TracingWoodgrains

Karma: 978

Omaha, NE – ACX Meetups Everywhere 2021

TracingWoodgrains23 Aug 2021 8:53 UTC

1 point

0 comments1 min readLW link

TracingWoodgrains 22 May 2023 16:55 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: LoganStrohl’s comment on: What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is
Thank you for this comment. It’s an extraordinarily perceptive, candid, and thorough look into a set of experiences few are familiar with, and gave me a great deal to chew on. I very much admire your commitment to becoming a parent despite the complexity of your position—good luck with it all, and thanks again for sharing your experience.

TracingWoodgrains 9 Jul 2023 6:25 UTC
31 points
30
in reply to: Muireall’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Poorly constructed public narratives, though, make for bad policy and bad culture. Yes, much of it carries the instrumental goal of pragmatic trans acceptance, but it’s often presented in such a way so as to not only elide the complexities of that acceptance, but to make any discussion of policy trade-offs or personal disagreements radioactive. More, people tend to be poor at distinguishing between “narrative-simplicity” statements and truths worth orienting one’s life around.
Morphological freedom is a powerful and unifying principle that is easily, intuitively understood and can rally a range of people with disparate metaphysical beliefs in support of simple, valuable quality-of-life policy, and it generalizes from issues around the transgender experience to groups that are treated more like strawmen or inconveniences in current discourse, such as therians/trans-species identity. “My body, my choice” has already been thoroughly absorbed by the abortion debate, but a similar approach encapsulating the essence of morphological freedom is an easy case to make and a hard one to reject.
The idea of gender as an essence separate to sex, intrinsic to all, is a much steeper request, one that demands people realign their view of what is rather than what ought to be. If they cannot or will not realign that view, whatever their perspective on morphological freedom, they are placed in the role of Enemy Of The Cause.
People like Zack are in a miserable position, because the narrative they present of their experience is deeply inconvenient for the majority of people who feel similarly to them and thoroughly convenient to those who hate them: if, rather than being a woman born in the wrong body, someone like Zack is a man with an orientation that makes him wish to be a woman, dismissing the whole thing as a perverted fetish is trivial for hostile actors, and it becomes almost impossible to make some policy cases activists wish to make.
You frame it as rounded-off nuance, and I almost see where you’re coming from with that, but it gets so thoroughly rounded off that to assert it becomes a threat and to examine its implications or propose it as a basis for policy is to all but declare war on the most vocal progressive trans activists.
I am, thankfully, not personally invested in the same way Zack is. While I can full-throatedly support a morphological freedom–driven initiative, though, I cannot accept the truth claims progressive trans activists ask people to accept, and find Zack’s descriptions to come much closer to what appears to be the underlying truth of the phenomenon, inasmuch as it is knowable, and in a way that enables a consistent approach as I wrestle with phenomena like trans-species identity that seem closely connected and aim to keep the whole consistent with my own observations and experience. Not precisely—I have my own nuances and quibbles I’d add. But close enough to be legible. I agree that pragmatic acceptance is the way to go, but disagree that the most popular public narratives are really serving that end in sustainable, healthy ways.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 13:26 UTC
15 points
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in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I think it’s worth explicitly stating that while I think most in this community are reading “I plan to compare the things that this post says directly against specific claims in mine, and acknowledge anything where I was factually inaccurate” as an example of a positive norm, it reads to me as a strongly negative one.
Specifically: Based on this comment, it sounds like you knew or should have known much of this evidence was available upon the decision to publish your original post, and you went ahead regardless without waiting to review claims that falsify parts of your original post. In other words, you mixed what appear to be materially false claims with true ones in a post aimed explicitly at destroying the reputation of an organization. The correct time to update factual inaccuracies in something so high-stakes is not after-the-fact, it is prior to publication, and the presence of correctable falsehoods in the original, whether or not you subsequently correct them, is a major issue.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 13:30 UTC
30 points
27
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I fundamentally disagree with the way a lot of rationalists are treating the threat of legal action. The legal system is a failsafe to ensure means for protection against serious misbehavior. Based on this post, I think Nonlinear is correct to assert that several of the claims in the original article were false and likely libelous. Legal action in response to libelous claims aimed at destroying your reputation in your community is not escalatory, it is proportionate, and a threat of it should be a reminder that the situation is serious, not treated as casus belli to publish any and all information.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 14:00 UTC
12 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
As the publisher, Ben has a duty beyond simply uncritically repeating a source’s claims, if he knew or had reason to know those claims are materially false—including not taking reasonable steps to verify truth. The claim about being asked to transport illegal recreational drugs across a border is the most immediately clear one to me. Nonlinear told him it was false, had screenshots available to the contrary, and he published it. Whether he preceded it with “Alice says” makes little difference in terms of either moral or legal responsibility.

I respect that you don’t see the allegations as awful, but it looks like they had a dramatically negative effect on the reputation of the organization as a whole. The bar for writing something that has dramatic negative effects on someone’s reputation is and should be high; the court of public opinion is no better or more functional than the court of law.

It seems fundamentally inaccurate to me to treat lawsuit threats as an escalation to the decision to publish something that will destroy an organization’s reputation within their own community. Whatever the merits of any specific suit, those are equally adversarial decisions and the one is a proportionate response to the other, not an escalation.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 14:48 UTC
13 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
My understanding is that they are addressing the same event (pharmacy for antibiotics and ADHD meds) in all locations, and they make it clear in his post they dispute every part of his frame about that event, including his presentation of their response as basically agreeing with him.

I’m not sure the value in focusing on a specific story when I’m making a general behavioral claim, though. My stance is this:

If (1) you inform someone that you are going to publish something that will be severely detrimental to their reputation and (2) they assert you are making several materially false claims in that publication, claims they have hard evidence exist, then (3) it is unreasonable not to wait to review that evidence, and (4) a libel suit is proportionate, not escalatory, in response to the actual publication of falsehoods that severely damage someone’s reputation.

From those, it follows that warning of a potential libel suit in advance of publication should absolutely not be read as “I am being unreasonably threatened and therefore should publish immediately to stand up to bullies.” It should be read as “I am entering a serious, mutually adversarial situation and I should be absolutely sure, to the best of my ability, that I have my facts straight.” The initial seriously adversarial decision is the choice to publish allegations, not the choice to sue. Both can be correct or incorrect depending on specific circumstance.

The decision to publish immediately, and your endorsement of that decision, is a bad misread of the situation—not defecting in response to defecting, but carelessness bordering on malice in an already adversarial context—and one that causes predictable harm should any allegations be materially, provably false.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 14:53 UTC
12 points
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in reply to: RamblinDash’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
My understanding of truth as an absolute defense to libel (disclaimer: law student, not lawyer, and referring to hastily examined case law, not deeply researched understanding) is that it refers to the truth of the core statement, not the truthful replication of defamation. In other words, I believe you can still be liable for publishing “A claims X” when X is false and you had reason to know that, depending on the circumstances.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 15:05 UTC
14 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
“I’m going to expend both of our time and cause huge amounts of damage” happened upon publication of the initial allegations. It was guaranteed to happen upon publication of the initial allegations. It was, in simple fact, the expected result of the initial allegations.

The original post was a weighty decision and if you post it there has better be a serious reason. A legal case is procedurally more weighty than inflicting massive reputational damage on someone in their own community, but it’s not clear that it’s morally more weighty, and treating it as escalatory feels like a category error no matter who you think wins the overall “bet” between Ben and Nonlinear.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 15:15 UTC
17 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
“I’m correct in seeking to inflict enormous reputational damage on you, therefore you are unjustified in responding with a threat of legal action, and your threat of legal action justifies me refusing to proactively examine promised exculpatory evidence” is the position I hear you endorsing, and I find it bizarre.

No! You can’t enter an adversarial frame, then object when people accurately treat it as adversarial and use their adversarial response as an excuse to avoid due diligence! That is not, or should not be, how any of this sort of investigative journalism works.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 15:38 UTC
17 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
No. He knew he was operating on partial information; he knew they had a great deal of information they were willing to give him in a short time span; he had no way of evaluating the quality of the evidence they would give before they would give it. He was not justified in half-doing his job whether or not they were being unpleasant in response—a threat of legal action is emphatically not an excuse to avoid considering their evidence prior to publication or rushing publication unless it becomes clear they are unreasonably delaying. A week or two, in response to serious allegations, is not an unreasonable delay, and no matter the ultimate strength of their story he neglected his responsibility to proactively understand it.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 15:51 UTC
19 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
When they asked for, and were denied, one week to compile evidence, I don’t think it’s reasonable to conclude much of anything based on the final response process taking longer.

It’s absolutely adversarial to reveal the truth if the truth is harmful to someone. It’s critical to distinguish between “adversarial” and “bad.” Choosing to investigate a group over a long period of time and then publish information to damage them is fundamentally an adversarial act. Not a bad thing, but for one who aims to practice investigative journalism, vital to keep in mind.

If your goal is to reveal the truth and not to inflict harm on someone, you should wait until you have all sides as thoroughly as you can reasonably get them, and not cut that process short when the party you are making allegations against responds with understandable antagonism—until and unless they refuse to cooperate further and have no more useful information to give.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 17:03 UTC
29 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I want to make a separate reply to register specifically in light of the downvotes you’ve attracted that while I disagree with your conclusions on the merits here, I think your mode of engagement on this is wholly appropriate and that the voting system is being, if not gamed, at least heavily influenced by people with strong emotional investment in the conflict at hand, which should be considered however the votes in the conversation wind up.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 19:33 UTC
16 points
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in reply to: faul_sname’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Specifically, I think people by default read this post as an example of good epistemic practice in a community built around good epistemic practice. In this case, though, I think the prior bad epistemic practice (not waiting for full information before publishing a highly consequential piece aimed at inflicting reputational damage on someone) is significant enough and bad enough that emphasizing a plan to update after the fact should be viewed primarily through the lens of damage control.
The standard with this sort of investigative piece should be to gather information of this nature prior to publication to whatever extent possible, where updating on new information after-the-fact is praiseworthy only if that information was not realistically knowable prior to publication.
You’re correct that it’s better than being wrong but not acknowledging it, but I think that’s a well-established standard in this sphere and there’s a stronger need to update based on the importance of gathering relevant information prior to publication.

TracingWoodgrains 14 Dec 2023 20:07 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: faul_sname’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
My read is that many people still consider the publication of the original post to be prudent and responsible given the circumstances, while any updates based on information that comes to light here will be prudent and responsible given the new information. Instead, I think people should view the original post as imprudent and irresponsible to the extent that it did not give one side of an adversarial situation an adequate hearing-out (and it really seems like it didn’t: a three-hour phone call where you misleadingly summarize their response as “Good summary!”, then refuse to wait until they can provide a more substantive response, is extraordinarily bad practice given the hundreds of hours he mentions putting into the rest of the investigation), with any subsequent updates being judged as returning towards responsibility after the fact rather than continuing a pattern of prudence.

TracingWoodgrains 15 Dec 2023 0:29 UTC
8 points
4
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I would be curious for that to occur and will make no confident proclamations about what they would or would not say. I suspect the epistemic status markers included are not nearly as protective as you would assume to the extent actual, materially harmful falsehoods were published, but I could be mistaken.

TracingWoodgrains 15 Dec 2023 0:41 UTC
41 points
19
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I responded to your EA forum comments much earlier in the day, but my responses are still stuck in the mod filter, so I might repeat myself a bit here. I’m not part of EA, but I’ve been around the rationalist sphere for a long while and I have more experience than most here with investigative journalism–adjacent work.
You regularly mention hundreds of hours of work, a deadline you had to meet, the inconvenience you would have faced upon delaying, and the chance that you might have chosen not to publish at all had you delayed.
That’s all very well and good, but honestly doesn’t sway the needle for me at all in terms of your duty in the situation. Self-imposed deadlines are not an excuse to avoid hearing out one party to a conflict you’re publishing.
In those hundreds of hours, so far as I can tell, you spent a grand total of three gathering one side of the story—the side of a group Ben’s post was explicitly adversarial towards and explicitly aimed at destroying the reputation of. When they told him they were compiling a detailed list of evidence to respond to some of his claims, you guys flatly refused to investigate further or delay your self-imposed deadline. I cover a story like this almost every week for the podcast I work for, and I put more time into gathering opposing stories than that.
I believe you when you say that (almost) all evidence Ben was given made it into the post. I emphatically disagree that holding a firm publication deadline was reasonable when you were being warned of evidence that would materially contradict many claims within your post. When the reputation of someone within their own community is at stake, you want to dot every i and cross every t, and spending hundreds of hours over the course of several months collecting accusations and a single-digit number in a week collecting rebuttals, up to and including making significant corrections on the final day and rejecting other significant corrections as being too late to add, does not meet that standard.
Trying someone in the court of public opinion can be as serious a matter as trying them in the court of law, and while you say the goal of the post was not to judge, that is both hard to square with lines like “I expect that if Nonlinear does more hiring in the EA ecosystem it is more-likely-than-not to chew up and spit out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world” and hard to square with the duty you take on by electing to publish an exposé about someone. You have to play the role of judge in an article like that, and you are not fulfilling your duty by circulating allegations without putting in sufficient due diligence.

TracingWoodgrains 15 Dec 2023 0:58 UTC
32 points
14
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Concretely, here’s what you should have done instead:
Pause. Wait. Delay. Completely halt publication of the post, against the direct promises you made to your sources, who have shown you credible evidence that they are worried about retaliation. Make your excuses, make your apologies, recognize that you are on the verge of publishing a partial narrative aimed at dealing serious reputational damage to someone in your sphere, and take a moment to absolutely ensure all the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed.
If you receive concrete evidence that you are about to publish a falsehood aimed at inflicting material harm on someone, your duty is simply not to do that. If you are scrambling on the last day to update clear material falsehoods in your post, as Spencer reports with the company reviews, something has failed in your fact-checking process, and you should grimace, take a deep breath, and pause publication until you have things figured out.
Of course Nonlinear was using aggressive tactics. There’s no truly returning from reputational damage inflicted by a post of that sort. Even if a response sways some people, it will at best always result in a sharp community divide, with people taking sides and landing with one adversarial party (you) or the other (them). I was unfamiliar with Nonlinear and Lightcone until these events, and don’t have any sort of personal stake in the fight other than a desire to see careful standards applied to investigative work. But it seems abundantly clear to me that proper caution was not taken in the publication of the original post, and the root of that seems to be an impression that it’s alright to publish material falsehoods if you update later, and that it’s more important to keep to a publication schedule than to ensure you’re presenting a complete picture. I emphatically disagree on both counts.

TracingWoodgrains 15 Dec 2023 4:33 UTC
50 points
26
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I told you what I wanted you to do. You say it’s unrealistic, I say that I wouldn’t think to hold you to a standard I don’t hold myself to.
I’m a blogger and a podcast producer, not an investigative journalist, and I’m paid to focus on internet nonsense, not truly critical, world-saving stuff. But I do my fair share of investigative work. This article is one of my recent high-effort investigations, over someone getting punched on a beach after a long series of ugly subculture drama—a much lower-stakes sequence than the one you covered, but one no less personal or painful for the participants.
The “antagonists” were not particularly communicative, but I reached out to them multiple times, including right before publication, checking if I could ask questions and asking them to review my claims about them for accuracy. I went to the person closest to them who was informed on the situation and got as much information as I could from them. I spent hours talking with my primary sources, the victim and his boyfriend, and collecting as much hard evidence as possible. I spent a long time weighing which points were material and which would just serve to stir up and uncover old drama. Parties claimed I was making major material errors at several points during the process, and I dug into their claims as thoroughly as I could and asked for all available evidence to verify. Often, the disputes they claimed were material hinged on dissatisfaction with framing.
All sources were, mutually, worried about retribution and vitriol from the other parties involved. All sources were part of the same niche subculture spaces, all had interacted many times over the past half-decade, mostly unhappily, and all had complicated, ugly backstories.
I was not paid for this, except inasmuch as I’m paid a part-time monthly salary for podcast production work. I did it in my spare time while balancing a full law school schedule. I approached it with care, with seriousness, and with full understanding of the reputational effects I expected it to have and the evidence I had backing and justifying those effects. What I want you to do is exactly what I would do if I were assigned this task, given comparable timing and hour constraints. No more, no less.
There’s no threshold of hours of engagement. The test I am describing is this: are you receiving, or do you seem likely to receive, new material facts that contradict elements of your narrative? You were, up until two hours before publication, with a promise that there was more on the way. There is nothing unreasonable about saying publication should be delayed in that circumstance.
Anyway, look, I’m not an investigative reporter with experience in the field, much as I LARP as one online. That said, I’m on good personal terms with several and am happy to put my money where my mouth is and check with them. Let me know if the following is an appropriate summary or whether you’d make changes:
Say you were advising someone on a story they’d been working on for six months aimed at presenting an exposé of a group their sources were confident was doing harm. They’d contacted dozens of people, cross-checked stories, and did extensive independent research over the course of hundreds of hours, paying their key sources for the trouble. Their sources, who will be anonymous but realistically identifiable in the article, express serious concerns about retribution and request a precise, known-in-advance publication date. Towards the end, they contact the group in question, with their primary conversation lasting a few hours and coming less than a week before their scheduled publication date. The group claims that several points in their article are materially wrong and libelous and asks for another week to compile evidence to rebut those claims, growing increasingly frantic as the publication date approaches and escalating to a threat of a libel suit. On the last day before publication, they show a draft to another person close to the story, who makes at least one clear correction of material fact, then, with a couple of hours to go before the scheduled publication, provides evidence contradicting another of the article’s supporting claims.
Would you advise them to publish the article in its current form, make a last-minute edit to include the final piece of material evidence, wait another week to review the claimed rebuttal, or take some other course of action?

TracingWoodgrains 15 Dec 2023 4:56 UTC
16 points
5
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
It’s tempting to nitpick the edits a bit, but I think this is probably close enough to get good answers while being approximately satisfactory to both of us. I’ll let you know how it goes.

TracingWoodgrains

Omaha, NE – ACX Mee­tups Every­where 2021

Omaha, NE – ACX Meetups Everywhere 2021