I do not think discussion of alleged misconduct by another organization is on-topic in a thread about unrelated misconduct merely because the person reporting the allegations was “influenced by” an EA podcast. That would turn every post relating to misconduct allegations into a megathread about any and all misconduct allegations from a very wide range of organizations, and would derail conversation about the initial topic.
I suspect you would not take kindly to a thread about alleged Sortition Foundation misconduct being derailed into a free-ranging discussion of (at best) very loosely analogous misconduct at unrelated organizations—and you would be right to be annoyed in that case. I think Zach is owed the same courtesy here.
You are picking up some irritation on my end, some of which is due my view that your link was somewhat misleading. In my view, there is a norm here that someone posting a link should fairly characterize the contents of that link. I think your categorization of the link as “on this topic” was somewhat misleading and clickbaity.
The nature of the content didn’t help. In my mind, it comes far too close to casually equating a dispute over authorship credit and IP to the largest financial fraud since Madoff. In my view, calling for a range of people to be put “in jail” and calling an organization a “thie[f]” like SBF constitute hyperbole that runs afoul of the Forum’s norms for civility, at least without some very strong evidence.
Assuming the Sortition Foundation is EA-adjacent enough to make its alleged misconduct an appropriate topic of discussion here—a question on which I express no opinion—there was an appropriate way to bring it up on the Forum. A link on an unrelated thread that did not fairly disclose its content was not it.
I do not think discussion of alleged misconduct by another organization is on-topic in a thread about unrelated misconduct merely because the person reporting the allegations was “influenced by” an EA podcast. That would turn every post relating to misconduct allegations into a megathread about any and all misconduct allegations from a very wide range of organizations, and would derail conversation about the initial topic.
I suspect you would not take kindly to a thread about alleged Sortition Foundation misconduct being derailed into a free-ranging discussion of (at best) very loosely analogous misconduct at unrelated organizations—and you would be right to be annoyed in that case. I think Zach is owed the same courtesy here.
You are picking up some irritation on my end, some of which is due my view that your link was somewhat misleading. In my view, there is a norm here that someone posting a link should fairly characterize the contents of that link. I think your categorization of the link as “on this topic” was somewhat misleading and clickbaity.
The nature of the content didn’t help. In my mind, it comes far too close to casually equating a dispute over authorship credit and IP to the largest financial fraud since Madoff. In my view, calling for a range of people to be put “in jail” and calling an organization a “thie[f]” like SBF constitute hyperbole that runs afoul of the Forum’s norms for civility, at least without some very strong evidence.
Assuming the Sortition Foundation is EA-adjacent enough to make its alleged misconduct an appropriate topic of discussion here—a question on which I express no opinion—there was an appropriate way to bring it up on the Forum. A link on an unrelated thread that did not fairly disclose its content was not it.