That’s the point. Metz could still lie if even Gerard wouldn’t talk to him, but not all lies are equally easy to get away with. Making his goal harder matters, even if strictly speaking he still has ways to reach it.
Okay, I think we both understand the problem with selective reporting. (An adversary who wants to minimize an audience’s estimate of the Heads-bias parameter of a biased coin can report only the Tails outcomes, and if the audience trusts them to be reporting fairly, that’s a huge distortion on what the audience ends up believing.) So this is probably a quantitative disagreement about what Metz’s goals and constraints are, and what my goals should be?
I understand and concede that in the limit of a sufficiently intelligent and sufficiently dishonest reporter with sufficiently many readers who trust him sufficiently much, whose only goal is to maximize reputational damage to their subject, the subject absolutely shouldn’t speak, because any information revealed is going to be perfectly cherry-picked and spun in a maximally damaging way to a maximal audience.
As I repeatedly express in the transcripts (“I’m hoping that I’m not an idiot for continuing to talk to you”, “why am I acting as if I believe him”, &c.), I have some uncertainty about whether I’m getting the calculus wrong here, but in order to update, I think I’m going to need more details than “he is out to harm everyone here.”
Certainly, he has no qualms about doing harm to people here. (We see that in his reaction to the Slate Star affair, where he displays no remorse for his role in Scott Alexander leaving his job.) But I think there’s an important difference between intended harm and indifference to harm in the course of reporting on a real story (that an ideological internet community is wielding influence in Silicon Valley).
Maybe it would help to be concrete about what harm you foresee? My median expectation here is that a book gets published in 2027; it kind of sucks (similar to how Metz’s previous reporting kind of sucked) and sells maybe 40K copies. The harm dealt to users of this website (in the form of people reading it and treating us worse, or making worse decisions about AI safety) is plausibly less than that of Metz’s August 2025 piece on Lighthaven and the Secular Solstice (which, to be clear, kind of sucked), because more people will read a New York Times article than buy an entire book.
Did your life get noticeably worse as a result of that article (which, as far as I can tell, didn’t even make the print edition)? Will you forever rue the date of 4 August 2025 as the day of an unspeakable injustice and tragedy, a wound in the world that can never be healed? Maybe this seems monstrous to you, but I just find it really hard to care about such diffuse purported harms compared to the immediate benefit of me getting to publish a cool meta-journalism blog post.
But I think there’s an important difference between intended harm and indifference to harm in the course of reporting on a real story
Imagine a suitably anthromorphized lion wanting to eat a sheep. Does the lion intend harm, or is the lion merely indifferent to harm? You can argue that the lion just wants dinner. The fact that the sheep has to be killed in order to become dinner just happens to be a step towards the lion’s ultimate goal. If the sheep was harmed in some other fashion, let’s say being thrown into a volcano, the lion would have no desire for that to happen at all! And if the lion managed to eat his fill in some other way, he might not even care about the sheep (until he got hungry again).
So clearly the lion doesn’t actually intend harm to the sheep. It just wants dinner. It’s indifferent to the harm that happens to the sheep in service of its goal.
But if you’re a (suitably anthromorphized) sheep in a place full of lions, you still had better take measures against lions eating you.
In some literal sense, Cade Metz is merely indifferent to the harm he causes to rationalists by lying about them. But he’s still a threat. His terminal goal is incompatible with rationalists’ welfare, even if he wouldn’t throw rationalists into a volcano just because it causes them harm.
Maybe it would help to be concrete about what harm you foresee?
The problem with this question is that the exact details of the harm can be wrong in a way that lets you nitpick the answer, but which has no relevance to the question “how should you deal with him?”. My rough guess is that he is a particular kind of leftist who is ideologically hostile to techbros and the tech industry and associates them with fascists, and is going to spin anything you say along those lines whether it is truthful or not. But the exact details of what he’s going to do and how he’s going to do it don’t matter, because harm based on one ideology is pretty similar to harm based on a somewhat different ideology.
Did your life get noticeably worse as a result of that article
Does anyone’s life get worse as a result of throwing one piece of litter on the ground in the park?
Talking to hostile media is a collective action problem.
As I repeatedly express in the transcripts (“I’m hoping that I’m not an idiot for continuing to talk to you”, “why am I acting as if I believe him”, &c.), I have some uncertainty about whether I’m getting the calculus wrong here,
This is itself something you are messing up. It’s the equivalent of the sheep saying “Nice juicy mutton right here.” You seem to think that being half-hearted about admitting your naivety only causes half as much harm than completely admitting your naivety. It doesn’t work that way; doing it halfway hurts you about as much as doing it fully.
No, he couldn’t. Journalists who outright make stuff up (as contrasted to engaging in mere “spin”) get fired in disgrace.
That’s the point. Metz could still lie if even Gerard wouldn’t talk to him, but not all lies are equally easy to get away with. Making his goal harder matters, even if strictly speaking he still has ways to reach it.
Okay, I think we both understand the problem with selective reporting. (An adversary who wants to minimize an audience’s estimate of the Heads-bias parameter of a biased coin can report only the Tails outcomes, and if the audience trusts them to be reporting fairly, that’s a huge distortion on what the audience ends up believing.) So this is probably a quantitative disagreement about what Metz’s goals and constraints are, and what my goals should be?
I understand and concede that in the limit of a sufficiently intelligent and sufficiently dishonest reporter with sufficiently many readers who trust him sufficiently much, whose only goal is to maximize reputational damage to their subject, the subject absolutely shouldn’t speak, because any information revealed is going to be perfectly cherry-picked and spun in a maximally damaging way to a maximal audience.
Given that foundation, I think there’s an empirical question of how close Metz is to that infinite limit along each of those dimensions—whether he’s close enough that the act-consequentialist cost of reputational damage to “the community” (which I have common interests with) outweighs my non-act-consequentialist committment to transparency and the benefit of getting to publish cool meta-journalism blog posts.
As I repeatedly express in the transcripts (“I’m hoping that I’m not an idiot for continuing to talk to you”, “why am I acting as if I believe him”, &c.), I have some uncertainty about whether I’m getting the calculus wrong here, but in order to update, I think I’m going to need more details than “he is out to harm everyone here.”
Certainly, he has no qualms about doing harm to people here. (We see that in his reaction to the Slate Star affair, where he displays no remorse for his role in Scott Alexander leaving his job.) But I think there’s an important difference between intended harm and indifference to harm in the course of reporting on a real story (that an ideological internet community is wielding influence in Silicon Valley).
Maybe it would help to be concrete about what harm you foresee? My median expectation here is that a book gets published in 2027; it kind of sucks (similar to how Metz’s previous reporting kind of sucked) and sells maybe 40K copies. The harm dealt to users of this website (in the form of people reading it and treating us worse, or making worse decisions about AI safety) is plausibly less than that of Metz’s August 2025 piece on Lighthaven and the Secular Solstice (which, to be clear, kind of sucked), because more people will read a New York Times article than buy an entire book.
Did your life get noticeably worse as a result of that article (which, as far as I can tell, didn’t even make the print edition)? Will you forever rue the date of 4 August 2025 as the day of an unspeakable injustice and tragedy, a wound in the world that can never be healed? Maybe this seems monstrous to you, but I just find it really hard to care about such diffuse purported harms compared to the immediate benefit of me getting to publish a cool meta-journalism blog post.
Imagine a suitably anthromorphized lion wanting to eat a sheep. Does the lion intend harm, or is the lion merely indifferent to harm? You can argue that the lion just wants dinner. The fact that the sheep has to be killed in order to become dinner just happens to be a step towards the lion’s ultimate goal. If the sheep was harmed in some other fashion, let’s say being thrown into a volcano, the lion would have no desire for that to happen at all! And if the lion managed to eat his fill in some other way, he might not even care about the sheep (until he got hungry again).
So clearly the lion doesn’t actually intend harm to the sheep. It just wants dinner. It’s indifferent to the harm that happens to the sheep in service of its goal.
But if you’re a (suitably anthromorphized) sheep in a place full of lions, you still had better take measures against lions eating you.
In some literal sense, Cade Metz is merely indifferent to the harm he causes to rationalists by lying about them. But he’s still a threat. His terminal goal is incompatible with rationalists’ welfare, even if he wouldn’t throw rationalists into a volcano just because it causes them harm.
The problem with this question is that the exact details of the harm can be wrong in a way that lets you nitpick the answer, but which has no relevance to the question “how should you deal with him?”. My rough guess is that he is a particular kind of leftist who is ideologically hostile to techbros and the tech industry and associates them with fascists, and is going to spin anything you say along those lines whether it is truthful or not. But the exact details of what he’s going to do and how he’s going to do it don’t matter, because harm based on one ideology is pretty similar to harm based on a somewhat different ideology.
Does anyone’s life get worse as a result of throwing one piece of litter on the ground in the park?
Talking to hostile media is a collective action problem.
This is itself something you are messing up. It’s the equivalent of the sheep saying “Nice juicy mutton right here.” You seem to think that being half-hearted about admitting your naivety only causes half as much harm than completely admitting your naivety. It doesn’t work that way; doing it halfway hurts you about as much as doing it fully.