It’s perfectly reasonable for any client to be suspicious of my motivations and alignment, I’m after all paid directly by the same government that is gunning to throw them behind bars! The clients that are most honest with me are overwhelmingly either newbies to the criminal justice system or factually innocent. The ones who lie to me the most are frequent flyers whose guilt is not in doubt (non-legally speaking). Everyone wants to be let out of jail, the problem is that the latter group has no viable recourse available to make that happen, and their typical temperament drifts them towards pathetic dishonesty.
ymeskhout
Karma: 1,270
I’m not sure what point you think I made here. I have a vague idea of how many lawsuits are filed in general, an extremely vague theory about what portion are defamation suits, and a hopelessly speculative guess of how many of those are frivolous. You’re expressing a significantly higher level of epistemic certainty about that last question, and I’m questioning what evidence it’s based on. You haven’t offered any basis except assertions and anecdotal citations to notable examples.
Interesting! I wasn’t aware of this exception. Writing about the law is hard because there are always a million different caveats, some of which will be obsolete by the next year.
I agree with asking this question. There’s a worthy journalistic norm against naming victims of sexual assault, and a norm in the other direction in favor of naming individuals charged with a crime. You could justify this by arguing that a criminal ‘forfeits’ the right to remain anonymous, that society has a transparency interest to know who has committed misdeeds. Whereas a victim has not done anything to diminish their default right to privacy.
How you apply these principles to NL depends entirely on who you view as the malefactor (or none/both), and there is demonstrable disagreement from the LW community on this question. So how do you adjudicate which names are ok to post?
Well damn, I really appreciate the comment. Your books have been such an inspiration to me but I still haven’t read Legal Systems Very Different from Ours yet. It’s been a while since I’ve looked into non-government law enforcement and the essay above wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive primer on the topic; rather it was focused on my own trajectory and how I changed my mind on a relatively narrow slice. Thanks again for the link, and for everything you do!
I hope you receive this feedback packaged along the constructive nature I intend. A concerning number of your responses that touch on legal issues demonstrate an obvious lack of subject matter familiarity. This is very apparent to me because I am a licensed and practicing lawyer, but your statements are likely to be read by other non-lawyers as epistemically certain to a degree that is unwarranted.
Everything I will say in this paragraph is potentially subject to a million needling obscure exceptions, because lawyers love exceptions. In general though, Tracing is correct that it’s largely irrelevant whether a contract was signed, when it was signed, or even whether it was ever written.
This issue is also tangential to the overall allegations levied against Nonlinear, because the dispute does not center on whether or not a contract was breached, but rather on behavior too inchoate to be adequately adjudicated within a legal framework. Consider for example how no one reads the lengthy terms of service that we all reflexively click ‘agree’ on. Courts in the United States have repeatedly ruled that these contracts are enforceable, even if they take the form of a loose piece of paper that slips out of some shrinkwrap. I personally think that’s an unfair standard, but the law doesn’t care about my opinion.
Similarly, the technical legal attributes of the salary contract will all undoubtedly take a backseat to more pressing concerns about consent, awareness, power imbalance, and basic fairness.
They’re in a bind with severely limited options. I’ve never had a client focus on a single avenue towards acquittal, they’ll take whatever they can get. They’ll switch focus from witness credibility, wrong first name on traffic ticket, filing deadlines missed by prosecutor, constitutional law argument they found on youtube, pretending to have a mental illness, or MARRYING a witness while in jail under the theory that spousal privilege somehow would prevent them from testifying (this happened!), etc.
Whether or not they seem me as ‘trustworthy’ is a question with multiple dimensions. If they don’t trust me to work hard on their case, I can prove otherwise by actually taking their Dick Bottoms leads seriously but that’s generally the opposite of what they want. I can also prove otherwise by researching legal remedies but they get pissed if I don’t reach the “right” answer. What it tends to boil down to is that they don’t trust me to be their criminal co-conspirator, like with clients who (coyly) ask me to threaten witnesses on their behalf or otherwise tamper with evidence somehow.
Generally I’m a fungible component of the system and the sociopathic bunch have no reason to care about what happens to me specifically (I don’t fault them for that) which is why I describe this as pure manipulation attempts.
FWIW when I was having these conversations with my clients, I was explicitly thinking of the exact same ideas presented in the Sequences. I do think that overall, LW would benefit from a higher appreciation of deception and how it can manifest in the real world. The scenarios I outlined are almost cartoonish, but they’re very real, and I thought it useful to demonstrate how I used very basic rationalist tools to uncover lies.
I disagree that we’re confusing multiple issues; my central point is that these things are deeply related.
This is what I’m talking about. It’s ok to say that these issues are related to each other, but it’ll remain useful to retain the ability to discuss and evaluate individual components. Otherwise:
A: “It’s ok to offer victims advice on how to reduce their risk.”
B: “No because the advice gets packaged with doubt over whether the victim really is a victim.”
A: “Ok but I’m not saying we should doubt victim’s stories, I’m only talking about advice on how to reduce risk.”
B: “But the advice tends to be given at inappropriate times and with what appears to be insufficient compassion”
A: “Yes that would be a problem, but again I’m not suggesting that people give advice inappropriately. I would hope that when I advocate for something, folks can presume there’s an implied ‘appropriately’ qualifier in there.”
B: “Well most of the advice people give is straight up wrong.”
A: “I just said...”
And so on. I’m not saying that the concerns you raise are invalid! But stuffing everything into the same discourse gets confusing very quickly. My post was strictly about “giving advice to victims” and the pushback you’re giving invokes all these collateral issues I never argued in favor of.
Maybe it turns out it’s impossible to disaggregate “giving advice” from all the other phenomena you’re describing, or maybe it’s impossible to give advice with appropriate timing and grace. Those are important discussions to have but nevertheless it helps to first imagine the least convenient possible world and to keep issues discrete, otherwise it all gets mixed into a murky soup.
It seems that you think that “male/female” should refer strictly to genetics while “man/woman” should refer to gender identity, but I don’t think this a great convention: in everyday use, “woman” and “female” are often used interchangeably.
I am aiming to do the best I can in communicating with precision and I apologize for any missteps on my part. It’s certainly true that “woman” and “female” are often used interchangeably but I’ve seen this become the source of significant confusion and ambiguity. You are correct about how I use the two terms (although it’s more about social role than identity); that is the convention I’ve eventually settled upon and so far it has worked well in minimizing ambiguity.
My working assumption about the word “female” is that it is much more heavily grounded within the context of reproductive capacity and the associated secondary characteristics (e.g. a livestock breeder ordering “females” from a supplier is not ambiguous in that context) which is why I used it.
Given your greater familiarity with this space I trust your judgment that “natural females” would not be negatively received here, but I’m doubtful this would be the case outside of LW and it’s difficult to keep a vocabulary index updated across so many places. I also imagine that transmen and non-binary individuals would not appreciate being called “female”, but they’d appreciate “natural female” even less. With regards to “genetic females” my question would be “as opposed to what?” so my (weak) objection is mostly based on its ambiguity to me. I wouldn’t be confident that either terms would carry the meaning I intend.
Either way, I was not privy to either of these alternate phrases before, so I hope it’s established that my use of “females” was not intended to be malicious. Language is imperfect and I’m trying to do the best I can in nevertheless communicating clearly.
Some examples of places where knowing someone identifies as a woman vs. as a man vs. as nonbinary would affect your view of their behavior:
I appreciate that you provided specific examples but my immediate reaction to your list was one of bafflement.
While I personally don’t care what bathrooms or changing room anyone uses, to the extent someone does prompt a negative reaction for being in the “wrong” room it would be entirely predicated on how that individual is perceived by others (read: pass), not what they personally identify as.
Similarly, I don’t understand why I would care about someone’s gender identity when assessing their sartorial choices; they either look good or not and me finding out about their internal identity wouldn’t prompt an update. I recently had two friends come across an XXXL pair of overalls they both managed to fit into each pant leg. I was able to deduce that they were being silly through an astute analysis of several context clues; I didn’t need to know what body size they subjectively “identified” as to reach that conclusion.
With casual social touching, I’ve never met anyone who drew the line based on someone’s identity. If these people do indeed exist, I would be intensely curious to better understand the basis of their preference. Namely: what would the difference be between someone asking for a hug while announcing they identify as Y versus, ceteris paribus, announcing that they identify as X.
To the extent my post had a thesis, it’s that using gender categories to imputing predictions is highly inefficient and a highly misleading sorting mechanism, and that it is generally better to be specific than hope you hit the correct stereotypes in your audience’s mind. The examples you list demonstrate this point exactly.
As a further analogy, consider if a friend were to tell me “I’m not wearing a polo shirt now, but I identify as someone who is wearing a polo shirt, and I am telling you this information in the hopes that you’ll correctly guess that I enjoy golfing.” Why play these riddles?
You stated that I potentially don’t interact with people’s gender that frequently, and that’s probably true. I generally avoid making assumptions about individuals, for the reasons stated above. Originally you said that my post lacked an “understanding of the experiences of trans people” and I’m still eager to learn more! What am I missing exactly and what sources would you recommend I read?
I appreciate this systemic approach to analyzing lying! The Pros/Cons depend heavily on the type of lie, and you can split it roughly between “factual lies” and “sympathy lies”. Factual lies are about whether or not this thing did or did not happen, while sympathy lies are used to generate sympathy from others (e.g. “if I get convicted I’ll lose everything”).
Sympathy lies are more likely to be successful, but they’re also not very consequential. It’s possible that it could have an effect at the slimmest of margins, but the risks give it an expected payoff close to zero. The only way I can see this work is if it’s done by the truly sociopathic compulsive liars who can manage to successfully con dozens of people.
Factual lies are meaningless. The evidence either corroborates their claims or it doesn’t. If there’s no corroboration except their word, then they open themselves up to potentially brutal cross-examination. Many many (guilty) defendants have confidently believed they can talk their way out of a situation and failed spectacularly (SBF comes to mind).
And yes, absolutely my job relies heavily on building trust and rapport with my clients. It occupies at least around 80% of my initial conversations with a client.
That’s interesting, I was not aware of this dynamic. Were there any particular posts that served as a good summary or lodestar for people’s stances on this topic?
As a relative outsider and with the job I have (and also fully acknowledging the self-serving aspect of what I’m about to say) this strikes me as a naive and self-destructive position to hold. People in the real world lie, cheat, manipulate, and exploit others, and it seems patently obvious to me that we need mechanisms to discourage that behavior. A culture of disdain towards that conduct is only one aspect of that fight.
How do you determine who counts as a whistleblower? The generic definition refers to anyone who discloses insider information with the intent to warn others about potentially illegal or unethical misconduct. By this definition, Kat is a whistleblower because she revealed information about Alice’s history of dishonesty (assuming of course this accusation is correct).
You mix up your tenses in sneaky way, projecting bad aspects of the past onto the future:
I think this would normally be an astute observation but in my case mixing up tenses has been a persistent source of frustration for my editors. Despite the scolding I get and my efforts to watch out for it, I screw this up constantly (I don’t know if this explains it but English is my third language and I mostly learned it in an ad-hoc manner). All I can say now is that the tense mix-up was an inadvertent error on my part. When I talk about which cultural values “will become” the dominant paradigm, I wasn’t referring to the future or present, but rather a jump forward in time from one past date to another (e.g. from 600 AD to 605 AD or whatever). Same when I talk about which code “will replicate”, it’s about a date in the past that is future from another date in the past. When I talk about “this community” I was referring to communities in the past that materially profited off of warfare.
I’m normally really bad at conjugating verbs consistently, so the mixed up tenses should not be seen as evidence of any hidden messages. I don’t know if that clears up any ambiguity.
You speak positively of violence through the lens of past societies that needed it, without disclaiming that it’s bad in a present-day lens
You’re not the only one to make this criticism but I admit I’m confused by it. I’m generally an optimist about the human condition largely because of how personally thrilling and eternally grateful I am towards the steady obsolescence of violence as a solution in modern life. I think it’s a Good Thing™ that humans nowadays are significantly more inclined to favor peaceful cooperation over violent conquest. But if I had to include throat-clearing passages in between all my sentences (violence is bad! trade is good! slavery is bad! peace is good! etc.) I wouldn’t fault the reader who would find this patronizing and infantilizing.
So in the passage you quoted above, I relay an observation that Men of Violence were “appropriately” praised by their community. All this means is that, purely from a base material gain, the community had a reason to praise conquerors who bring back stolen and looted riches. “Appropriately” here serves only to distinguish whether the community was acting arbitrarily or rationally; it was not at all intended to be praise for that conduct. The description here was fully intended to describe what is, not what ought. I’m reminded of a similar confusion regarding the “evolutionary benefits” of rape. Describing how sexual coercion can be a “successful” evolutionary strategy is not at all the same thing as arguing that rape is “good” or whatever. I would hope that this distinction is well established within these circles.
I already worry too much about being overly wordy, so in the interest of brevity and also to reduce the risk of coming off as patronizing, I avoid repeating points I think are too obvious. So in this case, I didn’t find it necessary to repeatedly disclaim how much I dislike rape, slavery, and violence. The exclusion of my denunciations in my post should not be taken as evidence of endorsement.
As a prolific criminal defense attorney, I cannot endorse that advice on those grounds. You should always hope that your attacker survives because killing someone (even if ultimately justified) exposes you to more serious legal jeopardy. Grosskreutz’s testimony was disastrous not because he was a criminal who was bad at testifying, but because he told the truth and the truth happened to be on Rittenhouse’s side. An attacker getting killed doesn’t mean one cannot draw inferences based on the circumstances.
Given that Ben is working on a response, I think it’s clearly the right call to wait a week or two until we have another round of counter-evidence before jumping to conclusions.
This is a remarkable sentence given your prior statement from three months ago:
I don’t have all the context of Ben’s investigation here, but as someone who has done investigations like this in the past, here are some thoughts on why I don’t feel super sympathetic to requests to delay publication
Have you changed your mind since?
To be clear, the decision to delay publication will always be a judgement call subject to reasonable disagreement. As pointed out, sometimes the targets of an investigation will request a publication delay under false pretenses either as an indefinite delay tactic or to break the story themselves under much more favorable framing.
Even the question of whether to notify the targets of an investigation is subject to reasonable disagreement. To give an intentionally trivial example from a journalistic amateur, the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus published an expose a few months ago about what it saw as shoddy practices by Linus Tech Tips, a wildly popular tech review channel. GN’s video was very well received, but the most notable criticism was around their intentional choice not to contact LTT for comment prior to publication. They defended their decision, arguing it is not necessary when there’s either a pattern of misbehavior or a significant risk of a cover-up.
One of the criticisms against LTT was how they failed to return an expensive prototype they received for testing purposes from Billet Labs, opting instead to auction it off without notice to or permission from Billet. GN’s concerns about notifying LTT appears vindicated, because less than 3 hours after GN’s video was posted, Linus quickly sent an email to Billet asking for an invoice (after months of radio silence) and then publicly proclaimed “we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype” falsely implying that Billet was in agreement. This was solid evidence that had LTT been notified in advance, they would’ve scrambled towards similarly dishonest attempts at public relations damage control.
So yes, reasonable people can disagree on whether or not to delay publication or even notify the targets of an investigation. No denying that. What should guide our decisions here should be adherence to generally-applicable principles, and I struggle to discern what yours are in this area.
For example, @Ben Pace vaguely cited what he thought were credible threats of retaliation against Chloe and Alice for speaking out. You speculate on several other possibilities:
My guess is Ben’s sources were worried about Emerson hiring stalkers, calling their family, trying to get them fired from their job, or threatening legal action.
Just by your telling there are ample reasons to discount the fears in this instance (though not conclusively so). Ben wrote that Emerson “reportedly” had plans to hire stalkers, and though this allegation is not impossible it strikes me as too inherently absurd to take seriously (How does one find stalkers to hire? What instructions would these stalkers receive? Would this be in person or online? How would Emerson guard against being linked to these stalkers? etc). The other fears you outline fall under a similar penumbra in that had Emerson pursued the plans, it would only serve as the best confirmation of the allegations against him as a vindictive and vengeful character (but also what exactly would he even say to their families?).
I don’t know what evidence Ben saw (and apparently neither do you) but absent specific evidence, retaliation is a meaningless metric to consider because anyone saying anything negative about someone can plausibly cite retaliation as a potential risk. But assuming the threats are 100% legitimate, how exactly does hewing to a specific publication date mitigate against any of them? You say that having things out in the open provides a defense, I admit I don’t understand how that works exactly, nor do I understand why public disclosure would cease to be an option had Emerson actually followed through on his hypothetical retaliations before the post was published. We all know about the Streisand effect by now.
I believe you’re completely off-base in concluding malicious intent from Emerson threatening a libel suit, and I addressed that in a separate reply. The argument against publication delay I found the most shocking was this one:
Separately, the time investment for things like this is really quite enormous and I have found it extremely hard to do work of this type in parallel to other kinds of work, especially towards the end of a project like this, when the information is ready for sharing, and lots of people have strong opinions and try to pressure you in various ways. Delaying by “just a week” probably translates into roughly 40 hours of productive time lost, even if there isn’t much to do, because it’s so hard to focus on other things. That’s just a lot of additional time, and so it’s not actually a very cheap ask.
This was a giant blaring red alarm to me. When I heard about “40 hours of lost productive time” I initially parsed its meaning as “lost productivity because I was flooded with tons of irrelevant information that took 40 hours to sort through”. I never would have guessed that you were instead referring to a mental fixation so severe that it occupies nearly half your waking hours. I would like to think that this should serve as a warning, a caution that perhaps one is too psychologically invested to adequately pursue truth, not as a justification to further accelerate.
I feel like we’re confusing multiple issues here, so I’ll try to break them into discrete pieces:
What is victim-blaming and why it is bad
How prevalent victim-blaming is, and whether it varies depending on the offense
What is the appropriate time to offer advice to a victim of an offense
How often allegations from a victim are met with suspicion or doubt, and whether it varies depending on the offense
How much reporting a given offense is discouraged, either formally or informally
How humiliating being a victim is, and how much that varies depending on the offense
There’s probably more but that’s a good start. It seems to me that you’re flattening all those discrete points under the same penumbra of “victim-blaming” with the implicit connotation of “therefore X is bad”.
I admit I don’t have a definition of victim-blaming that isn’t question-begging, since I couldn’t find a consistent standard for how to determine if something is ‘blame’. But at minimum, it seems clear that victim-blaming is not the same thing as items 4 through 6. I think it would be helpful if you used more precise language because most of your post is an argument against victim-doubting, victim-humiliating, etc. It might be a good idea to taboo the word victim-blaming unless you can offer a detailed definition.
No, the lying doesn’t come from a lack of trust but rather a manipulation attempt. Their overriding goal is to get off the charges no matter what it takes, so they’re willing to flip through and latch onto whatever narrative helps them get there. They basically want me to be a ventriloquist and use me to launder their talking points because it’s more believable coming from me. Of course as I pointed out, they don’t really think the plan all the way through.
The general animus against defamation lawsuits is one aspect I found particularly puzzling within this saga. And here I confess my biases in that I am a lawyer, but also a free speech maximalist who used to work at the ACLU (back when they were cool) and an emphatic supporter of anti-SLAPP statutes.
I suspect that defamation lawsuits have a poor reputation in part because of a selection bias. There are significantly more threats to sue than actual suits in our universe, and the threats that will shine brightest on the public’s memory will necessarily be the most outlandish and least substantiated. Threats are further proliferated because they’re very cheaply deployed (anyone with a bar card can type out a cease & desist letter on their phone on the toilet and still have time to flush) and — crucially — authentically terrifying regardless of the underlying merits or lack thereof. As you point out, there is no question that lawfare is often levied as a war of financial attrition.
The closest corollary would be the bevy of tort abuse stories. Before it was widely and thoroughly vindicated, the McDonald’s hot coffee story served as the lodestar condemnation that the American tort system was fucked beyond repair. But again, we’re going to deal with a selection bias problem here. Unless you’re trawling through every civil court docket in the country, the only time any layperson would hear about a personal injury story is when it’s blatantly ridiculous. The same issue exists with defamation lawsuits.
So just because defamation lawsuits are used as a tool of abuse, does not mean that every defamation claim is baseless. I would hope that this statement is self-evident. Instead of picturing a scorned celebrity siccing their horde of rabid lawyers against any whiff of criticism, I’d want you to consider that sometimes random nobodies are accused of quadruple homicide by TikTok psychics, or accused of election fraud by the former mayor of New York City. I’d hope that you can appreciate how terrifying it can be to be the subject of a malicious smear campaign, how daunting the prospect of initiating a defamation suit can be, and how uncertain any potential vindication might be.
I have no idea how many defamation lawsuits are initiated, but there are more than 40 million lawsuits filed every year in the US. Ideally you’d have some way to discern which grievances are valid and which ones aren’t besides just declaring all as inherently suspicious.