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.
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.