You criticize Ben for not waiting a week for a response, and yet you yourself were unable to wait a week for his response to the recent article. If you look in the comments, a lot of people have found significant misrepresentations in that article: the author paraphrased Chloe incorrectly, put those paraphrases in quotes as if they were her actual words, and then “debunked” those.
I’m worried that the response to one side presenting a biased account is to present an equally biased account in the other direction. The presentation about the new york times here appears to be an attempt to harness tribalistic feelings about hated outsiders. But what actually matters is the truth. I don’t think Ben’s original article ended up entirely truthful, and he should apologise for that. But Kat’s reply was not entirely truthful either.
Would a culture of lawsuits in EA help expose truth? I don’t think so. I think it would lead to the rich and powerful being handed a bludgeon they can use to prevent the powerless from speaking out about exploitation and harm. I wish this investigation was handled better, but I am still glad that it happened.
The great majority of my post focuses on process concerns. The primary sources introduced by Nonlinear are strong evidence of why those process concerns matter, but the process concerns stand independent. I agree that Nonlinear often paraphrased its subjects before responding to those paraphrases; that’s why I explicitly pulled specific lines from the original post that the primary sources introduced by Nonlinear stand as evidence against.
My ultimate conclusion was and is explicitly not that Nonlinear is vindicated on every point of criticism. It is that the process was fundamentally unfair and fundamentally out of line with journalistic standards and a duty to care that are important to uphold. Not everyone who is put in a position of needing to reply to a slanted article about them is going to be capable of a perfectly rigorous, even-keeled, precise response that defuses every point of realistically defusable criticism, which is one reason people should not be put in the position of needing to respond to those articles.
I was one of those who criticized Kat’s response pretty heavily, but I really appreciated TracingWoodgrains’ analysis and it did shift my perspective. I was operating from an assumption that Ben & Hab were using an appropriate truthseeking process, because why wouldn’t they? But now I have the sense that they didn’t respond to counterevidence from Spencer G (and others), and the promise of counterevidence from Nonlinear, appropriately. So now I’m confused enough to agree with TW’s conclusion: mistrial!
(edit: mind you, as my older comments suggest, in the end I won’t end up thinking Kat did nothing wrong at all. This post raises doubts about Ben’s approach to the case, though, due to which it’s hard to tell out how bad or not bad the conduct was.)
You criticize Ben for not waiting a week for a response, and yet you yourself were unable to wait a week for his response to the recent article. If you look in the comments, a lot of people have found significant misrepresentations in that article: the author paraphrased Chloe incorrectly, put those paraphrases in quotes as if they were her actual words, and then “debunked” those.
I’m worried that the response to one side presenting a biased account is to present an equally biased account in the other direction. The presentation about the new york times here appears to be an attempt to harness tribalistic feelings about hated outsiders. But what actually matters is the truth. I don’t think Ben’s original article ended up entirely truthful, and he should apologise for that. But Kat’s reply was not entirely truthful either.
Would a culture of lawsuits in EA help expose truth? I don’t think so. I think it would lead to the rich and powerful being handed a bludgeon they can use to prevent the powerless from speaking out about exploitation and harm. I wish this investigation was handled better, but I am still glad that it happened.
The great majority of my post focuses on process concerns. The primary sources introduced by Nonlinear are strong evidence of why those process concerns matter, but the process concerns stand independent. I agree that Nonlinear often paraphrased its subjects before responding to those paraphrases; that’s why I explicitly pulled specific lines from the original post that the primary sources introduced by Nonlinear stand as evidence against.
My ultimate conclusion was and is explicitly not that Nonlinear is vindicated on every point of criticism. It is that the process was fundamentally unfair and fundamentally out of line with journalistic standards and a duty to care that are important to uphold. Not everyone who is put in a position of needing to reply to a slanted article about them is going to be capable of a perfectly rigorous, even-keeled, precise response that defuses every point of realistically defusable criticism, which is one reason people should not be put in the position of needing to respond to those articles.
I was one of those who criticized Kat’s response pretty heavily, but I really appreciated TracingWoodgrains’ analysis and it did shift my perspective. I was operating from an assumption that Ben & Hab were using an appropriate truthseeking process, because why wouldn’t they? But now I have the sense that they didn’t respond to counterevidence from Spencer G (and others), and the promise of counterevidence from Nonlinear, appropriately. So now I’m confused enough to agree with TW’s conclusion: mistrial!
(edit: mind you, as my older comments suggest, in the end I won’t end up thinking Kat did nothing wrong at all. This post raises doubts about Ben’s approach to the case, though, due to which it’s hard to tell out how bad or not bad the conduct was.)