Uhhh no, I don’t trust them, and consider trusting them to be a pretty intense mistake. I’m friends with some very well-known people, where respected journal institutions (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) report about their lives. So I get to know them up close, and I get to directly see how the reporting misconstrues them. I’ve come away from this with intense distrust, to the degree that, similarly to Eliezer, I just don’t bother reading stuff they write about people anymore (unless it’s simply to track what news outlets are saying about people).
I’ll grant that fancy news outlets are more careful about being technically correct about facts (I’ve been interviewed by both high and low profile news outlets, and have in fact found the high profile ones are more dutiful in doublechecking concrete facts I tell them), but they are not trustworthy in terms of trying to present an accurate picture. It’s trivially easy to say only technically true things in a manner that leads people to a misleading conclusion.
One example is how the New York Times decided that they wouldn’t cover tech positively: https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
(Matt’s original tweet thread is saved here: https://web.archive.org/web/20221104004538/https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1588190763413868553 )
aella
I mean it as a data point, not as an argument on its own. In general, I’ve found that people who commit to strong lies about me online are more likely to have what I perceive to be symptoms of mental illness. For example, in one case I had mutual friends report to me that the person seemed to have a “mental break” and was acting quite unpredictably.
Unfortunately, when people seem to be acting in ways I have grown to associate with some subtypes of mental illness (seeming detached from reality in various ways, often accompanied with paranoia, usually as a shift, where they hadn’t acted like this before), I become more skeptical of claims they make, particularly when those claims are about other people being bad.
I don’t believe that all people with mental illnesses should never be trusted, or that we should discredit what they say simply because they have mental illness! I mean to say—if someone seems to have started behaving in an unstable, erratic manner, and then goes to an organization to make accusations, I feel more skeptical in that case compared to a reality in which the person were very stable, measured, and reasonable.
I mostly disagreed based on “I would much rather trust and provide emotional support to someone who later turns out to have been lying than to question—even subtly—the legitimacy of someone who has suffered sexual abuse.”, which feels dangerous to me personally if it were adopted as a community norm. do appreciate the general spirit of attempting to help though.
I came here to write something kind of sloppy, but this is a much more measured and clear thing than I could have written, and I agree with basically all of it (though I think I might have more support for point A than you do, depending on some nuance). I’m also pretty disappointed with CEA’s response and have some desire to go around semi-emotionally pointing something like, “this organization clearly does not have truth/integrity as its primary value, you cannot trust it”. I’m pretty sad about this; I’m not personally an EA but have many friends in the community and have supported and defended the movement from the sidelines for a long time. While I intend to keep supporting my friends I feel much less inclined to support the organized movement, now.
(in the interest of being hyper explicit, also wanna note that I support people believing the claims in the TIME article, think it’s good for people to genuinely state their beliefs about things, that it’s totally fine for people to come to different conclusions about it than I did.)
edit: Also, thank you!