If your numbers are right, the blackmailer came out with a reasonable rate of return on his effort. $20k for harassing someone you don’t like (I forget the details, but I understood him to have hostile personal history with several people involved) for half a year, well less than full time, is not a trivial reward. $60k is a pretty solid hourly rate, especially if he was not really in shape to work at the same salary as before, which on priors for someone who does something like this is very very likely.
If your when-healthy market salary is $200k, but you’re not healthy, so you can only get $120k/year from a job you can get and keep? And you get EV $30k from 15 hours a week of harassment for 6-9 months? That’s about your market rate! You’d do better than that working freelance but not that much better, and under many theories of being angry and unwell this is an easier ‘job’ to keep.
Someone told me that there was some dispute about whether he was suing MIRI for a payout, or suing to have a donation he gave returned. If it’s the latter that does feel somewhat different to me, and maybe outside the definition of blackmail.
Yeah in the latter case I would say this is maybe complicatedly blackmail, but definitely not straightforwardly blackmail (and maybe not blackmail at all). The strong nondisparagement clauses that must have been involved make that somewhat implausible to me, but I would need to know more details than I ever bothered to learn to determine how implausible and it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
If your numbers are right, the blackmailer came out with a reasonable rate of return on his effort. $20k for harassing someone you don’t like (I forget the details, but I understood him to have hostile personal history with several people involved) for half a year, well less than full time, is not a trivial reward. $60k is a pretty solid hourly rate, especially if he was not really in shape to work at the same salary as before, which on priors for someone who does something like this is very very likely.
If your when-healthy market salary is $200k, but you’re not healthy, so you can only get $120k/year from a job you can get and keep? And you get EV $30k from 15 hours a week of harassment for 6-9 months? That’s about your market rate! You’d do better than that working freelance but not that much better, and under many theories of being angry and unwell this is an easier ‘job’ to keep.
Someone told me that there was some dispute about whether he was suing MIRI for a payout, or suing to have a donation he gave returned. If it’s the latter that does feel somewhat different to me, and maybe outside the definition of blackmail.
Yeah in the latter case I would say this is maybe complicatedly blackmail, but definitely not straightforwardly blackmail (and maybe not blackmail at all). The strong nondisparagement clauses that must have been involved make that somewhat implausible to me, but I would need to know more details than I ever bothered to learn to determine how implausible and it doesn’t seem worth the effort.