Strong downvote solely for the highly mendacious description of lawsuits, notably omitted from the introductory allegory. WTF. You know better. You investigate this sort of drama all the time, you know exactly how legal threats are egregiously abused by the wealthy to shut down criticism! You knew this before #Metoo and case studies like Harvey Weinstein, you knew it after, and you know it now even while you are writing this fantasy description of how wonderful lawsuits are and how surely only noble and good people ever sue over libel:
Threats of lawsuits are fundamentally different to other threats. They are, as @Nathan Young put it, bets that the other party is so wrong you’re willing to expend both of your time and money to demonstrate it.
No, they are not. They are not anything like that.
TracingWoodgrains, you know damn right well that the point of a lawsuit threat has nothing to do with whether you think you are right, and that you can count on one hand the sort of libel lawsuit which follows this beautiful fantasy. They are not, in any way, a ‘bet that the other part is so wrong’. They are fundamentally different, because they are a bullet: they are solely a threat to destroy someone financially by running up costs. A defamation lawsuit costs tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, before ever going to trial, to defend simply as an ordinary matter of fact—particularly in US jurisdiction where there is no loser-pays rule so the defendant is out all legal costs permanently. They are cynically used to burn money based on the fact that rich people have a lot more money than poor people, and money has log utility, so when they burn $10k+ to burn your $10k+, they come out way ahead in punishing you, and the goal is not even to win the lawsuit, it’s to force you to a settlement when you run out of money. Which you will before they do, and in the case of Spartz suing Lightcone, it’s not like Lightcone has a ton of idle cash they can burn on a defense of their claims (which they would generally win, BTW).
And, if you really believe lawsuits are so awesome and wonderful, why aren’t you criticizing Spartz for not following through on the threat?
Rationalists are fond of Yudkowsky’s line: “Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.”
Indeed. And a lawsuit is a way to destroy someone, not counter-argue them. (And what goes on inside a court has only a questionable relationship to counterargument to begin with, which is why a decent chunk of rationality is about explaining why legal norms are so inappropriate for rational thinking.)
If it can be had nowhere else, the court is the way to get that counterargument,
It is being had right here!
I concur with @Daystar Eldthat people should not be “shunned, demonized, etc for threatening to use a very core right that they’re entitled to.”
People absolutely should be shunned, demonized, and criticised for doing many things they have legal rights to do, like engaging in lawfare to attack critics instead of, say, writing rebuttal posts and criticisms. There are countless horrible bad things which are legal to do but not moral, and usually, we expect humans older than 5 years old to have begun to appreciate this very important fact about the world.
The general animus against defamation lawsuits is one aspect I found particularly puzzling within this saga. And here I confess my biases in that I am a lawyer, but also a free speech maximalist who used to work at the ACLU (back when they were cool) and an emphatic supporter of anti-SLAPP statutes.
I suspect that defamation lawsuits have a poor reputation in part because of a selection bias. There are significantly more threats to sue than actual suits in our universe, and the threats that will shine brightest on the public’s memory will necessarily be the most outlandish and least substantiated. Threats are further proliferated because they’re very cheaply deployed (anyone with a bar card can type out a cease & desist letter on their phone on the toilet and still have time to flush) and — crucially — authentically terrifying regardless of the underlying merits or lack thereof. As you point out, there is no question that lawfare is often levied as a war of financial attrition.
The closest corollary would be the bevy of tort abuse stories. Before it was widely and thoroughly vindicated, the McDonald’s hot coffee story served as the lodestar condemnation that the American tort system was fucked beyond repair. But again, we’re going to deal with a selection bias problem here. Unless you’re trawling through every civil court docket in the country, the only time any layperson would hear about a personal injury story is when it’s blatantly ridiculous. The same issue exists with defamation lawsuits.
So just because defamation lawsuits are used as a tool of abuse, does not mean that every defamation claim is baseless. I would hope that this statement is self-evident. Instead of picturing a scorned celebrity siccing their horde of rabid lawyers against any whiff of criticism, I’d want you to consider that sometimes random nobodies are accused of quadruple homicide by TikTok psychics, or accused of election fraud by the former mayor of New York City. I’d hope that you can appreciate how terrifying it can be to be the subject of a malicious smear campaign, how daunting the prospect of initiating a defamation suit can be, and how uncertain any potential vindication might be.
I have no idea how many defamation lawsuits are initiated, but there are more than 40 million lawsuits filed every year in the US. Ideally you’d have some way to discern which grievances are valid and which ones aren’t besides just declaring all as inherently suspicious.
I am not a lawyer. If I use as examples only what people I have met in person have told me (i.e. not anything I have read online, because yes that is a sample selected for being outrageous), I know three people who were targets of defamation lawsuits, and zero people who used one. I know more people who were, in my opinion quite realistically threatened by a possibility of such lawsuit, and as a result decided to be quiet about some bad activities that definitely should have been discussed publicly. I am not even counting myself in that set, and I know about the same activities that I do not discuss, no one even needed to threaten me directly, it is enough to know that other people in analogical situation were threatened for me to connect the dots. I know zero people who considered or threatened using a defamation lawsuit.
Each of us can have an unrepresentative sample, given our different professions and people we hang out with. So I am not saying that my experience is more representative than yours. Just adding a different data point.
Based on my experience, using this kind of threat is an evidence of being a villain, because I have only seen obvious villains use this weapon, either as a threat or as actual lawsuit. Now I realize my experience may not be typical, but… it still seems more likely than the opposite.
On reflection, this is probably less about good and evil, and more about rich and poor. Rich people use legal attacks; rich people successfully deflect legal attacks. Poor (and average) people don’t use them, and can’t deflect them. I simply do not hang out with sufficiently rich people.
I’d want you to consider that sometimes random nobodies are accused of quadruple homicide by TikTok psychics, or accused of election fraud by the former mayor of New York City. I’d hope that you can appreciate how terrifying it can be to be the subject of a malicious smear campaign, how daunting the prospect of initiating a defamation suit can be, and how uncertain any potential vindication might be.
I’m sure all that is quite harmful, and I smiled to see the verdict against Giuliuani. I also think the criticisms of Nonlinear are clearly different from a Tiktok psychic accusing you of quadruple homicide, or Giuliani’s behavior in pushing election fraud repeatedly on the flimsiest of fraudulent evidence even after being corrected and during the trial itself (similar to Jones doubling down again and again on his ‘crisis actor’ narrative) and casually stoking death-threats against innocent people who must flee into hiding because of what Giuliani has said. (Is Nonlinear in hiding from people sending them death threats and their home address online? Maybe I missed that in all the comments?) So I thank you for the point you inadvertently make here in trying to defend libel lawsuits.
I’m not sure what point you think I made here. I have a vague idea of how many lawsuits are filed in general, an extremely vague theory about what portion are defamation suits, and a hopelessly speculative guess of how many of those are frivolous. You’re expressing a significantly higher level of epistemic certainty about that last question, and I’m questioning what evidence it’s based on. You haven’t offered any basis except assertions and anecdotal citations to notable examples.
This is a combative comment which fails to back up its claims.
how surely only noble and good people ever sue over libel
if you really believe lawsuits are so awesome and wonderful
He did not say this. This is not reasonable for you to write.
you can count on one hand the sort of libel lawsuit which follows this beautiful fantasy.
This is not true. This is obviously not true. A successful and important libel case (against Giuliani) was literally headline news this week. You can exceed five such cases just looking at similar cases: Dominion v Fox; Smartmatic v Fox; Coomer v Newsmax; Khalil v Fox; Andrews v D’Souza; and Weisenbach v Project Veritas. This is extremely unreasonable for you to say.
They are cynically used to burn money based on the fact that rich people have a lot more money than poor people
Nonlinear certainly doesn’t have more money than the EA community. Nonlinear plausibly (?) doesn’t have more money than Lighthouse; at a minimum, it’s not a significant difference.
which they would generally win, BTW
<argument needed>
It’s very unclear to me whether Lighthouse would win; your confidence here seems unreasonable; but more importantly, “no, that’s not true” is just not a useful thing to say here. (You’re responding to a post that did have many good citations of cases; seems like most people think it’s plausible they’d lose.)
And a lawsuit is a way to destroy someone, not counter-argue them.
In the most blandly literal sense possible, lawsuits are arguments.
what goes on inside a court has only a questionable relationship to counterargument to begin with, which is why a decent chunk of rationality is about explaining why legal norms are so inappropriate for rational thinking
You have again not given any argument for this.
The rules under which lawsuits proceed are deliberately setup in an attempt to get at the truth. Specific requirements- from the prohibition on hearsay; to the requirement of a neutral and unbiased jury; to the requirement that both sides be able to examine and respond to evidence and arguments- are both truthseeking and not generally followed outside of the court system.
“My ingroup’s internet discussions are so great that they’re not only better than the outside society’s way of determining contested questions, they invalidate their use” is a dangerously culty belief. I think it is particularly bad in this context, since the initial post had specific failures that the legal system would have handled correctly. (eg not giving Nonlinear time to respond; it’s possible that I’ll feel like the eventual outcome here is reasonable, IDK, but the initial post had clear issues.) But at a minimum, if you’re saying that people be “shunned, demonized, and criticised” (!), you really ought to say specifically why/how the courts would be unreliable in this case.
This is not true. This is obviously not true. A successful and important libel case (against Giuliani) was literally headline news this week. You can exceed five such cases just looking at similar cases: Dominion v Fox; Smartmatic v Fox; Coomer v Newsmax; Khalil v Fox; Andrews v D’Souza; and Weisenbach v Project Veritas. This is extremely unreasonable for you to say.
Those were in fact some of the cases I had in mind, yes, thank you—I read the news too. And what one learns from reading about them is how those are exceptional cases, newsworthy precisely because they reached any verdict rather than settling, driven by external politics and often third-party funding, and highly unusual until recently post-2016/Trump. It is certainly the case that sometimes villains like Alex Jones get smacked down properly by libel lawsuits; but note how wildly incomparable these cases are to the blog post that Spartz is threatening to sue over. Look, for example, at Jones’s malicious behavior even during the trial, or to take the most recent case, Giuliani, his repeated affirmation of the libelous and blatantly false claims. Look at the kinds of claims being punished in these lawsuits, like claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was completely fake and the victims’ relatives are fabricating their entire existence. (You’re going to analogize this to Pace saying ‘Nonlinear may not have treated some employees very well’? Really?) Look at how many of the plaintiffs are private citizens, who are in no way public figures. That this rash of victories for the good guys involves lawsuits does not redeem the general abuse of lawsuits.
None of which Ben Pace has done, and which is part of why I say he would have excellent odds: it’s unclear what damage has been done to Nonlinear, he had good grounds for his claims, has not said anything which would rise to the level of ‘actual malice’ against a public figure like Spartz, and was “well-intentioned”.
Nonlinear certainly doesn’t have more money than the EA community.
This is a double bait and switch: Nonlinear is just Spartz who can spend his money on whatever he likes, while the ‘EA community’ is not the one being specifically threatened, and even comparing Nonlinear and Lightcone is misleading, because Lightcone has many other ongoing responsibilities (such as spending money to maintain the website this is being written on or renovate buildings) and it would presumably be Pace personally being sued as well.
In the most blandly literal sense possible, lawsuits are arguments.
Wow. In any case, no, not even in the ‘literal sense’ is a lawsuit an ‘argument’, as lawsuits are speech-acts and binding actions. Lawsuits are acts of power and coercion; they are not arguments, even if arguments may be used in parts; saying that they ‘literally are arguments’ is like saying that lawsuits ‘literally are pieces of paper’. And if you simply exchange views or state views or refuse to take actions ordered by the judge (I encourage you to look up a dictionary definition of ‘argument’ if you really want to waste time taking this tack) that would constitute various kinds of fraud or perjury or contempt of court or violations of gag orders or disclosure of confidential information.
You have again not given any argument for this.
This is core to many of the Sequences in explaining things like why ‘burden of proof’ or ‘innocent until proven guilty’ are not how one should reason, and, for example, why adversarial norms of reasoning like simply denying claims and not substituting steelmen may be useful in law but not in LessWrong.
The rules under which lawsuits proceed are deliberately setup in an attempt to get at the truth.
No, they are not. Truth is only one of many concerns of lawsuits, under all prevailing legal philosophies, whether legal realism or law & economics; major concerns include economic efficiency, second-order incentives, predictability of rulings and precedent, and so on. Lawsuits, and criminal cases, are overturned routinely on grounds that have nothing to do with ‘getting at the truth’ and parties in lawsuits often stipulate to facts that no one believes for reasons of pragmatism. (And I’m leaving out historical examples like compurgation.) You do not use lawsuits to try to decide whether the sun goes around the earth, because lawsuits are not good ways to get at truths.
“My ingroup’s internet discussions are so great that they’re not only better than the outside society’s way of determining contested questions, they invalidate their use” is a dangerously culty belief
That does sound a bit culty but good thing I never said that. I would be just as angry about it if Spartz had instead threatened to sue a subreddit moderator on a subreddit I used, or someone who sent a spicy email to a mailing list, or tweeted about Spartz. This is an civil-society-wide norm, not a LW-only thing: arguments get arguments, not lawsuits. And when someone publishes some stuff about you that you don’t like, and you choose to break that norm by lawsuits...
from the prohibition on hearsay; to the requirement of a neutral and unbiased jury; to the requirement that both sides be able to examine and respond to evidence and arguments- are both truthseeking and not generally followed outside of the court system.
That’s all entirely wrong. A prohibition on hearsay is not ‘truthseeking’, obviously (much of history is based on things which would be thrown out as hearsay) but is related to the pragmatics. Juries are not required in lawsuits and parties often prefer a bench trial because they believe juries will be too ignorant or easily swayed rather than ‘truthseeking’ (and how do you explain how different systems make wildly different uses of bench trials if courts are so truthseeking? is truth found in lawsuits by jury trials in the USA but then truth works differently in the UK with almost all bench lawsuits?). Parties only examine and respond to a limited range of evidence and arguments, chosen for incentive reasons. And ‘not generally followed outside the court system’ is an argument against your claims: as if courts were the only place that anyone cared about truth? How does, say, science work since they don’t do… any of that?
you really ought to say specifically why/how the courts would be unreliable in this case.
As I already said, quite clearly, I thought, the point is not what the jury or judge would rule; I think were Pace sued and it was taken that far, he would win, for the obvious reasons related to his criticisms being entirely reasonable, often true (an absolute defense), and not made with actual malice, against a public figure, where the financial harms are minuscule at best—which make it quite hard to lose a libel lawsuit on its merits. But that’s largely irrelevant because it would probably never even get to the point of a jury or judge verdict. The point of lawfare is to harass and impoverish and censor, which is why Spartz dropped the threat when it didn’t look like it would work.
BTW, you think if lawsuits are so great for finding the truth, why isn’t Nonlinear suing now? If you feel that it wouldn’t work to sue now, you really ought to say specifically why/how the courts would be unreliable in this case.
Those were in fact some of the cases I had in mind, yes, thank you—I read the news too. And what one learns from reading about them is how those are exceptional cases, newsworthy precisely because they reached any verdict rather than settling, driven by external politics and often third-party funding, and highly unusual until recently post-2016/Trump. It is certainly the case that sometimes villains like Alex Jones get smacked down properly by libel lawsuits; but note how wildly incomparable these cases are to the blog post that Spartz is threatening to sue over. Look, for example, at Jones’s malicious behavior even during the trial, or to take the most recent case, Giuliani, his repeated affirmation of the libelous and blatantly false claims. Look at the kinds of claims being punished in these lawsuits, like claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was completely fake and the victims’ relatives are fabricating their entire existence. (You’re going to analogize this to Pace saying ‘Nonlinear may not have treated some employees very well’? Really?) Look at how many of the plaintiffs are private citizens, who are in no way public figures. That this rash of victories for the good guys involves lawsuits does not redeem the general abuse of lawsuit
(1) This is a response to you writing “you can count on one hand the sort of libel lawsuit which follows this beautiful fantasy”. Sarcastically stating “I read the news too” doesn’t help you- how obvious these are just makes it worse! You now seem to have entirely abandoned that standard without changing your mind. I can very easily start listing more libel cases that match the new distinctions you’re drawing, to the extent that they are clear enough; is there any point to me doing so? What is the evidence that would convince you that you’re wrong?
(2) One reason I’m confident that you don’t care about the distinctions you’re drawing is that the cases I cited already meet some of the standards you’ve now proposed, and you didn’t care enough to check. In particular, you wrote that “those are exceptional cases, newsworthy precisely because they reached any verdict rather than settling”. This is false, and you provided no justification or evidence for it. I cited six cases; none of them have reached verdicts. Dominion v. Fox, Khalil v. Fox, and Coomer v. Newsmax all did settle; Smartmatic v. Fox and Andrews v. D’Souza are still outstanding and so hasn’t reached a verdict. Weisenbach v. Project Veritas doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2022, but there has been no verdict that I can find. (Given that I’ve already presented you with cases satisfying one of the distinctions you drew above, are you now convinced that you were wrong?)
***
None of which Ben Pace has done, and which is part of why I say he would have excellent odds: it’s unclear what damage has been done to Nonlinear, he had good grounds for his claims, has not said anything which would rise to the level of ‘actual malice’ against a public figure like Spartz, and was “well-intentioned”.
it’s unclear what damage has been done to Nonlinear
Do you believe that unclear damages mean that you can’t win a lawsuit? If so, that’s untrue; damages are often also in dispute. (Did you mean to claim that there was zero damage done? That is different from what you wrote, and is false.)
he had good grounds for his claims
The legal term relevant here is “negligence”; “good grounds” is not the relevant legal terminology. He was negligent in publishing without giving Nonlinear time to reply or updating based on Spencer Greenberg’s evidence; in particular, Habryka stated that they had received evidence that claims in the post were false before they published. [ETA: Habrya comments on this here.] Why do you believe that this wasn’t negligent, if that’s what you meant by writing “had good grounds for his claims”? Or did you mean something else?
has not said anything which would rise to the level of ‘actual malice’ against a public figure like Spartz, and was “well-intentioned”.
You haven’t explained why you think that Spartz is a public figure; again, I find your lack of clear reasoning frustrating to deal with. In this specific case, searching for comments on ‘public figure’ by you in an attempt to figure out what you were thinking, I found a comment by you which did explain your reasoning:
He [Emerson Spartz] very obviously is one [a public figure]. As habryka points out, he has a WP entry backed by quite a few sources about him, specifically. He has an entire 5400-word New Yorker profile about him, which is just one of several you can grab from the WP entry (eg. Bloomberg). For comparison, I don’t think even Eliezer has gotten an entire New Yorker profile yet! If this is not a ‘public figure’, please do explain what you think it would take. Does he need a New York Times profile as well? (I regret to report that he only has 1 or 2 paragraphs thus far.)
Now, I am no particular fan of decreeing people ‘public figures’ who have not particularly sought out fame (and would not appreciate becoming a ‘public figure’ myself); however, most people would say that by the time you have been giving speeches to universities or agreeing to let a New Yorker journalist trail you around for a few months for a profile to boost your fame even further, it is safe to say that you have probably long since crossed whatever nebulous line divides ‘private’ from ‘public figure’.
Even in that comment, you never actually stated what you believe the standard for being a public figure is, or gave any legal citations to support that standard.[1] However, there’s at least enough detail to say that your claim is wrong; it’s absolutely not true that having a magazine profile is the level of fame required to make you a public figure. Waldbaum v. Fairchild Publications describes the standard for general public figures[2] as follows:
a person can be a general public figure only if he is a “celebrity”—his name a “household word”—whose ideas and actions the public in fact follows with great interest
To give a concrete example, musician Dr. Luke owns two publishing companies, has been nominated for numerous Grammys, and has had plenty of magazine articles written about him, including one specifically in the New Yorker; courts have also repeatedlyheld that he isn’t a general public figure.
***
This is a double bait and switch: Nonlinear is just Spartz who can spend his money on whatever he likes, while the ‘EA community’ is not the one being specifically threatened, and even comparing Nonlinear and Lightcone is misleading, because Lightcone has many other ongoing responsibilities (such as spending money to maintain the website this is being written on or renovate buildings) and it would presumably be Pace personally being sued as well.
My comment was not misleading. I was explicitly responding to a quote, which I directly quoted in my comment right above what you responded to, where you stated that “[lawsuits] are cynically used to burn money based on the fact that rich people have a lot more money than poor people”. This is about “rich” vs. “poor”. The rest of the quote is “money has log utility, so when they burn $10k+ to burn your $10k+, they come out way ahead in punishing you, and the goal is not even to win the lawsuit, it’s to force you to a settlement when you run out of money. Which you will before they do, and in the case of Spartz suing Lightcone, it’s not like Lightcone has a ton of idle cash they can burn on a defense of their claims”.[3]
Some libel threats fall under your analysis; others do not. I have already given many examples of lawsuits that do not- Fox News, for example, is not likely to simply run out of money, nor is it poorer than its various legal opponents. Your analysis of this specific case is wrong; Habryka has explicitly stated that Lightcone has enough money to defend a libel suit. He also said that Lightcone would probably be able to fundraise from the EA community for a defense.
***
I found this extremely frustrating to reply to. I personally regard most of the concrete claims you made in the original comment as being not just wrong, but both obviously wrong and unsupported. You seem to have abandoned actually defending them, and indeed even noted how obvious my counterarguments were- “yes, thank you—I read the news too”. (You didn’t change your mind in response, though!)
Judging by the timestamps, you wrote your long response very quickly. It’s taken me much, much longer to write this reply, and I’m only a small fraction through replying so far. (I’ll reply to the rest later, I guess, ugh ugh ugh.) There’s a very obvious reason why you were so much faster: you didn’t bother to defend your specific previous claims or to check if the new stuff you tossed out was actually right. It would have taken you ~10 seconds to verify if any of the lawsuits named reached a verdict, instead of wrongly making up that they all had; it’s taken me much longer to check all of them and write up a reply. It would have taken you ~5 minutes[4] to find the legal definition of public figure, instead of making up your own. It’s taken me far longer to find a different comment that actually explained what you were talking about, and to then lookup and write a response myself, including even finding a specific person who was both the subject of a New Yorker article and had been determined to not be a public figure. This is a gish gallop.
The linked comment is in response to a comment by an attorney who correctly stated the standard for being a public figure and correctly stated that Spartz isn’t a public figure… which you ignored when you made up your own uncited standard for what a public figure is. (It’s also a pretty devastating indictment of LW that the attorney commenting with a correct definition and application of “public figure” received considerably less karma/agreement than you making up your own incorrect standard, which gave a more popular answer.)
There’s also the category of “limited purpose public figure”. Spartz also probably (but not definitely) isn’t one; all of the citations you gave- and probably almost all of his publicity, judging by his Wikipedia page- don’t relate to Nonlinear or AI broadly, or their treatment of interns specifically.
The new argument that you’ve made here might or might not be true; you’ve tossed it out without sufficient justification. Nonlinear would also like to spend money on other things, and I don’t know how to compare their resources, preferences, and alternative expenditures vs. Lightcone; you haven’t even tried. (Note that your argument requires a significant difference.)
I haven’t read this whole comment, though expect I will. Just making a quick clarification:
Habryka stated that they had received evidence that claims in the post were false before they published.
I don’t think that’s an accurate summary of the linked comment (though it’s also not like totally unrelated). Here it is in full:
Ok, I pinged Spencer. He sent me screenshots of text messages he sent Ben that he sent ~2 hours before publication of the post (in the middle of the barrage of comms that Nonlinear was firing off at the time, which included the libel threats), and which Kat posted to the comment thread less than 48 hours after the messages were sent to Ben.
I stand by my summary that everything Ben knew at the time of writing the post, made it into the post. Of course if you send something 2 hours before the post is published, late at night, it’s not going to make it into the post (but it might very well make it into a comment, which it did).
I agree that this comment confirms that Spencer sent us evidence that related to some claims in the post. It does not speak on my epistemic state with regards to the relevance of that evidence.
(To take an object-level stance on the issue, though I was more responding to the fact that I expect people will interpret that sentence as me saying something I am not saying, I do think that Spencer’s messages were evidence, though really not very much evidence, and I would object to my epistemic state being summarized in this context as being interpreted as Spencer’s screenshots falsifying anything about Ben’s original post, though I agree that they are bayesian evidence against the hypothesis. I do think for the argument at hand to have force it needs to meet a higher standard than “some bayesian evidence”, and I don’t currently think it meets that threshold by my own lights)
I would be just as angry about it if Spartz had instead threatened to sue a subreddit moderator on a subreddit I used, or someone who sent a spicy email to a mailing list, or tweeted about Spartz. This is an civil-society-wide norm, not a LW-only thing: arguments get arguments, not lawsuits. And when someone publishes some stuff about you that you don’t like, and you choose to break that norm by lawsuits.
I don’t think that’s the civil-society-wide norm? Using the threat of defamation lawsuits to keep people from saying true things, especially when the person threatening is richer or otherwise more powerful, that I agree there’s a norm against. But using the threat to keep someone from doing something they’re already not supposed to be doing [1], that I don’t see a norm against? This looks to me like a threat to bring in the legal system to keep the dispute within bounds.
(I was initially really negative on NL for threatening a suit, but I’ve reversed on this after coming to understand the situation better.)
[1] In this case, saying damaging things some of which they expect will be shown to be false. He published after saying to NL that “I do expect you’ll be able to show a bunch of the things you said.” And should have expected to be publishing some false claims just based on how many claims there were and how little time he allocated to checking the final claims with NL.
In this case, saying damaging things some of which they expect will be shown to be false. He published after saying to NL that “I do expect you’ll be able to show a bunch of the things you said.”
I don’t think this means very much without specifying which things, and how relevant to the overall question they are. I would say this both in worlds where I expect something substantial or something minor to be inaccurate. I also don’t expect Ben would have said something different if he had waited longer for adversarial fact-checking. Reaching an epistemic status of “I don’t expect you’ll be able to show any of the things you said” seems extremely hard and unlikely.
I think it’s reasonable to criticize not waiting longer. But I object to using a sentence like this as really any evidence about the degree to which that was a mistake, or about the degree to which there are material errors in the post. Of course in any post like this, in a situation as adversarial like this, will there be some things that the post gets wrong. That’s true in any domain of this complexity. I think admitting to potential error helps in situations like this and interpreting things as adversarially as this undermines people’s ability to be honest and open to new evidence in situations like this.
I included Ben’s quote because it seems relevant, but I think I’d be saying pretty much the same thing without it (or if it turned out NL used Ben’s quote out of context). The “should have expected to be publishing some false claims just based on how many claims there were and how little time he allocated to checking the final claims with NL” is sufficient.
Manifold encourages market creators to participate in their own markets. Are you concerned that I will disregard the resolution criteria and steal the mana? Note that if Manifold thought judges should not bet in their own markets they could easily prohibit it or put a notification on markets where the creator was placing bets to warn prospective participants.
(I’ve updated the resolution criteria a few times to make it more specific since creating the market, each time in ways that make it less likely to resolve YES, and I’m long YES)
I knew they did not prohibit it, but I am surprised they are actively encouraging it. In any real-money market, doing anything analogous would almost certainly be grossly illegal. I have significant restrictions on my real-life trading, and I just work at a company that sells information about the market, but doesn’t actually run it. I’ve found the practice of people betting in their own markets on manifold to predictably result in unfair resolutions, and so I do judge people who do it, and I judge more harshly if they don’t actively disclose the fact. I came to manifold on the expectation that it was trying to be like a real-money prediction market, and just couldn’t because of laws in the US. As I see them diverging more and more from the standards of real markets, I become more and more disappointed. But you do make a fair point that perhaps I should judge Manifold more than the market makers if they are actively encouraging such bad behavior.
I did not know this. How long has this been around?
Still strikes me as a really bad idea to ignore the norms that actual financial markets have developed over centuries of experience, but I am curious if this will actually solve the problem of judges biased by having a position in their own markets.
We’ve been thinking about letting market creators delegate a judge that is not themselves. People sometimes do this informally. Also Manifold team members (and mods we delegate) have the power to overturn resolutions—though iirc we only do this in extreme cases.
I agree that some people use them that way. I disagree that is a fair descriptor of every lawsuit threat, and think in this case the parties had approximately equal power and influence, and that six months of building a case against Nonlinear is every bit as threatening as a lawsuit. Since the overwhelming community consensus was that Ben’s six months collecting negative information about someone with 60 hours to respond was reasonable and Nonlinear’s threat of a lawsuit if not given another week to respond was unreasonable, I felt, and feel, that the community needs to sharply update against the reasonableness of collecting and presenting only negative information and somewhat more weakly update against lawsuit threats being de facto proof of bad faith and unfair dealing.
It is being had right here!
It is being had here after Nonlinear’s reputation was damaged in what reads to me as a fundamentally unfair way, and being had in the way it is only because word happened to make it to me from a community I am a neighbor to but not a part of and I happened to be obsessive enough to respond. The court of public opinion is fickle and unreliable, relying on oratory skills and the chance of who happens to show up at least as much as anything else.
EDIT:
And, if you really believe lawsuits are so awesome and wonderful, why aren’t you criticizing Spartz for not following through on the threat?
Why create a caricature of me? I don’t believe lawsuits are awesome and wonderful. I think they are a last resort that no parties should desire and that every effort to reach an out-of-court settlement should be found even if someone raises the spectre of a lawsuit. Nobody is ever obligated to pursue one, but there are settings in which it is defensible. In this case, I am at least somewhat optimistic that the EA community as a whole will find a way to undo the bulk of the material harm caused by the original post through its own methods.
notably omitted from the introductory allegory.
To clarify, I think that if EA has a strong principle against suing the New York Times, one of the most powerful institutions on the planet, for libel if the Times makes materially false claims with actual malice that do real reputational damage, that principle is not praiseworthy. I made the nod to that principle in the opening allegory with an eyebrow raised. Every example you give of the problem of libel suits is of their use by the strong against the weak, but every part of the legal system is bad if abused by the strong to crush the weak. That doesn’t mean the system as a whole has no legitimate role.
The passive background threat of libel suits against powerful journalistic outlets is a significant part of the process that causes journalists to stick with technically correct claims. It is good that the New York Times can be held liable if it causes damage to someone by lying about them, and good that journalists have to keep that possibility in mind.
(which they would generally win, BTW).
I want to be clear that, as a matter of policy and out of an excess of caution given my career path, I do not and will not make prognostications on the likelihood of success of any given lawsuit.
To clarify, I think that if EA has a strong principle against suing the New York Times, one of the most powerful institutions on the planet, for libel if the Times makes materially false claims with actual malice that do real reputational damage, that principle is not praiseworthy.
Gawker engaged in a lot of things that seemed libelous against a lot of people but for a long time, no successful libel suit was run against them.
It took the 8-figure lawsuit from Peter Thiel to move against Gawker. If it would take a similar amount of money for a successful suit with merit against the New York Times, that’s a lot of money that competes for other EA priorities. It makes sense that it’s too expensive and EA funders would see more bang for their buck elsewhere.
If financial concerns are the key mover, sure (although I don’t think it takes an 8-figure lawsuit to sue Gawker, just to ruin them). Gwern’s comment seemed to be outlining much more of an ethical principle: thou shalt not threaten defamation lawsuits even when you have suffered actual damages from actual defamation.
Lawsuits are an asymmetric weapon. Rich people can easily afford them (even if they know they would lose). If their use is unchecked, it would mean that no one would dare to criticize rich people (except for other rich people, but those may not care about specific wrongs that do not concern them).
There is always a chance to lose a lawsuit even if you were right; for example, you may fail to prove it. You would probably also lose a lawsuit if, let’s say, 80% of your accusations are right, but the remaining 20% are wrong. (In which case, the community would still benefit from exposing the actor.) And even if you win the lawsuit… “the process is the punishment”, it cost you lots of money and time.
I think that an absolute ban on lawsuits would probably be excessive, but given the asymmetry of power and the devastating impact, what rule would you propose to make the situation balanced?
*
Yes, there is also an opposite concern… people writing shit online can damage someone’s reputation and business. If those people are more popular on LW, or if they do not have a business that could be damaged in turn, this is also an asymmetric weapon.
I guess the only thing I can say here is that if someone writes an article on LW about you, you can also respond by writing an article on LW; either immediately, or later, or both. Critics are not censored here, you are not required to spend money to defend yourself, the time spent can be reduced to… quoting a list of accusations, adding “this is false” under each of them, and at the end saying “hey, I can prove all of this to be false, but it will take me some time and work… in the meanwhile, shouldn’t the burden of the proof be on the accuser?”, or something like that.
It seems to me that Nonlinear handled this situation sub-optimally precisely because they were already considering the possibility of legal escalation. Which means they also wanted their response to be 100% bulletproof. Which is why it took so much time for them to prepare it. If you read their response as it is now, you could probably extract their main arguments into five or seven bullet points… and those could have been posted immediately as a comment under the original article, with “the proofs will be provided soon, it takes some time to collect the screenshots and ask involved third parties for consent”. Of course, in situations of stress people often do things they later with they did differently. But the threat of lawsuits just further escalated the situation.
(Not sure if my memory serves me well, but I think the original objections were mostly about whether vegan food was or wasn’t available. If instead I saw a list saying “actually, the salaries were much higher, approximately X but please wait until we find the exact numbers… they was a boyfriend invited to spend a few weeks with us, so definitely no social isolation… and the ‘illegal drugs’ was actually Adderall” etc., that would have changed my mind more effectively. When instead I saw a threat of lawsuit and nitpicking about vegan food, I assumed that the rest of the accusations was mostly true.)
I agree NL chose a bad strategy, but I also think you mischaracterize it? Instead of making a long list of claims they were asserting were false (without documentation) they picked one relatively serious accusation and responded to it in detail with screenshots.
I supposed one’s perspective depends on how you see the relative seriousness of accusations. From my perspective, to be isolated from friends and family is a huge red flag, but not being given vegan food is… an asshole move, certainly, but… as I am not a vegan myself, I see it as nothing too serious, also because it was only one day.
It’s like, if someone accused me of “arson, murder, and jaywalking”, and I focused my entire defense on why what I did does not qualify as jaywalking… even if I made my case successfully, it would probably seem quite weird. (But if instead I said that the supposedly murdered person is actually alive, just give me some time to call them...)
I think the accusation around food was much more serious than Jaywalking. Ben’s post had:
She was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days. Alice eventually gave in and ate non-vegan food in the house
I understood this to be claiming, some explicitly and some implicitly, that:
Alice was dependent on NL for food because she had covid.
NL would not provide her with food compatible with her dietary restrictions.
After two days she had eaten whatever small amount food was available that met her dietary restrictions, NL was still not providing her with acceptable food, so she decided to compromise her ethics in the name of not starving.
Now, the full picture ended up being pretty different from this (and also very messy and still disputed) but I don’t think it’s surprising that as stated many people took this as a serious accusation, and I don’t think it was trivial or otherwise a bad choice for NL to rebut.
(Repeating, though, that I don’t think chosing to spend their time rebutting a single claim in detail was a good strategy, and instead would have rather seen them say which claims they objected to up front. And I’m frustrated with myself that I didn’t suggest this at the time.)
I also think this accusation was relatively serious to me.
I do not think it was among the very most serious accusations in the post, but I think it was a valid one to reply to. I also found the response that Kat wrote pretty compelling, and think it meaningfully affected my interpretation of the situation (I still assign some probability that Ben or Alice will have some good explanation of the situation that flips my understanding of the facts around, which has happened a few times in this whole situation, but I think that relies on trust in those parties that I don’t think should be shared by others on this forum, and I think given the evidence provided, I think it’s very reasonable for an observer to consider that accusation confidently false and relatively serious)
(2) I think something odd about the comments claiming that this post is full of misinformation, is that they don’t correct any of the misinformation. Like, I get that assembling receipts, evidence etc can take a while, and writing a full rebuttal of this would take a while. But if there are false claims in the post, pick one and say why it’s false.
Seconding this.
I would be pretty interested to read a comment from nonlinear folks listing out everything that they believe to be false in the narrative as stated, even if they can’t substantiate their counter-claims yet.
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems like it should take less than an hour to read the post, make a note of every claim that’s not true, and then post that list of false claims, even if it would take many days to collect all the evidence that shows those points are false.
I imagine that would be helpful for you, because readers are much more likely to reserve judgement if you listed which specific things are false.
Personally, I could look over that list and say “oh yeah, number 8 [or whatever] is cruxy for me. If that turns out not to be true, I think that substantially changes my sense of the situation.”, and I would feel actively interested in what evidence you provide regarding that point later. And it would let you know which points to prioritize refuting, because you would know which things are cruxy for people reading.
In contrast, a generalized bid to reserve judgement because “many of the important claims were false or extremely misleading”...well, it just seems less credible, and so leaves me less willing to actually reserve judgement.
Indeed, deferring on producing such a list of claims-you-think-are-false suggests the possibility that you’re trying to “get your story straight.” ie that you’re taking the time now to hurriedly go through and check which facts you and others will be able to prove or disprove, so that you know which things you can safely lie or exagerate about, or what narrative paints you in the best light while still being consistent with the legible facts.
“We chose this example not because it’s the most important (although it certainly paints us in a very negative and misleading light) but simply because it was the fastest claim to explain where we had extremely clear evidence without having to add a lot of context, explanation, find more evidence, etc.
We have job contracts, interview recordings, receipts, chat histories, and more, which we are working full-time on preparing.
This claim was a few sentences in Ben’s article but took us hours to refute because we had to track down all of the conversations, make them readable, add context, anonymize people, check our facts, and write up an explanation that was rigorous and clear. Ben’s article is over 10,000 words and we’re working as fast as we can to respond to every point he made.
Again, we are not asking for the community to believe us unconditionally. We want to show everybody all of the evidence and also take responsibility for the mistakes we made.”
As for the “isolated” claim, we showed that this did not happen. Alice lived/worked apart from us for 50% of the time. Chloe’s boyfriend was invited to travel with us 40% of the time. We encouraged them to have regular calls with friends and family when they weren’t visiting. We have the invite policy where it says they’re encouraged to invite friends and family (and they followed up on this, like with Chloe’s boyfriend).
I have never had any interaction with lawsuits of any kind, including those relating to libel etc.
However, a social dynamic I have observed several times in my life is that Person A and Person B have some kind of conflict. Person A is utterly convinced of the rightness (and righteousness) of their position.
Someone (either B or a third party, C) suggests that it may be prudent to involve the police or the teachers/parents (if these people are chidden) or other authorities. Person A, on mention of the police/teachers/whoever suddenly looses that utter confidence they had in the obvious morality of their position, and runs a mile. Curiously person A in this case will often genuinely feel that the mention of involving authority was an attack or an escalation (Although I think they are always wrong in that estimation, and that the main effect is to de-escalate). I have, on none of these occasions, actually seen the police/teachers/whoever actually be contacted. I believe there exists a certain frame of mind a human can get into, where they are in a position of relative power, and believe they have a great moral authority behind them. And that simply being reminded that they may potentially have to persuade a higher authority of this rightness is enough to break the spell.
So, reminding people that they may need to answer to a higher authority for their actions is a generically useful strategy against a wide range of attacks, one that I imagine people fall back on instinctively all the time. In this case that means mentioning lawyers. Holding “they mentioned lawyers” against the Nonlinear people seems insane. Mentioning authority is a prudent way of defusing or deescalating many social situations. Even if you think it was the wrong move in this exact case I think you shouldn’t judge someone (who is probably in a bit of a flap given the accusations involved) too harshly for making the move that is usually right.
To be clear, it’s not that they “mentioned lawyers”, it’s that they said:
Given the irreversible damage that would occur by publishing, it simply is inexcusable to not give us a bit of time to correct the libelous falsehoods in this document, and 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. The legal case is unambiguous and publishing it now would both be unethical and gross negligence, causing irreversible damage.
Which has a bit of a different feel to it than “mentioning lawyers”. (I think you otherwise make a decent point, though one I think that doesn’t apply very well to this situation)
Since the /r/slatestarcodex comment section is unlikely to get the long-term traffic this mirror is, I want to copy my reply there over here as well.
I’m honestly really frustrated by your response to this post. The incident I describe is not trivial and it is not tangential to the purposes of the rationalist community. It directly damages the community’s credibility towards its core goals in a major way. You are about as trusted as a public figure gets among the rationalists, and when you see this whole thing, you vote it down and rebuke me because I don’t hate libel lawsuits as much as I hate libel.
Rationalists spend a lot of time criticizing poor journalistic practices from outside the community. It should raise massive alarms that someone can spend six months digging up dirt on another community member, provide scant time to reply and flat-out refuse to look at exculpatory evidence, and be praised by the great majority of the community who noticed while those who pointed out the issues with what was going on were ignored.
If a prominent person in your community spends six months working to gather material to destroy your reputation, then flat-out refuses to look at your exculpatory evidence or to update his post in response to exculpatory evidence from another trusted community member—evidence he his collaborator now admits overturns an allegation in the article—there is nothing at all disproportionate or inappropriate about a desperate lawsuit threat—not a threat if the post goes live, but a threat if they won’t even look at hard evidence against their claims—minutes before the reputation-destroying post goes live. That’s not the strong crushing the weak whistleblower, that’s a desperate response to reputational kamikaze.
It is not an issue with my post that I accurately defend that libel lawsuit threat as a sane response to an insane situation. It is an issue with the rationalist community as a whole that they nodded along to that insane situation, and an issue with you that your major takeaway from my post is that I’m wrong about lawsuits.
A six-month campaign to gather negative info about someone is not a truth-seeking process, it is not a rational process, and it is not a process to which the community should respond by politely arguing about whether lawsuits could possibly be justified as a response. It is a repudiation of the principles the rationalist community espouses and demands an equally vehement response, a response that nobody within the community gave until I stumbled over the post by happenstance three months later.
You are wrong. Your takeaway from my article is wrong. What happened during that investigation was wrong, and sufficiently wrong that I see no cause to reply by coming out swinging about the horrors of the legal system. You should be extinguishing the fire in your own community’s house, and the people cheering you on for responding to someone trying to put that fire out with a rebuke are helping you burn down your own community’s credibility. You had no obligation to respond to the situation; having responded, though, you take on a duty to it which you are neglecting by responding in this way given your stature within this community and the gravity of the original error.
I really don’t want to get into a whole conversation here, just a quick comment so that people don’t make wrong updates:
evidence he now admits overturns an allegation in the article
I don’t think Ben has said anything that indicates that he believes evidence provided “overturns an allegation in the article”. I have, but I didn’t write the article. I have asked you a few times to please not attribute things that I said to Ben or generalize them confidently to statements about the whole process here. Ben knows much more about the details here than I do, and I would really appreciate if you distinguish between me and him here. It’s plausible to me that Ben also believes this, but I don’t think your summary here is accurate.
to update his post in response to exculpatory evidence from another trusted community member
I don’t think Ben has refused to update his post. Indeed he has many times offered to update the post and has pretty prominently linked to all relevant counter-evidence (and has also promised to update the post in response to the new evidence provided). I think there is some valid criticism here about not waiting to publish, but I don’t think there is a valid criticism about not being willing to update the post. AFAIK all requests that were made to update the post with links or references to relevant counter-evidence were fulfilled.
A six-month campaign to gather negative info about someone is not a truth-seeking process
I really don’t want to have a whole conversation here, but this does seem like an inaccurate summary of the process that occurred. The actual thing that happened is that Ben heard some specific accusations about Nonlinear which seemed very concerning, so he investigated those accusations. In the process of investigating those accusations he did not aim to make a full assessment of Nonlinear as an organization, but chose the limited scope of figuring out whether the accusations were accurate, and whether they were part of a larger pattern. This importantly is still a biased evidence-gathering process, because he did not also seek to find other good things that Nonlinear has done that might outweigh the harm indicated by these accusations. This seems like a totally normal thing to do. You hear some accusations, so you figure out how much truth there is to them, you don’t also do a search process for all the good things the organization might have done.
I think you are over-interpreting a single paragraph at the top of the post that was trying to help people realize that they were receiving biased evidence, which I think was good and wish was included in other posts. That paragraph was not aiming to give a summary of the whole process, it was just trying to clearly acknowledge a bias that is present in investigations like this.
If you want I am happy to get on a call or have a DM conversation, I could give you some pointers about the actual process that occurred. Or you could talk to Ben about it after more of the object-level response was written. I do think you are pretty mistaken about the actual thing that happened here.
I edited the original to “his collaborator.” My apologies for the imprecision; I’ll be more careful about attribution.
Ben refused to update his post at the time in dispute—the moment when the lawsuit threat was sent. That he was willing to update it after publishing false information, and remains willing to update it, is not material to that point. Spencer provided important context which, when seen in full, dramatically changed public understanding of one allegation in the final article. You and Ben refused to delay publication to update that allegation before the article went live. When considering whether a lawsuit threat was reasonable and whether the publication of that allegation as written was actionably defamatory, that moment of publication is the relevant one. Since I am responding to Gwern’s criticism of my defense of that moment, I figured the context for that was clear.
As for whether my summary of the process is fair, I recognize we disagree here but stand by it and would say the same whether or not he included that disclaimer. The final article and the process that led to it was not totally normal by any stretch, an argument I present extensively in my post and throughout our conversations here. It is not normal to spend six months and hundreds of hours investigating negative information about people in your community, then publicizing it with a condemnation of those people to your whole community. I would definitely be keen to hear more about the actual process via DM, though, and could certainly see it changing my understanding of that process in important ways.
Ben refused to update his post at the time in dispute—the moment when the lawsuit threat was sent. That he was willing to update it after publishing false information, and remains willing to update it, is not material to that point.
I think “refusing update” in this context would usually be understood to be about updating the published post for some ongoing period of time, at least that’s how I understood it. But seems fine, I now understand the point you are trying to make.
(Also, just to clarify for other readers, the lawsuit threat and the evidence Spencer sent over were separate events with two different groups of people who I think weren’t aware of the messages the other group was sending. Indeed Spencer requested secrecy about him talking to Ben at all about this).
It is hard to gauge, for obvious reasons, but the situation is asymmetric: even if Spartz-Nonlinear and Lightcone have similar annual budgets or assets or however you want to try to equate them, they are not the same. Lightcone is under constraints, like fulltime employees for maintaining & running these websites and renovating Rose Garden (which I recall them soliciting donations for because their budget wasn’t going to cover it),* whereas Spartz-Nonlinear seems like it could halt its minimal activities/expenses if necessary without anything crashing to the ground, and devote his full cashflow to a lawsuit (with the benefit of contingency financing, as the plaintiff, paid out of damages). In addition, even if they are equal… how does one know that? Or willingness to be vindictive?
* As finance types know, cash(flow) is king. Since we’re on the topic of libel lawsuits, this reminds me of the Oberlin bakery lawsuit, one of the rare bright spots where libel lawsuits seem to have done what they were supposed to, eventually—where Oberlin tried to destroy a private bakery maliciously by organized protests & repeated statements they knew were false, to score political points about ‘fighting racism’. As I recall, the financial penalties, years later after the trial, were painful for Oberlin, despite it being on paper extremely wealthy, because it had so many restrictions by donors on assets and so many fixed expenses, that when its insurer bailed on covering the liability, it had a liquidity problem. (I think they had to… take out a loan to actually pay it off? I wonder what happened with that.)
gwern—The situation is indeed quite asymmetric, insofar as some people at Lightcone seem to have launched a poorly-researched slander attack on another EA organization, Nonlinear, which has been suffering serious reputational harm as a result. Whereas Nonlinear did not attack Lightcone or its people, except insofar as necessary to defend themselves.
Treating Nonlinear as a disposable organization, and treating its leaders as having disposable careers, seems ethically very bad.
Strong downvote solely for the highly mendacious description of lawsuits, notably omitted from the introductory allegory. WTF. You know better. You investigate this sort of drama all the time, you know exactly how legal threats are egregiously abused by the wealthy to shut down criticism! You knew this before #Metoo and case studies like Harvey Weinstein, you knew it after, and you know it now even while you are writing this fantasy description of how wonderful lawsuits are and how surely only noble and good people ever sue over libel:
No, they are not. They are not anything like that.
TracingWoodgrains, you know damn right well that the point of a lawsuit threat has nothing to do with whether you think you are right, and that you can count on one hand the sort of libel lawsuit which follows this beautiful fantasy. They are not, in any way, a ‘bet that the other part is so wrong’. They are fundamentally different, because they are a bullet: they are solely a threat to destroy someone financially by running up costs. A defamation lawsuit costs tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, before ever going to trial, to defend simply as an ordinary matter of fact—particularly in US jurisdiction where there is no loser-pays rule so the defendant is out all legal costs permanently. They are cynically used to burn money based on the fact that rich people have a lot more money than poor people, and money has log utility, so when they burn $10k+ to burn your $10k+, they come out way ahead in punishing you, and the goal is not even to win the lawsuit, it’s to force you to a settlement when you run out of money. Which you will before they do, and in the case of Spartz suing Lightcone, it’s not like Lightcone has a ton of idle cash they can burn on a defense of their claims (which they would generally win, BTW).
And, if you really believe lawsuits are so awesome and wonderful, why aren’t you criticizing Spartz for not following through on the threat?
Indeed. And a lawsuit is a way to destroy someone, not counter-argue them. (And what goes on inside a court has only a questionable relationship to counterargument to begin with, which is why a decent chunk of rationality is about explaining why legal norms are so inappropriate for rational thinking.)
It is being had right here!
People absolutely should be shunned, demonized, and criticised for doing many things they have legal rights to do, like engaging in lawfare to attack critics instead of, say, writing rebuttal posts and criticisms. There are countless horrible bad things which are legal to do but not moral, and usually, we expect humans older than 5 years old to have begun to appreciate this very important fact about the world.
The general animus against defamation lawsuits is one aspect I found particularly puzzling within this saga. And here I confess my biases in that I am a lawyer, but also a free speech maximalist who used to work at the ACLU (back when they were cool) and an emphatic supporter of anti-SLAPP statutes.
I suspect that defamation lawsuits have a poor reputation in part because of a selection bias. There are significantly more threats to sue than actual suits in our universe, and the threats that will shine brightest on the public’s memory will necessarily be the most outlandish and least substantiated. Threats are further proliferated because they’re very cheaply deployed (anyone with a bar card can type out a cease & desist letter on their phone on the toilet and still have time to flush) and — crucially — authentically terrifying regardless of the underlying merits or lack thereof. As you point out, there is no question that lawfare is often levied as a war of financial attrition.
The closest corollary would be the bevy of tort abuse stories. Before it was widely and thoroughly vindicated, the McDonald’s hot coffee story served as the lodestar condemnation that the American tort system was fucked beyond repair. But again, we’re going to deal with a selection bias problem here. Unless you’re trawling through every civil court docket in the country, the only time any layperson would hear about a personal injury story is when it’s blatantly ridiculous. The same issue exists with defamation lawsuits.
So just because defamation lawsuits are used as a tool of abuse, does not mean that every defamation claim is baseless. I would hope that this statement is self-evident. Instead of picturing a scorned celebrity siccing their horde of rabid lawyers against any whiff of criticism, I’d want you to consider that sometimes random nobodies are accused of quadruple homicide by TikTok psychics, or accused of election fraud by the former mayor of New York City. I’d hope that you can appreciate how terrifying it can be to be the subject of a malicious smear campaign, how daunting the prospect of initiating a defamation suit can be, and how uncertain any potential vindication might be.
I have no idea how many defamation lawsuits are initiated, but there are more than 40 million lawsuits filed every year in the US. Ideally you’d have some way to discern which grievances are valid and which ones aren’t besides just declaring all as inherently suspicious.
I am not a lawyer. If I use as examples only what people I have met in person have told me (i.e. not anything I have read online, because yes that is a sample selected for being outrageous), I know three people who were targets of defamation lawsuits, and zero people who used one. I know more people who were, in my opinion quite realistically threatened by a possibility of such lawsuit, and as a result decided to be quiet about some bad activities that definitely should have been discussed publicly. I am not even counting myself in that set, and I know about the same activities that I do not discuss, no one even needed to threaten me directly, it is enough to know that other people in analogical situation were threatened for me to connect the dots. I know zero people who considered or threatened using a defamation lawsuit.
Each of us can have an unrepresentative sample, given our different professions and people we hang out with. So I am not saying that my experience is more representative than yours. Just adding a different data point.
Based on my experience, using this kind of threat is an evidence of being a villain, because I have only seen obvious villains use this weapon, either as a threat or as actual lawsuit. Now I realize my experience may not be typical, but… it still seems more likely than the opposite.
On reflection, this is probably less about good and evil, and more about rich and poor. Rich people use legal attacks; rich people successfully deflect legal attacks. Poor (and average) people don’t use them, and can’t deflect them. I simply do not hang out with sufficiently rich people.
I’m sure all that is quite harmful, and I smiled to see the verdict against Giuliuani. I also think the criticisms of Nonlinear are clearly different from a Tiktok psychic accusing you of quadruple homicide, or Giuliani’s behavior in pushing election fraud repeatedly on the flimsiest of fraudulent evidence even after being corrected and during the trial itself (similar to Jones doubling down again and again on his ‘crisis actor’ narrative) and casually stoking death-threats against innocent people who must flee into hiding because of what Giuliani has said. (Is Nonlinear in hiding from people sending them death threats and their home address online? Maybe I missed that in all the comments?) So I thank you for the point you inadvertently make here in trying to defend libel lawsuits.
I’m not sure what point you think I made here. I have a vague idea of how many lawsuits are filed in general, an extremely vague theory about what portion are defamation suits, and a hopelessly speculative guess of how many of those are frivolous. You’re expressing a significantly higher level of epistemic certainty about that last question, and I’m questioning what evidence it’s based on. You haven’t offered any basis except assertions and anecdotal citations to notable examples.
This is a combative comment which fails to back up its claims.
He did not say this. This is not reasonable for you to write.
This is not true. This is obviously not true. A successful and important libel case (against Giuliani) was literally headline news this week. You can exceed five such cases just looking at similar cases: Dominion v Fox; Smartmatic v Fox; Coomer v Newsmax; Khalil v Fox; Andrews v D’Souza; and Weisenbach v Project Veritas. This is extremely unreasonable for you to say.
Nonlinear certainly doesn’t have more money than the EA community. Nonlinear plausibly (?) doesn’t have more money than Lighthouse; at a minimum, it’s not a significant difference.
<argument needed>
It’s very unclear to me whether Lighthouse would win; your confidence here seems unreasonable; but more importantly, “no, that’s not true” is just not a useful thing to say here. (You’re responding to a post that did have many good citations of cases; seems like most people think it’s plausible they’d lose.)
In the most blandly literal sense possible, lawsuits are arguments.
You have again not given any argument for this.
The rules under which lawsuits proceed are deliberately setup in an attempt to get at the truth. Specific requirements- from the prohibition on hearsay; to the requirement of a neutral and unbiased jury; to the requirement that both sides be able to examine and respond to evidence and arguments- are both truthseeking and not generally followed outside of the court system.
“My ingroup’s internet discussions are so great that they’re not only better than the outside society’s way of determining contested questions, they invalidate their use” is a dangerously culty belief. I think it is particularly bad in this context, since the initial post had specific failures that the legal system would have handled correctly. (eg not giving Nonlinear time to respond; it’s possible that I’ll feel like the eventual outcome here is reasonable, IDK, but the initial post had clear issues.) But at a minimum, if you’re saying that people be “shunned, demonized, and criticised” (!), you really ought to say specifically why/how the courts would be unreliable in this case.
Those were in fact some of the cases I had in mind, yes, thank you—I read the news too. And what one learns from reading about them is how those are exceptional cases, newsworthy precisely because they reached any verdict rather than settling, driven by external politics and often third-party funding, and highly unusual until recently post-2016/Trump. It is certainly the case that sometimes villains like Alex Jones get smacked down properly by libel lawsuits; but note how wildly incomparable these cases are to the blog post that Spartz is threatening to sue over. Look, for example, at Jones’s malicious behavior even during the trial, or to take the most recent case, Giuliani, his repeated affirmation of the libelous and blatantly false claims. Look at the kinds of claims being punished in these lawsuits, like claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was completely fake and the victims’ relatives are fabricating their entire existence. (You’re going to analogize this to Pace saying ‘Nonlinear may not have treated some employees very well’? Really?) Look at how many of the plaintiffs are private citizens, who are in no way public figures. That this rash of victories for the good guys involves lawsuits does not redeem the general abuse of lawsuits.
None of which Ben Pace has done, and which is part of why I say he would have excellent odds: it’s unclear what damage has been done to Nonlinear, he had good grounds for his claims, has not said anything which would rise to the level of ‘actual malice’ against a public figure like Spartz, and was “well-intentioned”.
This is a double bait and switch: Nonlinear is just Spartz who can spend his money on whatever he likes, while the ‘EA community’ is not the one being specifically threatened, and even comparing Nonlinear and Lightcone is misleading, because Lightcone has many other ongoing responsibilities (such as spending money to maintain the website this is being written on or renovate buildings) and it would presumably be Pace personally being sued as well.
Wow. In any case, no, not even in the ‘literal sense’ is a lawsuit an ‘argument’, as lawsuits are speech-acts and binding actions. Lawsuits are acts of power and coercion; they are not arguments, even if arguments may be used in parts; saying that they ‘literally are arguments’ is like saying that lawsuits ‘literally are pieces of paper’. And if you simply exchange views or state views or refuse to take actions ordered by the judge (I encourage you to look up a dictionary definition of ‘argument’ if you really want to waste time taking this tack) that would constitute various kinds of fraud or perjury or contempt of court or violations of gag orders or disclosure of confidential information.
This is core to many of the Sequences in explaining things like why ‘burden of proof’ or ‘innocent until proven guilty’ are not how one should reason, and, for example, why adversarial norms of reasoning like simply denying claims and not substituting steelmen may be useful in law but not in LessWrong.
No, they are not. Truth is only one of many concerns of lawsuits, under all prevailing legal philosophies, whether legal realism or law & economics; major concerns include economic efficiency, second-order incentives, predictability of rulings and precedent, and so on. Lawsuits, and criminal cases, are overturned routinely on grounds that have nothing to do with ‘getting at the truth’ and parties in lawsuits often stipulate to facts that no one believes for reasons of pragmatism. (And I’m leaving out historical examples like compurgation.) You do not use lawsuits to try to decide whether the sun goes around the earth, because lawsuits are not good ways to get at truths.
That does sound a bit culty but good thing I never said that. I would be just as angry about it if Spartz had instead threatened to sue a subreddit moderator on a subreddit I used, or someone who sent a spicy email to a mailing list, or tweeted about Spartz. This is an civil-society-wide norm, not a LW-only thing: arguments get arguments, not lawsuits. And when someone publishes some stuff about you that you don’t like, and you choose to break that norm by lawsuits...
That’s all entirely wrong. A prohibition on hearsay is not ‘truthseeking’, obviously (much of history is based on things which would be thrown out as hearsay) but is related to the pragmatics. Juries are not required in lawsuits and parties often prefer a bench trial because they believe juries will be too ignorant or easily swayed rather than ‘truthseeking’ (and how do you explain how different systems make wildly different uses of bench trials if courts are so truthseeking? is truth found in lawsuits by jury trials in the USA but then truth works differently in the UK with almost all bench lawsuits?). Parties only examine and respond to a limited range of evidence and arguments, chosen for incentive reasons. And ‘not generally followed outside the court system’ is an argument against your claims: as if courts were the only place that anyone cared about truth? How does, say, science work since they don’t do… any of that?
As I already said, quite clearly, I thought, the point is not what the jury or judge would rule; I think were Pace sued and it was taken that far, he would win, for the obvious reasons related to his criticisms being entirely reasonable, often true (an absolute defense), and not made with actual malice, against a public figure, where the financial harms are minuscule at best—which make it quite hard to lose a libel lawsuit on its merits. But that’s largely irrelevant because it would probably never even get to the point of a jury or judge verdict. The point of lawfare is to harass and impoverish and censor, which is why Spartz dropped the threat when it didn’t look like it would work.
BTW, you think if lawsuits are so great for finding the truth, why isn’t Nonlinear suing now? If you feel that it wouldn’t work to sue now, you really ought to say specifically why/how the courts would be unreliable in this case.
(1) This is a response to you writing “you can count on one hand the sort of libel lawsuit which follows this beautiful fantasy”. Sarcastically stating “I read the news too” doesn’t help you- how obvious these are just makes it worse! You now seem to have entirely abandoned that standard without changing your mind. I can very easily start listing more libel cases that match the new distinctions you’re drawing, to the extent that they are clear enough; is there any point to me doing so? What is the evidence that would convince you that you’re wrong?
(2) One reason I’m confident that you don’t care about the distinctions you’re drawing is that the cases I cited already meet some of the standards you’ve now proposed, and you didn’t care enough to check. In particular, you wrote that “those are exceptional cases, newsworthy precisely because they reached any verdict rather than settling”. This is false, and you provided no justification or evidence for it. I cited six cases; none of them have reached verdicts. Dominion v. Fox, Khalil v. Fox, and Coomer v. Newsmax all did settle; Smartmatic v. Fox and Andrews v. D’Souza are still outstanding and so hasn’t reached a verdict. Weisenbach v. Project Veritas doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2022, but there has been no verdict that I can find. (Given that I’ve already presented you with cases satisfying one of the distinctions you drew above, are you now convinced that you were wrong?)
***
Do you believe that unclear damages mean that you can’t win a lawsuit? If so, that’s untrue; damages are often also in dispute. (Did you mean to claim that there was zero damage done? That is different from what you wrote, and is false.)
The legal term relevant here is “negligence”; “good grounds” is not the relevant legal terminology. He was negligent in publishing without giving Nonlinear time to reply or updating based on Spencer Greenberg’s evidence; in particular, Habryka stated that they had received evidence that claims in the post were false before they published. [ETA: Habrya comments on this here.] Why do you believe that this wasn’t negligent, if that’s what you meant by writing “had good grounds for his claims”? Or did you mean something else?
You haven’t explained why you think that Spartz is a public figure; again, I find your lack of clear reasoning frustrating to deal with. In this specific case, searching for comments on ‘public figure’ by you in an attempt to figure out what you were thinking, I found a comment by you which did explain your reasoning:
Even in that comment, you never actually stated what you believe the standard for being a public figure is, or gave any legal citations to support that standard.[1] However, there’s at least enough detail to say that your claim is wrong; it’s absolutely not true that having a magazine profile is the level of fame required to make you a public figure. Waldbaum v. Fairchild Publications describes the standard for general public figures[2] as follows:
To give a concrete example, musician Dr. Luke owns two publishing companies, has been nominated for numerous Grammys, and has had plenty of magazine articles written about him, including one specifically in the New Yorker; courts have also repeatedly held that he isn’t a general public figure.
***
My comment was not misleading. I was explicitly responding to a quote, which I directly quoted in my comment right above what you responded to, where you stated that “[lawsuits] are cynically used to burn money based on the fact that rich people have a lot more money than poor people”. This is about “rich” vs. “poor”. The rest of the quote is “money has log utility, so when they burn $10k+ to burn your $10k+, they come out way ahead in punishing you, and the goal is not even to win the lawsuit, it’s to force you to a settlement when you run out of money. Which you will before they do, and in the case of Spartz suing Lightcone, it’s not like Lightcone has a ton of idle cash they can burn on a defense of their claims”.[3]
Some libel threats fall under your analysis; others do not. I have already given many examples of lawsuits that do not- Fox News, for example, is not likely to simply run out of money, nor is it poorer than its various legal opponents. Your analysis of this specific case is wrong; Habryka has explicitly stated that Lightcone has enough money to defend a libel suit. He also said that Lightcone would probably be able to fundraise from the EA community for a defense.
***
I found this extremely frustrating to reply to. I personally regard most of the concrete claims you made in the original comment as being not just wrong, but both obviously wrong and unsupported. You seem to have abandoned actually defending them, and indeed even noted how obvious my counterarguments were- “yes, thank you—I read the news too”. (You didn’t change your mind in response, though!)
Judging by the timestamps, you wrote your long response very quickly. It’s taken me much, much longer to write this reply, and I’m only a small fraction through replying so far. (I’ll reply to the rest later, I guess, ugh ugh ugh.) There’s a very obvious reason why you were so much faster: you didn’t bother to defend your specific previous claims or to check if the new stuff you tossed out was actually right. It would have taken you ~10 seconds to verify if any of the lawsuits named reached a verdict, instead of wrongly making up that they all had; it’s taken me much longer to check all of them and write up a reply. It would have taken you ~5 minutes[4] to find the legal definition of public figure, instead of making up your own. It’s taken me far longer to find a different comment that actually explained what you were talking about, and to then lookup and write a response myself, including even finding a specific person who was both the subject of a New Yorker article and had been determined to not be a public figure. This is a gish gallop.
The linked comment is in response to a comment by an attorney who correctly stated the standard for being a public figure and correctly stated that Spartz isn’t a public figure… which you ignored when you made up your own uncited standard for what a public figure is. (It’s also a pretty devastating indictment of LW that the attorney commenting with a correct definition and application of “public figure” received considerably less karma/agreement than you making up your own incorrect standard, which gave a more popular answer.)
There’s also the category of “limited purpose public figure”. Spartz also probably (but not definitely) isn’t one; all of the citations you gave- and probably almost all of his publicity, judging by his Wikipedia page- don’t relate to Nonlinear or AI broadly, or their treatment of interns specifically.
The new argument that you’ve made here might or might not be true; you’ve tossed it out without sufficient justification. Nonlinear would also like to spend money on other things, and I don’t know how to compare their resources, preferences, and alternative expenditures vs. Lightcone; you haven’t even tried. (Note that your argument requires a significant difference.)
Arguably, it would have taken you zero minutes; the comment I linked was a response to an attorney who told you the correct answer.
I haven’t read this whole comment, though expect I will. Just making a quick clarification:
I don’t think that’s an accurate summary of the linked comment (though it’s also not like totally unrelated). Here it is in full:
I agree that this comment confirms that Spencer sent us evidence that related to some claims in the post. It does not speak on my epistemic state with regards to the relevance of that evidence.
(To take an object-level stance on the issue, though I was more responding to the fact that I expect people will interpret that sentence as me saying something I am not saying, I do think that Spencer’s messages were evidence, though really not very much evidence, and I would object to my epistemic state being summarized in this context as being interpreted as Spencer’s screenshots falsifying anything about Ben’s original post, though I agree that they are bayesian evidence against the hypothesis. I do think for the argument at hand to have force it needs to meet a higher standard than “some bayesian evidence”, and I don’t currently think it meets that threshold by my own lights)
I don’t think that’s the civil-society-wide norm? Using the threat of defamation lawsuits to keep people from saying true things, especially when the person threatening is richer or otherwise more powerful, that I agree there’s a norm against. But using the threat to keep someone from doing something they’re already not supposed to be doing [1], that I don’t see a norm against? This looks to me like a threat to bring in the legal system to keep the dispute within bounds.
(I was initially really negative on NL for threatening a suit, but I’ve reversed on this after coming to understand the situation better.)
[1] In this case, saying damaging things some of which they expect will be shown to be false. He published after saying to NL that “I do expect you’ll be able to show a bunch of the things you said.” And should have expected to be publishing some false claims just based on how many claims there were and how little time he allocated to checking the final claims with NL.
I don’t think this means very much without specifying which things, and how relevant to the overall question they are. I would say this both in worlds where I expect something substantial or something minor to be inaccurate. I also don’t expect Ben would have said something different if he had waited longer for adversarial fact-checking. Reaching an epistemic status of “I don’t expect you’ll be able to show any of the things you said” seems extremely hard and unlikely.
I think it’s reasonable to criticize not waiting longer. But I object to using a sentence like this as really any evidence about the degree to which that was a mistake, or about the degree to which there are material errors in the post. Of course in any post like this, in a situation as adversarial like this, will there be some things that the post gets wrong. That’s true in any domain of this complexity. I think admitting to potential error helps in situations like this and interpreting things as adversarially as this undermines people’s ability to be honest and open to new evidence in situations like this.
I included Ben’s quote because it seems relevant, but I think I’d be saying pretty much the same thing without it (or if it turned out NL used Ben’s quote out of context). The “should have expected to be publishing some false claims just based on how many claims there were and how little time he allocated to checking the final claims with NL” is sufficient.
Place your bets!
Of course this market is “Conditioning on Nonlinear bringing a lawsuit, how likely are they to win?” which is a different question.
I would were the judge not betting in the market. You really should be more upfront about that.
Manifold encourages market creators to participate in their own markets. Are you concerned that I will disregard the resolution criteria and steal the mana? Note that if Manifold thought judges should not bet in their own markets they could easily prohibit it or put a notification on markets where the creator was placing bets to warn prospective participants.
(I’ve updated the resolution criteria a few times to make it more specific since creating the market, each time in ways that make it less likely to resolve YES, and I’m long YES)
I knew they did not prohibit it, but I am surprised they are actively encouraging it. In any real-money market, doing anything analogous would almost certainly be grossly illegal. I have significant restrictions on my real-life trading, and I just work at a company that sells information about the market, but doesn’t actually run it. I’ve found the practice of people betting in their own markets on manifold to predictably result in unfair resolutions, and so I do judge people who do it, and I judge more harshly if they don’t actively disclose the fact. I came to manifold on the expectation that it was trying to be like a real-money prediction market, and just couldn’t because of laws in the US. As I see them diverging more and more from the standards of real markets, I become more and more disappointed. But you do make a fair point that perhaps I should judge Manifold more than the market makers if they are actively encouraging such bad behavior.
Manifold also explicitly encourages insider trading; I think they’re just not trying to emulate real-money markets.
You can also rate how someone resolved their market afterwards, which I assume does something
I did not know this. How long has this been around?
Still strikes me as a really bad idea to ignore the norms that actual financial markets have developed over centuries of experience, but I am curious if this will actually solve the problem of judges biased by having a position in their own markets.
I added the reviews feature on July 12.
We’ve been thinking about letting market creators delegate a judge that is not themselves. People sometimes do this informally.
Also Manifold team members (and mods we delegate) have the power to overturn resolutions—though iirc we only do this in extreme cases.
Since the beginning.
I’m not sure, I haven’t been using Manifold for very long, sorry!
I agree that some people use them that way. I disagree that is a fair descriptor of every lawsuit threat, and think in this case the parties had approximately equal power and influence, and that six months of building a case against Nonlinear is every bit as threatening as a lawsuit. Since the overwhelming community consensus was that Ben’s six months collecting negative information about someone with 60 hours to respond was reasonable and Nonlinear’s threat of a lawsuit if not given another week to respond was unreasonable, I felt, and feel, that the community needs to sharply update against the reasonableness of collecting and presenting only negative information and somewhat more weakly update against lawsuit threats being de facto proof of bad faith and unfair dealing.
It is being had here after Nonlinear’s reputation was damaged in what reads to me as a fundamentally unfair way, and being had in the way it is only because word happened to make it to me from a community I am a neighbor to but not a part of and I happened to be obsessive enough to respond. The court of public opinion is fickle and unreliable, relying on oratory skills and the chance of who happens to show up at least as much as anything else.
EDIT:
Why create a caricature of me? I don’t believe lawsuits are awesome and wonderful. I think they are a last resort that no parties should desire and that every effort to reach an out-of-court settlement should be found even if someone raises the spectre of a lawsuit. Nobody is ever obligated to pursue one, but there are settings in which it is defensible. In this case, I am at least somewhat optimistic that the EA community as a whole will find a way to undo the bulk of the material harm caused by the original post through its own methods.
To clarify, I think that if EA has a strong principle against suing the New York Times, one of the most powerful institutions on the planet, for libel if the Times makes materially false claims with actual malice that do real reputational damage, that principle is not praiseworthy. I made the nod to that principle in the opening allegory with an eyebrow raised. Every example you give of the problem of libel suits is of their use by the strong against the weak, but every part of the legal system is bad if abused by the strong to crush the weak. That doesn’t mean the system as a whole has no legitimate role.
The passive background threat of libel suits against powerful journalistic outlets is a significant part of the process that causes journalists to stick with technically correct claims. It is good that the New York Times can be held liable if it causes damage to someone by lying about them, and good that journalists have to keep that possibility in mind.
I want to be clear that, as a matter of policy and out of an excess of caution given my career path, I do not and will not make prognostications on the likelihood of success of any given lawsuit.
Gawker engaged in a lot of things that seemed libelous against a lot of people but for a long time, no successful libel suit was run against them.
It took the 8-figure lawsuit from Peter Thiel to move against Gawker. If it would take a similar amount of money for a successful suit with merit against the New York Times, that’s a lot of money that competes for other EA priorities. It makes sense that it’s too expensive and EA funders would see more bang for their buck elsewhere.
If financial concerns are the key mover, sure (although I don’t think it takes an 8-figure lawsuit to sue Gawker, just to ruin them). Gwern’s comment seemed to be outlining much more of an ethical principle: thou shalt not threaten defamation lawsuits even when you have suffered actual damages from actual defamation.
Lawsuits are an asymmetric weapon. Rich people can easily afford them (even if they know they would lose). If their use is unchecked, it would mean that no one would dare to criticize rich people (except for other rich people, but those may not care about specific wrongs that do not concern them).
There is always a chance to lose a lawsuit even if you were right; for example, you may fail to prove it. You would probably also lose a lawsuit if, let’s say, 80% of your accusations are right, but the remaining 20% are wrong. (In which case, the community would still benefit from exposing the actor.) And even if you win the lawsuit… “the process is the punishment”, it cost you lots of money and time.
I think that an absolute ban on lawsuits would probably be excessive, but given the asymmetry of power and the devastating impact, what rule would you propose to make the situation balanced?
*
Yes, there is also an opposite concern… people writing shit online can damage someone’s reputation and business. If those people are more popular on LW, or if they do not have a business that could be damaged in turn, this is also an asymmetric weapon.
I guess the only thing I can say here is that if someone writes an article on LW about you, you can also respond by writing an article on LW; either immediately, or later, or both. Critics are not censored here, you are not required to spend money to defend yourself, the time spent can be reduced to… quoting a list of accusations, adding “this is false” under each of them, and at the end saying “hey, I can prove all of this to be false, but it will take me some time and work… in the meanwhile, shouldn’t the burden of the proof be on the accuser?”, or something like that.
It seems to me that Nonlinear handled this situation sub-optimally precisely because they were already considering the possibility of legal escalation. Which means they also wanted their response to be 100% bulletproof. Which is why it took so much time for them to prepare it. If you read their response as it is now, you could probably extract their main arguments into five or seven bullet points… and those could have been posted immediately as a comment under the original article, with “the proofs will be provided soon, it takes some time to collect the screenshots and ask involved third parties for consent”. Of course, in situations of stress people often do things they later with they did differently. But the threat of lawsuits just further escalated the situation.
(Not sure if my memory serves me well, but I think the original objections were mostly about whether vegan food was or wasn’t available. If instead I saw a list saying “actually, the salaries were much higher, approximately X but please wait until we find the exact numbers… they was a boyfriend invited to spend a few weeks with us, so definitely no social isolation… and the ‘illegal drugs’ was actually Adderall” etc., that would have changed my mind more effectively. When instead I saw a threat of lawsuit and nitpicking about vegan food, I assumed that the rest of the accusations was mostly true.)
I agree NL chose a bad strategy, but I also think you mischaracterize it? Instead of making a long list of claims they were asserting were false (without documentation) they picked one relatively serious accusation and responded to it in detail with screenshots.
I supposed one’s perspective depends on how you see the relative seriousness of accusations. From my perspective, to be isolated from friends and family is a huge red flag, but not being given vegan food is… an asshole move, certainly, but… as I am not a vegan myself, I see it as nothing too serious, also because it was only one day.
It’s like, if someone accused me of “arson, murder, and jaywalking”, and I focused my entire defense on why what I did does not qualify as jaywalking… even if I made my case successfully, it would probably seem quite weird. (But if instead I said that the supposedly murdered person is actually alive, just give me some time to call them...)
I think the accusation around food was much more serious than Jaywalking. Ben’s post had:
I understood this to be claiming, some explicitly and some implicitly, that:
Alice was dependent on NL for food because she had covid.
NL would not provide her with food compatible with her dietary restrictions.
After two days she had eaten whatever small amount food was available that met her dietary restrictions, NL was still not providing her with acceptable food, so she decided to compromise her ethics in the name of not starving.
Now, the full picture ended up being pretty different from this (and also very messy and still disputed) but I don’t think it’s surprising that as stated many people took this as a serious accusation, and I don’t think it was trivial or otherwise a bad choice for NL to rebut.
(Repeating, though, that I don’t think chosing to spend their time rebutting a single claim in detail was a good strategy, and instead would have rather seen them say which claims they objected to up front. And I’m frustrated with myself that I didn’t suggest this at the time.)
I also think this accusation was relatively serious to me.
I do not think it was among the very most serious accusations in the post, but I think it was a valid one to reply to. I also found the response that Kat wrote pretty compelling, and think it meaningfully affected my interpretation of the situation (I still assign some probability that Ben or Alice will have some good explanation of the situation that flips my understanding of the facts around, which has happened a few times in this whole situation, but I think that relies on trust in those parties that I don’t think should be shared by others on this forum, and I think given the evidence provided, I think it’s very reasonable for an observer to consider that accusation confidently false and relatively serious)
Many people did push for this at the time:
And:
Agreed! What I was trying to say is that I additionally feel badly for not having called for this.
I had thought people did push them for this?
We said this in our post about the vegan food:
“We chose this example not because it’s the most important (although it certainly paints us in a very negative and misleading light) but simply because it was the fastest claim to explain where we had extremely clear evidence without having to add a lot of context, explanation, find more evidence, etc.
We have job contracts, interview recordings, receipts, chat histories, and more, which we are working full-time on preparing.
This claim was a few sentences in Ben’s article but took us hours to refute because we had to track down all of the conversations, make them readable, add context, anonymize people, check our facts, and write up an explanation that was rigorous and clear. Ben’s article is over 10,000 words and we’re working as fast as we can to respond to every point he made.
Again, we are not asking for the community to believe us unconditionally. We want to show everybody all of the evidence and also take responsibility for the mistakes we made.”
As for the “isolated” claim, we showed that this did not happen. Alice lived/worked apart from us for 50% of the time. Chloe’s boyfriend was invited to travel with us 40% of the time. We encouraged them to have regular calls with friends and family when they weren’t visiting. We have the invite policy where it says they’re encouraged to invite friends and family (and they followed up on this, like with Chloe’s boyfriend).
I have never had any interaction with lawsuits of any kind, including those relating to libel etc.
However, a social dynamic I have observed several times in my life is that Person A and Person B have some kind of conflict. Person A is utterly convinced of the rightness (and righteousness) of their position.
Someone (either B or a third party, C) suggests that it may be prudent to involve the police or the teachers/parents (if these people are chidden) or other authorities. Person A, on mention of the police/teachers/whoever suddenly looses that utter confidence they had in the obvious morality of their position, and runs a mile. Curiously person A in this case will often genuinely feel that the mention of involving authority was an attack or an escalation (Although I think they are always wrong in that estimation, and that the main effect is to de-escalate). I have, on none of these occasions, actually seen the police/teachers/whoever actually be contacted. I believe there exists a certain frame of mind a human can get into, where they are in a position of relative power, and believe they have a great moral authority behind them. And that simply being reminded that they may potentially have to persuade a higher authority of this rightness is enough to break the spell.
So, reminding people that they may need to answer to a higher authority for their actions is a generically useful strategy against a wide range of attacks, one that I imagine people fall back on instinctively all the time. In this case that means mentioning lawyers. Holding “they mentioned lawyers” against the Nonlinear people seems insane. Mentioning authority is a prudent way of defusing or deescalating many social situations. Even if you think it was the wrong move in this exact case I think you shouldn’t judge someone (who is probably in a bit of a flap given the accusations involved) too harshly for making the move that is usually right.
To be clear, it’s not that they “mentioned lawyers”, it’s that they said:
Which has a bit of a different feel to it than “mentioning lawyers”. (I think you otherwise make a decent point, though one I think that doesn’t apply very well to this situation)
Since the /r/slatestarcodex comment section is unlikely to get the long-term traffic this mirror is, I want to copy my reply there over here as well.
I’m honestly really frustrated by your response to this post. The incident I describe is not trivial and it is not tangential to the purposes of the rationalist community. It directly damages the community’s credibility towards its core goals in a major way. You are about as trusted as a public figure gets among the rationalists, and when you see this whole thing, you vote it down and rebuke me because I don’t hate libel lawsuits as much as I hate libel.
Rationalists spend a lot of time criticizing poor journalistic practices from outside the community. It should raise massive alarms that someone can spend six months digging up dirt on another community member, provide scant time to reply and flat-out refuse to look at exculpatory evidence, and be praised by the great majority of the community who noticed while those who pointed out the issues with what was going on were ignored.
If a prominent person in your community spends six months working to gather material to destroy your reputation, then flat-out refuses to look at your exculpatory evidence or to update his post in response to exculpatory evidence from another trusted community member—evidence
hehis collaborator now admits overturns an allegation in the article—there is nothing at all disproportionate or inappropriate about a desperate lawsuit threat—not a threat if the post goes live, but a threat if they won’t even look at hard evidence against their claims—minutes before the reputation-destroying post goes live. That’s not the strong crushing the weak whistleblower, that’s a desperate response to reputational kamikaze.It is not an issue with my post that I accurately defend that libel lawsuit threat as a sane response to an insane situation. It is an issue with the rationalist community as a whole that they nodded along to that insane situation, and an issue with you that your major takeaway from my post is that I’m wrong about lawsuits.
A six-month campaign to gather negative info about someone is not a truth-seeking process, it is not a rational process, and it is not a process to which the community should respond by politely arguing about whether lawsuits could possibly be justified as a response. It is a repudiation of the principles the rationalist community espouses and demands an equally vehement response, a response that nobody within the community gave until I stumbled over the post by happenstance three months later.
You are wrong. Your takeaway from my article is wrong. What happened during that investigation was wrong, and sufficiently wrong that I see no cause to reply by coming out swinging about the horrors of the legal system. You should be extinguishing the fire in your own community’s house, and the people cheering you on for responding to someone trying to put that fire out with a rebuke are helping you burn down your own community’s credibility. You had no obligation to respond to the situation; having responded, though, you take on a duty to it which you are neglecting by responding in this way given your stature within this community and the gravity of the original error.
I really don’t want to get into a whole conversation here, just a quick comment so that people don’t make wrong updates:
I don’t think Ben has said anything that indicates that he believes evidence provided “overturns an allegation in the article”. I have, but I didn’t write the article. I have asked you a few times to please not attribute things that I said to Ben or generalize them confidently to statements about the whole process here. Ben knows much more about the details here than I do, and I would really appreciate if you distinguish between me and him here. It’s plausible to me that Ben also believes this, but I don’t think your summary here is accurate.
I don’t think Ben has refused to update his post. Indeed he has many times offered to update the post and has pretty prominently linked to all relevant counter-evidence (and has also promised to update the post in response to the new evidence provided). I think there is some valid criticism here about not waiting to publish, but I don’t think there is a valid criticism about not being willing to update the post. AFAIK all requests that were made to update the post with links or references to relevant counter-evidence were fulfilled.
I really don’t want to have a whole conversation here, but this does seem like an inaccurate summary of the process that occurred. The actual thing that happened is that Ben heard some specific accusations about Nonlinear which seemed very concerning, so he investigated those accusations. In the process of investigating those accusations he did not aim to make a full assessment of Nonlinear as an organization, but chose the limited scope of figuring out whether the accusations were accurate, and whether they were part of a larger pattern. This importantly is still a biased evidence-gathering process, because he did not also seek to find other good things that Nonlinear has done that might outweigh the harm indicated by these accusations. This seems like a totally normal thing to do. You hear some accusations, so you figure out how much truth there is to them, you don’t also do a search process for all the good things the organization might have done.
I think you are over-interpreting a single paragraph at the top of the post that was trying to help people realize that they were receiving biased evidence, which I think was good and wish was included in other posts. That paragraph was not aiming to give a summary of the whole process, it was just trying to clearly acknowledge a bias that is present in investigations like this.
If you want I am happy to get on a call or have a DM conversation, I could give you some pointers about the actual process that occurred. Or you could talk to Ben about it after more of the object-level response was written. I do think you are pretty mistaken about the actual thing that happened here.
I edited the original to “his collaborator.” My apologies for the imprecision; I’ll be more careful about attribution.
Ben refused to update his post at the time in dispute—the moment when the lawsuit threat was sent. That he was willing to update it after publishing false information, and remains willing to update it, is not material to that point. Spencer provided important context which, when seen in full, dramatically changed public understanding of one allegation in the final article. You and Ben refused to delay publication to update that allegation before the article went live. When considering whether a lawsuit threat was reasonable and whether the publication of that allegation as written was actionably defamatory, that moment of publication is the relevant one. Since I am responding to Gwern’s criticism of my defense of that moment, I figured the context for that was clear.
As for whether my summary of the process is fair, I recognize we disagree here but stand by it and would say the same whether or not he included that disclaimer. The final article and the process that led to it was not totally normal by any stretch, an argument I present extensively in my post and throughout our conversations here. It is not normal to spend six months and hundreds of hours investigating negative information about people in your community, then publicizing it with a condemnation of those people to your whole community. I would definitely be keen to hear more about the actual process via DM, though, and could certainly see it changing my understanding of that process in important ways.
I think “refusing update” in this context would usually be understood to be about updating the published post for some ongoing period of time, at least that’s how I understood it. But seems fine, I now understand the point you are trying to make.
(Also, just to clarify for other readers, the lawsuit threat and the evidence Spencer sent over were separate events with two different groups of people who I think weren’t aware of the messages the other group was sending. Indeed Spencer requested secrecy about him talking to Ben at all about this).
Do Nonlinear and Lightcone in fact have vastly different financial resources?
My impression is that they do not, in which case this line of criticism is moot here
It is hard to gauge, for obvious reasons, but the situation is asymmetric: even if Spartz-Nonlinear and Lightcone have similar annual budgets or assets or however you want to try to equate them, they are not the same. Lightcone is under constraints, like fulltime employees for maintaining & running these websites and renovating Rose Garden (which I recall them soliciting donations for because their budget wasn’t going to cover it),* whereas Spartz-Nonlinear seems like it could halt its minimal activities/expenses if necessary without anything crashing to the ground, and devote his full cashflow to a lawsuit (with the benefit of contingency financing, as the plaintiff, paid out of damages). In addition, even if they are equal… how does one know that? Or willingness to be vindictive?
* As finance types know, cash(flow) is king. Since we’re on the topic of libel lawsuits, this reminds me of the Oberlin bakery lawsuit, one of the rare bright spots where libel lawsuits seem to have done what they were supposed to, eventually—where Oberlin tried to destroy a private bakery maliciously by organized protests & repeated statements they knew were false, to score political points about ‘fighting racism’. As I recall, the financial penalties, years later after the trial, were painful for Oberlin, despite it being on paper extremely wealthy, because it had so many restrictions by donors on assets and so many fixed expenses, that when its insurer bailed on covering the liability, it had a liquidity problem. (I think they had to… take out a loan to actually pay it off? I wonder what happened with that.)
gwern—The situation is indeed quite asymmetric, insofar as some people at Lightcone seem to have launched a poorly-researched slander attack on another EA organization, Nonlinear, which has been suffering serious reputational harm as a result. Whereas Nonlinear did not attack Lightcone or its people, except insofar as necessary to defend themselves.
Treating Nonlinear as a disposable organization, and treating its leaders as having disposable careers, seems ethically very bad.