He then went around saying we’d threatened to sue if he published (link to one comment of many where they do this), when we couldn’t have made it more clear that that wasn’t the case.
Excerpt from email we sent to Ben. Bolding in the original.
But then, from the next paragraph of that same email:
...if published as is we intend to pursue legal action for libel against Ben Pace personally and Lightcone for the maximum damages permitted by law.
It seems to me that you and Emerson are trying to have it two ways. On the one hand, the email clearly says that you only wanted time. On the other hand, the email also clearly says that if Ben gave you that time and then didn’t respond the way you wanted, you were still going to sue him. “we’d threatened to sue if he published” is a much more accurate summary of that email than “We said we would sue if they didn’t give us time to share the evidence with them. ” IMO.
(note, I haven’t read Ben’s original piece, just your rebuttal)
I don’t really share this sense (I think that even most of Gregory Lewis’ posts in this thread have had concretely useful advice for HLI, e.g. this one), but let’s suppose for the moment that it’s true. Should we care?
In the last round of posts, four to six months ago, HLI got plenty of concrete and helpful suggestions. A lot of them were unpleasant, stuff like “you should withdraw your cost-effectiveness analysis” and “here are ~10 easy-to-catch problems with the stats you published”, but highly specific and actionable. What came of that? What improvements has HLI made? As far as I can tell, almost nothing has changed, and they’re still fundraising off of the same flawed analyses. There wasn’t even any movement on this unambiguous blunder until you called it out. It seems to me that giving helpful, concrete suggestions to HLI has been tried, and shown to be low impact.
One thing people can do in a thread like this one is talk to HLI, to praise them, ask them questions, or try to get them to do things differently. But another thing they can do is talk to each other, to try and figure out whether they should donate to HLI or not. For that, criticism of HLI is valuable, even if it’s not directed to HLI. This, too, counts as “figuring out a path forward”.