. Given that and the degree to which litigating it could derail things, I’ll simply say that the core takeaway should be that I shared part of the post with Oliver prior to publication and we had a confusing and somewhat frustrating conversation about it, and that the bulk of the post contained arguments we had already been litigating in the public sphere.
Just to clarify, the only section that was shared with me was the following:
You don’t even have to look as far as my examples, though. To his credit, Oliver repeatedlyasked for better examples of what to do in similar situations. To the credit of the rationalist community, it contains some of those examples. To Oliver’s discredit, however, he had full awareness of one better example, as his response to allegations of community misconduct was one of its subjects of investigation.
Last year, a rationalist meetup organizer faced accusations of misconduct, Oliver and his wife Claire (who was in charge of meetup organization as a whole) banned him from an event, he objected, and Claire agreed to be bound by a community investigation. One principle used in that investigation is worth highlighting:
Anyone accused of misconduct should promptly be informed of any accusations made against them and given an opportunity to tell their side of the story, present evidence, and propose witnesses. Emergency preliminary actions should be taken where allegations are sufficiently serious and credible, but the accused should be given an opportunity to defend themselves as quickly as possible.[16]
In the end, the team writing the report highlighted several specific allegations against its primary subject before including a telling line:
We were unable to substantiate any other allegations made against [redacted]. At his request, we are not repeating unsubstantiated allegations in this document.
A prudent decision.
I pointed out one concrete error in the relevant section (which Tracing corrected), and then said some other stuff about the panel’s relationship to that section.
Mostly want people to not walk away with the impression that I saw the whole post, or any substantial fraction of it, which would directly contradict a point I made in another comment.
I shared the full post with a member of the panel, a CEA community health team representative, and several others who seemed well positioned to give good feedback prior to publication and made several adjustments based on their feedback.
Seeing that the local norm is to inform people of substantial responses before providing them, I told Ben and Oliver I would be providing a response that pulled together much of what I had been litigating in Oliver with public and brought in the ACX meetup dispute details and a bit more. Oliver wanted to see the meetup section, so I shared it, and he warned that specific factual allegations might be incorrect pending more information they gave (with a couple of examples) so I investigated those factual claims to ensure nothing I said contradicted what he was saying (which it did not).
Oliver corrected one point I’d misread in that section before going into the confusing and frustrating conversation I refer to.
Given that conversation, our prior conversations, and his prior public statements, I felt (and continue to feel) that I had enough to establish all that needed to be established in my post.
I appreciate that you publicly update when you get things wrong, but the frequency with which you make these mistakes serves as strong evidence to me that I had sufficient information to make this post.
I find myself confused about why you think this line of reasoning goes through in this case, but is something that you vehemently object to in the case of Ben’s post. To be clear, there are lots of ways these situation are disanalogous, but it still feels somewhat contradictory to me with the other principles about process outlined in the post.
I also want to again emphasize that I am really not the right counterparty here. Ben is the person who has far more context on the relevant details, and is far more knowledgeable on this than I am, and indeed my first paragraph in our DM conversation was me asking you to please not generalize from my level of knowledge and rate of error to Ben’s knowledge and rate of error. We are not in the same reference class in terms of knowledge about this situation. Ben however is and should be quite busy gathering evidence and writing a follow-up response to Nonlinear, and so it’s mostly me commenting so far.
It appears to be consensus in that thread that I followed proper procedure by first asking a Rethink Priorities board member, who sure seemed to confirm what I said.
Yep, I am sorry for not being clear here. It was not a load-bearing part of my argument, and I updated afterwards that I will write things less quickly in these threads (to provide context for readers, in a paragraph focused on the effort Lightcone put into this investigation I said “talked to dozens of people who worked at Nonlinear” instead of “talked to dozens of people who worked with the relevant people at Nonlinear”, which I agree is an important thing to get right, but it really was just an honest mistake as I was writing quickly and it wasn’t intended to be any kind of new information, just a summary of known information).
I really don’t think this has much to do with the degree to which Ben and me would have been able to provide evidence relevant to your claims.
I don’t see any incorrect assumptions about libel law here. I continue to think that a libel suit against the original post had little chance of succeeding. You are linking here to one sentence, which is not claiming to be comprehensive in any way. I agree that simply stating your epistemic status or citing you sources alone does not protect you from libel (though both are likely to help in most circumstances).
in our direct messages about this post prior to publication, provided a snippet of a private conversation about the ACX meetup board decision where you took a maximally broad interpretation of while I had limited ways of verifying, pressured me to add it as context to this post in a way that would have led to a substantially false statement on my part, then admitted greater confusion to a board member while saying nothing to me about the same, after which I reconfirmed with the same board member that the wording I chose was accurate to his perception.
This feels like a misrepresentation, but also doesn’t seem worth litigating. My primary response was “Happy to get into a DM chat with you and the panel members if you want to follow-up more on this”.
agreed that the claim about vegan food as written, which Spencer tried to correct prior to publication, was substantially incorrect.
This part is correct. I also think post-publication I don’t think I defended those claims as correct (after Kat had shared more substantial screenshots, which did update me).
(Edit: forgot this one on my first pass, quick comment just to be comprehensive:
I really appreciate you doing this and reaching out! For what it’s worth, I think saying that “all of whom disagreed with my decision” is not an accurate summary of quotes like:
On the request for more time for right to reply, that’s a judgement call—is this a fair period for the allegations involved, or time wasting? It’s not unknown for journalists to put in a right to reply on serious allegations, and the subject ask for more time, and then try to get ahead of the story by breaking it themselves (by denying it).
I think the responses you received are very interesting, but I don’t think that’s accurately summarized as “all of whom disagreed with your decision”.)
I find myself confused about why you this line of reasoning goes through in this case, but is something that you very vehemently object to in the case of Ben’s post.
I’m confused at your confusion. I have strong concerns about the process behind Ben’s post, and see a similar process at work in some of your comments. I am careful about the specific factual claims I make and respond to.
I recognize that you’re not the right counterparty for Nonlinear’s specific claims, but I do think you’re in as much of a position to address my process concerns as Ben is. When responding to my post, you passed over the bullet point addressing the hypo I ran, which forms a key part of my process argument as a whole. I respect people’s right to respond or not respond to whichever conversations they want, but since the process is at the core of my point and that part was preregistered by both of us and is directly material to process, I do think it’s the most germane.
I also think post-publication I don’t think I defended those claims as correct (after Kat had shared more substantial screenshots, which did update me).
I appreciate that. If nothing else, I think this establishes that those claims should not have made it into the original post.
I share your uncertainty about litigating the other sub-points further, but think they’re important indicators of why I was comfortable making the post when I did and informing you of publication but not sharing in full. The bulk of the post and the core of the argument within it was repurposed from our public conversations. I shared the section that introduced new information (the ACX meetup part) with you and you fact-checked it. You referenced specific parts of Kat’s evidence you contested, which I checked with my own writing on those pieces of evidence, concluded I was still comfortable with those sections, and maintained.
Appreciate your response. I have more thoughts, but am probably not going to comment much further for a while, unless there is a lot more activity on this post.
I recognize that you’re not the right counterparty for Nonlinear’s specific claims, but I do think you’re in as much of a position to address my process concerns as Ben is.
I do think this is definitely not true. I know much less about the process that gave rise to Ben’s post than Ben does. I have a high-level overview, and I made decisions at a very high level of “how much time to allocate to this investigation”, but when it comes to details like:
what exactly happened for fact-checking purposes,
how much different claims are backed up by primary sources vs. witness accounts,
how much private evidence there is that didn’t make it into the post,
what the exact tradeoffs were for delaying vs. not-delaying,
how much it seemed like Nonlinear was bluffing vs. being real about promising to provide counter-evidence in a week
that is stuff that Ben has substantially more information on than I have, all of which seem relevant to the claims made in your post.
I am trying my best to share what information I have, mostly to free up time for Ben to do a more substantial response to the full post. But please don’t mistake my knowledge here for anything remotely as thorough as where Ben is at. I expect his comments on process to also be substantially superior to mine.
For what it’s worth, I think saying that “all of whom disagreed with my decision” is not an accurate summary of quotes like:
On the request for more time for right to reply, that’s a judgement call—is this a fair period for the allegations involved, or time wasting? It’s not unknown for journalists to put in a right to reply on serious allegations, and the subject ask for more time, and then try to get ahead of the story by breaking it themselves (by denying it).
Do you think it’s an accurate summary of quotes like the rest of her reply?
This feels like a good example of why you shouldn’t over-promise to your sources—you want a cordial relationship with them but you need boundaries too. I can definitely see a situation where you would agree to give a source a heads up once you’d decided to publish — if it was a story where they’d recounted a violent incident or sexual assault, or if they needed notice to stay somewhere else or watch out for hacking attempts. But I would be very wary of agreeing in advance when I would publish an investigation—it isn’t done until it’s done.
In the end the story is going out under your name, and you will face the legal and ethical consequences, so you can’t publish until you’re satisfied. If the sources are desperate to make the information public, they can make a statement on social media. Working with a journalist involves a trade-off: in exchange for total control, you get greater credibility, plausible deniability and institutional legal protection. If I wasn’t happy with a story against a ticking clock, I wouldn’t be pressured into publication. That’s a huge risk of libelling the subjects of the piece and trashing your professional reputation.
I don’t think there’s much use to selectively quoting a paragraph using the phrase “judgment call” when the reply as a whole emphasizes that she considers it a mistake to agree in advance to a particular publication date, that an investigation isn’t done until it’s done, and that you will face the legal and ethical consequences of publishing any falsehoods. In particular, to stick with the factual backing we both agree on: You maintained a hard publication date while receiving information two hours beforehand that substantially called into question a claim in the article that was later demonstrated to be false. Do you think “disagreed with your decision” is an inaccurate summary of those two paragraphs as they relate to that specific decision?
I think “your decision” implied that it was specifically about the choice to delay. I agree that all three had critiques of the process that was used, which indeed I found valuable and interesting to read!
It was. You decided, knowing hard evidence had just come in against one of the claims in the post, not to delay publication for even the length of time it would take to fix that claim, a claim that would later prove false.
I think I am failing to understand the argument here, but on the very specific decision to delay, the reply you cite said “that’s a judgement call”. Doesn’t seem worth litigating here though.
That’s right, though it seems to me that if someone thought it was reasonable to not give any right to reply in first place, then they presumably must also think that giving people only a very short time to reply is also OK, so one subsumes the other.
I am not totally confident of this, but on the face of it, if you think it was a reasonable judgement call to give someone no notice before posting, then it must also be a reasonable judgement call to give someone 4⁄1 days before posting.
I don’t think anyone here is arguing that in absolute terms Ben should have spent more time verifying claims non-adversarially? Like, Ben really did do a lot of that, and I think there might be many valid objections about how Ben went about it, but “more time” doesn’t seem like currently something people are arguing for.
My model is people specifically wanted Ben to spend more time in the adversarial stage of a potential fact-finding process, but the above quote suggests that in some circumstances “0 hours” is an acceptable amount of time to spend on that, which I find it hard to square with a perspective that “60 hours” is an unacceptable amount of time to spend on that, according to this specific source.
I really don’t know how the norms of professional investigative journalism work, but I imagine a lot hinges on whether the source of concern / subject of the piece is the repository of a large amount of relevant information about the central claims.
e.g. the point is “how much work do you need to put in to make sure your claims are accurate” and then sometimes that implies “no need to get replies from the subject of the piece because you can get the information elsewhere” and sometimes that implies “you have to engage a bunch with the subject of the piece because they have relevant information.”
I am however not super sure how this is related to the specific claim at hand here, which was just about whether the journalists that TracingWoodgrains asked are accurately summarized as “disagreeing with [the decision to not delay]”.
It seems to me is that at least one of the journalists thought it was a messy judgement call and didn’t give a recommendation one way or another on the contested question. So it seems inaccurate to me to summarize them the way TracingWoodgrains did.
(The other journalist says:
I think it depends a lot on the group’s ability to provide evidence the investigators’ claims are wrong. In a situation like that I would really press them on the specifics. They should be able to provide evidence fairly quickly. You don’t want a libel suit but you also don’t want to let them indefinitely delay the publication of an article that will be damaging to them. It is a tricky situation! I am not sure an investigative reporter would be able to help much more simply because what you’re providing is a pretty vague account, though I totally understand the reasons why that’s necessary.
which I also don’t think should be succinctly summarized in the same way)
(I feel sad about the downvotes here. I really feel like I am not making a particularly complicated point here, and am doing so in good faith. Would appreciate if voters could clarify, since I feel like my argument is pretty straightforward and is done in good faith)
I think it’s that you’re not factoring in the bigger point that Tracing and the journalist were making—that it is a clear error to promise a hard deadline to sources and so get into a situation where the you are having to make the judgement call about delaying
Sure, I think there is a reasonable argument to be had here that tries to answer a broader question, but I don’t think that should come at a loss of the ability to make locally valid arguments (but also, seems like votes corrected themselves).
Small sidenote that my guess is most people are modeling but still seemed good to make explicit: That market only resolves if Nonlinear does indeed file a suit. My current guess is it’s very unlikely for them to sue, and the world in which they sue are of course the worlds where it’s most likely they would win.
This means this market does not measure the probability of a libel suit against the original post succeeding, but only of it succeeding conditional on Nonlinear deciding to go ahead with such a suit, which I think increased the probability a lot.
I’m not a fan of the fact that this market resolves YES if there’s a settlement. A settlement is not an admission of guilt. Lawyers often tell defendants to settle lawsuits even if they’re completely innocent. So this market mostly captures whether NL would get some financial compensation from the lawsuit, not whether Lightcone/Ben would be found liable for defamation.
The beauty of Manifold is that you can make your own competing market with resolution criteria you find preferable.
I am sympathetic to this view, but there is a settlement dollar figure at which I think a market should resolve to YES rather than N/A. I don’t know what it should be, but treating (e.g.) the massive Fox News / Dominion settlement as N/A doesn’t track the spirit of the market either. A big enough settlement is a de facto admission of very probable loss if trial happened.
Hard to discern what that threshold would be. In a field where damage claims are more grounded in facts (e.g., medical malpractice), I’d suggest a percentage of the damages claimed in the complaint. But alleged defamation damages tend to be hyberbole.
the section ‘Avoidable, Unambiguous Falsehoods’ contains mostly claims that are, to the best of my knowledge, not actually falsehoods, but are correct
(Emphasis mine)
Even if your claim is correct, that doesn’t make the situation much better. It’s not sufficient for most of the egregious claims Ben Pace made to have been correct—a single false and egregious claim can be very damaging and constitute libel.
I agree that some false and egregious claims can do this. I contend that none of the things that I expect will end up actually falsified will turn out to be in such a category. We can dig more into this when the relevant evidence is presented.
(I do also want to clarify that Me and Ben were somewhat ironically not shared on this post in advance, and I would have left comments with evidence falsifying at least one or two of the claims)
I agree that you probably should have had the chance to review the post (noting what TracingWoodgrain has said makes me a little less certain of this, though I still believe it)
I also think that most people, myself included, would be happy to read your comments now if you want to share them.
This post seems premature to me (edit: which I recognize might seem in conflict with my defense of Ben not giving Nonlinear more time to respond before publication, and am happy to go into why I hold both of these positions after Ben published his response).
In-particular the section ‘Avoidable, Unambiguous Falsehoods’ contains mostly claims that are, to the best of my knowledge, not actually falsehoods, but are correct. And that section of the post seems quite load-bearing (given that the central case of the post relies on spreading false and/or misleading information about Nonlinear, and the case for an absence of due diligence).
Ben is working on a response, and given that I think it’s clearly the right call to wait a week or two until we have another round of counter-evidence before jumping to conclusions. If in a week or two people still think the section of “Avoidable, Unambiguous falsehoods” does indeed contain such things, then I think an analysis like this makes sense, and people can spend time thinking through the implications of that (I disagree with various other parts of the post, but I think mine and Ben’s time is best spent engaging with Nonlinear’s post and not getting distracted by discussion on this post).
I might also try to get some responses out earlier, but my current sense is people would like us to not rush out a response to reduce the risk of any errors introduced and to generally save people time and attention. Interested in people’s takes in the replies if they disagree. If people prefer we can post evidence more piecemeal and quickly, though my vague read is that people prefer us taking time and to publish something more comprehensive.
(I do also want to clarify that Me and Ben were not shared on this post in advance, and I would have left comments with evidence falsifying at least one or two of the claims)
Since the time I have started looking into this, you have:
incorrectly described the nature of people you talked with around Nonlinear, for which you subsequently apologized.
incorrectly claimed Nonlinear might be sponsored by Rethink Priorities, which you subsequently retracted. (EDIT: While as per below he did text a board member to check here, I think the example still has some value)
made likely-incorrect assumptions about libel law, which I subsequently clarified.
incorrectly predicted what journalists would think of your investigative process, after which we collaborated on a hypothetical to ask journalists, all of whom disagreed with your decision.
in our direct messages about this post prior to publication, provided a snippet of a private conversation about the ACX meetup board decision where you took a maximally broad interpretation of something I had limited ways of verifying, pressured me to add it as context to this post in a way that would have led to a substantially false statement on my part, then admitted greater confusion to a board member while saying nothing to me about the same, after which I reconfirmed with the same board member that the wording I chose was accurate to his perception.
agreed that the claim about vegan food as written, which Spencer tried to correct prior to publication, was substantially incorrect.
I appreciate that you publicly update when you get things wrong, but the frequency with which you make these mistakes serves as strong evidence to me that I had sufficient information to make this post.
The specific falsehoods, while useful, are not the core of my point. The core of my point is that a process aimed at finding only the negative, in which a great majority of your time is spent gathering evidence from one side of a situation and sympathizing with one party to it, will necessarily lead to a post aimed at something other than truth-seeking and a trial in the court of public opinion without due process. The journalistic standard I advocate for and you disagree with stands independent of any subsequent factual claims. The primary source documents I include in this post stand as useful evidence independent of any new evidence that gets introduced, and would have materially changed the interpretation of every one of the points in the section you dispute.
I stand by my post, and its timing, in full.
I work for Habryka, so my opinion here should be discounted. (for what it’s worth I think I have disagreed with some of his other comments this week, and I think your post did update me on some other things, which I’m planning to write up). But re:
this seems egregiously inaccurate to me. Two of the three journalists said some flavor of “it’s complicated” on the topic of whether to delay publication, for very similar reasons to what Habryka has mentioned. It seems like at best it was a wash, and it felt pretty weird in the OP that you wrote them up as if they supported your thesis.
I think it’s worth pointing to the specifics of each, because I really don’t think it’s unreasonable to gloss as “all of whom disagreed.”
This goes without saying.
“I would really press them on the specifics. They should be able to provide evidence very quickly. You don’t want a libel suit...”
They were very clearly offering to provide specific, hard evidence in a short time span, not asking for an indefinite delay. Some of that specific, hard evidence came in two hours before publication. Ben and Oliver did not press them on the specifics, they said they had a hard deadline and that was that.
I’ve bolded the parts that present the most emphatic disagreement. A lot of the problems around the deadline were created by promising sources a hard deadline, something that she would not do. As a result of that promised hard deadline, they got into a situation where, with two hours to go, they looked at new information they received that complicated things and said “Sorry, story goes up as-is.” This seems clearly incompatible with the advice in those two paragraphs. The third paragraph mentions a judgment call, and there of course my own judgment call would be different (a week to gather evidence against the results of six months of investigation seems like the minimum for a fair period, certainly not time-wasting) but I recognize there’s a bit more flex there. The rest, though? “Disagreed” is the most straightforward read by far.
This one seems unfair to include: he confirmed with a Rethink Priorities board member over texts first.
You’re right that that’s useful context to include. It weakens the signal of that example (and I’ll edit accordingly) but, I would argue, not so much that the example is worth excluding altogether.
Thank you for explaining all of this.
If it is ok, can you please clarify what you said here because I am not sure if I properly understand it: “in our direct messages about this post prior to publication, provided a snippet of a private conversation about the ACX meetup board decision where you took a maximally broad interpretation of while I had limited ways of verifying, pressured me to add it as context to this post in a way that would have led to a substantially false statement on my part, then admitted greater confusion to a board member while saying nothing to me about the same, after which I reconfirmed with the same board member that the wording I chose was accurate to his perception.”
After checking with Oliver, my impression is that to properly detail that section would require sharing non-public information we would need another party’s permission to share. Given that and the degree to which litigating it could derail things, I’ll simply say that the core takeaway should be that I shared part of the post with Oliver prior to publication and we had a confusing and somewhat frustrating conversation about it, and that the bulk of the post contained arguments we had already been litigating in the public sphere.
Just to clarify, the only section that was shared with me was the following:
I pointed out one concrete error in the relevant section (which Tracing corrected), and then said some other stuff about the panel’s relationship to that section.
Mostly want people to not walk away with the impression that I saw the whole post, or any substantial fraction of it, which would directly contradict a point I made in another comment.
I can confirm this is accurate. More fully:
I shared the full post with a member of the panel, a CEA community health team representative, and several others who seemed well positioned to give good feedback prior to publication and made several adjustments based on their feedback.
Seeing that the local norm is to inform people of substantial responses before providing them, I told Ben and Oliver I would be providing a response that pulled together much of what I had been litigating in Oliver with public and brought in the ACX meetup dispute details and a bit more. Oliver wanted to see the meetup section, so I shared it, and he warned that specific factual allegations might be incorrect pending more information they gave (with a couple of examples) so I investigated those factual claims to ensure nothing I said contradicted what he was saying (which it did not).
Oliver corrected one point I’d misread in that section before going into the confusing and frustrating conversation I refer to.
Given that conversation, our prior conversations, and his prior public statements, I felt (and continue to feel) that I had enough to establish all that needed to be established in my post.
I find myself confused about why you think this line of reasoning goes through in this case, but is something that you vehemently object to in the case of Ben’s post. To be clear, there are lots of ways these situation are disanalogous, but it still feels somewhat contradictory to me with the other principles about process outlined in the post.
I also want to again emphasize that I am really not the right counterparty here. Ben is the person who has far more context on the relevant details, and is far more knowledgeable on this than I am, and indeed my first paragraph in our DM conversation was me asking you to please not generalize from my level of knowledge and rate of error to Ben’s knowledge and rate of error. We are not in the same reference class in terms of knowledge about this situation. Ben however is and should be quite busy gathering evidence and writing a follow-up response to Nonlinear, and so it’s mostly me commenting so far.
Some quick responses to your bullet list:
It appears to be consensus in that thread that I followed proper procedure by first asking a Rethink Priorities board member, who sure seemed to confirm what I said.
Yep, I am sorry for not being clear here. It was not a load-bearing part of my argument, and I updated afterwards that I will write things less quickly in these threads (to provide context for readers, in a paragraph focused on the effort Lightcone put into this investigation I said “talked to dozens of people who worked at Nonlinear” instead of “talked to dozens of people who worked with the relevant people at Nonlinear”, which I agree is an important thing to get right, but it really was just an honest mistake as I was writing quickly and it wasn’t intended to be any kind of new information, just a summary of known information).
I really don’t think this has much to do with the degree to which Ben and me would have been able to provide evidence relevant to your claims.
I don’t see any incorrect assumptions about libel law here. I continue to think that a libel suit against the original post had little chance of succeeding. You are linking here to one sentence, which is not claiming to be comprehensive in any way. I agree that simply stating your epistemic status or citing you sources alone does not protect you from libel (though both are likely to help in most circumstances).
This feels like a misrepresentation, but also doesn’t seem worth litigating. My primary response was “Happy to get into a DM chat with you and the panel members if you want to follow-up more on this”.
This part is correct. I also think post-publication I don’t think I defended those claims as correct (after Kat had shared more substantial screenshots, which did update me).
(Edit: forgot this one on my first pass, quick comment just to be comprehensive:
I really appreciate you doing this and reaching out! For what it’s worth, I think saying that “all of whom disagreed with my decision” is not an accurate summary of quotes like:
I think the responses you received are very interesting, but I don’t think that’s accurately summarized as “all of whom disagreed with your decision”.)
I’m confused at your confusion. I have strong concerns about the process behind Ben’s post, and see a similar process at work in some of your comments. I am careful about the specific factual claims I make and respond to.
I recognize that you’re not the right counterparty for Nonlinear’s specific claims, but I do think you’re in as much of a position to address my process concerns as Ben is. When responding to my post, you passed over the bullet point addressing the hypo I ran, which forms a key part of my process argument as a whole. I respect people’s right to respond or not respond to whichever conversations they want, but since the process is at the core of my point and that part was preregistered by both of us and is directly material to process, I do think it’s the most germane.
I appreciate that. If nothing else, I think this establishes that those claims should not have made it into the original post.
I share your uncertainty about litigating the other sub-points further, but think they’re important indicators of why I was comfortable making the post when I did and informing you of publication but not sharing in full. The bulk of the post and the core of the argument within it was repurposed from our public conversations. I shared the section that introduced new information (the ACX meetup part) with you and you fact-checked it. You referenced specific parts of Kat’s evidence you contested, which I checked with my own writing on those pieces of evidence, concluded I was still comfortable with those sections, and maintained.
Appreciate your response. I have more thoughts, but am probably not going to comment much further for a while, unless there is a lot more activity on this post.
I do think this is definitely not true. I know much less about the process that gave rise to Ben’s post than Ben does. I have a high-level overview, and I made decisions at a very high level of “how much time to allocate to this investigation”, but when it comes to details like:
what exactly happened for fact-checking purposes,
how much different claims are backed up by primary sources vs. witness accounts,
how much private evidence there is that didn’t make it into the post,
what the exact tradeoffs were for delaying vs. not-delaying,
how much it seemed like Nonlinear was bluffing vs. being real about promising to provide counter-evidence in a week
that is stuff that Ben has substantially more information on than I have, all of which seem relevant to the claims made in your post.
I am trying my best to share what information I have, mostly to free up time for Ben to do a more substantial response to the full post. But please don’t mistake my knowledge here for anything remotely as thorough as where Ben is at. I expect his comments on process to also be substantially superior to mine.
Perfectly reasonable. I appreciate your engagement and look forward to Ben’s response.
Do you think it’s an accurate summary of quotes like the rest of her reply?
I don’t think there’s much use to selectively quoting a paragraph using the phrase “judgment call” when the reply as a whole emphasizes that she considers it a mistake to agree in advance to a particular publication date, that an investigation isn’t done until it’s done, and that you will face the legal and ethical consequences of publishing any falsehoods. In particular, to stick with the factual backing we both agree on: You maintained a hard publication date while receiving information two hours beforehand that substantially called into question a claim in the article that was later demonstrated to be false. Do you think “disagreed with your decision” is an inaccurate summary of those two paragraphs as they relate to that specific decision?
I think “your decision” implied that it was specifically about the choice to delay. I agree that all three had critiques of the process that was used, which indeed I found valuable and interesting to read!
It was. You decided, knowing hard evidence had just come in against one of the claims in the post, not to delay publication for even the length of time it would take to fix that claim, a claim that would later prove false.
My statement was accurate.
I think I am failing to understand the argument here, but on the very specific decision to delay, the reply you cite said “that’s a judgement call”. Doesn’t seem worth litigating here though.
The judgement call is on giving time for “right to reply”, not for “taking more time to verify claims”, right? Those seem kind of different to me.
That’s right, though it seems to me that if someone thought it was reasonable to not give any right to reply in first place, then they presumably must also think that giving people only a very short time to reply is also OK, so one subsumes the other.
I am not totally confident of this, but on the face of it, if you think it was a reasonable judgement call to give someone no notice before posting, then it must also be a reasonable judgement call to give someone 4⁄1 days before posting.
I don’t think anyone here is arguing that in absolute terms Ben should have spent more time verifying claims non-adversarially? Like, Ben really did do a lot of that, and I think there might be many valid objections about how Ben went about it, but “more time” doesn’t seem like currently something people are arguing for.
My model is people specifically wanted Ben to spend more time in the adversarial stage of a potential fact-finding process, but the above quote suggests that in some circumstances “0 hours” is an acceptable amount of time to spend on that, which I find it hard to square with a perspective that “60 hours” is an unacceptable amount of time to spend on that, according to this specific source.
I really don’t know how the norms of professional investigative journalism work, but I imagine a lot hinges on whether the source of concern / subject of the piece is the repository of a large amount of relevant information about the central claims.
e.g. the point is “how much work do you need to put in to make sure your claims are accurate” and then sometimes that implies “no need to get replies from the subject of the piece because you can get the information elsewhere” and sometimes that implies “you have to engage a bunch with the subject of the piece because they have relevant information.”
Yeah, I agree with these considerations.
I am however not super sure how this is related to the specific claim at hand here, which was just about whether the journalists that TracingWoodgrains asked are accurately summarized as “disagreeing with [the decision to not delay]”.
It seems to me is that at least one of the journalists thought it was a messy judgement call and didn’t give a recommendation one way or another on the contested question. So it seems inaccurate to me to summarize them the way TracingWoodgrains did.
(The other journalist says:
which I also don’t think should be succinctly summarized in the same way)
(I feel sad about the downvotes here. I really feel like I am not making a particularly complicated point here, and am doing so in good faith. Would appreciate if voters could clarify, since I feel like my argument is pretty straightforward and is done in good faith)
I think it’s that you’re not factoring in the bigger point that Tracing and the journalist were making—that it is a clear error to promise a hard deadline to sources and so get into a situation where the you are having to make the judgement call about delaying
Sure, I think there is a reasonable argument to be had here that tries to answer a broader question, but I don’t think that should come at a loss of the ability to make locally valid arguments (but also, seems like votes corrected themselves).
Place your bets!
Small sidenote that my guess is most people are modeling but still seemed good to make explicit: That market only resolves if Nonlinear does indeed file a suit. My current guess is it’s very unlikely for them to sue, and the world in which they sue are of course the worlds where it’s most likely they would win.
This means this market does not measure the probability of a libel suit against the original post succeeding, but only of it succeeding conditional on Nonlinear deciding to go ahead with such a suit, which I think increased the probability a lot.
Good point to make explicit!
I’m not a fan of the fact that this market resolves YES if there’s a settlement. A settlement is not an admission of guilt. Lawyers often tell defendants to settle lawsuits even if they’re completely innocent. So this market mostly captures whether NL would get some financial compensation from the lawsuit, not whether Lightcone/Ben would be found liable for defamation.
The beauty of Manifold is that you can make your own competing market with resolution criteria you find preferable.
I am sympathetic to this view, but there is a settlement dollar figure at which I think a market should resolve to YES rather than N/A. I don’t know what it should be, but treating (e.g.) the massive Fox News / Dominion settlement as N/A doesn’t track the spirit of the market either. A big enough settlement is a de facto admission of very probable loss if trial happened.
Would there be a monetary settlement threshold which would capture the idea of LC/Ben losing?
Hard to discern what that threshold would be. In a field where damage claims are more grounded in facts (e.g., medical malpractice), I’d suggest a percentage of the damages claimed in the complaint. But alleged defamation damages tend to be hyberbole.
(Emphasis mine)
Even if your claim is correct, that doesn’t make the situation much better. It’s not sufficient for most of the egregious claims Ben Pace made to have been correct—a single false and egregious claim can be very damaging and constitute libel.
I agree that some false and egregious claims can do this. I contend that none of the things that I expect will end up actually falsified will turn out to be in such a category. We can dig more into this when the relevant evidence is presented.
(I do also want to clarify that Me and Ben were somewhat ironically not shared on this post in advance, and I would have left comments with evidence falsifying at least one or two of the claims)
I agree that you probably should have had the chance to review the post (noting what TracingWoodgrain has said makes me a little less certain of this, though I still believe it)
I also think that most people, myself included, would be happy to read your comments now if you want to share them.