Alongside our ban announcement for Phil, Iām issuing a warning for this comment and this other comment, both of which made strong negative claims about Phil without furnishing any evidence or examples. While some people on the thread presumably knew what they were referring to, itās hard for public discussions to go well when comments like this donāt include more context.
However, when I discussed the negative claims with Halstead, he provided me with evidence that they were broadly correct ā the warning only concerns the way the claims were presented. While itās still important to back up negative claims about other people when you post them, it does matter whether or not those claims can be reasonably backed up.
Iām pretty surprised and disappointed by this warning. I made 3 claims about ways that Phil has interacted with me.
I didnāt share the facebook messages because I thought it would be a breach of privacy to share a private message thread without Philās permission, and I donāt want to talk to him, so I canāt get his permission.
I also donāt especially want to link to the piece calling me a racist, which anyone familiar with Philās output would already know about, in any case.
There is a reason I didnāt share the screenshot of the the paedophilia/ārape accusations, which is that I thought it would be totally unfair to the people accused. This is why I called them ācelebritiesā rather vaguely.
As you say, I have shown all of these claims to be true in private in any case.
This feels a lot like punishing someone for having the guts to call out a vindictive individual in the grip of a lifelong persecution complex. As illustrated by the upvotes on my comments, lots of people agree with me, but didnāt want to say anything, for whatever reason. If you were going to offer any sanction for anyone, I would have thought it would be the people at CSER, such as Simon Beard and Luke Kemp, who have kept collaborating with him and endorsing his work for the last few years, despite knowing about the behaviour that you have just banned him for.
I appreciate that these kinds of moderation decisions can be difficult, but I also donāt agree with the warning to Halstead. And if it is to be given, then I am uncomfortable that Halstead has been singled outāit would seem consistent to apply the same warning to me, as I supported Halsteadās claims, and added my own, both without providing evidence.
With regard to the people mentioned, neither are forum regulars, and my understanding is that neither have plans for continued collaborations with Phil.
(As with other comments in this thread, Iām responding as an individual moderator rather than as a voice of the moderation team.)
Thank you for sharing this comment. While I read your comment closely when considering a warning to Halstead, I donāt think it encounters the same problems:
Regarding your support for Halsteadās claims ā I think the original claimant should try very hard to present evidence, but I donāt think the same burden falls on people who support them (in part because they might not have evidence of their own).
Regarding your own claims: While your comments had some unsupported accusations, many of the accusations did have support, and most of what you wrote was a discussion of Philās writing rather than his actions or character (making it easier for someone to verify). To the extent that you violated the norm of providing evidence for accusations, you violated it to a lesser degree than Halstead ā the accusations were less severe, and werenāt essential to the overall message of your comments.
That said, I donāt think it was fair to only āwarnā Halstead ā looking back, I think the ideal response might have been to reply to the ban announcement (or write a separate post) reminding people to try to avoid making accusations without evidence, and pointing to examples from multiple users. Our goal was to reinforce a norm, not to punish anyone.
(Since I drafted the original message, and it was only reviewed and approved by other moderators, Iāll use āIā in some parts of this thread.)
I owe you an apology for a lack of clarity in this message, and for not discussing my concerns with you in private before posting it (given that weād already been discussing other aspects of the situation).
āWarningā was the wrong word to use. The thing we were trying to convey wasnāt āthis is the kind of content that could easily lead to a banā, but instead āthis goes against a norm we want to promote on the Forum, and we think this was avoidableā. There were much better ways to express the latter.
Youāve been an excellent contributor to this site (e.g. winning two Forum prizes). We didnāt intend the comment to feel like a punishment, but the end result clearly didnāt match our intentions. Itās understandable that you kept your comments brief and vague ā particularly the one addressed to Sean, who presumably had the necessary context to understand it.
I also should have said that I think the discussion resulting from your comment was really valuable, and Iām glad you wrote it ā I prefer the norm-skirting version of your comment to the comment not existing.
But I still think the norm is important, and I also think that comments like yours are more likely to have good consequences when they include more evidence.
*****
...which anyone familiar with Philās output would already know about, in any case.
While most voters obviously endorsed your statement, I got a concerned message from one user (good Forum contributor, fairly new to the community) who was confused about the situation and didnāt know what had happened. They didnāt understand why Phil was being attacked for using language similar to the people who were attacking him, or why his claim that you had lied was being downvoted with no responses to disprove it.
When I wrote the comment, I was trying to keep that person in mind, and others like them ā both by encouraging the use of evidence, and by clarifying from a neutral perspective that your claims actually had more backing than Philās.
*****
On your points 1-3:
Iām not sure which part of your comments this maps to, but I assume the Facebook messages in question were insults from Phil. I agree itās reasonable not to share those.
I understand your reluctance to link the piece, but in this case, itās public writing that has been widely shared (and heavily criticized as unfair and misleading). I think that sharing it would have made the conversation easier to follow and validated your claims against Phil ā in particular, by showing that his denial at the end of this comment was wrong.
That reasoning makes sense. There may have been a way to show what happened without compromising the people accused (e.g. sharing a screenshot with names blotted out), but the post being on someoneās Facebook wall (and presumably not publicly viewable) could still make that dicey.
I donāt mean to argue that every Forum comment needs to have as much evidence as possible. But when a personal accusation is at stake, and canāt easily be verified by an outside reader, I do think itās important to provide at least some backing ā at least if thereās a quick way to do so without violating someoneās privacy (e.g. linking to a public paper).
One complication in this situation is that Phil doesnāt have a good reputation among the Forumās users, some of whom have had unpleasant personal interactions with him (myself included, several times over). But I donāt want our norms about personal accusations to depend on how popular or pleasant the targets are. If you were accusing me of calling you a Nazi, Iād hope you would link to evidence, and I want the same standard to hold for Phil.
If you were going to offer any sanction for anyone, I would have thought it would be the people at CSER, such as Simon Beard and Luke Kemp, who have kept collaborating with him and endorsing his work for the last few years, despite knowing about the behaviour that you have just banned him for.
As we said in our ban announcement, Phil was banned for his behavior on the Forum. Itās not impossible that someoneās conduct outside the Forum might lead us to ban them, but that would require much more evidence. And I find it hard to imagine a realistic scenario wherein weād also sanction that personās academic collaborators just for working with them.
*****
To close off this reply, I want to reiterate that Iām sorry for the message. I could have handled this better, and I understand your frustration. But while I wish Iād expressed my concerns differently, I still think that the norm of making at least a small effort to back up personal accusations with evidence is an important one.
Hi Aaron, I appreciate this and understand the thought process behind the decision. I do generally agree that it is important to provide evidence for this kind of thing, but there were reasons not to do so in this case, which made it a bit unusual.
I think the EA community (and rationality community) is systematically too much at risk of being too charitable. I donāt have a citation for that but my impression is very much that this has been pointed out repeatedly in the instances where there was community discussion on problematic behavior of people who seemed interpersonally incorrigible. I think itās really unwise and has bad consequences to continue repeating that mistake.
While I mostly agree with you in general (e.g. Gleb Tsipursky getting too many second chances), Iām not quite sure what youāre trying to say in this case.
Do you think that the moderators were too charitable toward Phil? He was banned from the Forum for a year, and we tried to make it clear that his comments were rude and unacceptable. Before that thread, his comments were generally unremarkable, with the exception of one bitter exchange of the type that happens once in a while for many different users. And Iām loathe to issue Forum-based consequences for someoneās interpersonal behavior outside the Forum unless itās a truly exceptional circumstance.
*****
To the extent that someoneās problematic interpersonal behavior is being discussed on the Forum, I still believe we should try to actually show evidence. Many Forum readers are new to the community, or otherwise arenāt privy to drama within the field of longtermist research. If someone wants to warn the entire community that someone is behaving badly, the most effective warnings will include evidence. (Though as I said in my reply to Halsteadās reply, his comment was still clearly valuable overall.)
Imagine showing a random person from outside the EA community* (say, someone familiar with Twitter) this comment and this comment, as well as the karma scores. That person might conclude āHalstead was right and Phil was wrongā. They might also conclude āHalstead is a popular member of the ingroup and Phil is getting cancelled for wrongthinkā.
To many of us inside the community, itās obvious that the first conclusion is more accurate. But the second thing happens all the time, and a good way to prove that weāre not in the ācancelled for wrongthinkā universe is to have a strong norm that negative claims come with evidence.
*This isnāt to say that all moderation should necessarily pass the āwould make sense to a random Twitter userā test. But I think itās a useful test to run in this case.
Do you think that the moderators were too charitable toward Phil?
No, I didnāt mean to voice an opinion on that part. (And the moderation decision seemed reasonable to me.)
My comment was prompted by the concern that giving a warning to Halstead (for not providing more evidence) risks making it difficult for people to voice concerns in the future. My impression is that itās already difficult enough to voice negative opinions on othersā character. Specifically, I think thereās an effect where, if you voice a negative opinion and arenāt extremely skilled at playing the game of being highly balanced, polite and charitable (e.g., some other peopleās comments in the discussion strike me as almost superhumanly balanced and considerate), youāll offend the parts of the EA forum audience that implicitly consider being charitable to the accused a much more fundamental virtue than protecting other individuals (the potential victims of bad behavior) and the community at large (problematic individuals in my view tend to create a ādistortion fieldā around them that can have negative norm-eroding consequences in various ways ā though that was probably much more the case with other community drama than here, given that Phil wrote articles mostly at the periphery of the community.)
Of course, these potential drawbacks I mention only count in worlds where the concerns raised are in fact accurate. The only way to get to the bottom of things is indeed with truth-tracking norms, and being charitable (edit: and thorough) is important for that.
I just feel that the demands for evidence shouldnāt be too strong or absolute, partly also because there are instances where itās difficult to verbalize why exactly someoneās behavior seems unacceptable (even though it may be really obvious to people who are closely familiar with the situation that it is).
Lastly, I think itās particularly bad to disincentivize people for how they framed things in instances where they turned out to be right. (Itās different if there was a lot of uncertainty as to whether Halstead had valid concerns, or whether he was just pursuing a personal vendetta against someone.)
Of course, these situations are really, really tricky, and I donāt envy the forum moderators for having to navigate the waters.
If someone wants to warn the entire community that someone is behaving badly, the most effective warnings will include evidence.
True, but that also means that the right incentives are already there. If someone doesnāt provide the evidence, it could be that they find that itās hard to articulate, that there are privacy concerns, or that the person doesnāt have the mental energy at the time to polish their evidence and reasoning, but feels strongly enough that theyād like to speak up with a shorter comment. Issuing a warning discourages all those options. All else equal, providing clear evidence is certainly best. But I wouldnāt want to risk missing out on the relevant info that community veterans (whose reputation is automatically on the line when they voice a strong concern) have a negative opinion for one reason or another.
It is very unusual to issue a moderation warning for a comment at +143 karma, the second most upvoted comment on the entire page, for undermining public discussion. Creating public knowledge about hostile behaviour can be a very useful service, and I think a lot of people would agree that is the case here. Indeed, since this thread was created I have seen it productively referenced elsewhere as evidence on an important matter.
Furthermore, failing to show screenshots, private emails etc. can be an admirable display of restraint. I do not think we want to encourage people to go around leaking private communication all the time.
(As with other comments in this thread, Iām responding as an individual moderator rather than as a voice of the moderation team.)
It is very unusual to issue a moderation warning for a comment at +143 karma, the second most upvoted comment on the entire page, for undermining public discussion.
On the one hand ā yes, certainly unusual, and one could reasonably interpret karma as demonstrating that many people thought a comment was valuable for public discussion.
However, I am exceedingly wary of changing the way moderation works based on a commentās karma score, particularly when the moderation is the āreminder of our normsā kind rather than the āyouāre bannedā kind. (And almost all of our moderation is the former; weāve issued exactly two bans since the new Forum launched in 2018, other than for spammers.)
While some users contribute more value to Forum discussion than others, and karma can be a signal of this, I associate the pattern of āgiving āvaluedā users more leeway to bend rules/ānormsā with many bad consequences in many different settings.
Creating public knowledge about hostile behaviour can be a very useful service, and I think a lot of people would agree that is the case here.
I agree with both statements, but I also think that providing a bit more evidence can move a comment from āa lot of people agree, because they trust the author/āhave access to non-public informationā to āeveryone agrees, because they can see the evidenceā.
As I noted in my reply to Halstead, some users donāt have the inside knowledge required to verify unsupported claims, and I donāt want those people getting left out of public discussions because e.g. they didnāt see a certain Facebook thread.
(If someone claims hostile behavior occurred, but doesnāt show evidence, does that actually ācreate public knowledgeā of the behavior itself? It might help some people connect the dots, but for many people, all they see is a claim.)
I do not think we want to encourage people to go around leaking private communication all the time.
I agree that leaking private communication is a behavior to discourage in most cases. And I agree with Halstead that at least one of his claims (maybe two) would have been difficult to provide evidence for without disclosing private information. However, another claim was based on an academic paper shared widely in EA spaces, and not linking to the paper seems more confusing than helpful (though as I say in my reply to Halsteadās reply, his comment was still clearly valuable overall).
Alongside our ban announcement for Phil, Iām issuing a warning for this comment and this other comment, both of which made strong negative claims about Phil without furnishing any evidence or examples. While some people on the thread presumably knew what they were referring to, itās hard for public discussions to go well when comments like this donāt include more context.
However, when I discussed the negative claims with Halstead, he provided me with evidence that they were broadly correct ā the warning only concerns the way the claims were presented. While itās still important to back up negative claims about other people when you post them, it does matter whether or not those claims can be reasonably backed up.
Iām pretty surprised and disappointed by this warning. I made 3 claims about ways that Phil has interacted with me.
I didnāt share the facebook messages because I thought it would be a breach of privacy to share a private message thread without Philās permission, and I donāt want to talk to him, so I canāt get his permission.
I also donāt especially want to link to the piece calling me a racist, which anyone familiar with Philās output would already know about, in any case.
There is a reason I didnāt share the screenshot of the the paedophilia/ārape accusations, which is that I thought it would be totally unfair to the people accused. This is why I called them ācelebritiesā rather vaguely.
As you say, I have shown all of these claims to be true in private in any case.
This feels a lot like punishing someone for having the guts to call out a vindictive individual in the grip of a lifelong persecution complex. As illustrated by the upvotes on my comments, lots of people agree with me, but didnāt want to say anything, for whatever reason. If you were going to offer any sanction for anyone, I would have thought it would be the people at CSER, such as Simon Beard and Luke Kemp, who have kept collaborating with him and endorsing his work for the last few years, despite knowing about the behaviour that you have just banned him for.
I appreciate that these kinds of moderation decisions can be difficult, but I also donāt agree with the warning to Halstead. And if it is to be given, then I am uncomfortable that Halstead has been singled outāit would seem consistent to apply the same warning to me, as I supported Halsteadās claims, and added my own, both without providing evidence.
With regard to the people mentioned, neither are forum regulars, and my understanding is that neither have plans for continued collaborations with Phil.
Simon Beard is providing the foreword for his forthcoming book, and Luke Kemp has provided a supporting quote for it.
(As with other comments in this thread, Iām responding as an individual moderator rather than as a voice of the moderation team.)
Thank you for sharing this comment. While I read your comment closely when considering a warning to Halstead, I donāt think it encounters the same problems:
Regarding your support for Halsteadās claims ā I think the original claimant should try very hard to present evidence, but I donāt think the same burden falls on people who support them (in part because they might not have evidence of their own).
Regarding your own claims: While your comments had some unsupported accusations, many of the accusations did have support, and most of what you wrote was a discussion of Philās writing rather than his actions or character (making it easier for someone to verify). To the extent that you violated the norm of providing evidence for accusations, you violated it to a lesser degree than Halstead ā the accusations were less severe, and werenāt essential to the overall message of your comments.
That said, I donāt think it was fair to only āwarnā Halstead ā looking back, I think the ideal response might have been to reply to the ban announcement (or write a separate post) reminding people to try to avoid making accusations without evidence, and pointing to examples from multiple users. Our goal was to reinforce a norm, not to punish anyone.
(Since I drafted the original message, and it was only reviewed and approved by other moderators, Iāll use āIā in some parts of this thread.)
I owe you an apology for a lack of clarity in this message, and for not discussing my concerns with you in private before posting it (given that weād already been discussing other aspects of the situation).
āWarningā was the wrong word to use. The thing we were trying to convey wasnāt āthis is the kind of content that could easily lead to a banā, but instead āthis goes against a norm we want to promote on the Forum, and we think this was avoidableā. There were much better ways to express the latter.
Youāve been an excellent contributor to this site (e.g. winning two Forum prizes). We didnāt intend the comment to feel like a punishment, but the end result clearly didnāt match our intentions. Itās understandable that you kept your comments brief and vague ā particularly the one addressed to Sean, who presumably had the necessary context to understand it.
I also should have said that I think the discussion resulting from your comment was really valuable, and Iām glad you wrote it ā I prefer the norm-skirting version of your comment to the comment not existing.
But I still think the norm is important, and I also think that comments like yours are more likely to have good consequences when they include more evidence.
*****
While most voters obviously endorsed your statement, I got a concerned message from one user (good Forum contributor, fairly new to the community) who was confused about the situation and didnāt know what had happened. They didnāt understand why Phil was being attacked for using language similar to the people who were attacking him, or why his claim that you had lied was being downvoted with no responses to disprove it.
When I wrote the comment, I was trying to keep that person in mind, and others like them ā both by encouraging the use of evidence, and by clarifying from a neutral perspective that your claims actually had more backing than Philās.
*****
On your points 1-3:
Iām not sure which part of your comments this maps to, but I assume the Facebook messages in question were insults from Phil. I agree itās reasonable not to share those.
I understand your reluctance to link the piece, but in this case, itās public writing that has been widely shared (and heavily criticized as unfair and misleading). I think that sharing it would have made the conversation easier to follow and validated your claims against Phil ā in particular, by showing that his denial at the end of this comment was wrong.
That reasoning makes sense. There may have been a way to show what happened without compromising the people accused (e.g. sharing a screenshot with names blotted out), but the post being on someoneās Facebook wall (and presumably not publicly viewable) could still make that dicey.
I donāt mean to argue that every Forum comment needs to have as much evidence as possible. But when a personal accusation is at stake, and canāt easily be verified by an outside reader, I do think itās important to provide at least some backing ā at least if thereās a quick way to do so without violating someoneās privacy (e.g. linking to a public paper).
One complication in this situation is that Phil doesnāt have a good reputation among the Forumās users, some of whom have had unpleasant personal interactions with him (myself included, several times over). But I donāt want our norms about personal accusations to depend on how popular or pleasant the targets are. If you were accusing me of calling you a Nazi, Iād hope you would link to evidence, and I want the same standard to hold for Phil.
As we said in our ban announcement, Phil was banned for his behavior on the Forum. Itās not impossible that someoneās conduct outside the Forum might lead us to ban them, but that would require much more evidence. And I find it hard to imagine a realistic scenario wherein weād also sanction that personās academic collaborators just for working with them.
*****
To close off this reply, I want to reiterate that Iām sorry for the message. I could have handled this better, and I understand your frustration. But while I wish Iād expressed my concerns differently, I still think that the norm of making at least a small effort to back up personal accusations with evidence is an important one.
Hi Aaron, I appreciate this and understand the thought process behind the decision. I do generally agree that it is important to provide evidence for this kind of thing, but there were reasons not to do so in this case, which made it a bit unusual.
I think the EA community (and rationality community) is systematically too much at risk of being too charitable. I donāt have a citation for that but my impression is very much that this has been pointed out repeatedly in the instances where there was community discussion on problematic behavior of people who seemed interpersonally incorrigible. I think itās really unwise and has bad consequences to continue repeating that mistake.
While I mostly agree with you in general (e.g. Gleb Tsipursky getting too many second chances), Iām not quite sure what youāre trying to say in this case.
Do you think that the moderators were too charitable toward Phil? He was banned from the Forum for a year, and we tried to make it clear that his comments were rude and unacceptable. Before that thread, his comments were generally unremarkable, with the exception of one bitter exchange of the type that happens once in a while for many different users. And Iām loathe to issue Forum-based consequences for someoneās interpersonal behavior outside the Forum unless itās a truly exceptional circumstance.
*****
To the extent that someoneās problematic interpersonal behavior is being discussed on the Forum, I still believe we should try to actually show evidence. Many Forum readers are new to the community, or otherwise arenāt privy to drama within the field of longtermist research. If someone wants to warn the entire community that someone is behaving badly, the most effective warnings will include evidence. (Though as I said in my reply to Halsteadās reply, his comment was still clearly valuable overall.)
Imagine showing a random person from outside the EA community* (say, someone familiar with Twitter) this comment and this comment, as well as the karma scores. That person might conclude āHalstead was right and Phil was wrongā. They might also conclude āHalstead is a popular member of the ingroup and Phil is getting cancelled for wrongthinkā.
To many of us inside the community, itās obvious that the first conclusion is more accurate. But the second thing happens all the time, and a good way to prove that weāre not in the ācancelled for wrongthinkā universe is to have a strong norm that negative claims come with evidence.
*This isnāt to say that all moderation should necessarily pass the āwould make sense to a random Twitter userā test. But I think itās a useful test to run in this case.
No, I didnāt mean to voice an opinion on that part. (And the moderation decision seemed reasonable to me.)
My comment was prompted by the concern that giving a warning to Halstead (for not providing more evidence) risks making it difficult for people to voice concerns in the future. My impression is that itās already difficult enough to voice negative opinions on othersā character. Specifically, I think thereās an effect where, if you voice a negative opinion and arenāt extremely skilled at playing the game of being highly balanced, polite and charitable (e.g., some other peopleās comments in the discussion strike me as almost superhumanly balanced and considerate), youāll offend the parts of the EA forum audience that implicitly consider being charitable to the accused a much more fundamental virtue than protecting other individuals (the potential victims of bad behavior) and the community at large (problematic individuals in my view tend to create a ādistortion fieldā around them that can have negative norm-eroding consequences in various ways ā though that was probably much more the case with other community drama than here, given that Phil wrote articles mostly at the periphery of the community.)
Of course, these potential drawbacks I mention only count in worlds where the concerns raised are in fact accurate. The only way to get to the bottom of things is indeed with truth-tracking norms, and being charitable (edit: and thorough) is important for that.
I just feel that the demands for evidence shouldnāt be too strong or absolute, partly also because there are instances where itās difficult to verbalize why exactly someoneās behavior seems unacceptable (even though it may be really obvious to people who are closely familiar with the situation that it is).
Lastly, I think itās particularly bad to disincentivize people for how they framed things in instances where they turned out to be right. (Itās different if there was a lot of uncertainty as to whether Halstead had valid concerns, or whether he was just pursuing a personal vendetta against someone.)
Of course, these situations are really, really tricky, and I donāt envy the forum moderators for having to navigate the waters.
True, but that also means that the right incentives are already there. If someone doesnāt provide the evidence, it could be that they find that itās hard to articulate, that there are privacy concerns, or that the person doesnāt have the mental energy at the time to polish their evidence and reasoning, but feels strongly enough that theyād like to speak up with a shorter comment. Issuing a warning discourages all those options. All else equal, providing clear evidence is certainly best. But I wouldnāt want to risk missing out on the relevant info that community veterans (whose reputation is automatically on the line when they voice a strong concern) have a negative opinion for one reason or another.
It is very unusual to issue a moderation warning for a comment at +143 karma, the second most upvoted comment on the entire page, for undermining public discussion. Creating public knowledge about hostile behaviour can be a very useful service, and I think a lot of people would agree that is the case here. Indeed, since this thread was created I have seen it productively referenced elsewhere as evidence on an important matter.
Furthermore, failing to show screenshots, private emails etc. can be an admirable display of restraint. I do not think we want to encourage people to go around leaking private communication all the time.
(As with other comments in this thread, Iām responding as an individual moderator rather than as a voice of the moderation team.)
On the one hand ā yes, certainly unusual, and one could reasonably interpret karma as demonstrating that many people thought a comment was valuable for public discussion.
However, I am exceedingly wary of changing the way moderation works based on a commentās karma score, particularly when the moderation is the āreminder of our normsā kind rather than the āyouāre bannedā kind. (And almost all of our moderation is the former; weāve issued exactly two bans since the new Forum launched in 2018, other than for spammers.)
While some users contribute more value to Forum discussion than others, and karma can be a signal of this, I associate the pattern of āgiving āvaluedā users more leeway to bend rules/ānormsā with many bad consequences in many different settings.
I agree with both statements, but I also think that providing a bit more evidence can move a comment from āa lot of people agree, because they trust the author/āhave access to non-public informationā to āeveryone agrees, because they can see the evidenceā.
As I noted in my reply to Halstead, some users donāt have the inside knowledge required to verify unsupported claims, and I donāt want those people getting left out of public discussions because e.g. they didnāt see a certain Facebook thread.
(If someone claims hostile behavior occurred, but doesnāt show evidence, does that actually ācreate public knowledgeā of the behavior itself? It might help some people connect the dots, but for many people, all they see is a claim.)
I agree that leaking private communication is a behavior to discourage in most cases. And I agree with Halstead that at least one of his claims (maybe two) would have been difficult to provide evidence for without disclosing private information. However, another claim was based on an academic paper shared widely in EA spaces, and not linking to the paper seems more confusing than helpful (though as I say in my reply to Halsteadās reply, his comment was still clearly valuable overall).
Substantiated true claims are the best, but sometimes merely stating important true facts can also be a public service...