This is helpful; thanks. It brings up something I have been internally musing about (not specifically about your post or comments) --
For this exercise, let’s (roughly) condense the criticism of Lightcone into “They have acted like a partisan advocate, rather than a neutral truthseeker.” I can think of three ways to go from there, which have a good bit of overlap:
“We expect everyone to be a neutral truthseeker here; partisan advocacy is against our norms.”
“We accept some degree of advocacy from both sides here, but Lightcone went way over the line of permissible advocacy here.”
“A core problem is that Lightcone presented itself as a neutral truthseeker conducting an ‘investigation,’ when in fact its actions were that of a partisan advocate.”
As someone who is focused more about setting norms in the future than arbitrating Lightcone’s specific conduct per se, it might be helpful for future norm-building if Lightcone’s critics are clear about the extent to which each of these three pathways explains how they believe that Lightcone went astray. My guess is that it is some combination of number 2 and number 3 for most people, but I don’t actually know that.
This is helpful; thanks. It brings up something I have been internally musing about (not specifically about your post or comments) --
For this exercise, let’s (roughly) condense the criticism of Lightcone into “They have acted like a partisan advocate, rather than a neutral truthseeker.” I can think of three ways to go from there, which have a good bit of overlap:
“We expect everyone to be a neutral truthseeker here; partisan advocacy is against our norms.”
“We accept some degree of advocacy from both sides here, but Lightcone went way over the line of permissible advocacy here.”
“A core problem is that Lightcone presented itself as a neutral truthseeker conducting an ‘investigation,’ when in fact its actions were that of a partisan advocate.”
As someone who is focused more about setting norms in the future than arbitrating Lightcone’s specific conduct per se, it might be helpful for future norm-building if Lightcone’s critics are clear about the extent to which each of these three pathways explains how they believe that Lightcone went astray. My guess is that it is some combination of number 2 and number 3 for most people, but I don’t actually know that.