(Spoilered to make it easier for people to write their own unprimed.)
As far as I know: the person has not admitted doing the thing; there has been no justice done, no public accountability; no reason to think the thing would not happen again if circumstances enabled.
I believe the user is in good standing on LW; they are “one of us”. I might feel differently if I was referring to Roman Polanski’s films, or the Unabomber’s math papers. I might feel differently if I was not publishing on LW. (This point also relevant when choosing between a comment and a footnote. I publish on my blog and crosspost here, so a footnote would be more visible to outside readers.)
I don’t know how many people are aware of the accusation. It was published on LW but might not have been seen widely. I don’t know if the lack-of-reaction is because broadly speaking people don’t know of the accusations; or think no-reaction is appropriate; or think “some reaction would be good but idk what and no one else is doing anything so uh”; or what.
I don’t particularly have any public response in mind. The person could be banned from LW but I dunno if I think that would actually be good. I’m not actively trying to make anything happen. But the (apparent) complete lack of reaction does seem bad to me; and it seems more likely to me that making the accusation more widely known causes a reaction that I consider broadly positive than a reaction I consider broadly negative.
I am confident enough in the accusation to say “I believe _” rather than “it seems likely to me that ”, but not confident enough to simply say “”. (I’m reluctant to put this in terms of probabilities, partly because the difference between those three confidence levels doesn’t just feel like a matter of probabilities to me?)
Many people have acted unethically and illegally in minor ways. This is not a minor way.
If I don’t mention the belief in this situation, when do I? It will almost never be relevant. Create a whole new post to remind people of it? Bring it up whenever the person posts on LW? Those don’t feel better, to me.
Pointing in the other direction, I feel like there’s a kind of culture where people feel unable to mention anyone without disclaiming that every bad thing the person has done is bad. Like, I think [the idea of Orson Scott Card I’ve picked up from Reddit, and likely also the actual Orson Scott Card] is homophobic and that’s bad. But I don’t want anyone who mentions Orson Scott Card to feel compelled to say that he’s a homophobe and that’s bad. I do think mentioning the belief points in the direction towards that kind of culture; but I also don’t want a culture where people don’t mention such things because they don’t want that kind of culture.
The weight of these feels pretty firmly on “mention the belief” to me.
If you are not confident enough in the strength of your evidence to simply say X, don’t publish it at all. In particular you state that you are intending to act on a “credible accusation”. This suggests that you do not actually have first-hand evidence of the truth of the matter, no matter how much you trust your source, and should be taken as further reason not to publish at all.
If you believe that a crime has been committed, that it should be punished, and have some testimony or other evidence to back up that accusation, we are not the people you should be talking to.
If you feel very strongly that you should publish anyway, consult a lawyer capable of advising you on matters of defamation before you do so.
It seems to be that your advice would prohibit me from saying “I believe Roman Polanski is a child rapist” or “I believe OJ Simpson is a murderer”. I’d try to avoid flatly asserting those. (I seem to have a higher bar than most for doing that.) I certainly have no first hand evidence on the truth of the claims.
If you think your advice wouldn’t apply to those, why not? If you think it would...
I’m not going to refrain out of fear of defamation lawsuits. I think that would be both cowardly and a miscalculation of the risks.
One enormous difference is that both of those are matters of public record, as determined by admission and/or jury verdicts made after examining direct evidence. Furthermore, in the current context you are not going to damage either of their lives to any meaningful degree by publically making the claim (regardless of whether the statements are true or not). If you were making either claim under similar circumstances to the situation you were asking about, I would also strongly advise against it for much the same reasons.
Note that I am not just talking about “fear of defamation lawsuits”. Legal advice would help in reducing the risk to yourself and anyone financially connected with you certainly, but also increases the chances of successfully prosecuting the case (in court or otherwise) against the person you believe to have committed this crime.
Quite frankly, stating “by the way, I believe this person to have committed crime X” in a post tangentially related to that person seems one of the worst possible ways to go about the matter.
both of those are matters of public record, as determined by admission and/or jury verdicts made after examining direct evidence
I specifically chose examples where I believe this is not the case. As I understand the situations:
Polanski has pled guilty to some of what I accuse him of. He denies other parts, which he has not been tried for. I don’t know in what parts of the process a jury would have been involved. (Also, the guilty plea was part of a deal, and I think plea deals have a substantial rate of false confessions.)
Simpson denies it and was famously acquitted by a jury. He was later found liable in a civil trial. I don’t know if a jury would have been involved in that.
increases the chances of successfully prosecuting the case (in court or otherwise) against the person you believe to have committed this crime.
Prosecuting the person is not my goal here. If I do think about the effect of me-saying-something on the chances of the person getting convicted, my guess is that the effect is probably tiny but more likely to lean positive than negative.
If you think the effect is likely substantially negative to the extent that it’s worth getting legal advice, I’d like to hear more detail.
Is it that you feel insufficient attention was paid to this person’s misdeeds and you want to focus attention on it?
Or is it that you feel uncomfortable with mentioning this person in a way that reinforces their status as a person in good standing on less wrong?
If the former, I would create a question post in the form “Why are we ignoring what X did?”, linking to the original post bringing up their misdeeds.
If the latter it’s more tricky. I don’t think it’s worth derailing your post for that purpose. If it’s possible to avoid mentioning them without stealing credit I would. Alternatively you could consider making their name a hyperlink to the post bringing up their misdeeds, but not actually say anything accusatory in the post itself.
I’m not really happy about either of those options, but I don’t have any better ideas.
I think I want to be the kind of person who wouldn’t collaborate on a movie with Roman Polanski. Which is not to say “it is the job of director’s guilds to punish members when they believe the legal system has failed to do so effectively”. It’s not to say “I’m going to punish anyone who collaborates on a movie with Roman Polanski”. But I think that’s the kind of person I want to be.
And if I were on a forum for aspiring movie directors, and talking about one of Roman Polanski’s movies, I think mentioning his irrelevant-to-movies actions would a) help me be that kind of person; and b) help others who want to be that kind of person, be that kind of person.
Which is related to the second, but felt worth bringing out explicitly.
Alternatively you could consider making their name a hyperlink to the post bringing up their misdeeds, but not actually say anything accusatory in the post itself.
Hm, yeah. That does feel less likely to cause drama, but...
I think my model for how that works is that by doing that, I’m giving myself kind of a plausible-deniable out where if someone talks about it I can be like “why are you bringing this up? I didn’t say anything I just gave a link”. And people recognize that I have that, and that I can make it frustrating for them if they say anything, and are less likely to say anything? I dunno, low confidence on this. (And not described very well.) But it feels like something is going on there that I don’t love.
Also I think as a reader I’d prefer to know what I’m clicking before I click it.
It’s not to say “I’m going to punish anyone who collaborates on a movie with Roman Polanski”. But I think that’s the kind of person I want to be.
What’s wrong with doing this is that you’re causing harm, not that you’re “punishing”. Ruining someone’s reputation out of pure motives with no explicit desire to cause harm still does cause harm, and needs to be judged on that basis. “The harm I do is not punishment” doesn’t change whether you should do it.
And the Polanski comparison doesn’t work, even in a directors’ forum, because in a situation where Polanski’s bad deeds are not well known so you need to tell people about him, as far as you know he could be innocent and the victim of a smear campaign. Now you know otherwise, but that’s hindsight.
I also find your original question to be the wrong question. Before asking whether it’s okay to mention the accusation in an irrelevant context, you need to establish that it’s okay to mention it at all.
A culture of “we can’t accuse anyone of anything until it’s been proven in a court of law” causes harm too.
I get the impression you’re very aware of the harms of going too far in one direction, and completely insensitive to the harms of going too far in the other direction.
You are trying to hedge by saying “it’s not punishment”, which implies that you think that there’s some chance that he’s innocent and because you’re not punishing him, what you’re doing wouldn’t be too bad when done to an innocent person. If you’re uncertain enough about him that you’re going to hedge, you shouldn’t be doing anything to him at all.
I get the impression you’re very aware of the harms of going too far in one direction, and completely insensitive to the harms of going too far in the other direction.
You’re not telling us what the accusation or the evidence are. Which means that I can’t decide for myself what the risks are of erring in either direction. And it would be a bad idea to assume they work in the way most favorable to you when you don’t tell us what they are.
You are trying to hedge by saying “it’s not punishment”, which implies
I have said no such thing. I did a ctrl+f for “punish” on this page to check. The only paragraph I’ve used that word is one where I’m not remotely saying this, and I have no idea why you’re reading it this way.
Even if I had said that, it would not imply what you say it would.
You’re not telling us what the accusation or the evidence are.
Right. That’s in part because I’m sensitive to the potential harms of doing so.
Which means that I can’t decide for myself what the risks are of erring in either direction.
Obviously you can’t decide what they are in this specific situation. But then I would think the thing to do would be to hold uncertainty. You don’t need to either assume that the harms work out one way, or that they work out another. You can say “I don’t know which way they work out, but some things that would make me think they work out one way are… and some things that would make me think they work out the other way are...”. Recall the paragraph I closed with:
Note that a blanket “do/don’t mention”, based on what I’ve said so far, feels unlikely to be very helpful here. I think there are probably situations compatible with what I describe where mentioning is good, and situations compatible with what I describe where mentioning is not good. The question is how we decide which is which.
This coversation is frustrating. Going forward I’m going to try to avoid putting effort into replying to you, on this post.
You compared what you would do to this guy to what you’d do to Polanski, and what you’d do to Polanski would be to badmouth him but not to “punish” him.
But then I would think the thing to do would be to hold uncertainty. You don’t need to either assume that the harms work out one way, or that they work out another.
There are situations where I need to have definite information in order to choose one side, and where significant uncertainty makes it appropriate to choose the other side. “Is it okay to harm this person?” is such a situation. If I’m uncertain about whether you have good reason to harm him, especially if it’s your own choice not to explain why, I’m going to say “no”, not be neutral about it.
You are not a robot and you don’t follow the first law of robotics. Actively hurting someone requires better justification than not doing so and allowing harm by inaction.
The question is how we decide which is which.
This is literally true, but the answer includes such things as “how good is your judgment about this person?” And that’s something you probably aren’t good at answering (because humans in general aren’t good at assessing their own ability to judge).
So looking back at this thread I realize I owe you a (limited) apology: I thought it had been you who told me to consult a lawyer, but that was a different user whose name also starts with a J.
It remains the case that you are misreading me, in a way that I don’t even see how you could be doing it, and that that’s frustrating. I don’t think I retract anything that I’ve said to you, and I still don’t want to put effort into replying to you, partly because you’re accusing me of saying things I did not say (even after I pointed out that I didn’t say them!) and believing things I do not believe.
But it’s possible that if I’d realized sooner that you were someone new, I would have put more effort into my earlier replies and we’d be in a better position now? Or maybe not. But in any case, I think you had not at the time earned the kind of reply that I started out giving you. So I’m sorry about that.
Most of this would take more effort to reply to than I want to, but this bit is easy:
You compared what you would do to this guy to what you’d do to Polanski, and what you’d do to Polanski would be to badmouth him but not to “punish” him.
This is simply false. You are wildly misreading me.
As far as I know: the person has not admitted doing the thing; there has been no justice done, no public accountability; no reason to think the thing would not happen again if circumstances enabled.
Is the thing something the person might not have realized that they were doing, or realized the gravity of? Has someone directly contacted the person in private?
(Extra paragraph because spoilers seemingly don’t work on GreaterWrong if they cover a whole comment?)
Argh, maybe I should have obfuscated even those details, and e.g. instead of saying “this is not a minor way” say “I think it is relevant whether or not it is a minor way”; and conclude where the balance of the considerations pointed without saying which considerations pointed in which way?
I think probably that level of paranoia-or-something feels excessive. And it would have made the comment much harder to write.
Some considerations I have:
(Spoilered to make it easier for people to write their own unprimed.)
As far as I know: the person has not admitted doing the thing; there has been no justice done, no public accountability; no reason to think the thing would not happen again if circumstances enabled.
I believe the user is in good standing on LW; they are “one of us”. I might feel differently if I was referring to Roman Polanski’s films, or the Unabomber’s math papers. I might feel differently if I was not publishing on LW. (This point also relevant when choosing between a comment and a footnote. I publish on my blog and crosspost here, so a footnote would be more visible to outside readers.)
I don’t know how many people are aware of the accusation. It was published on LW but might not have been seen widely. I don’t know if the lack-of-reaction is because broadly speaking people don’t know of the accusations; or think no-reaction is appropriate; or think “some reaction would be good but idk what and no one else is doing anything so uh”; or what.
I don’t particularly have any public response in mind. The person could be banned from LW but I dunno if I think that would actually be good. I’m not actively trying to make anything happen. But the (apparent) complete lack of reaction does seem bad to me; and it seems more likely to me that making the accusation more widely known causes a reaction that I consider broadly positive than a reaction I consider broadly negative.
I am confident enough in the accusation to say “I believe _” rather than “it seems likely to me that ”, but not confident enough to simply say “”. (I’m reluctant to put this in terms of probabilities, partly because the difference between those three confidence levels doesn’t just feel like a matter of probabilities to me?)
Many people have acted unethically and illegally in minor ways. This is not a minor way.
If I don’t mention the belief in this situation, when do I? It will almost never be relevant. Create a whole new post to remind people of it? Bring it up whenever the person posts on LW? Those don’t feel better, to me.
Pointing in the other direction, I feel like there’s a kind of culture where people feel unable to mention anyone without disclaiming that every bad thing the person has done is bad. Like, I think [the idea of Orson Scott Card I’ve picked up from Reddit, and likely also the actual Orson Scott Card] is homophobic and that’s bad. But I don’t want anyone who mentions Orson Scott Card to feel compelled to say that he’s a homophobe and that’s bad. I do think mentioning the belief points in the direction towards that kind of culture; but I also don’t want a culture where people don’t mention such things because they don’t want that kind of culture.
The weight of these feels pretty firmly on “mention the belief” to me.
If you are not confident enough in the strength of your evidence to simply say X, don’t publish it at all. In particular you state that you are intending to act on a “credible accusation”. This suggests that you do not actually have first-hand evidence of the truth of the matter, no matter how much you trust your source, and should be taken as further reason not to publish at all.
If you believe that a crime has been committed, that it should be punished, and have some testimony or other evidence to back up that accusation, we are not the people you should be talking to.
If you feel very strongly that you should publish anyway, consult a lawyer capable of advising you on matters of defamation before you do so.
It seems to be that your advice would prohibit me from saying “I believe Roman Polanski is a child rapist” or “I believe OJ Simpson is a murderer”. I’d try to avoid flatly asserting those. (I seem to have a higher bar than most for doing that.) I certainly have no first hand evidence on the truth of the claims.
If you think your advice wouldn’t apply to those, why not? If you think it would...
I’m not going to refrain out of fear of defamation lawsuits. I think that would be both cowardly and a miscalculation of the risks.
One enormous difference is that both of those are matters of public record, as determined by admission and/or jury verdicts made after examining direct evidence. Furthermore, in the current context you are not going to damage either of their lives to any meaningful degree by publically making the claim (regardless of whether the statements are true or not). If you were making either claim under similar circumstances to the situation you were asking about, I would also strongly advise against it for much the same reasons.
Note that I am not just talking about “fear of defamation lawsuits”. Legal advice would help in reducing the risk to yourself and anyone financially connected with you certainly, but also increases the chances of successfully prosecuting the case (in court or otherwise) against the person you believe to have committed this crime.
Quite frankly, stating “by the way, I believe this person to have committed crime X” in a post tangentially related to that person seems one of the worst possible ways to go about the matter.
I specifically chose examples where I believe this is not the case. As I understand the situations:
Polanski has pled guilty to some of what I accuse him of. He denies other parts, which he has not been tried for. I don’t know in what parts of the process a jury would have been involved. (Also, the guilty plea was part of a deal, and I think plea deals have a substantial rate of false confessions.)
Simpson denies it and was famously acquitted by a jury. He was later found liable in a civil trial. I don’t know if a jury would have been involved in that.
Prosecuting the person is not my goal here. If I do think about the effect of me-saying-something on the chances of the person getting convicted, my guess is that the effect is probably tiny but more likely to lean positive than negative.
If you think the effect is likely substantially negative to the extent that it’s worth getting legal advice, I’d like to hear more detail.
What are you trying to achieve?
Is it that you feel insufficient attention was paid to this person’s misdeeds and you want to focus attention on it?
Or is it that you feel uncomfortable with mentioning this person in a way that reinforces their status as a person in good standing on less wrong?
If the former, I would create a question post in the form “Why are we ignoring what X did?”, linking to the original post bringing up their misdeeds.
If the latter it’s more tricky. I don’t think it’s worth derailing your post for that purpose. If it’s possible to avoid mentioning them without stealing credit I would. Alternatively you could consider making their name a hyperlink to the post bringing up their misdeeds, but not actually say anything accusatory in the post itself.
I’m not really happy about either of those options, but I don’t have any better ideas.
To some extent both of those, but also...
I think I want to be the kind of person who wouldn’t collaborate on a movie with Roman Polanski. Which is not to say “it is the job of director’s guilds to punish members when they believe the legal system has failed to do so effectively”. It’s not to say “I’m going to punish anyone who collaborates on a movie with Roman Polanski”. But I think that’s the kind of person I want to be.
And if I were on a forum for aspiring movie directors, and talking about one of Roman Polanski’s movies, I think mentioning his irrelevant-to-movies actions would a) help me be that kind of person; and b) help others who want to be that kind of person, be that kind of person.
Which is related to the second, but felt worth bringing out explicitly.
Hm, yeah. That does feel less likely to cause drama, but...
I think my model for how that works is that by doing that, I’m giving myself kind of a plausible-deniable out where if someone talks about it I can be like “why are you bringing this up? I didn’t say anything I just gave a link”. And people recognize that I have that, and that I can make it frustrating for them if they say anything, and are less likely to say anything? I dunno, low confidence on this. (And not described very well.) But it feels like something is going on there that I don’t love.
Also I think as a reader I’d prefer to know what I’m clicking before I click it.
What’s wrong with doing this is that you’re causing harm, not that you’re “punishing”. Ruining someone’s reputation out of pure motives with no explicit desire to cause harm still does cause harm, and needs to be judged on that basis. “The harm I do is not punishment” doesn’t change whether you should do it.
And the Polanski comparison doesn’t work, even in a directors’ forum, because in a situation where Polanski’s bad deeds are not well known so you need to tell people about him, as far as you know he could be innocent and the victim of a smear campaign. Now you know otherwise, but that’s hindsight.
I also find your original question to be the wrong question. Before asking whether it’s okay to mention the accusation in an irrelevant context, you need to establish that it’s okay to mention it at all.
A culture of “we can’t accuse anyone of anything until it’s been proven in a court of law” causes harm too.
I get the impression you’re very aware of the harms of going too far in one direction, and completely insensitive to the harms of going too far in the other direction.
You are trying to hedge by saying “it’s not punishment”, which implies that you think that there’s some chance that he’s innocent and because you’re not punishing him, what you’re doing wouldn’t be too bad when done to an innocent person. If you’re uncertain enough about him that you’re going to hedge, you shouldn’t be doing anything to him at all.
You’re not telling us what the accusation or the evidence are. Which means that I can’t decide for myself what the risks are of erring in either direction. And it would be a bad idea to assume they work in the way most favorable to you when you don’t tell us what they are.
I have said no such thing. I did a ctrl+f for “punish” on this page to check. The only paragraph I’ve used that word is one where I’m not remotely saying this, and I have no idea why you’re reading it this way.
Even if I had said that, it would not imply what you say it would.
Right. That’s in part because I’m sensitive to the potential harms of doing so.
Obviously you can’t decide what they are in this specific situation. But then I would think the thing to do would be to hold uncertainty. You don’t need to either assume that the harms work out one way, or that they work out another. You can say “I don’t know which way they work out, but some things that would make me think they work out one way are… and some things that would make me think they work out the other way are...”. Recall the paragraph I closed with:
This coversation is frustrating. Going forward I’m going to try to avoid putting effort into replying to you, on this post.
You compared what you would do to this guy to what you’d do to Polanski, and what you’d do to Polanski would be to badmouth him but not to “punish” him.
There are situations where I need to have definite information in order to choose one side, and where significant uncertainty makes it appropriate to choose the other side. “Is it okay to harm this person?” is such a situation. If I’m uncertain about whether you have good reason to harm him, especially if it’s your own choice not to explain why, I’m going to say “no”, not be neutral about it.
You are not a robot and you don’t follow the first law of robotics. Actively hurting someone requires better justification than not doing so and allowing harm by inaction.
This is literally true, but the answer includes such things as “how good is your judgment about this person?” And that’s something you probably aren’t good at answering (because humans in general aren’t good at assessing their own ability to judge).
So looking back at this thread I realize I owe you a (limited) apology: I thought it had been you who told me to consult a lawyer, but that was a different user whose name also starts with a J.
It remains the case that you are misreading me, in a way that I don’t even see how you could be doing it, and that that’s frustrating. I don’t think I retract anything that I’ve said to you, and I still don’t want to put effort into replying to you, partly because you’re accusing me of saying things I did not say (even after I pointed out that I didn’t say them!) and believing things I do not believe.
But it’s possible that if I’d realized sooner that you were someone new, I would have put more effort into my earlier replies and we’d be in a better position now? Or maybe not. But in any case, I think you had not at the time earned the kind of reply that I started out giving you. So I’m sorry about that.
Most of this would take more effort to reply to than I want to, but this bit is easy:
This is simply false. You are wildly misreading me.
Is the thing something the person might not have realized that they were doing, or realized the gravity of? Has someone directly contacted the person in private?
(Suggest editing in spoiler tags)
Basically no, and yes.
(Extra paragraph because spoilers seemingly don’t work on GreaterWrong if they cover a whole comment?)
Argh, maybe I should have obfuscated even those details, and e.g. instead of saying “this is not a minor way” say “I think it is relevant whether or not it is a minor way”; and conclude where the balance of the considerations pointed without saying which considerations pointed in which way?
I think probably that level of paranoia-or-something feels excessive. And it would have made the comment much harder to write.