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.
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.