Iâd like to re-iterate that we did not say we would sue if they published. We said we would sue if they didnât give us time to share the evidence with them.
They were not supporting discourse. They were trying to avoid discourse.
Ben explicitly said heâd updated about Aliceâs 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 heâd 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 wouldnât chill the discourse and make it so people wouldnât 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 youâre 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 âpredatorsâ 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. Thatâs in part because I donât actually have an opinion on that pointâreaching an opinion Iâd feel comfortable asserting would require hours of pouring over posts and comments with that question in mind, which doesnât seem a good use of my time.
My concern was that TracingWoodgrainsâ analysis about âThreats of lawsuitsâ generallyâthe plural is in the originalâappeared 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 didnât respond the way you wanted, you were still going to sue him. âweâd threatened to sue if he publishedâ is a much more accurate summary of that email than âWe said we would sue if they didnât give us time to share the evidence with them. â IMO.
(note, I havenât read Benâs original piece, just your rebuttal)
When we said âpublish it as isâ we meant published now without having seen the evidence. Also, you cut that quote out of its context. The full quote is âGiven 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 actionâ.
You could try to make the case that they didnât know that and itâs ambiguous, but I think itâs 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 âwe are not asking for X. Weâre asking for Yâ. The whole email is making a case for Y. The email ends with us saying in bold again âPlease Yâ (precisely, we end the email saying, in bold âPlease wait a week for the evidence. To do otherwise violates the communityâs epistemic norms.â). However, in the email, thereâs 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 thereâs strong evidence to the contrary.
I had all that context when I read it, and the reading youâre giving here still didnât 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 donât actually conflict. What I landed on here was âthey wonât sue Ben so long as he removes the parts they consider false and libelous, even if whatâs left is still pretty harshâ. âNonlinear wonât sue so long as Ben reads the evidence, no matter what he does with itâ isnât quite ruled out by the text, but leaves a lot of it unexplained: thereâs a lot of focus on publishing false informationin that email, much more than just that one line. It doesnât really seem to make logical sense either: if some of Benâs post is libelous, why would his looking at contradictory evidence and deciding not to rewrite anything make it better?
Anyway, thatâs my thought process on it; if Iâd got that emailâagain, knowing nothing about you folks except what you wrote in the rebuttal post, and I guess that one subthread about nondisparagement agreements from the originalâthen Iâd 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 âlibelâ 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 âunambiguousâ contradiction seems overly pedantic to me. Surely Kat didnât expect Ben would receive her evidence and do nothing with it? So when Kat asked for time to âgather and share the evidenceâ, she expected Ben, as a reasonable person, would change the article in response, so it wouldnât be âpublished as isâ.
Surely Kat didnât 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 heâd decided to publish anyway: âHe insists on going ahead and publishing this with false information intact, and is refusing to give us time to provide receipts/âtime stamps/âtext messages and other evidenceâ. Ben already wasnât doing what Nonlinear wanted; the idea that he might continue shouldnât have been beyond their imagination. Since thatâs unlikely, it follows that Lightcone shouldnât have believed it, and should instead have expected that Nonlinearâs threat was meant the way it was written.
More broadly, I think for any kind of claim of the form âyour interpretation of what I said was clearly wrong and maybe bad faith, it should have been obvious what I really meantâ, any kind of thoughtful response is going to look pedantic, because itâs 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 wonât be able to make progress.
(This was indeed my interpretation when I read it. Maybe it was wrong and didnât 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.)
Iâd like to re-iterate that we did not say we would sue if they published. We said we would sue if they didnât give us time to share the evidence with them.
They were not supporting discourse. They were trying to avoid discourse.
Ben explicitly said heâd updated about Aliceâs 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 heâd wasted $10,000 and his last 6 months listening to a person who has a reputation of saying false and misleading things.
He just didnât 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 âretaliatoryâ or somehow unethical.
He then went around saying weâd threatened to sue if he published (link to one comment of many where they do this), when we couldnât have made it more clear that that wasnât the case.
Excerpt from email we sent to Ben. Bolding in the original.
This sort of suing threat wouldnât chill the discourse and make it so people wouldnât 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 youâre 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 âpredatorsâ 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. Thatâs in part because I donât actually have an opinion on that pointâreaching an opinion Iâd feel comfortable asserting would require hours of pouring over posts and comments with that question in mind, which doesnât seem a good use of my time.
My concern was that TracingWoodgrainsâ analysis about âThreats of lawsuitsâ generallyâthe plural is in the originalâappeared 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 didnât respond the way you wanted, you were still going to sue him. âweâd threatened to sue if he publishedâ is a much more accurate summary of that email than âWe said we would sue if they didnât give us time to share the evidence with them. â IMO.
(note, I havenât read Benâs original piece, just your rebuttal)
When we said âpublish it as isâ we meant published now without having seen the evidence. Also, you cut that quote out of its context. The full quote is âGiven 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 actionâ.
You could try to make the case that they didnât know that and itâs ambiguous, but I think itâs 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 âwe are not asking for X. Weâre asking for Yâ. The whole email is making a case for Y. The email ends with us saying in bold again âPlease Yâ (precisely, we end the email saying, in bold âPlease wait a week for the evidence. To do otherwise violates the communityâs epistemic norms.â). However, in the email, thereâs 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 thereâs strong evidence to the contrary.
I had all that context when I read it, and the reading youâre giving here still didnât 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 donât actually conflict. What I landed on here was âthey wonât sue Ben so long as he removes the parts they consider false and libelous, even if whatâs left is still pretty harshâ. âNonlinear wonât sue so long as Ben reads the evidence, no matter what he does with itâ isnât quite ruled out by the text, but leaves a lot of it unexplained: thereâs a lot of focus on publishing false information in that email, much more than just that one line. It doesnât really seem to make logical sense either: if some of Benâs post is libelous, why would his looking at contradictory evidence and deciding not to rewrite anything make it better?
Anyway, thatâs my thought process on it; if Iâd got that emailâagain, knowing nothing about you folks except what you wrote in the rebuttal post, and I guess that one subthread about nondisparagement agreements from the originalâthen Iâd 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 âlibelâ 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 âunambiguousâ contradiction seems overly pedantic to me. Surely Kat didnât expect Ben would receive her evidence and do nothing with it? So when Kat asked for time to âgather and share the evidenceâ, she expected Ben, as a reasonable person, would change the article in response, so it wouldnât be âpublished as isâ.
Why not? According to Nonlinear, they had already told Ben they had evidence, and heâd decided to publish anyway: âHe insists on going ahead and publishing this with false information intact, and is refusing to give us time to provide receipts/âtime stamps/âtext messages and other evidenceâ. Ben already wasnât doing what Nonlinear wanted; the idea that he might continue shouldnât have been beyond their imagination. Since thatâs unlikely, it follows that Lightcone shouldnât have believed it, and should instead have expected that Nonlinearâs threat was meant the way it was written.
More broadly, I think for any kind of claim of the form âyour interpretation of what I said was clearly wrong and maybe bad faith, it should have been obvious what I really meantâ, any kind of thoughtful response is going to look pedantic, because itâs 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 wonât be able to make progress.
(This was indeed my interpretation when I read it. Maybe it was wrong and didnât 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.)