The whole point of having laws against defamation, whether libel (written defamation) or slander (spoken defamation), is to hold people to higher epistemic standards when they communicate very negative things about people or organizations—especially negative things that would stick in the readers/listeners minds in ways that would be very hard for subsequent corrections or clarifications to counter-act.
Without making any comment about the accuracy or inaccuracy of this post, I would just point out that nobody in EA should be shocked that an organization (e.g. Nonlinear) that is being libeled (in its view) would threaten a libel suit to deter the false accusations (as they see them), to nudge the author(e.g. Ben Pace) towards making sure that their negative claims are factually correct and contextually fair.
That is the whole point and function of defamation law: to promote especially high standards of research, accuracy, and care when making severe negative comments. This helps promote better epistemics, when reputations are on the line. If we never use defamation law for its intended purpose, we’re being very naive about the profound costs of libel and slander to those who might be falsely accused.
EA Forum is a very active public forum, where accusations can have very high stakes for those who have devoted their lives to EA. We should not expect that EA Forum should be completely insulated from defamation law, or that posts here should be immune to libel suits. Again, the whole point of libel suits is to encourage very high epistemic standards when people are making career-ruining and organization-ruining claims.
(Note: I’ve also cross-posted this to EA Forum here )
I agree there are some circumstances under which libel suits are justified, but the net-effect on the availability of libel suits strikes me as extremely negative for communities like ours, and I think it’s very reasonable to have very strong norms against threatening or going through with these kinds of suits. Just because an option is legally available, doesn’t mean that a community has to be fine with that option being pursued.
That is the whole point and function of defamation law: to promote especially high standards of research, accuracy, and care when making severe negative comments. This helps promote better epistemics, when reputations are on the line.
This, in-particular, strikes me as completely unsupported. The law does not strike me as particularly well-calibrated about what promotes good communal epistemics, and I do not see how preventing negative evidence from being spread, which is usually the most undersupplied type of evidence already, helps “promote better epistemics”. Naively the prior should be that when you suppress information, you worsen the accuracy of people’s models of the world.
As a concrete illustration of this, libel law in the U.S. and the U.K. function very differently. It seems to me that the U.S. law has a much better effects on public discourse, by being substantially harder actually make happen. It is also very hard to sue someone in a foreign court for libel (i.e. a US citizen suing a german citizen is very hard).
This means we can’t have a norm that generically permits libel suits, since U.K. libel suits follow a very different standard than U.S. ones, and we have to decide for ourselves where our standards for information control like this is.
IMO, both U.S. and UK libel suits should both be very strongly discouraged, since I know of dozens of cases where organizations and individuals have successfully used them to prevent highly important information from being propagated, and I think approximately no case where they did something good (instead organizations that frequently have to deal with libel suits mostly just leverage loopholes in libel law that give them approximate immunity, even when making very strong and false accusations, usually with the clarity of the arguments and the transparency of the evidence taking a large hit).
IMO, both U.S. and UK libel suits should both be very strongly discouraged, since I know of dozens of cases where organizations and individuals have successfully used them to prevent highly important information from being propagated, and I think approximately no case where they did something good (instead organizations that frequently have to deal with libel suits mostly just leverage loopholes in libel law that give them approximate immunity, even when making very strong and false accusations, usually with the clarity of the arguments and the transparency of the evidence taking a large hit).
(Unavoidably political, as lawsuits often are)
A central example of the court system broadly, and libel lawsuits narrowly, promoting better epistemics are the allegations that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
It is certainly not true that there are always loopholes that give immunity, see e.g. Fox News’ very expensive settlement in Dominion v. Fox News.
The whole point of having laws against defamation, whether libel (written defamation) or slander (spoken defamation), is to hold people to higher epistemic standards when they communicate very negative things about people or organizations
This might be true of some other country’s laws against defamation, but it is not true of defamation law in the US. Under US law, merely being wrong, sloppy, and bad at reasoning would not be sufficient to make something count as defamation; it only counts if the writer had actual knowledge that the claims were false, or was completely indifferent to whether they were true or false.
Jim—I didn’t claim that libel law solves all problems in holding people to higher epistemic standards.
Often, it can be helpful just to incentivize avoiding the most egregious forms of lying and bias—e.g. punishing situations when ‘the writer had actual knowledge that the claims were false, or was completely indifferent to whether they were true or false’.
Jim’s point here is compatible with “US libel laws are a force for good epistemics”, since a law can be aimed at lying+bullshitting and still disincentivize bad reasoning (to some degree) as a side-effect.
But I do think Jim’s point strongly suggests that we should have a norm against suing someone merely for reasoning poorly or getting the wrong answer. That would be moving from “lawsuits are good for norm enforcement” to “frivolous lawsuits are good for norm enforcement”, which is way less plausible.
Without making any comment about the accuracy or inaccuracy of this post, I would just point out that nobody in EA should be shocked that an organization (e.g. Nonlinear) that is being libeled (in its view) would threaten a libel suit to deter the false accusations (as they see them), to nudge the author(e.g. Ben Pace) towards making sure that their negative claims are factually correct and contextually fair.
Wikipedia claims: “The 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, however, radically changed the nature of libel law in the United States by establishing that public officials could win a suit for libel only when they could prove the media outlet in question knew either that the information was wholly and patently false or that it was published ‘with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not’.”
Spartz isn’t a “public official”, so maybe the standard is laxer here?
If not, then it seems clear to me that Spartz wouldn’t win in a fair trial, because whether or not Ben got tricked by Alice/Chloe and accidentally signal-boosted others’ lies, it’s very obvious that Ben is neither deliberately asserting falsehoods, nor publishing “with reckless disregard”.
(Ben says he spent “100-200 hours” researching this post, which is way beyond the level of thoroughness we should require for criticizing an organization on LessWrong or the EA Forum!)
I think there should be a strong norm against threatening people with libel merely for saying a falsehood; the standard should at minimum be that you have good reason to think the person is deliberately lying or bullshitting.
(I think the standard should be way higher than that, too, given the chilling effect of litigiousness; but I won’t argue that here.)
Spartz isn’t a “public official”, so maybe the standard is laxer here?
The relevant category (from newer case law than New Your Times Co v. Sullivan) is public figure, not public official, which is further distinguished into general-purpose and limited-purpose public figures. I haven’t looked for case law on it, but I suspect that being the cofounder of a 501(c)(3) is probably sufficient by itself to make someone a limited-purpose public figure with respect to discussion of professional conduct within that 501(c)(3).
Also, the cases specifically call out asymmetric access to media as a reason for their distinctions, and it seems to me that in this case, no such asymmetry exists. The people discussed in the post are equally able to post on LessWrong and the EA Forum (both as replies and as a top-level post), and, to my knowledge, neither Ben nor anyone else has restricted or threatened to restrict that.
Wikipedia claims: “The 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, however, radically changed the nature of libel law in the United States by establishing that public officials could win a suit for libel only when they could prove the media outlet in question knew either that the information was wholly and patently false or that it was published ‘with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not’.”
This is typically referred to as showing “actual malice.” But as you correctly surmised, this case law is irrelevant. Sullivan has been extended to cover public figures as well, but Spartz is not a public figure.[1]
I am not a California attorney, but the caselaw says that the elements of a libelous statement are that it is:
false,
defamatory,
unprivileged,
and has a natural tendency to injure or causes special damage.
Libel only applies to statements of fact or mixed statements of fact and opinion, but not exclusive statements of opinion.[2] This post clearly has many direct statements of fact.[3] Many of these statements of fact have a natural tendency to injure Spartz’s and Nonlinear’s reputation. I’m certain that them being published has already cause Spartz and Nonlinear a substantial amount of damages. So if they are false and Spartz decides to bring a case against Ben then I would bet that Ben would be found liable for libel
Public figures are typically those who have general fame or notoriety in the community. Marilyn Monroe, Bill Clinton, Kim Kardashian, Riley Reid? all public figures. Your high school teacher, your maid, or the boss of a medium sized company? not public figures.
“Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free” ”
Public figures are typically those who have general fame or notoriety in the community.
He very obviously is one. 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’.
Emerson Spartz has a Wikipedia article, and the critique is highly relevant to him in-particular. My best understanding is that Emerson is a public figure for the purpose of this article (though not necessarily for the purpose of all articles), but it doesn’t seem super clear cut to me.
Rob—you claim ‘it’s very obvious that Ben is neither deliberately asserting falsehoods, nor publishing “with reckless disregard’.
Why do you think that’s obvious? We don’t know the facts of the matter. We don’t know what information he gathered. We don’t know the contents of the interviews he did. As far as we can tell, there was no independent editing, fact-checking, or oversight in this writing process. He’s just a guy who hasn’t been trained as an investigative journalist, who did some investigative journalism-type research, and wrote it up.
Number of hours invested in research does not necessarily correlate with objectivity of research—quite the opposite, if someone has any kind of hidden agenda.
I think it’s likely that Ben was researching and writing in good faith, and did not have a hidden agenda. But that’s based on almost nothing other than my heuristic that ‘he seems to be respected in EA/LessWrong circles, and EAs generally seem to act in good faith’.
But I’d never heard of him until yesterday. He has no established track record as an investigative journalist. And I have no idea what kind of hidden agendas he might have.
So, until we know a lot more about this case, I’ll withhold judgment about who might or might not be deliberately asserting falsehoods.
I know Ben, I’ve conversed with him a number of times in the past and seen lots of his LW comments, and I have a very strong and confident sense of his priorities and values. I also read the post, which “shows its work” to such a degree that Ben would need to be unusually evil and deceptive in order for this post to be an act of deception.
I don’t have any private knowledge about Nonlinear or about Ben’s investigation, but I’m happy to vouch for Ben, such that if he turns out to have been lying, I ought to take a credibility hit too.
He’s just a guy who hasn’t been trained as an investigative journalist
If he were a random non-LW investigative journalist, I’d be a lot less confident in the post’s honesty.
Number of hours invested in research does not necessarily correlate with objectivity of research
“Number of hours invested” doesn’t prove Ben isn’t a lying sociopath (heck, if you think that you can just posit that he’s lying about the hours spent), but if he isn’t a lying sociopath, it’s strong evidence against negligence.
So, until we know a lot more about this case, I’ll withhold judgment about who might or might not be deliberately asserting falsehoods.
That’s totally fine, since as you say, you’d never heard of Ben until yesterday. (FWIW, I think he’s one of the best rationalists out there, and he’s a well-established Berkeley-rat community member who co-runs LessWrong and who tons of other veteran LWers can vouch for.)
My claim isn’t “Geoffrey should be confident that Ben is being honest” (that maybe depends on how much stock you put in my vouching and meta-vouching here), but rather:
I’m pretty sure Emerson doesn’t have strong reason to think Ben isn’t being honest here.
If Emerson lacks strong reason to think Ben is being dishonest, then he definitely shouldn’t have threatened to sue Ben.
E.g., I’m claiming here that you shouldn’t sue someone for libel if you feel highly uncertain about whether they’re being honest or dishonest. It’s ethically necessary (though IMO not sufficient) that you feel pretty sure the other person is being super dishonest. And I’d be very surprised if Emerson has rationally reached that epistemic state (because I know Ben, and I expect he conducted himself in his interactions with Nonlinear the same way he normally conducts himself).
Reading these comments three months later, I want to note that I am downgrading your credibility as well and I think it’s worth specifically stating as such, because while it seems abundantly clear your intentions are good and you do not participate in bad faith, the series of extremely harsh comments I’ve been directing towards Ben’s work in the update thread apply to your analysis of his work as well. I think you treated number of hours as a reason to assign credibility without considering balance in those hours, and failed to consider the ways in which refusing to look at contrary evidence credibly promised to be available soon suggests reckless disregard for truth.
(But insofar as you continue to be unsure about Ben, yes, you should be open to the possibility that Emerson has hidden information that justifies Emerson thinking Ben is being super dishonest. My confidence re “no hidden information like that” is downstream of my beliefs about Ben’s character.)
What you described was perhaps the intent behind the law, but that’s not necessarily how it is used in practice. You can use the law to intimidate people who have less money than you, simply by giving the money to a lawyer… and then the other side needs to spend about the same money on their lawyer… or risk losing the case. “The process is the punishment.”
(I have recently contributed money to a defense fund of a woman who exposed a certain criminal organization in my country. The organization was disbanded, a few members were convicted, one of them ended up in prison, but the boss is politically well-connected and keeps avoiding punishment. In turn, the boss filed five lawsuits against her for “damaging a good reputation of a legal entity”. He already lost one of the lawsuits, and is likely to lose all of them, but he has lots of money so he probably doesn’t care. Meanwhile, the legal expenses have almost ruined the woman, so she needs to ask people for contributions. non-English link)
A brief note on defamation law:
The whole point of having laws against defamation, whether libel (written defamation) or slander (spoken defamation), is to hold people to higher epistemic standards when they communicate very negative things about people or organizations—especially negative things that would stick in the readers/listeners minds in ways that would be very hard for subsequent corrections or clarifications to counter-act.
Without making any comment about the accuracy or inaccuracy of this post, I would just point out that nobody in EA should be shocked that an organization (e.g. Nonlinear) that is being libeled (in its view) would threaten a libel suit to deter the false accusations (as they see them), to nudge the author(e.g. Ben Pace) towards making sure that their negative claims are factually correct and contextually fair.
That is the whole point and function of defamation law: to promote especially high standards of research, accuracy, and care when making severe negative comments. This helps promote better epistemics, when reputations are on the line. If we never use defamation law for its intended purpose, we’re being very naive about the profound costs of libel and slander to those who might be falsely accused.
EA Forum is a very active public forum, where accusations can have very high stakes for those who have devoted their lives to EA. We should not expect that EA Forum should be completely insulated from defamation law, or that posts here should be immune to libel suits. Again, the whole point of libel suits is to encourage very high epistemic standards when people are making career-ruining and organization-ruining claims.
(Note: I’ve also cross-posted this to EA Forum here )
(Copying my response from the EA Forum)
I agree there are some circumstances under which libel suits are justified, but the net-effect on the availability of libel suits strikes me as extremely negative for communities like ours, and I think it’s very reasonable to have very strong norms against threatening or going through with these kinds of suits. Just because an option is legally available, doesn’t mean that a community has to be fine with that option being pursued.
This, in-particular, strikes me as completely unsupported. The law does not strike me as particularly well-calibrated about what promotes good communal epistemics, and I do not see how preventing negative evidence from being spread, which is usually the most undersupplied type of evidence already, helps “promote better epistemics”. Naively the prior should be that when you suppress information, you worsen the accuracy of people’s models of the world.
As a concrete illustration of this, libel law in the U.S. and the U.K. function very differently. It seems to me that the U.S. law has a much better effects on public discourse, by being substantially harder actually make happen. It is also very hard to sue someone in a foreign court for libel (i.e. a US citizen suing a german citizen is very hard).
This means we can’t have a norm that generically permits libel suits, since U.K. libel suits follow a very different standard than U.S. ones, and we have to decide for ourselves where our standards for information control like this is.
IMO, both U.S. and UK libel suits should both be very strongly discouraged, since I know of dozens of cases where organizations and individuals have successfully used them to prevent highly important information from being propagated, and I think approximately no case where they did something good (instead organizations that frequently have to deal with libel suits mostly just leverage loopholes in libel law that give them approximate immunity, even when making very strong and false accusations, usually with the clarity of the arguments and the transparency of the evidence taking a large hit).
(Unavoidably political, as lawsuits often are)
A central example of the court system broadly, and libel lawsuits narrowly, promoting better epistemics are the allegations that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
It is certainly not true that there are always loopholes that give immunity, see e.g. Fox News’ very expensive settlement in Dominion v. Fox News.
More broadly: “Trump, his attorneys, and his supporters falsely asserted widespread election fraud in public statements, but few such assertions were made in court.” The false allegations of fraud were dependent on things like hearsay, false claims that opponents weren’t given a chance to respond to, and vague or unsupported claims; virtually all discussion on the internet, and this post in particular, feature all three; the court system explicitly bans these. (Note that people who can’t support their case under legal standards of evidence often just settle or don’t bring a case in the first place.)
This might be true of some other country’s laws against defamation, but it is not true of defamation law in the US. Under US law, merely being wrong, sloppy, and bad at reasoning would not be sufficient to make something count as defamation; it only counts if the writer had actual knowledge that the claims were false, or was completely indifferent to whether they were true or false.
Jim—I didn’t claim that libel law solves all problems in holding people to higher epistemic standards.
Often, it can be helpful just to incentivize avoiding the most egregious forms of lying and bias—e.g. punishing situations when ‘the writer had actual knowledge that the claims were false, or was completely indifferent to whether they were true or false’.
Jim’s point here is compatible with “US libel laws are a force for good epistemics”, since a law can be aimed at lying+bullshitting and still disincentivize bad reasoning (to some degree) as a side-effect.
But I do think Jim’s point strongly suggests that we should have a norm against suing someone merely for reasoning poorly or getting the wrong answer. That would be moving from “lawsuits are good for norm enforcement” to “frivolous lawsuits are good for norm enforcement”, which is way less plausible.
Wikipedia claims: “The 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, however, radically changed the nature of libel law in the United States by establishing that public officials could win a suit for libel only when they could prove the media outlet in question knew either that the information was wholly and patently false or that it was published ‘with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not’.”
Spartz isn’t a “public official”, so maybe the standard is laxer here?
If not, then it seems clear to me that Spartz wouldn’t win in a fair trial, because whether or not Ben got tricked by Alice/Chloe and accidentally signal-boosted others’ lies, it’s very obvious that Ben is neither deliberately asserting falsehoods, nor publishing “with reckless disregard”.
(Ben says he spent “100-200 hours” researching this post, which is way beyond the level of thoroughness we should require for criticizing an organization on LessWrong or the EA Forum!)
I think there should be a strong norm against threatening people with libel merely for saying a falsehood; the standard should at minimum be that you have good reason to think the person is deliberately lying or bullshitting.
(I think the standard should be way higher than that, too, given the chilling effect of litigiousness; but I won’t argue that here.)
The relevant category (from newer case law than New Your Times Co v. Sullivan) is public figure, not public official, which is further distinguished into general-purpose and limited-purpose public figures. I haven’t looked for case law on it, but I suspect that being the cofounder of a 501(c)(3) is probably sufficient by itself to make someone a limited-purpose public figure with respect to discussion of professional conduct within that 501(c)(3).
Also, the cases specifically call out asymmetric access to media as a reason for their distinctions, and it seems to me that in this case, no such asymmetry exists. The people discussed in the post are equally able to post on LessWrong and the EA Forum (both as replies and as a top-level post), and, to my knowledge, neither Ben nor anyone else has restricted or threatened to restrict that.
This is typically referred to as showing “actual malice.” But as you correctly surmised, this case law is irrelevant. Sullivan has been extended to cover public figures as well, but Spartz is not a public figure.[1]
I am not a California attorney, but the caselaw says that the elements of a libelous statement are that it is:
false,
defamatory,
unprivileged,
and has a natural tendency to injure or causes special damage.
Libel only applies to statements of fact or mixed statements of fact and opinion, but not exclusive statements of opinion.[2] This post clearly has many direct statements of fact.[3] Many of these statements of fact have a natural tendency to injure Spartz’s and Nonlinear’s reputation. I’m certain that them being published has already cause Spartz and Nonlinear a substantial amount of damages. So if they are false and Spartz decides to bring a case against Ben then I would bet that Ben would be found liable for libel
Public figures are typically those who have general fame or notoriety in the community. Marilyn Monroe, Bill Clinton, Kim Kardashian, Riley Reid? all public figures. Your high school teacher, your maid, or the boss of a medium sized company? not public figures.
i.e. Fact: “Johnny cheated on his wife with Jessica,” Opinion: “Johnny is a terrible person,” Mixed: “I hate how much Johnny cheats on his wife.”
“Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free” ”
He very obviously is one. 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’.
Emerson Spartz has a Wikipedia article, and the critique is highly relevant to him in-particular. My best understanding is that Emerson is a public figure for the purpose of this article (though not necessarily for the purpose of all articles), but it doesn’t seem super clear cut to me.
Rob—you claim ‘it’s very obvious that Ben is neither deliberately asserting falsehoods, nor publishing “with reckless disregard’.
Why do you think that’s obvious? We don’t know the facts of the matter. We don’t know what information he gathered. We don’t know the contents of the interviews he did. As far as we can tell, there was no independent editing, fact-checking, or oversight in this writing process. He’s just a guy who hasn’t been trained as an investigative journalist, who did some investigative journalism-type research, and wrote it up.
Number of hours invested in research does not necessarily correlate with objectivity of research—quite the opposite, if someone has any kind of hidden agenda.
I think it’s likely that Ben was researching and writing in good faith, and did not have a hidden agenda. But that’s based on almost nothing other than my heuristic that ‘he seems to be respected in EA/LessWrong circles, and EAs generally seem to act in good faith’.
But I’d never heard of him until yesterday. He has no established track record as an investigative journalist. And I have no idea what kind of hidden agendas he might have.
So, until we know a lot more about this case, I’ll withhold judgment about who might or might not be deliberately asserting falsehoods.
I know Ben, I’ve conversed with him a number of times in the past and seen lots of his LW comments, and I have a very strong and confident sense of his priorities and values. I also read the post, which “shows its work” to such a degree that Ben would need to be unusually evil and deceptive in order for this post to be an act of deception.
I don’t have any private knowledge about Nonlinear or about Ben’s investigation, but I’m happy to vouch for Ben, such that if he turns out to have been lying, I ought to take a credibility hit too.
If he were a random non-LW investigative journalist, I’d be a lot less confident in the post’s honesty.
“Number of hours invested” doesn’t prove Ben isn’t a lying sociopath (heck, if you think that you can just posit that he’s lying about the hours spent), but if he isn’t a lying sociopath, it’s strong evidence against negligence.
That’s totally fine, since as you say, you’d never heard of Ben until yesterday. (FWIW, I think he’s one of the best rationalists out there, and he’s a well-established Berkeley-rat community member who co-runs LessWrong and who tons of other veteran LWers can vouch for.)
My claim isn’t “Geoffrey should be confident that Ben is being honest” (that maybe depends on how much stock you put in my vouching and meta-vouching here), but rather:
I’m pretty sure Emerson doesn’t have strong reason to think Ben isn’t being honest here.
If Emerson lacks strong reason to think Ben is being dishonest, then he definitely shouldn’t have threatened to sue Ben.
E.g., I’m claiming here that you shouldn’t sue someone for libel if you feel highly uncertain about whether they’re being honest or dishonest. It’s ethically necessary (though IMO not sufficient) that you feel pretty sure the other person is being super dishonest. And I’d be very surprised if Emerson has rationally reached that epistemic state (because I know Ben, and I expect he conducted himself in his interactions with Nonlinear the same way he normally conducts himself).
Reading these comments three months later, I want to note that I am downgrading your credibility as well and I think it’s worth specifically stating as such, because while it seems abundantly clear your intentions are good and you do not participate in bad faith, the series of extremely harsh comments I’ve been directing towards Ben’s work in the update thread apply to your analysis of his work as well. I think you treated number of hours as a reason to assign credibility without considering balance in those hours, and failed to consider the ways in which refusing to look at contrary evidence credibly promised to be available soon suggests reckless disregard for truth.
Fair enough. Thanks for replying. It’s helpful to have a little more background on Ben. (I might write more, but I’m busy with a newborn baby here...)
(But insofar as you continue to be unsure about Ben, yes, you should be open to the possibility that Emerson has hidden information that justifies Emerson thinking Ben is being super dishonest. My confidence re “no hidden information like that” is downstream of my beliefs about Ben’s character.)
Yes, the standard is different for private individuals than public officials, where it is merely “negligence” rather than “actual malice”. (https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/proving-fault-actual-malice-and-negligence)
What you described was perhaps the intent behind the law, but that’s not necessarily how it is used in practice. You can use the law to intimidate people who have less money than you, simply by giving the money to a lawyer… and then the other side needs to spend about the same money on their lawyer… or risk losing the case. “The process is the punishment.”
(I have recently contributed money to a defense fund of a woman who exposed a certain criminal organization in my country. The organization was disbanded, a few members were convicted, one of them ended up in prison, but the boss is politically well-connected and keeps avoiding punishment. In turn, the boss filed five lawsuits against her for “damaging a good reputation of a legal entity”. He already lost one of the lawsuits, and is likely to lose all of them, but he has lots of money so he probably doesn’t care. Meanwhile, the legal expenses have almost ruined the woman, so she needs to ask people for contributions. non-English link)
The ‘whole point of libel suits’ is to weaponize the expensive brokenness of the legal system to punish people for saying mean things about you.