TracingWoodgrains

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 19, 2023, 6:08 PM

  23 points

  6 ∶ 2

  in reply to: PeterSlattery’s comment on: Effec­tive Asper­sions: How the Non­lin­ear In­ves­ti­ga­tion Went Wrong

  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.

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 19, 2023, 6:03 PM

  41 points

  11 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Effec­tive Asper­sions: How the Non­lin­ear In­ves­ti­ga­tion Went Wrong

  I find myself confused about why you this line of reasoning goes through in this case, but is something that you very vehemently object to in the case of Ben’s post.

  I’m confused at your confusion. I have strong concerns about the process behind Ben’s post, and see a similar process at work in some of your comments. I am careful about the specific factual claims I make and respond to.

  I recognize that you’re not the right counterparty for Nonlinear’s specific claims, but I do think you’re in as much of a position to address my process concerns as Ben is. When responding to my post, you passed over the bullet point addressing the hypo I ran, which forms a key part of my process argument as a whole. I respect people’s right to respond or not respond to whichever conversations they want, but since the process is at the core of my point and that part was preregistered by both of us and is directly material to process, I do think it’s the most germane.

  I also think post-publication I don’t think I defended those claims as correct (after Kat had shared more substantial screenshots, which did update me).

  I appreciate that. If nothing else, I think this establishes that those claims should not have made it into the original post.

  I share your uncertainty about litigating the other sub-points further, but think they’re important indicators of why I was comfortable making the post when I did and informing you of publication but not sharing in full. The bulk of the post and the core of the argument within it was repurposed from our public conversations. I shared the section that introduced new information (the ACX meetup part) with you and you fact-checked it. You referenced specific parts of Kat’s evidence you contested, which I checked with my own writing on those pieces of evidence, concluded I was still comfortable with those sections, and maintained.

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 19, 2023, 5:46 PM

  58 points

  18 ∶ 3

  in reply to: PeterSlattery’s comment on: Effec­tive Asper­sions: How the Non­lin­ear In­ves­ti­ga­tion Went Wrong

  All of those are reasonable options. The money Ben paid to sources would go a long way towards hiring a professional—it’s almost as much as I make in my (part-time) journalism-adjacent work in a year.

  Like I say, I’m not averse to citizen journalism and it would be incredibly hypocritical of me if I was. There’s a lot amateurs can do in this sort of thing, but I think it requires willingness to act as something other than prosecutor—or, if you see yourself only able to act as prosecutor, to provide your evidence to a neutral third party who can get the other side of things.

  Electing a group puts a lot of pressure on that group, but it’s approximately what any large enough organization seems to do to handle misconduct allegations and has the advantage of allowing clear and predictable structure.

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 19, 2023, 5:27 PM

  76 points

  42 ∶ 4

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Effec­tive Asper­sions: How the Non­lin­ear In­ves­ti­ga­tion Went Wrong

  The great majority of my post focuses on process concerns. The primary sources introduced by Nonlinear are strong evidence of why those process concerns matter, but the process concerns stand independent. I agree that Nonlinear often paraphrased its subjects before responding to those paraphrases; that’s why I explicitly pulled specific lines from the original post that the primary sources introduced by Nonlinear stand as evidence against.

  My ultimate conclusion was and is explicitly not that Nonlinear is vindicated on every point of criticism. It is that the process was fundamentally unfair and fundamentally out of line with journalistic standards and a duty to care that are important to uphold. Not everyone who is put in a position of needing to reply to a slanted article about them is going to be capable of a perfectly rigorous, even-keeled, precise response that defuses every point of realistically defusable criticism, which is one reason people should not be put in the position of needing to respond to those articles.

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 19, 2023, 5:17 PM

  141 points

  42 ∶ 13

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Effec­tive Asper­sions: How the Non­lin­ear In­ves­ti­ga­tion Went Wrong

  Since the time I have started looking into this, you have:

  • incorrectly described the nature of people you talked with around Nonlinear, for which you subsequently apologized.

  • incorrectly claimed Nonlinear might be sponsored by Rethink Priorities, which you subsequently retracted. (EDIT: While as per below he did text a board member to check here, I think the example still has some value)

  • made likely-incorrect assumptions about libel law, which I subsequently clarified.

  • incorrectly predicted what journalists would think of your investigative process, after which we collaborated on a hypothetical to ask journalists, all of whom disagreed with your decision.

  • in our direct messages about this post prior to publication, provided a snippet of a private conversation about the ACX meetup board decision where you took a maximally broad interpretation of something I had limited ways of verifying, pressured me to add it as context to this post in a way that would have led to a substantially false statement on my part, then admitted greater confusion to a board member while saying nothing to me about the same, after which I reconfirmed with the same board member that the wording I chose was accurate to his perception.

  • agreed that the claim about vegan food as written, which Spencer tried to correct prior to publication, was substantially incorrect.

  I appreciate that you publicly update when you get things wrong, but the frequency with which you make these mistakes serves as strong evidence to me that I had sufficient information to make this post.

  The specific falsehoods, while useful, are not the core of my point. The core of my point is that a process aimed at finding only the negative, in which a great majority of your time is spent gathering evidence from one side of a situation and sympathizing with one party to it, will necessarily lead to a post aimed at something other than truth-seeking and a trial in the court of public opinion without due process. The journalistic standard I advocate for and you disagree with stands independent of any subsequent factual claims. The primary source documents I include in this post stand as useful evidence independent of any new evidence that gets introduced, and would have materially changed the interpretation of every one of the points in the section you dispute.

  I stand by my post, and its timing, in full.

Effec­tive Asper­sions: How the Non­lin­ear In­ves­ti­ga­tion Went Wrong

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 15, 2023, 9:27 PM

  37 points

  11 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  It’s not weird, it’s just that there might be a disconnect in tone. “Destroy reputation” has negative connotations; “raise red flags” has responsible connotations. It can be correct to damage someone’s reputation if they do things incompatible with that reputation, and raising red flags has a way of doing that.

  I think I’ve been clear and consistent in terms of “better ways.” When people raise concerns, they should be investigated. When you’re looking to publish those concerns, you should make reasonable efforts to verify their specifics, which matter a great deal and cannot be handwaved away. If you are reporting secondhand and not from direct experience, you should either receive primary source documents that let you see evidence directly or check to see whether the accused can provide contrary evidence on every claim in dispute.

  In this case, every claim that was important enough to be included in the document was important enough to verify with either direct primary evidence or against Nonlinear’s word and evidence. There are multiple unambiguous instances in the article where you relayed false information that was contradicted by evidence Nonlinear was volunteering to make available to you. You excuse those by claiming that pressure meant you had a duty to release. It did not. Pressure is the correct response to imminent publication of falsehoods and is only inappropriate against truth. The greater the pressure, the more it matters whether you wind up presenting the truth on every particular in your report.

  In numbered format:

  1. If Alice or Chloe had wanted to share their direct personal experience, they could have done so without using you as an intermediary, taking personal responsibility for the truth or falsehood of their claims.

  2. Once you elected to be intermediary, you should have relied on primary source documents and gathered as much of it as possible to support or contradict various claims. You should not have turned down a request to send you detailed primary source documents, nor should you have neglected to update your story on receiving new ones even two hours before publication.

  3. In the absence of primary source documents for or against a given claim, you would be free to share it as a claim from an involved party reliant on their word.

  4. The only appropriate time to publish is when the report is complete—when every claim you want to publish has been vetted and is good to go. External and internal pressure, even threats of lawsuits, matter massively less than whether you have given a complete and accurate accounting of what you were aiming to investigate.

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 15, 2023, 8:56 PM

  24 points

  7 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  At the time of publication, I struggle to differentiate between “destroy the reputation” and “allow the very extensive rumors and warnings from many dozens of people … to translate into further investigation and scrutiny [comparable to the case of FTX, the biggest scandal in your community]”. I respect that you perceive a difference but the one seems like an expansion of the other. Raising serious red flags about an organization has straightforward and predictable reputational effects.

  I’ll strikethrough the other claim—I must have misinterpreted some of what I remembered reading about it.

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 15, 2023, 7:23 PM

  43 points

  13 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  It’s a category error, in my estimation, to lump casual commentary in with published articles. You and Ben published a thorough, detailed article that mixed hundreds of hours of investigative reporting and opinion with a very specific goal: Destroy the reputation of a group within your community. It is currently the sixth-most popular post of the year, which I believe is a significant decline from its peak, and had massive impacts on your community and subculture.

  That is something altogether different from an offhand comment deep in a thread. It is a massive undertaking with potentially massive ramifications in the lives of other people and as such entails a massive duty to those people. What are the merits of this kind of relationship to publication—a kind, I want to emphasize, that every journalistic institution in the United States claims? Very simple: if you have that kind of relationship to publication, you do not cause damage to others via propagation of false rumors about them.

  Journalists don’t have a very good reputation right now, and not without reason, but a responsibility for accuracy is core to the first, second, and third principles in their code of ethics. “They were simply too loyal to truth, and too cautious about publishing things that later turned out to be false” is not a criticism I have ever heard leveled at a journalistic institution.

  The standard is not “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” but a minimum standard is absolutely “wait to review immediately forthcoming contradictory evidence before publishing falsehood.”

  I admire the first-principles thinking of rationalists and effective altruists. In many ways, it resonates with me. But the standards of common law and of broader ethics are written in blood, and outright dismissing those standards due to confidence that your own first-principles thinking is superior not only leaves you open to liability any time your actions clash with those standards, it leaves you in a position to cause much of the same damage those standards were written to prevent.

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 15, 2023, 6:57 PM

  21 points

  9 ∶ 3

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  “Meaningful” covers cases like the ones you mentioned. I stand by my words.

  Journalists are responsible, to the best of my understanding, for the accuracy of every single thing they say, which includes the things their sources say. If a source says something a journalist knows to be false and the journalist reports that claim, knowing it to be false, they are not fulfilling their duty. As far as I can observe, this aligns with the legal standard (as I discuss here) as well as the ethical standard.

  When you amplify someone’s claims, you take responsibility for those claims. When you amplify false claims where contradictory evidence is available to you and you decline to investigate that contradictory evidence, you take responsibility for that.

  If someone had evidence of fraud at FTX, they should have published specifically the limited set of evidence they were confident in and could independently verify. If they lacked the time to build a more cohesive, complete story, they should have found someone who had that time.

  People live and die on their reputations, and spreading falsehoods that damage someone’s reputation is and should be seen as more than just a minor faux pas. I understand the environment that makes EAs want to overcorrect on this right now, but due diligence is not optional when whistleblowing.

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 14, 2023, 10:42 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Rockwell’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  This comment on the LessWrong forums strikes me as a compelling rebuttal here. I don’t deny that the effects of defamation-focused civil litigation can be devastating, but the effects of defamation itself are often at least as bad. Before making this post, which caused enormous reputational damage to Nonlinear (a group I heard about only through this drama), Ben spent a total of three hours hearing their responses and refused to give them requested time to make more of their side clear in advance. Inasmuch as he got anything wrong in it, the errors are serious and have caused serious damage of precisely the sort that courts are a last-resort remedy for.

  People should not feel like they have no recourse beyond submitting to the court of public opinion, with all its flaws and biases. I’m mostly an outsider to the EA community, and while I respect the people within it as clear thinkers, I don’t trust “keep it in the family” as the sole approach with EA more than I do in any other community. I believe that in a case like this, a threat of a defamation lawsuit should be seen not as a dramatic escalation, but as a predictable and proportionate response to a threat to destroy someone’s reputation within their own community, independent of the merits of either party’s claim. It’s not straightforwardly clear to me that one causes more devastation than the other.

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 14, 2023, 7:04 PM

  17 points

  8 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  It’s misleading to frame the argument as “them claiming things were inaccurate was appropriate reason to delay publication.” The appropriate reason to delay publication was their evident willingness to compile specific counter-evidence within a week. Of course subjects of hostile articles will always claim inaccuracies, but it matters whether they can credibly claim ability to provide contrary information. “Very last-minute screenshots” simply should not be a thing when working on an investigative piece of this magnitude—if you’re doing investigative work, you have a duty to do it right, not call it short based on the “time [you] had budgeted” and publish whatever you have.

  Here’s my standard: epistemic disclaimers do not matter much when it comes to articles impugning reputations. What matters is presenting all available information accurately to the best of your ability. Your claim that the alternative was not a delay simply does not hold water: whether the alternative was a delay or no publication at all was fully within your control. There’s no reason to suspect any retaliation would be greater without publication than with publication; your time budget is nobody’s concern but your own. If the post contained a single meaningful falsehood at publication that could have been prevented by reviewing the information the subject of the article was actively preparing for you, publication at the chosen time was unreasonable no matter how many disclaimers Ben included.

• TracingWoodgrainsDec 14, 2023, 12:37 PM

  56 points

  13 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  I am not an effective altruist, but I am broadly adjacent and I work on stories about sensitive and complex situations with competing information from various parties regularly. I am coming to this fresh, not having heard of Nonlinear or Lightcone prior to yesterday.

  Of all responses in this saga, I confess this is the one I’m least sympathetic to. Lawsuit threats are distinctly unfriendly. Here’s another thing that’s distinctly unfriendly: publishing libelous information likely to do irreparable damage to an organization without giving them the opportunity to proactively correct falsehoods. The legal system is a way of systematizing responses to that sort of unfriendliness; it is not kind, it is not pleasant, but it is a legitimate response to a calculated decision to inflict enormous reputational harm.

  So you would have lost 40 hours of productive time? Respectfully: so what? You have sources actively claiming you are about to publish directly false information about them and asking for time to provide evidence that information is directly false. A lot of time, when people do that, they provide a different gloss on the same substantive information, and your original story can go ahead without serious issue. But it’s vital to at least see what they’re talking about!

  As of right now, I am persuaded that at least some of the claims in the original article—claims, again, used to inflict serious reputational harm—were substantively false in a way that could and should have been corrected by checking the evidence provided by the accused parties. I am persuaded that you published those claims without due diligence, that those claims materially contributed to damaging the reputation of an organization in the community where its reputation mattered most, and that you received warning in advance that there was evidence available to indicate the falsehood of those claims.

  I’m an outsider to this situation proceeding on the limited information in these two posts and comment sections, but given that information, I think the decision to publish potentially materially false information without waiting for available hard evidence to counter it was a poor one to which “threats of retaliation” (libel suits) were a proportionate response, not an unreasonable escalation.