I find this post to be emotionally manipulative to a pretty substantial degree. It opens by explicitly asking readers to picture a scene involving the NYT, which most people will have a negative association with:
Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek’s Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they’d heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called TESCREAL. They spend hundreds of hours over six months on interviews and evidence collection, paying Émile and Timnit for their time and effort. The phrase “HBD” is muttered, but it’s nobody’s birthday.
… and then proceeds to try to build an analogy between the NYT and Ben’s post.
When Nonlinear posted their reply, there was some controversy over whether the section “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” is okay or not. I defended it because, rightly or wrongly, Nonlinear had their reputation destroyed to a significant extent by Ben’s post, and I thought and still think that gives them some leeway when it comes to emotional appeals in their post. Nothing like that applies here, yet this post is written like a novel rather than an impartial analysis. (To be clear there’s much more to this than just the central analogy, but I’m not going to get into details.)
I think emotional manipulation is always bad because it’s orthogonal to truth, but it’s super extra bad when the topic under discussion is this controversial and emotionally loaded in the first place. I don’t expect many to agree with this, but I honestly think it may be because you don’t realize the extent to which you’re being manipulated because I guess this is more subtle than what Nonlinear did. I’d argue that makes it worse; Nonlinear’s section on Ben actually told the readers what it was doing. Again, don’t expect much agreement here, but I think incentivizing stuff like this is a bad idea, and it’s especially bad if we’re only incentivizing it if the author doesn’t admit what they’re doing.
The post itself also seems premature for the reasons habryka already mentioned. Both Ben’s post and Nonlinear’s reply widely swung pubic opinion; why do we expect that Ben’s reply won’t do the same? And if it does, then it seems unhelpful to make a post framing it as a settled matter. And it’s also not true that they’re unambiguous falsehoods since most of them leave plenty of room for argument, as demonstrated by people still arguing about them.
I feel like you’re eliding my point on the New York Times section. The example there is rhetorically effective not because there is an analogy between what the New York Times does and what this post did, but because there isn’t. The NYT, whatever its flaws (and there are many) would never publish a post like the original callout. Oh, they’d write a hit piece, sure, but it would be much more precise: every detail cross-checked, negative info in the lede with exculpatory info below, so forth. I meant it when I said you’re lucky the NYT doesn’t cover you the way that post was written, and I think that’s an important substantive point to make.
This community has no trouble noticing and objecting to bad journalistic practice when it’s from an outsider looking in, but it applies different levels of trust to insiders, and I think in that case it caused them to miss obvious warning signs that they would have spotted in any other context. It’s useful and material to my argument to demonstrate that by establishing a context where everyone would see the warning signs.
I reject that this post is premature because I didn’t wait for Ben’s further response. He wrote an article after six months of work; everyone has plenty of material to react to, and my post centers around recognizing that a six-month hunt for negative information is fundamentally not a truth-seeking process and that the community ignored major red flags that were present and mentioned at the moment of publication.
People are still arguing about the falsehoods, but it’s unclear to me either that those arguments have any substance or that they’re germane to the core of my point. So far, the main truth-claim argument I’ve gotten against the points I highlight in this post is that “lived apart for six weeks of the four months” is compatible with “wasn’t allowed to live apart,” which I still don’t see. Meanwhile, one of my crucial points—that Ben received exculpatory evidence two hours before posting but was so committed to a posting schedule he would not edit anything—is admitted by all parties.
If you want to argue that they remain ambiguous, it’s more useful to make it with specifics than to gesture vaguely at it.
People are still arguing about the falsehoods, but it’s unclear to me either that those arguments have any substance or that they’re germane to the core of my point.
Well yes, I would have been very surprised if you thought they had substance given your post. But the term “unambiguous” generally implies that reasonable people don’t disagree, not just that the author feels strongly about them. This is one of the many elements of your post that made me describe it as manipulative; you’re taking one side on an issue that people are still arguing about and call it unambiguous.
There are plenty of people who have strong feelings about the accusations but don’t talk like that. Nonlinear themselves didn’t talk like that! Throughout these discussions, there’s usually an understanding that we differentiate between how strongly we feel about something and whether it’s a settled matter, even from people who perceive the situation as incredibly unfair.
Reasonable disagreement, I think, should be as in the legal sense for doubt: disagreement based on clear reasons, not disagreement from people who are generally reasonable. I’ve had a lot of complaints about my “unambiguous” claims being ambiguous, very few reasons provided as to why they are, and no compelling ones (but of course I would say that). I’d see a lot more use to engaging with your point if instead of simply asserting that people could disagree, you explain precisely which you disagree with and why.
Reasonable disagreement, I think, should be as in the legal sense for doubt: disagreement based on clear reasons, not disagreement from people who are generally reasonable.
With this definition, any and all ability to enforce norms objectively goes out the window. A follower of {insert crazy idea X} would be equally justified to talk about unambiguous delusions in doubters of X, and anyone disputing it would have to get into a debate about the merits of X rather than pointing out that plenty of people disagree with X so it doesn’t seem unambiguous.
We already have plenty of words to express personal opinions about a topic. Why would you want to define words that talk about consensus to also refer to personal opinions only? That just takes away our ability to differentiate between them. Why would we want that? Whether or not most people think something is useful information.
And there’s also a motte-and-bailey thing going on here. Because if you really only want to talk about what you personally think, then there wouldn’t be a reason to talk about unambiguous falsehoods. You’ve used the word unambiguous because it conveys a sense of objectivity, and when challenged, you defend by saying you that personally feel that way.
I’d see a lot more use to engaging with your point if instead of simply asserting that people could disagree, you explain precisely which you disagree with and why.
This is the second time you’ve tried to turn my objection into an object-level debate, and it completely misses the point. You don’t even know if I have any object-level disagreements with your post. I critiqued your style of of communication, which I believe to be epistemically toxic, not the merits of your argument.
If a company has 21 employees and someone says it has 7, I’m not going to call the situation ambiguous just because someone disagrees with me. That is the sense I am using the term. The lines contained clear errors that I would expect a serious outlet to correct; I think people who disagree they are errors do so without good reason.
I’m not retreating to “I personally feel that way.” Those lines are wrong either for strict factual inaccuracies or for framing and tones that leads people to a substantially false picture and should be corrected. There is no bailey here—I meant what I said.
Speaking of unpleasant framing, I’m wholly unimpressed by the framing of me “trying to turn [your] objection into an object-level debate.” It matters whether, on the object level, things I said were unambiguous are.
It’s inevitable that some people are going to dislike the way I chose to frame my reply, but I did so carefully and with an eye towards serious, charitable, direct engagement with the topic on its merits. “Epistemically toxic” is strong phrasing that I wholly reject.
If a company has 21 employees and someone says it has 7, I’m not going to call the situation ambiguous just because someone disagrees with me
Just for the record, it is definitely false that at any point during the period Ben’s investigation covered, Nonlinear would be accurately described as “having 21 employees”. I am also pretty confident that at no point Nonlinear could have been described as “having 21 employees”, unless there was maybe some very temporary internship program, but the average number of employees was verifiably very far from 21.
(Edit: Removed an unnecessary aside about evidentiary standards. I just want to make sure nobody walks away with a wrong impression about concurrent employees. I don’t really want to get into more indirect stuff)
Ben’s original phrasing (“My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe).”) seems clearly to be referring to their total number of employees, not the concurrent number.
I sympathize with how you’re feeling here, and I agree that taking Nonlinear’s word for it without evidence would not have constituted fact-checking, but I think you may be falling into an arguments-as-soldiers mindset. If it’s not overstepping to suggest (and I apologize if it is!), I think it might be helpful to take a step back from this discussion and do something less stressful for a while, so as to hopefully return with less of a sense of urgency.
Yeah, sorry. To be clear I was responding specifically to TracingWoodgrain’s claim which is written in a way that implies concurrent employees. However, the thing I should have done was to be less nitpicky and be like “just to clarify, you probably meant to say ‘if a company has had 21 employees, and someone says it had 7...’”, and then maybe make some response.
Based on TracingWoodgrain’s phrasing, the above does really seem to be talking about concurrent employees, and I care a lot about people not ending up with the wrong impression of that number. Ben’s post does talk about the number of concurrent employees multiple times, so this seemed like a relevant claim.
I do agree that I should have done less of a “gotcha” thing, and instead just tried to clarify the conversation. Conversation gets worse when every sentence gets interpreted in the most adversarial and narrow fashion, and I contributed to that in the above.
I appreciate the suggestion to take a step back. I do care a lot about preventing false narratives from what was written in Ben’s post from taking hold, and which things are substantiated by evidence, because Nonlinear’s post contains such a huge number of inaccurate claims about what Ben, Alice or Chloe said.
Based on the language that TracingWoodgrains used, I did genuinely come to believe that he thought Nonlinear had 21 concurrent employees during the relevant period, and have a draft DM to him where I ask him for clarification on this, because if so, that does seem like a major misunderstanding. Now Tracing has clarified, and I think we can let this discussion rest.
By “has” I meant “has had a total of”, in line with their consistent claim of past count. I think that should have been clear given context and am unsure why you’re acting as if I would be claiming something different to that.
It was simple to fact-check. Trivial, really:
They wanted to tell you. They were ready to answer questions and had the information immediately on hand. They knew exactly how many employees they’d had. You could have asked; they would have told you. If you wanted more specifics to ensure you had an accurate count, I suspect that a week would be plenty of time for them to pull up records.
You wouldn’t need to take their word for it; most companies keep records of past employees and have some form of evidence to back their claims. You would have needed to go to a source that had the info available, and such a source was there and begging to speak with you.
(Edit: This comment was responding to a version of Tracing’s comment before an edit. The comment became moot when Tracing edited his comment to clarify, so am removing it to not get dragged into discussions that seem unnecessary)
I’m baffled. What do you mean “during the relevant period”? The relevant period as explicitly written into Ben’s post is the company’s entire history.
Chloe and Alice were in no position to know the company’s historical employee count as of September 7, 2023, which is the only thing that matters at all in determining whether Ben’s claim was accurate.
If you go and check the primary sources, and they definitely confirm that during the relevant period [presumably you mean: while Chloe/Alice were employed there] Nonlinear did not have 21 employees (and had much closer to the number of employees that Ben listed), it will update me further towards the conclusion that you are straining at gnats to defend obvious inaccuracies.
If a company has 21 employees and someone says it has 7, I’m not going to call the situation ambiguous just because someone disagrees with me.
Sure, I agree with this particular case. There is a level of clarity above which you can say ambiguous without getting criticism. Mathematical statements or extremely simple factual statements are in that category. If that had been the only item in the section, I wouldn’t have an issue with it. But you’ve also picked the most objective one to make this argument. Habyrka also already admitted that he got the number of people in the company wrong, so this is not the problematic claim.
Edit: Apologies, I didn’t check the context. I endorse the general point about narrow claims, but the quote from Habryka isn’t relevant.
Speaking of unpleasant framing, I’m wholly unimpressed by the framing of me “trying to turn [your] objection into an object-level debate.” It matters whether, on the object level, things I said were unambiguous are.
I don’t get the point here. “The object-level question matters” isn’t a rebuttal to “you’re trying to make it about an object-level question”.
It’s inevitable that some people are going to dislike the way I chose to frame my reply, but I did so carefully and with an eye towards serious, charitable, direct engagement with the topic on its merits. “Epistemically toxic” is strong phrasing that I wholly reject.
I agree that it’s a strong phrasing, but I stand by it. I wouldn’t bring up style if I didn’t if I only had minor issues with it. I think the ability to differentiate between consensus-level claims and opinions is one of the main reasons why discussion on LW and EA is less bad than discussion everywhere else on the internet, and I perceive this post and the conversation as an step toward eroding that difference.
I have no doubts that you think the style was fine. I also have no doubts that you’d be able to justify the “charitable” and “direct” adjectives as you understand them. I expect the problem would again be that you’ll define them by subjective, things-people-can-disagree-about standards. By my standards, the post is not direct engagement since it begins by drawing an emotionally loaded analogy, and it’s not charitable because of the section I’ve been criticizing. Both of these are true regardless of the object-level merits (unless every object level claim were in the category of extremely straight-forward factual statements, which it isn’t).
But you’ve also picked the most objective one to make this argument. Habyrka also already admitted that he got the number of people in the company wrong, so this is not the problematic claim.
This comment has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at hand! I have never admitted I “got the number of people in the company wrong”! And even if I did, it wouldn’t matter because I didn’t write the post.
The comment you linked talks about a completely separate discussion where the question at hand was how many people who have worked with Kat/Emerson/Drew we have talked to, which is multiple dozens. I misspoke and instead said that we had talked to that many people who “worked at Nonlinear” which is false. But this had nothing to do with Ben’s claim in the post, it was just me being sloppy with language.
I absolutely do not admit that Ben’s post substantially got the number of Nonlinear employees during the relevant period wrong. As far as I can tell it is still accurate.
I absolutely do not admit that Ben’s post substantially got the number of Nonlinear employees during the relevant period wrong. As far as I can tell it is still accurate.
His precise sentence was this:
My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe).
He did not say “At the time Alice and Chloe were working there, they’d had...”. He used the present tense! It is simple revisionism to act as if the sentence says anything else. Anyone reading that sentence would and should come to the conclusion that he was speaking about the company as a whole, providing background context for who they are, not anchoring it to some unspecified point in the past.
He did not say “At the time Alice and Chloe were working there, they’d had...”. He used the present tense!
Presumably you meant to say “he used the past tense”.
You used the present tense in this discussion, so I was responding to claims about the present tense. You said “If a company has 21 employees and someone says it has 7, I’m not going to call the situation ambiguous just because someone disagrees with me.”, which to me reads as clearly talking about how many employees a company has simultaneously.
I agree that in the quoted section Ben’s post talks in the past tense in a way that implies it is talking about all historical employees (by the end of the period Ben’s investigation covers, Nonlinear was not properly incorporated, so there is not even really a sense of legal employment, so how to handle past data points, and what the ground truth is, is messier than it would usually be). The veracity of that statement seems still right to me, though not one I really want to litigate here, or am really that confident about.
In other places he also talks about the number of concurrent employees. I just wanted to make sure no falsehoods about concurrent employees get propagated.
I meant nothing of the sort. “They’ve had” is present perfect tense, and it’s in a section where he is referring to Nonlinear in the present tense as of 7 September 2023 as he outlines the basics of their structure and history.
EDIT:
which to me reads as clearly talking about how many employees a company has simultaneously.
This reading would make sense in isolation; as we have all been talking about the same fact pattern for a week, I admit it makes rather less sense to me. Either you read my statement as a general hypothetical to demonstrate what an unambiguous falsehood looks like, in which case there’s no issue, or you read it as referring to the Nonlinear situation, in which common sense dictates it should be read as sloppy shorthand for the “has had 21 employees” fact pattern that’s been under discussion.
I meant nothing of the sort. “They’ve had” is present perfect tense, and it’s in a section where he is referring to Nonlinear in the present tense as of 7 September 2023 as he outlines the basics of their structure and history.
Ah, sorry, that’s not how I would have used “present tense”, but I am also not a native english speaker.
This reading would make sense in isolation; as we have all been talking about the same fact pattern for a week, I admit it makes rather less sense to me.
I agree it would have been better to ask for clarification instead of immediately objecting. As I say in a comment above, I do really care about misrepresentations of Ben’s post being corrected, because there is a very large amount of that in Nonlinear’s reply.
I did just straightforwardly update from the language you used here that in the OP you had interpreted Ben as talking about the number of maximum concurrent employees during the relevant period (which I agree is not the most natural interpretation of the language Ben used, but seemed implied to me by the language you used). We’ve now clarified, and I apologize for jumping to hasty conclusions about your epistemic state.
Ah, sorry! I had vaguely remembered that comment and it took me a while to find it, and I think I was so annoyed in that moment that I just assumed the context would fit without checking (which I realize makes no sense since you didn’t even write the original post). I’ll edit my comment.
The example there is rhetorically effective not because there is an analogy between what the New York Times does and what this post did, but because there isn’t.
I objected to the comparison because it’s emotionally loaded. “You’re worse than {bad thing}” isn’t any less emotionally loaded than “you’re like {bad thing}”.
Oh, they’d write a hit piece, sure, but it would be much more precise: every detail cross-checked
Can you clarify what you mean by cross-checked here?
I know of multiple hit-pieces written about people close to me, and it has never been the case that major newspapers cross-checked facts with the person accused, and they often got substantial facts wrong, so I am not sure what kind of cross-checking you are talking about (and how it’s supposed to compare with the kind of fact-checking that Ben did in his post).
If large newspapers get specific factual points wrong they can and should be sued for libel. Partially as a consequence, when making accusations against people they are generally careful to stick within the bounds of the technically true even if uncharitably framed.
This is one reason, despite the distaste towards them in this community, I will not disavow libel suits as error-correcting mechanisms: they are a strong motivator for newspapers and one every journalist keeps in mind. Trust is a currency. Corrections are seen as stains on papers, retractions more so, losing lawsuits worst of all.
When I say “cross-checked” I don’t necessarily mean “checked with the accused”—although that comes into it—but verified with hard, unambiguous evidence. Not every paper keeps a high evidentiary standard, but the NYT—despite its many faults—does.
EDIT: for those who doubt this—keep an eye on how many conservatives still cite data presented by the NYT to make their points. It has clear biases in structure, presentation, and style of content, but its overall production value is unusually high. Its preeminence in the news world is not a coincidence, it having maintained that preeminence rather than being disrupted in the digital age is not a coincidence, and understanding the how and why of that is useful especially if you dislike it.
There’s an important qualifier here: it is extremely hard for a public figure (including a “limited-purpose public figure”) to win a libel suit in the United States. I would submit that most of the inhibitory effect of libel law in the U.S. as it relates to public figures comes from the fear of litigation, or the costs of litigation, rather than the risk of an actual-malice finding at trial. (Actual malice requires a showing that the speaker knew that the statement was false, or acted with reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Mere negligence isn’t enough.)
I bring that up because I don’t think libel law causes newspapers to insist that everything derogatory that they print about a person be “verified with hard, unambiguous evidence” unless you water that term down a lot.
Yeah, reflecting on the hit pieces that were New York Times related, I do believe the New York Times in-particular is quite diligent with its fact-checking. Though this is of course very far from universal among newspapers. See for example one of the recent Politico articles on EA and DC policy activism referring to the founder of Open Philanthropy as “Harold Karnofsky”, which is really one of the most basic fact-checking errors to make (his real name is Holden Karnofsky).
I don’t believe it’s libel suits that cause the difference here, given that other newspapers can get away with much lower standards while being similarly susceptible to libel suits. I think it’s a reputation that the New York Times is trying to maintain that is mostly enforced outside of the legal system.
It’s both. It’s important to remember that the primary effect of legal-system-as-backdrop isn’t “people get sued” but “people constrain their behavior because they know there could theoretically be legal consequences.” Every journalist knows what happened to Gawker, and the word “libel” is never terribly far from their minds.
The NYT is absolutely trying to maintain a reputation. Journalists as a whole are too, often less successfully. And for all of them, one of the greatest possible stains on that reputation would be a libel suit. There are many layers of error-correcting and error-checking mechanisms built atop the common-law foundation that come together into professional or institutional norms, but that doesn’t make the foundation meaningless.
The lessons of the Gawker case involve not publishing celebrity sex tapes, and not enraging vindictive billionaires, but I’m not sure what they have to do with defamation. The sex tape wasn’t false.
Totally fair; I should have clarified. The Gawker case was fresh on my mind as an incident of journalistic malpractice due to this conversation and is the most memorable example of lawsuits taking down a journalistic outlet. It’s a good example of the risks of irresponsible journalism in general but definitely wasn’t libel, and precision would have been better.
I find this post to be emotionally manipulative to a pretty substantial degree. It opens by explicitly asking readers to picture a scene involving the NYT, which most people will have a negative association with:
… and then proceeds to try to build an analogy between the NYT and Ben’s post.
When Nonlinear posted their reply, there was some controversy over whether the section “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” is okay or not. I defended it because, rightly or wrongly, Nonlinear had their reputation destroyed to a significant extent by Ben’s post, and I thought and still think that gives them some leeway when it comes to emotional appeals in their post. Nothing like that applies here, yet this post is written like a novel rather than an impartial analysis. (To be clear there’s much more to this than just the central analogy, but I’m not going to get into details.)
I think emotional manipulation is always bad because it’s orthogonal to truth, but it’s super extra bad when the topic under discussion is this controversial and emotionally loaded in the first place. I don’t expect many to agree with this, but I honestly think it may be because you don’t realize the extent to which you’re being manipulated because I guess this is more subtle than what Nonlinear did. I’d argue that makes it worse; Nonlinear’s section on Ben actually told the readers what it was doing. Again, don’t expect much agreement here, but I think incentivizing stuff like this is a bad idea, and it’s especially bad if we’re only incentivizing it if the author doesn’t admit what they’re doing.
The post itself also seems premature for the reasons habryka already mentioned. Both Ben’s post and Nonlinear’s reply widely swung pubic opinion; why do we expect that Ben’s reply won’t do the same? And if it does, then it seems unhelpful to make a post framing it as a settled matter. And it’s also not true that they’re unambiguous falsehoods since most of them leave plenty of room for argument, as demonstrated by people still arguing about them.
I feel like you’re eliding my point on the New York Times section. The example there is rhetorically effective not because there is an analogy between what the New York Times does and what this post did, but because there isn’t. The NYT, whatever its flaws (and there are many) would never publish a post like the original callout. Oh, they’d write a hit piece, sure, but it would be much more precise: every detail cross-checked, negative info in the lede with exculpatory info below, so forth. I meant it when I said you’re lucky the NYT doesn’t cover you the way that post was written, and I think that’s an important substantive point to make.
This community has no trouble noticing and objecting to bad journalistic practice when it’s from an outsider looking in, but it applies different levels of trust to insiders, and I think in that case it caused them to miss obvious warning signs that they would have spotted in any other context. It’s useful and material to my argument to demonstrate that by establishing a context where everyone would see the warning signs.
I reject that this post is premature because I didn’t wait for Ben’s further response. He wrote an article after six months of work; everyone has plenty of material to react to, and my post centers around recognizing that a six-month hunt for negative information is fundamentally not a truth-seeking process and that the community ignored major red flags that were present and mentioned at the moment of publication.
People are still arguing about the falsehoods, but it’s unclear to me either that those arguments have any substance or that they’re germane to the core of my point. So far, the main truth-claim argument I’ve gotten against the points I highlight in this post is that “lived apart for six weeks of the four months” is compatible with “wasn’t allowed to live apart,” which I still don’t see. Meanwhile, one of my crucial points—that Ben received exculpatory evidence two hours before posting but was so committed to a posting schedule he would not edit anything—is admitted by all parties.
If you want to argue that they remain ambiguous, it’s more useful to make it with specifics than to gesture vaguely at it.
Well yes, I would have been very surprised if you thought they had substance given your post. But the term “unambiguous” generally implies that reasonable people don’t disagree, not just that the author feels strongly about them. This is one of the many elements of your post that made me describe it as manipulative; you’re taking one side on an issue that people are still arguing about and call it unambiguous.
There are plenty of people who have strong feelings about the accusations but don’t talk like that. Nonlinear themselves didn’t talk like that! Throughout these discussions, there’s usually an understanding that we differentiate between how strongly we feel about something and whether it’s a settled matter, even from people who perceive the situation as incredibly unfair.
Reasonable disagreement, I think, should be as in the legal sense for doubt: disagreement based on clear reasons, not disagreement from people who are generally reasonable. I’ve had a lot of complaints about my “unambiguous” claims being ambiguous, very few reasons provided as to why they are, and no compelling ones (but of course I would say that). I’d see a lot more use to engaging with your point if instead of simply asserting that people could disagree, you explain precisely which you disagree with and why.
With this definition, any and all ability to enforce norms objectively goes out the window. A follower of {insert crazy idea X} would be equally justified to talk about unambiguous delusions in doubters of X, and anyone disputing it would have to get into a debate about the merits of X rather than pointing out that plenty of people disagree with X so it doesn’t seem unambiguous.
We already have plenty of words to express personal opinions about a topic. Why would you want to define words that talk about consensus to also refer to personal opinions only? That just takes away our ability to differentiate between them. Why would we want that? Whether or not most people think something is useful information.
And there’s also a motte-and-bailey thing going on here. Because if you really only want to talk about what you personally think, then there wouldn’t be a reason to talk about unambiguous falsehoods. You’ve used the word unambiguous because it conveys a sense of objectivity, and when challenged, you defend by saying you that personally feel that way.
This is the second time you’ve tried to turn my objection into an object-level debate, and it completely misses the point. You don’t even know if I have any object-level disagreements with your post. I critiqued your style of of communication, which I believe to be epistemically toxic, not the merits of your argument.
If a company has 21 employees and someone says it has 7, I’m not going to call the situation ambiguous just because someone disagrees with me. That is the sense I am using the term. The lines contained clear errors that I would expect a serious outlet to correct; I think people who disagree they are errors do so without good reason.
I’m not retreating to “I personally feel that way.” Those lines are wrong either for strict factual inaccuracies or for framing and tones that leads people to a substantially false picture and should be corrected. There is no bailey here—I meant what I said.
Speaking of unpleasant framing, I’m wholly unimpressed by the framing of me “trying to turn [your] objection into an object-level debate.” It matters whether, on the object level, things I said were unambiguous are.
It’s inevitable that some people are going to dislike the way I chose to frame my reply, but I did so carefully and with an eye towards serious, charitable, direct engagement with the topic on its merits. “Epistemically toxic” is strong phrasing that I wholly reject.
Just for the record, it is definitely false that at any point during the period Ben’s investigation covered, Nonlinear would be accurately described as “having 21 employees”. I am also pretty confident that at no point Nonlinear could have been described as “having 21 employees”, unless there was maybe some very temporary internship program, but the average number of employees was verifiably very far from 21.
(Edit: Removed an unnecessary aside about evidentiary standards. I just want to make sure nobody walks away with a wrong impression about concurrent employees. I don’t really want to get into more indirect stuff)
Ben’s original phrasing (“My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe).”) seems clearly to be referring to their total number of employees, not the concurrent number.
I sympathize with how you’re feeling here, and I agree that taking Nonlinear’s word for it without evidence would not have constituted fact-checking, but I think you may be falling into an arguments-as-soldiers mindset. If it’s not overstepping to suggest (and I apologize if it is!), I think it might be helpful to take a step back from this discussion and do something less stressful for a while, so as to hopefully return with less of a sense of urgency.
Yeah, sorry. To be clear I was responding specifically to TracingWoodgrain’s claim which is written in a way that implies concurrent employees. However, the thing I should have done was to be less nitpicky and be like “just to clarify, you probably meant to say ‘if a company has had 21 employees, and someone says it had 7...’”, and then maybe make some response.
Based on TracingWoodgrain’s phrasing, the above does really seem to be talking about concurrent employees, and I care a lot about people not ending up with the wrong impression of that number. Ben’s post does talk about the number of concurrent employees multiple times, so this seemed like a relevant claim.
I do agree that I should have done less of a “gotcha” thing, and instead just tried to clarify the conversation. Conversation gets worse when every sentence gets interpreted in the most adversarial and narrow fashion, and I contributed to that in the above.
I appreciate the suggestion to take a step back. I do care a lot about preventing false narratives from what was written in Ben’s post from taking hold, and which things are substantiated by evidence, because Nonlinear’s post contains such a huge number of inaccurate claims about what Ben, Alice or Chloe said.
Based on the language that TracingWoodgrains used, I did genuinely come to believe that he thought Nonlinear had 21 concurrent employees during the relevant period, and have a draft DM to him where I ask him for clarification on this, because if so, that does seem like a major misunderstanding. Now Tracing has clarified, and I think we can let this discussion rest.
By “has” I meant “has had a total of”, in line with their consistent claim of past count. I think that should have been clear given context and am unsure why you’re acting as if I would be claiming something different to that.
It was simple to fact-check. Trivial, really:
They wanted to tell you. They were ready to answer questions and had the information immediately on hand. They knew exactly how many employees they’d had. You could have asked; they would have told you. If you wanted more specifics to ensure you had an accurate count, I suspect that a week would be plenty of time for them to pull up records.
You wouldn’t need to take their word for it; most companies keep records of past employees and have some form of evidence to back their claims. You would have needed to go to a source that had the info available, and such a source was there and begging to speak with you.
(Edit: This comment was responding to a version of Tracing’s comment before an edit. The comment became moot when Tracing edited his comment to clarify, so am removing it to not get dragged into discussions that seem unnecessary)
I’m baffled. What do you mean “during the relevant period”? The relevant period as explicitly written into Ben’s post is the company’s entire history.
Chloe and Alice were in no position to know the company’s historical employee count as of September 7, 2023, which is the only thing that matters at all in determining whether Ben’s claim was accurate.
If you go and check the primary sources, and they definitely confirm that during the relevant period [presumably you mean: while Chloe/Alice were employed there] Nonlinear did not have 21 employees (and had much closer to the number of employees that Ben listed), it will update me further towards the conclusion that you are straining at gnats to defend obvious inaccuracies.
Sure, I agree with this particular case. There is a level of clarity above which you can say ambiguous without getting criticism. Mathematical statements or extremely simple factual statements are in that category. If that had been the only item in the section, I wouldn’t have an issue with it. But you’ve also picked the most objective one to make this argument.Habyrka also already admittedthat he got the number of people in the company wrong, so this is not the problematic claim.Edit: Apologies, I didn’t check the context. I endorse the general point about narrow claims, but the quote from Habryka isn’t relevant.
I don’t get the point here. “The object-level question matters” isn’t a rebuttal to “you’re trying to make it about an object-level question”.
I agree that it’s a strong phrasing, but I stand by it. I wouldn’t bring up style if I didn’t if I only had minor issues with it. I think the ability to differentiate between consensus-level claims and opinions is one of the main reasons why discussion on LW and EA is less bad than discussion everywhere else on the internet, and I perceive this post and the conversation as an step toward eroding that difference.
I have no doubts that you think the style was fine. I also have no doubts that you’d be able to justify the “charitable” and “direct” adjectives as you understand them. I expect the problem would again be that you’ll define them by subjective, things-people-can-disagree-about standards. By my standards, the post is not direct engagement since it begins by drawing an emotionally loaded analogy, and it’s not charitable because of the section I’ve been criticizing. Both of these are true regardless of the object-level merits (unless every object level claim were in the category of extremely straight-forward factual statements, which it isn’t).
This comment has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at hand! I have never admitted I “got the number of people in the company wrong”! And even if I did, it wouldn’t matter because I didn’t write the post.
The comment you linked talks about a completely separate discussion where the question at hand was how many people who have worked with Kat/Emerson/Drew we have talked to, which is multiple dozens. I misspoke and instead said that we had talked to that many people who “worked at Nonlinear” which is false. But this had nothing to do with Ben’s claim in the post, it was just me being sloppy with language.
I absolutely do not admit that Ben’s post substantially got the number of Nonlinear employees during the relevant period wrong. As far as I can tell it is still accurate.
His precise sentence was this:
He did not say “At the time Alice and Chloe were working there, they’d had...”. He used the present tense! It is simple revisionism to act as if the sentence says anything else. Anyone reading that sentence would and should come to the conclusion that he was speaking about the company as a whole, providing background context for who they are, not anchoring it to some unspecified point in the past.
This is a strange claim to litigate in this way.
Presumably you meant to say “he used the past tense”.
You used the present tense in this discussion, so I was responding to claims about the present tense. You said “If a company has 21 employees and someone says it has 7, I’m not going to call the situation ambiguous just because someone disagrees with me.”, which to me reads as clearly talking about how many employees a company has simultaneously.
I agree that in the quoted section Ben’s post talks in the past tense in a way that implies it is talking about all historical employees (by the end of the period Ben’s investigation covers, Nonlinear was not properly incorporated, so there is not even really a sense of legal employment, so how to handle past data points, and what the ground truth is, is messier than it would usually be). The veracity of that statement seems still right to me, though not one I really want to litigate here, or am really that confident about.
In other places he also talks about the number of concurrent employees. I just wanted to make sure no falsehoods about concurrent employees get propagated.
I meant nothing of the sort. “They’ve had” is present perfect tense, and it’s in a section where he is referring to Nonlinear in the present tense as of 7 September 2023 as he outlines the basics of their structure and history.
EDIT:
This reading would make sense in isolation; as we have all been talking about the same fact pattern for a week, I admit it makes rather less sense to me. Either you read my statement as a general hypothetical to demonstrate what an unambiguous falsehood looks like, in which case there’s no issue, or you read it as referring to the Nonlinear situation, in which common sense dictates it should be read as sloppy shorthand for the “has had 21 employees” fact pattern that’s been under discussion.
Ah, sorry, that’s not how I would have used “present tense”, but I am also not a native english speaker.
I agree it would have been better to ask for clarification instead of immediately objecting. As I say in a comment above, I do really care about misrepresentations of Ben’s post being corrected, because there is a very large amount of that in Nonlinear’s reply.
I did just straightforwardly update from the language you used here that in the OP you had interpreted Ben as talking about the number of maximum concurrent employees during the relevant period (which I agree is not the most natural interpretation of the language Ben used, but seemed implied to me by the language you used). We’ve now clarified, and I apologize for jumping to hasty conclusions about your epistemic state.
Ah, sorry! I had vaguely remembered that comment and it took me a while to find it, and I think I was so annoyed in that moment that I just assumed the context would fit without checking (which I realize makes no sense since you didn’t even write the original post). I’ll edit my comment.
Thank you!
I objected to the comparison because it’s emotionally loaded. “You’re worse than {bad thing}” isn’t any less emotionally loaded than “you’re like {bad thing}”.
Can you clarify what you mean by cross-checked here?
I know of multiple hit-pieces written about people close to me, and it has never been the case that major newspapers cross-checked facts with the person accused, and they often got substantial facts wrong, so I am not sure what kind of cross-checking you are talking about (and how it’s supposed to compare with the kind of fact-checking that Ben did in his post).
If large newspapers get specific factual points wrong they can and should be sued for libel. Partially as a consequence, when making accusations against people they are generally careful to stick within the bounds of the technically true even if uncharitably framed.
This is one reason, despite the distaste towards them in this community, I will not disavow libel suits as error-correcting mechanisms: they are a strong motivator for newspapers and one every journalist keeps in mind. Trust is a currency. Corrections are seen as stains on papers, retractions more so, losing lawsuits worst of all.
When I say “cross-checked” I don’t necessarily mean “checked with the accused”—although that comes into it—but verified with hard, unambiguous evidence. Not every paper keeps a high evidentiary standard, but the NYT—despite its many faults—does.
EDIT: for those who doubt this—keep an eye on how many conservatives still cite data presented by the NYT to make their points. It has clear biases in structure, presentation, and style of content, but its overall production value is unusually high. Its preeminence in the news world is not a coincidence, it having maintained that preeminence rather than being disrupted in the digital age is not a coincidence, and understanding the how and why of that is useful especially if you dislike it.
There’s an important qualifier here: it is extremely hard for a public figure (including a “limited-purpose public figure”) to win a libel suit in the United States. I would submit that most of the inhibitory effect of libel law in the U.S. as it relates to public figures comes from the fear of litigation, or the costs of litigation, rather than the risk of an actual-malice finding at trial. (Actual malice requires a showing that the speaker knew that the statement was false, or acted with reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Mere negligence isn’t enough.)
I bring that up because I don’t think libel law causes newspapers to insist that everything derogatory that they print about a person be “verified with hard, unambiguous evidence” unless you water that term down a lot.
Yeah, reflecting on the hit pieces that were New York Times related, I do believe the New York Times in-particular is quite diligent with its fact-checking. Though this is of course very far from universal among newspapers. See for example one of the recent Politico articles on EA and DC policy activism referring to the founder of Open Philanthropy as “Harold Karnofsky”, which is really one of the most basic fact-checking errors to make (his real name is Holden Karnofsky).
I don’t believe it’s libel suits that cause the difference here, given that other newspapers can get away with much lower standards while being similarly susceptible to libel suits. I think it’s a reputation that the New York Times is trying to maintain that is mostly enforced outside of the legal system.
It’s both. It’s important to remember that the primary effect of legal-system-as-backdrop isn’t “people get sued” but “people constrain their behavior because they know there could theoretically be legal consequences.” Every journalist knows what happened to Gawker, and the word “libel” is never terribly far from their minds.
The NYT is absolutely trying to maintain a reputation. Journalists as a whole are too, often less successfully. And for all of them, one of the greatest possible stains on that reputation would be a libel suit. There are many layers of error-correcting and error-checking mechanisms built atop the common-law foundation that come together into professional or institutional norms, but that doesn’t make the foundation meaningless.
Wasn’t the Gawker suit for invasion of privacy, infringement of personality rights, and intentional infliction of emotional distress? It involved a suit by a third-tier celebrity over a leaked sex tape, financed by a billionaire with a major grudge against Gawker.
The lessons of the Gawker case involve not publishing celebrity sex tapes, and not enraging vindictive billionaires, but I’m not sure what they have to do with defamation. The sex tape wasn’t false.
Totally fair; I should have clarified. The Gawker case was fresh on my mind as an incident of journalistic malpractice due to this conversation and is the most memorable example of lawsuits taking down a journalistic outlet. It’s a good example of the risks of irresponsible journalism in general but definitely wasn’t libel, and precision would have been better.
I disliked the opening parable too