I’d like to re-iterate that we did not say we would sue if they published. We said we would sue if they didn’t give us time to share the evidence with them.
They were not supporting discourse. They were trying to avoid discourse.
Ben explicitly said he’d updated about Alice’s reliability based on our conversation and evidence we showed in the call.
He knew he was about to receive even more evidence that would mean he’d wasted $10,000 and his last 6 months listening to a person who has a reputation of saying false and misleading things.
Excerpt from email we sent to Ben. Bolding in the original.
This sort of suing threat wouldn’t chill the discourse and make it so people wouldn’t post valid criticisms of an EA org. EA is all about publishing rigorous and valid criticisms of different charities.
It would incentivize people to not write unsubstantiated and explicitly slanted hit pieces causing massive and irreversible damage to people who might be innocent.
Make sure you’re being rigorous and impartial before you do something that you know will cause massive suffering and irreversible & permanent damage to somebody.
Writing critical pieces, especially ones that are vitriolic, calling people “predators” chewing up and spitting out the youth of the community, is something that will cause massive, predictable, and irreversible harms to its victims.
The community should disincentivize using this weapon recklessly.
Thanks, Kat. To be clear, I am not expressing an opinion about whether it was appropriate to make a litigation threat in the circumstances in which Nonlinear found itself. That’s in part because I don’t actually have an opinion on that point—reaching an opinion I’d feel comfortable asserting would require hours of pouring over posts and comments with that question in mind, which doesn’t seem a good use of my time.
My concern was that TracingWoodgrains’ analysis about “Threats of lawsuits” generally—the plural is in the original—appeared to conflate threatening to sue and actually seeing a case to trial. The latter is a costly signal; the former is not. I think it would be unfortunate if the community came to view threats to sue as a credible signal of correctness; that would incentivize making many more of those threats in circumstances where it was not appropriate to do so.
This is a fair distinction, but it does make me want to toy with a peculiar thought. As things stand in this community, threats to sue are themselves a costly signal of something even independent of proceeding to trial, because the counterparty can publicize them and get a lot of support from people furious that someone is breaking a norm against such threats.
...if published as is we intend to pursue legal action for libel against Ben Pace personally and Lightcone for the maximum damages permitted by law.
It seems to me that you and Emerson are trying to have it two ways. On the one hand, the email clearly says that you only wanted time. On the other hand, the email also clearly says that if Ben gave you that time and then didn’t respond the way you wanted, you were still going to sue him. “we’d threatened to sue if he published” is a much more accurate summary of that email than “We said we would sue if they didn’t give us time to share the evidence with them. ” IMO.
(note, I haven’t read Ben’s original piece, just your rebuttal)
When we said “publish it as is” we meant published now without having seen the evidence. Also, you cut that quote out of its context. The full quote is “Given the irreversible damage that would occur by publishing, it simply is inexcusable to not give us a bit of time to correct the libelous falsehoods in this document, and if published as is we intend to pursue legal action”.
You could try to make the case that they didn’t know that and it’s ambiguous, but I think it’s more than made up for by when we say explicitly that we were not doing this and we bolded it.
With that as context I find it really hard to believe that they genuinely believed that we would sue them if they published it unchanged a week later after seeing our evidence.
Like, imagine telling somebody, in bold “we are not asking for X. We’re asking for Y”. The whole email is making a case for Y. The email ends with us saying in bold again “Please Y” (precisely, we end the email saying, in bold “Please wait a week for the evidence. To do otherwise violates the community’s epistemic norms.”). However, in the email, there’s a single ambiguously worded sentence that fits incredibly well with Y but could also plausibly be X.
In such cases, people should interpret the ambiguous sentence as us asking for Y unless there’s strong evidence to the contrary.
I had all that context when I read it, and the reading you’re giving here still didn’t occur to me. To me it says, unambigiously, two contradictory things. When I read something like that I try to find a perspective where the two things don’t actually conflict. What I landed on here was “they won’t sue Ben so long as he removes the parts they consider false and libelous, even if what’s left is still pretty harsh”. “Nonlinear won’t sue so long as Ben reads the evidence, no matter what he does with it” isn’t quite ruled out by the text, but leaves a lot of it unexplained: there’s a lot of focus on publishing false informationin that email, much more than just that one line. It doesn’t really seem to make logical sense either: if some of Ben’s post is libelous, why would his looking at contradictory evidence and deciding not to rewrite anything make it better?
Anyway, that’s my thought process on it; if I’d got that email—again, knowing nothing about you folks except what you wrote in the rebuttal post, and I guess that one subthread about nondisparagement agreements from the original—then I’d certainly have taken it as a threat, contingent on publishing without changes. I hope it helps illustrate how Lightcone could take it the same way.
(searching for “libel” in the original thread also gives me this comment, making the same point three months ago, so I guess I am not adding anything new to the discourse after all. Oh well, there are probably some other people who read this thread but not that one).
This “unambiguous” contradiction seems overly pedantic to me. Surely Kat didn’t expect Ben would receive her evidence and do nothing with it? So when Kat asked for time to “gather and share the evidence”, she expected Ben, as a reasonable person, would change the article in response, so it wouldn’t be “published as is”.
Surely Kat didn’t expect Ben would receive her evidence and do nothing with it?
Why not? According to Nonlinear, they had already told Ben they had evidence, and he’d decided to publish anyway: “He insists on going ahead and publishing this with false information intact, and is refusing to give us time to provide receipts/time stamps/text messages and other evidence”. Ben already wasn’t doing what Nonlinear wanted; the idea that he might continue shouldn’t have been beyond their imagination. Since that’s unlikely, it follows that Lightcone shouldn’t have believed it, and should instead have expected that Nonlinear’s threat was meant the way it was written.
More broadly, I think for any kind of claim of the form “your interpretation of what I said was clearly wrong and maybe bad faith, it should have been obvious what I really meant”, any kind of thoughtful response is going to look pedantic, because it’s going to involve parsing through what specifically was said, what they knew when they said it, and what their audience knew when they heard it. In this kind of discussion I think your pedantry threshold has to be set much higher than usual, or you won’t be able to make progress.
(This was indeed my interpretation when I read it. Maybe it was wrong and didn’t align with the intent of what Nonlinear tried to communicate, which would be unfortunate, but I think my interpretation was a reasonable one. Commenters on the original post also seemed to think that this interpretation was reasonable.)
I’d like to re-iterate that we did not say we would sue if they published. We said we would sue if they didn’t give us time to share the evidence with them.
They were not supporting discourse. They were trying to avoid discourse.
Ben explicitly said he’d updated about Alice’s reliability based on our conversation and evidence we showed in the call.
He knew he was about to receive even more evidence that would mean he’d wasted $10,000 and his last 6 months listening to a person who has a reputation of saying false and misleading things.
He just didn’t want to see that evidence. And he did masterful frame control by trying to make it seem like if we did share this evidence, that was us being “retaliatory” or somehow unethical.
He then went around saying we’d threatened to sue if he published (link to one comment of many where they do this), when we couldn’t have made it more clear that that wasn’t the case.
Excerpt from email we sent to Ben. Bolding in the original.
This sort of suing threat wouldn’t chill the discourse and make it so people wouldn’t post valid criticisms of an EA org. EA is all about publishing rigorous and valid criticisms of different charities.
It would incentivize people to not write unsubstantiated and explicitly slanted hit pieces causing massive and irreversible damage to people who might be innocent.
Make sure you’re being rigorous and impartial before you do something that you know will cause massive suffering and irreversible & permanent damage to somebody.
Writing critical pieces, especially ones that are vitriolic, calling people “predators” chewing up and spitting out the youth of the community, is something that will cause massive, predictable, and irreversible harms to its victims.
The community should disincentivize using this weapon recklessly.
Thanks, Kat. To be clear, I am not expressing an opinion about whether it was appropriate to make a litigation threat in the circumstances in which Nonlinear found itself. That’s in part because I don’t actually have an opinion on that point—reaching an opinion I’d feel comfortable asserting would require hours of pouring over posts and comments with that question in mind, which doesn’t seem a good use of my time.
My concern was that TracingWoodgrains’ analysis about “Threats of lawsuits” generally—the plural is in the original—appeared to conflate threatening to sue and actually seeing a case to trial. The latter is a costly signal; the former is not. I think it would be unfortunate if the community came to view threats to sue as a credible signal of correctness; that would incentivize making many more of those threats in circumstances where it was not appropriate to do so.
This is a fair distinction, but it does make me want to toy with a peculiar thought. As things stand in this community, threats to sue are themselves a costly signal of something even independent of proceeding to trial, because the counterparty can publicize them and get a lot of support from people furious that someone is breaking a norm against such threats.
But then, from the next paragraph of that same email:
It seems to me that you and Emerson are trying to have it two ways. On the one hand, the email clearly says that you only wanted time. On the other hand, the email also clearly says that if Ben gave you that time and then didn’t respond the way you wanted, you were still going to sue him. “we’d threatened to sue if he published” is a much more accurate summary of that email than “We said we would sue if they didn’t give us time to share the evidence with them. ” IMO.
(note, I haven’t read Ben’s original piece, just your rebuttal)
When we said “publish it as is” we meant published now without having seen the evidence. Also, you cut that quote out of its context. The full quote is “Given the irreversible damage that would occur by publishing, it simply is inexcusable to not give us a bit of time to correct the libelous falsehoods in this document, and if published as is we intend to pursue legal action”.
You could try to make the case that they didn’t know that and it’s ambiguous, but I think it’s more than made up for by when we say explicitly that we were not doing this and we bolded it.
With that as context I find it really hard to believe that they genuinely believed that we would sue them if they published it unchanged a week later after seeing our evidence.
Like, imagine telling somebody, in bold “we are not asking for X. We’re asking for Y”. The whole email is making a case for Y. The email ends with us saying in bold again “Please Y” (precisely, we end the email saying, in bold “Please wait a week for the evidence. To do otherwise violates the community’s epistemic norms.”). However, in the email, there’s a single ambiguously worded sentence that fits incredibly well with Y but could also plausibly be X.
In such cases, people should interpret the ambiguous sentence as us asking for Y unless there’s strong evidence to the contrary.
I had all that context when I read it, and the reading you’re giving here still didn’t occur to me. To me it says, unambigiously, two contradictory things. When I read something like that I try to find a perspective where the two things don’t actually conflict. What I landed on here was “they won’t sue Ben so long as he removes the parts they consider false and libelous, even if what’s left is still pretty harsh”. “Nonlinear won’t sue so long as Ben reads the evidence, no matter what he does with it” isn’t quite ruled out by the text, but leaves a lot of it unexplained: there’s a lot of focus on publishing false information in that email, much more than just that one line. It doesn’t really seem to make logical sense either: if some of Ben’s post is libelous, why would his looking at contradictory evidence and deciding not to rewrite anything make it better?
Anyway, that’s my thought process on it; if I’d got that email—again, knowing nothing about you folks except what you wrote in the rebuttal post, and I guess that one subthread about nondisparagement agreements from the original—then I’d certainly have taken it as a threat, contingent on publishing without changes. I hope it helps illustrate how Lightcone could take it the same way.
(searching for “libel” in the original thread also gives me this comment, making the same point three months ago, so I guess I am not adding anything new to the discourse after all. Oh well, there are probably some other people who read this thread but not that one).
This “unambiguous” contradiction seems overly pedantic to me. Surely Kat didn’t expect Ben would receive her evidence and do nothing with it? So when Kat asked for time to “gather and share the evidence”, she expected Ben, as a reasonable person, would change the article in response, so it wouldn’t be “published as is”.
Why not? According to Nonlinear, they had already told Ben they had evidence, and he’d decided to publish anyway: “He insists on going ahead and publishing this with false information intact, and is refusing to give us time to provide receipts/time stamps/text messages and other evidence”. Ben already wasn’t doing what Nonlinear wanted; the idea that he might continue shouldn’t have been beyond their imagination. Since that’s unlikely, it follows that Lightcone shouldn’t have believed it, and should instead have expected that Nonlinear’s threat was meant the way it was written.
More broadly, I think for any kind of claim of the form “your interpretation of what I said was clearly wrong and maybe bad faith, it should have been obvious what I really meant”, any kind of thoughtful response is going to look pedantic, because it’s going to involve parsing through what specifically was said, what they knew when they said it, and what their audience knew when they heard it. In this kind of discussion I think your pedantry threshold has to be set much higher than usual, or you won’t be able to make progress.
(This was indeed my interpretation when I read it. Maybe it was wrong and didn’t align with the intent of what Nonlinear tried to communicate, which would be unfortunate, but I think my interpretation was a reasonable one. Commenters on the original post also seemed to think that this interpretation was reasonable.)