I can definitely be persuaded of this, and that’s in line with the conclusion I was aiming towards in my last section: lawsuits are a last resort and a sign of an embarrassing failure to resolve disputes any other way. The EA community prides itself on having better-than-median approaches to these things, so it can and should find a satisfactory resolution that does not involve an actual lawsuit.
TracingWoodgrains
Karma: 2,101
What do you mean?
People who think Lightcone would win (ie “no libel”) tend to treat the suit as a threat simply to waste their time and money. I haven’t seen many people who strongly think Nonlinear would win (ie “libel”) but that threatening a (winning) suit would be wrong of them.
I’m not sure how this would contradict my point. You don’t think the threat was reasonable because you don’t think the case was a slam dunk. If you thought they actually had a slam dunk case against you and were virtually guaranteed to win via summary judgment, do you think a libel suit would be a reasonable threat?
Thank you for saying this.
I’ve noticed that among those who most strongly condemn the idea of bringing a defamation lawsuit, almost all also assume that Lightcone would win the suit. I have seen nobody make the case that this is a slam-dunk defamation case but that Nonlinear should still never consider pursuing it on principle.
It was. You decided, knowing hard evidence had just come in against one of the claims in the post, not to delay publication for even the length of time it would take to fix that claim, a claim that would later prove false.
My statement was accurate.
This is a fair distinction, but it does make me want to toy with a peculiar thought. As things stand in this community, threats to sue are themselves a costly signal of something even independent of proceeding to trial, because the counterparty can publicize them and get a lot of support from people furious that someone is breaking a norm against such threats.
Totally fair; I should have clarified. The Gawker case was fresh on my mind as an incident of journalistic malpractice due to this conversation and is the most memorable example of lawsuits taking down a journalistic outlet. It’s a good example of the risks of irresponsible journalism in general but definitely wasn’t libel, and precision would have been better.
For what it’s worth, I think saying that “all of whom disagreed with my decision” is not an accurate summary of quotes like:
On the request for more time for right to reply, that’s a judgement call—is this a fair period for the allegations involved, or time wasting? It’s not unknown for journalists to put in a right to reply on serious allegations, and the subject ask for more time, and then try to get ahead of the story by breaking it themselves (by denying it).
Do you think it’s an accurate summary of quotes like the rest of her reply?
This feels like a good example of why you shouldn’t over-promise to your sources—you want a cordial relationship with them but you need boundaries too. I can definitely see a situation where you would agree to give a source a heads up once you’d decided to publish — if it was a story where they’d recounted a violent incident or sexual assault, or if they needed notice to stay somewhere else or watch out for hacking attempts. But I would be very wary of agreeing in advance when I would publish an investigation—it isn’t done until it’s done.
In the end the story is going out under your name, and you will face the legal and ethical consequences, so you can’t publish until you’re satisfied. If the sources are desperate to make the information public, they can make a statement on social media. Working with a journalist involves a trade-off: in exchange for total control, you get greater credibility, plausible deniability and institutional legal protection. If I wasn’t happy with a story against a ticking clock, I wouldn’t be pressured into publication. That’s a huge risk of libelling the subjects of the piece and trashing your professional reputation.
I don’t think there’s much use to selectively quoting a paragraph using the phrase “judgment call” when the reply as a whole emphasizes that she considers it a mistake to agree in advance to a particular publication date, that an investigation isn’t done until it’s done, and that you will face the legal and ethical consequences of publishing any falsehoods. In particular, to stick with the factual backing we both agree on: You maintained a hard publication date while receiving information two hours beforehand that substantially called into question a claim in the article that was later demonstrated to be false. Do you think “disagreed with your decision” is an inaccurate summary of those two paragraphs as they relate to that specific decision?
It’s both. It’s important to remember that the primary effect of legal-system-as-backdrop isn’t “people get sued” but “people constrain their behavior because they know there could theoretically be legal consequences.” Every journalist knows what happened to Gawker, and the word “libel” is never terribly far from their minds.
The NYT is absolutely trying to maintain a reputation. Journalists as a whole are too, often less successfully. And for all of them, one of the greatest possible stains on that reputation would be a libel suit. There are many layers of error-correcting and error-checking mechanisms built atop the common-law foundation that come together into professional or institutional norms, but that doesn’t make the foundation meaningless.
If large newspapers get specific factual points wrong they can and should be sued for libel. Partially as a consequence, when making accusations against people they are generally careful to stick within the bounds of the technically true even if uncharitably framed.
This is one reason, despite the distaste towards them in this community, I will not disavow libel suits as error-correcting mechanisms: they are a strong motivator for newspapers and one every journalist keeps in mind. Trust is a currency. Corrections are seen as stains on papers, retractions more so, losing lawsuits worst of all.
When I say “cross-checked” I don’t necessarily mean “checked with the accused”—although that comes into it—but verified with hard, unambiguous evidence. Not every paper keeps a high evidentiary standard, but the NYT—despite its many faults—does.
EDIT: for those who doubt this—keep an eye on how many conservatives still cite data presented by the NYT to make their points. It has clear biases in structure, presentation, and style of content, but its overall production value is unusually high. Its preeminence in the news world is not a coincidence, it having maintained that preeminence rather than being disrupted in the digital age is not a coincidence, and understanding the how and why of that is useful especially if you dislike it.
I feel like you’re eliding my point on the New York Times section. The example there is rhetorically effective not because there is an analogy between what the New York Times does and what this post did, but because there isn’t. The NYT, whatever its flaws (and there are many) would never publish a post like the original callout. Oh, they’d write a hit piece, sure, but it would be much more precise: every detail cross-checked, negative info in the lede with exculpatory info below, so forth. I meant it when I said you’re lucky the NYT doesn’t cover you the way that post was written, and I think that’s an important substantive point to make.
This community has no trouble noticing and objecting to bad journalistic practice when it’s from an outsider looking in, but it applies different levels of trust to insiders, and I think in that case it caused them to miss obvious warning signs that they would have spotted in any other context. It’s useful and material to my argument to demonstrate that by establishing a context where everyone would see the warning signs.
I reject that this post is premature because I didn’t wait for Ben’s further response. He wrote an article after six months of work; everyone has plenty of material to react to, and my post centers around recognizing that a six-month hunt for negative information is fundamentally not a truth-seeking process and that the community ignored major red flags that were present and mentioned at the moment of publication.
People are still arguing about the falsehoods, but it’s unclear to me either that those arguments have any substance or that they’re germane to the core of my point. So far, the main truth-claim argument I’ve gotten against the points I highlight in this post is that “lived apart for six weeks of the four months” is compatible with “wasn’t allowed to live apart,” which I still don’t see. Meanwhile, one of my crucial points—that Ben received exculpatory evidence two hours before posting but was so committed to a posting schedule he would not edit anything—is admitted by all parties.
If you want to argue that they remain ambiguous, it’s more useful to make it with specifics than to gesture vaguely at it.
Good question. Let me think on it.
The answer I’m tempted towards is, of course, “Me”—for things that can be done remotely, at least. It’s something I’ve done professionally only in the context of podcast production and I don’t want to claim extraordinary experience or overstate my qualifications, but I do think I have a few unusual traits that make me well-suited for that sort of thing and it’s a process I take seriously.
Part of why I hesitate there is that I can’t do anything near-future (next five months or so) due to my commitments and don’t want to throw my hat in a ring where I’m too busy to ever do anything, but it’s a general style of work I enjoy and am open to.
I prefer to do more than idly self-promote, though—I’ll consider the question further.
You’re right that that’s useful context to include. It weakens the signal of that example (and I’ll edit accordingly) but, I would argue, not so much that the example is worth excluding altogether.
I don’t, no. Obviously it could stretch almost arbitrarily high, but I expect there are competent people who would tackle it for $50-$100/hour, for example. It’s also pretty common for journalists who take interest in a topic to pursue it of their own initiative, but they have their own incentives and work (indeed, must work) towards different goals than the people who tip them off to things.
The broader reading is hard to answer because people vary wildly in their skills, interests, and resources. If I were advising myself, for example, I would say “Start poking around and see what pops up,” because that’s what I’ve always done. If I were advising someone with lots of money but little time, I would say “Spend your money to find someone with more time,” because that seems like a pretty universal problem-solver. If I were advising someone with a large public presence, I would say “Call in a few favors from people you know,” because reputation is power.
Let’s go for the purest case, though: a random community member with little experience, money, or presence. The most important thing is finding somebody credible who has those. You can try tipping leads to trustworthy journalists (yeah yeah, I know) who operate close to that area, sharing concerns in private with more influential members of your community to see if any of them can lead things off, or simply saying whatever you have hard evidence of in a public forum and seeing where it leads. The ultimate goal is, I’d say, always to find someone with the time and capacity to look into things in depth and with balance, as much as is realistic given the situation. That can be a pretty constrained group, which is why large organizations usually end up having dedicated positions for that sort of thing, but that’s the ideal.
Someone can be at once exhausted and triumphant after completing a major, complicated, lengthy process, and that combination of tones is what I took from the post. See eg:
When I saw on Monday that Chloe had decided to write a comment on the post, I felt a sense of “Ah, the job is done.” That’s all I wanted.
Glad to hear it! I agree with your assessment of the stylistic choices—part of the goal in my post was to divorce those stylistic choices (which I read primarily as evidence of the difficulty of responding with precision under community pressure and during a time of intense stress) from the new concrete evidence that was provided.
I can confirm this is accurate. More fully:
I shared the full post with a member of the panel, a CEA community health team representative, and several others who seemed well positioned to give good feedback prior to publication and made several adjustments based on their feedback.
Seeing that the local norm is to inform people of substantial responses before providing them, I told Ben and Oliver I would be providing a response that pulled together much of what I had been litigating in Oliver with public and brought in the ACX meetup dispute details and a bit more. Oliver wanted to see the meetup section, so I shared it, and he warned that specific factual allegations might be incorrect pending more information they gave (with a couple of examples) so I investigated those factual claims to ensure nothing I said contradicted what he was saying (which it did not).
Oliver corrected one point I’d misread in that section before going into the confusing and frustrating conversation I refer to.
Given that conversation, our prior conversations, and his prior public statements, I felt (and continue to feel) that I had enough to establish all that needed to be established in my post.
Perfectly reasonable. I appreciate your engagement and look forward to Ben’s response.
After checking with Oliver, my impression is that to properly detail that section would require sharing non-public information we would need another party’s permission to share. Given that and the degree to which litigating it could derail things, I’ll simply say that the core takeaway should be that I shared part of the post with Oliver prior to publication and we had a confusing and somewhat frustrating conversation about it, and that the bulk of the post contained arguments we had already been litigating in the public sphere.
I maintain, of course, that the cleanest and best resolution would be for LC to back off of trying to litigate every specific claim to its maximum capacity and instead acknowledge the ways going on a hunt only for negative information and then refusing to pause to consider exculpatory evidence (including a point they agree was exculpatory on an accusation they agree was significant) poisoned the well in the dispute as a whole—even expecting them to continue to believe they were more-or-less correct about NL.
As things stand, it looks almost inevitable that Ben’s next post will focus primarily on relitigating specific claims and aiming to prove he really was right about NL. Oliver has, however, indicated at least some inclination towards the idea that if that does not persuade people, they will be more open to considering the procedural points I raise here. I believe him in that and am broadly optimistic that what I anticipate will be a lukewarm response to that further litigation will open the door to a clean resolution.
Failing a broadly community-satisfactory outcome from that, it does seem like an ideal case for arbitration or something that fills the same role, yes.