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.)
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.)