I think we should have a community norm that threatening libel suits (or actually suing) is incredibly unacceptable in almost all cases—I’m not sure what the exact exceptions should be, but maybe it should require “they were knowingly making false claims.”
I feel unsure whether it would be good to enforce such a norm regarding the current Nonlinear situation because there wasn’t common knowledge beforehand and because I feel too strongly about this norm to not be afraid that I’m biased (and because hearing them out is the principled thing to do). But I think building common knowledge of such a norm would be good.
I’m more confident that we should generally have norms prohibiting using threats of legal action to prevent exchange of information than I am of the exact form those norms should take. But to give my immediate thoughts:
I think the best thing for Alice to do if Bob is lying about her is to just refute the lies. In an ideal world, this is sufficient. In practice, I guess maybe it’s insufficient, or maybe refuting the lies would require sharing private information, so if necessary I would next escalate to informing forum moderators, presenting evidence privately, and requesting a ban.
Only once those avenues are exhausted might I consider threatening a libel suit acceptable.
I do notice now that the Nonlinear situation in particular is impacted by Ben Pace being a LessWrong admin—so if step 1 doesn’t work, step 2 might have issues, so maybe escalating to step 3 might be acceptable sooner than usual.
Concerns have been raised that there might be some sort of large first-mover advantage. I’m not sure I buy this—my instinct is that the Nonlinear cofounders are just bad-faith actors making any arguments that seem advantageous to them (though out of principle I’m trying to withhold final judgement). That said, I could definitely imagine deciding in the future that this is a large enough concern to justify weaker norms against rapid escalation.
I think we should have a community norm that threatening libel suits (or actually suing) is incredibly unacceptable in almost all cases—I’m not sure what the exact exceptions should be, but maybe it should require “they were knowingly making false claims.”
I feel unsure whether it would be good to enforce such a norm regarding the current Nonlinear situation because there wasn’t common knowledge beforehand and because I feel too strongly about this norm to not be afraid that I’m biased (and because hearing them out is the principled thing to do). But I think building common knowledge of such a norm would be good.
Under this community norm, how does Alice respond when Bob lies about her in public in a way that hurts her commercial business?
I’m more confident that we should generally have norms prohibiting using threats of legal action to prevent exchange of information than I am of the exact form those norms should take. But to give my immediate thoughts:
I think the best thing for Alice to do if Bob is lying about her is to just refute the lies. In an ideal world, this is sufficient. In practice, I guess maybe it’s insufficient, or maybe refuting the lies would require sharing private information, so if necessary I would next escalate to informing forum moderators, presenting evidence privately, and requesting a ban.
Only once those avenues are exhausted might I consider threatening a libel suit acceptable.
I do notice now that the Nonlinear situation in particular is impacted by Ben Pace being a LessWrong admin—so if step 1 doesn’t work, step 2 might have issues, so maybe escalating to step 3 might be acceptable sooner than usual.
Concerns have been raised that there might be some sort of large first-mover advantage. I’m not sure I buy this—my instinct is that the Nonlinear cofounders are just bad-faith actors making any arguments that seem advantageous to them (though out of principle I’m trying to withhold final judgement). That said, I could definitely imagine deciding in the future that this is a large enough concern to justify weaker norms against rapid escalation.