You seem to be disregarding other considerations at play here.
Zooming out, if we forget about the specifics of this situation and instead think about the more general question of whether or not one should honor requests to delay such publications, one consideration is wanting to avoid unjustifiably harming someones reputation (in this case yours, Kat’s, and Nonlinear’s).
But I think habryka lists some other important considerations too in his comment:
Guarding against retaliation
Guarding against lost productivity
Guarding against reality-distortion fields
Personally, I don’t have strong feelings about where the equilibrium should be here. However, I do feel strongly that the discussion needs to look at the considerations on both sides.
Also, I raise my eyebrow a fair bit at those who do have strong feelings about where the equilibrium should be. At least if they haven’t thought about it for many hours. It strikes me as a genuinely difficult task to enumerate and weigh the considerations at play.
If we want to look at general principles rather than specific cases, if the original post had not contained a bunch of serious misinformation (according to evidence that I have access to) then I would have been much more sympathetic to not delaying.
But the combination of serious misinformation + being unwilling to delay a short period to get the rest of the evidence I find to be a very bad combination.
I also don’t think the retaliation point is a very good one, as refusing to delay doesn’t actually prevent retaliation.
I don’t find the lost productivity point is particularly strong given that this was a major investigation already involving something like 150 hours of work. In that context, another 20 hours carefully reviewing evidence seems minimal (if it’s worth ~150 hours to investigate it’s worth 170 to ensure it’s accurate presumably)
Guarding against reality distortion fields is an interesting point I hadn’t thought of until Oliver brought it up. However, it doesn’t seem (correct me if I’m wrong) that Ben felt swayed away from posting after talking to nonlinear for 3 hours—if that’s true then it doesn’t seem like much of a concern here. I also think pre-committing to a release date helps a bit with that.
You seem to be disregarding other considerations at play here.
Zooming out, if we forget about the specifics of this situation and instead think about the more general question of whether or not one should honor requests to delay such publications, one consideration is wanting to avoid unjustifiably harming someones reputation (in this case yours, Kat’s, and Nonlinear’s).
But I think habryka lists some other important considerations too in his comment:
Guarding against retaliation
Guarding against lost productivity
Guarding against reality-distortion fields
Personally, I don’t have strong feelings about where the equilibrium should be here. However, I do feel strongly that the discussion needs to look at the considerations on both sides.
Also, I raise my eyebrow a fair bit at those who do have strong feelings about where the equilibrium should be. At least if they haven’t thought about it for many hours. It strikes me as a genuinely difficult task to enumerate and weigh the considerations at play.
If we want to look at general principles rather than specific cases, if the original post had not contained a bunch of serious misinformation (according to evidence that I have access to) then I would have been much more sympathetic to not delaying.
But the combination of serious misinformation + being unwilling to delay a short period to get the rest of the evidence I find to be a very bad combination.
I also don’t think the retaliation point is a very good one, as refusing to delay doesn’t actually prevent retaliation.
I don’t find the lost productivity point is particularly strong given that this was a major investigation already involving something like 150 hours of work. In that context, another 20 hours carefully reviewing evidence seems minimal (if it’s worth ~150 hours to investigate it’s worth 170 to ensure it’s accurate presumably)
Guarding against reality distortion fields is an interesting point I hadn’t thought of until Oliver brought it up. However, it doesn’t seem (correct me if I’m wrong) that Ben felt swayed away from posting after talking to nonlinear for 3 hours—if that’s true then it doesn’t seem like much of a concern here. I also think pre-committing to a release date helps a bit with that.