Yep. Posts critical of Less Wrong are often highly upvoted on Less Wrong, so I’d say a good defense (one containing factual statements, not just “this is 100% wrong and I will sue you”) has like 80% chance to get 100 or more karma.
I didn’t understand the part about “resurfacing old content”, but one can simply link the old article from the new one, and ask moderators to link the new article from the old one. (The fact that the new article will be on the front page but the old one will no longer be there, seems to work in favor of the new article.) Even if moderators for some mysterious reason refused to make the link, a comment under the old article saying “there is a response from Nonlinear” with a link would probably be highly upvoted.
Oli’s comment is a good summary of my relevant concerns! And I’m definitely happy to link prominently to any response by Nonlinear, and make edits if things are shown to be false.
As well as a bunch of other reasons already mentioned (and some not), another one is that most of the things they proposed to show me didn’t seem that cruxy to me? Maybe a few of stories are wrong, but I believe the people were really very hurt by their time at Nonlinear, and I believe both were quite credibly intimidated, and I’m pretty sure a lot of folks in the relevant ecosystems would like to know if I believe that. When we talked Nonlinear mostly wanted to say that Alice told lies about things like why she quit being vegan, but even if that’s true tons of my evidence doesn’t come from Alice or from her specific stories, so the delay request didn’t seem like it would likely change my mind. Maybe it will, but I think it’s more important to say when I believe that terrible behavior has occurred, so I didn’t feel beholden to delay for them.
Yes, we intend to. But given that our comments just asking for people to withhold judgment are getting downvoted, that doesn’t bode well for future posts getting enough upvotes to be seen.
It’s going to take us at least a week to gather all the evidence, then it will take a decent amount of time to write up.
In the meantime, people have heard terrible things about us and nobody’s a perfect rationalist who will simply update. Once you’ve made up your mind about somebody, it can be really hard to change.
Additionally, once things are on the internet, they’re usually there for good. Now it might be that the first thing people find when looking up Nonlinear is this post, even if we do disprove the claims.
A post that would most likely have been substantially different if he’d seen all of our evidence first. He already made multiple updates to the post based on the things we shared, and he would have made far more if he had given us the chance to actually present our evidence.
Not to mention that now that he’s published this and sent them money, it’s psychologically difficult for him to update.
I think a comment “just asking for people to withhold judgement” would not be especially downvoted. I think the comments in which you’ve asked people to withhold judgement include other incredibly toxic behavior.
You could possibly do a more incremental version of this, e.g. link to a Google Drive where you upload the pieces of evidence as you find them? That way people could start updating right away rather than waiting until everything’s been put together. And then you could add a comment linking to the write-up when it’s done.
This doesn’t seem like an issue. You could instead write a separate post a week later which has a chance of gaining traction.
Yep. Posts critical of Less Wrong are often highly upvoted on Less Wrong, so I’d say a good defense (one containing factual statements, not just “this is 100% wrong and I will sue you”) has like 80% chance to get 100 or more karma.
I didn’t understand the part about “resurfacing old content”, but one can simply link the old article from the new one, and ask moderators to link the new article from the old one. (The fact that the new article will be on the front page but the old one will no longer be there, seems to work in favor of the new article.) Even if moderators for some mysterious reason refused to make the link, a comment under the old article saying “there is a response from Nonlinear” with a link would probably be highly upvoted.
Oli’s comment is a good summary of my relevant concerns! And I’m definitely happy to link prominently to any response by Nonlinear, and make edits if things are shown to be false.
As well as a bunch of other reasons already mentioned (and some not), another one is that most of the things they proposed to show me didn’t seem that cruxy to me? Maybe a few of stories are wrong, but I believe the people were really very hurt by their time at Nonlinear, and I believe both were quite credibly intimidated, and I’m pretty sure a lot of folks in the relevant ecosystems would like to know if I believe that. When we talked Nonlinear mostly wanted to say that Alice told lies about things like why she quit being vegan, but even if that’s true tons of my evidence doesn’t come from Alice or from her specific stories, so the delay request didn’t seem like it would likely change my mind. Maybe it will, but I think it’s more important to say when I believe that terrible behavior has occurred, so I didn’t feel beholden to delay for them.
Yes, we intend to. But given that our comments just asking for people to withhold judgment are getting downvoted, that doesn’t bode well for future posts getting enough upvotes to be seen.
It’s going to take us at least a week to gather all the evidence, then it will take a decent amount of time to write up.
In the meantime, people have heard terrible things about us and nobody’s a perfect rationalist who will simply update. Once you’ve made up your mind about somebody, it can be really hard to change.
Additionally, once things are on the internet, they’re usually there for good. Now it might be that the first thing people find when looking up Nonlinear is this post, even if we do disprove the claims.
A post that would most likely have been substantially different if he’d seen all of our evidence first. He already made multiple updates to the post based on the things we shared, and he would have made far more if he had given us the chance to actually present our evidence.
Not to mention that now that he’s published this and sent them money, it’s psychologically difficult for him to update.
I think a comment “just asking for people to withhold judgement” would not be especially downvoted. I think the comments in which you’ve asked people to withhold judgement include other incredibly toxic behavior.
You could possibly do a more incremental version of this, e.g. link to a Google Drive where you upload the pieces of evidence as you find them? That way people could start updating right away rather than waiting until everything’s been put together. And then you could add a comment linking to the write-up when it’s done.