Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong

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.

This is a combative comment which fails to back up its claims.

how surely only noble and good people ever sue over libel

if you really believe lawsuits are so awesome and wonderful

He did not say this. This is not reasonable for you to write.

you can count on one hand the sort of libel lawsuit which follows this beautiful fantasy.

This is not true. This is obviously not true. A successful and important libel case (against Giuliani) was literally headline news this week. You can exceed five such cases just looking at similar cases: Dominion v Fox; Smartmatic v Fox; Coomer v Newsmax; Khalil v Fox; Andrews v D’Souza; and Weisenbach v Project Veritas. This is extremely unreasonable for you to say.

They are cynically used to burn money based on the fact that rich people have a lot more money than poor people

Nonlinear certainly doesn’t have more money than the EA community. Nonlinear plausibly (?) doesn’t have more money than Lighthouse; at a minimum, it’s not a significant difference.

which they would generally win, BTW

<argument needed>

It’s very unclear to me whether Lighthouse would win; your confidence here seems unreasonable; but more importantly, “no, that’s not true” is just not a useful thing to say here. (You’re responding to a post that did have many good citations of cases; seems like most people think it’s plausible they’d lose.)

And a lawsuit is a way to destroy someone, not counter-argue them.

In the most blandly literal sense possible, lawsuits are arguments.

what goes on inside a court has only a questionable relationship to counterargument to begin with, which is why a decent chunk of rationality is about explaining why legal norms are so inappropriate for rational thinking

You have again not given any argument for this.

The rules under which lawsuits proceed are deliberately setup in an attempt to get at the truth. Specific requirements- from the prohibition on hearsay; to the requirement of a neutral and unbiased jury; to the requirement that both sides be able to examine and respond to evidence and arguments- are both truthseeking and not generally followed outside of the court system.

“My ingroup’s internet discussions are so great that they’re not only better than the outside society’s way of determining contested questions, they invalidate their use” is a dangerously culty belief. I think it is particularly bad in this context, since the initial post had specific failures that the legal system would have handled correctly. (eg not giving Nonlinear time to respond; it’s possible that I’ll feel like the eventual outcome here is reasonable, IDK, but the initial post had clear issues.) But at a minimum, if you’re saying that people be “shunned, demonized, and criticised” (!), you really ought to say specifically why/how the courts would be unreliable in this case.

which they would generally win

Place your bets!

I agree that some people use them that way. I disagree that is a fair descriptor of every lawsuit threat, and think in this case the parties had approximately equal power and influence, and that six months of building a case against Nonlinear is every bit as threatening as a lawsuit. Since the overwhelming community consensus was that Ben's six months collecting negative information about someone with 60 hours to respond was reasonable and Nonlinear's threat of a lawsuit if not given another week to respond was unreasonable, I felt, and feel, that the community needs to sharply update against the reasonableness of collecting and presenting only negative information and somewhat more weakly update against lawsuit threats being de facto proof of bad faith and unfair dealing.

It is being had right here!

It is being had here after Nonlinear's reputation was damaged in what reads to me as a fundamentally unfair way, and being had in the way it is only because word happened to make it to me from a community I am a neighbor to but not a part of and I happened to be obsessive enough to respond. The court of public opinion is fickle and unreliable, relying on oratory skills and the chance of who happens to show up at least as much as anything else.

EDIT:

And, if you really believe lawsuits are so awesome and wonderful, why aren't you criticizing Spartz for not following through on the threat?

Why create a caricature of me? I don't believe lawsuits are awesome and wonderful. I think they are a last resort that no parties should desire and that every effort to reach an out-of-court settlement should be found even if someone raises the spectre of a lawsuit. Nobody is ever obligated to pursue one, but there are settings in which it is defensible. In this case, I am at least somewhat optimistic that the EA community as a whole will find a way to undo the bulk of the material harm caused by the original post through its own methods. 

notably omitted from the introductory allegory. 

To clarify, I think that if EA has a strong principle against suing the New York Times, one of the most powerful institutions on the planet, for libel if the Times makes materially false claims with actual malice that do real reputational damage, that principle is not praiseworthy. I made the nod to that principle in the opening allegory with an eyebrow raised. Every example you give of the problem of libel suits is of their use by the strong against the weak, but every part of the legal system is bad if abused by the strong to crush the weak. That doesn't mean the system as a whole has no legitimate role. 

The passive background threat of libel suits against powerful journalistic outlets is a significant part of the process that causes journalists to stick with technically correct claims. It is good that the New York Times can be held liable if it causes damage to someone by lying about them, and good that journalists have to keep that possibility in mind.

(which they would generally win, BTW).

I want to be clear that, as a matter of policy and out of an excess of caution given my career path, I do not and will not make prognostications on the likelihood of success of any given lawsuit. 

I have never had any interaction with lawsuits of any kind, including those relating to libel etc.

However, a social dynamic I have observed several times in my life is that Person A and Person B have some kind of conflict. Person A is utterly convinced of the rightness (and righteousness) of their position.

Someone (either B or a third party, C) suggests that it may be prudent to involve the police or the teachers/parents (if these people are chidden) or other authorities. Person A, on mention of the police/teachers/whoever suddenly looses that utter confidence they had in the obvious morality of their position, and runs a mile. Curiously person A in this case will often genuinely feel that the mention of involving authority was an attack or an escalation (Although I think they are always wrong in that estimation, and that the main effect is to de-escalate). I have, on none of these occasions, actually seen the police/teachers/whoever actually be contacted. I believe there exists a certain frame of mind a human can get into, where they are in a position of relative power, and believe they have a great moral authority behind them. And that simply being reminded that they may potentially have to persuade a higher authority of this rightness is enough to break the spell.

So, reminding people that they may need to answer to a higher authority for their actions is a generically useful strategy against a wide range of attacks, one that I imagine people fall back on instinctively all the time. In this case that means mentioning lawyers. Holding "they mentioned lawyers" against the Nonlinear people seems insane. Mentioning authority is a prudent way of defusing or deescalating many social situations. Even if you think it was the wrong move in this exact case I think you shouldn't judge someone (who is probably in a bit of a flap given the accusations involved) too harshly for making the move that is usually right.

Since the /r/slatestarcodex comment section is unlikely to get the long-term traffic this mirror is, I want to copy my reply there over here as well.

I’m honestly really frustrated by your response to this post. The incident I describe is not trivial and it is not tangential to the purposes of the rationalist community. It directly damages the community’s credibility towards its core goals in a major way. You are about as trusted as a public figure gets among the rationalists, and when you see this whole thing, you vote it down and rebuke me because I don’t hate libel lawsuits as much as I hate libel.

Rationalists spend a lot of time criticizing poor journalistic practices from outside the community. It should raise massive alarms that someone can spend six months digging up dirt on another community member, provide scant time to reply and flat-out refuse to look at exculpatory evidence, and be praised by the great majority of the community who noticed while those who pointed out the issues with what was going on were ignored.

If a prominent person in your community spends six months working to gather material to destroy your reputation, then flat-out refuses to look at your exculpatory evidence or to update his post in response to exculpatory evidence from another trusted community member—evidence he his collaborator now admits overturns an allegation in the article—there is nothing at all disproportionate or inappropriate about a desperate lawsuit threat—not a threat if the post goes live, but a threat if they won’t even look at hard evidence against their claims—minutes before the reputation-destroying post goes live. That’s not the strong crushing the weak whistleblower, that’s a desperate response to reputational kamikaze.

It is not an issue with my post that I accurately defend that libel lawsuit threat as a sane response to an insane situation. It is an issue with the rationalist community as a whole that they nodded along to that insane situation, and an issue with you that your major takeaway from my post is that I’m wrong about lawsuits.

A six-month campaign to gather negative info about someone is not a truth-seeking process, it is not a rational process, and it is not a process to which the community should respond by politely arguing about whether lawsuits could possibly be justified as a response. It is a repudiation of the principles the rationalist community espouses and demands an equally vehement response, a response that nobody within the community gave until I stumbled over the post by happenstance three months later.

You are wrong. Your takeaway from my article is wrong. What happened during that investigation was wrong, and sufficiently wrong that I see no cause to reply by coming out swinging about the horrors of the legal system. You should be extinguishing the fire in your own community’s house, and the people cheering you on for responding to someone trying to put that fire out with a rebuke are helping you burn down your own community's credibility. You had no obligation to respond to the situation; having responded, though, you take on a duty to it which you are neglecting by responding in this way given your stature within this community and the gravity of the original error.

Do Nonlinear and Lightcone in fact have vastly different financial resources?

My impression is that they do not, in which case this line of criticism is moot here

I have this weird feeling (and feel weird about admitting it) that the response from Nonlinear sometimes felt too good.

One explanation is that you have this weird feeling because many problems turn out to be honest misunderstandings, and a response that is too good rules out the possibility that there's been an honest misunderstanding. Realizing that being charitable is not an option and that you are forced to believe that one of the two sides is a liar (or out of touch enough that they may as well be a liar) is 1) unpleasant, and 2) rare.

Naive question: why are the disgruntled ex-employees who seem to have made many serious false allegations the only ones whose 'privacy' is being protected here? 

The people who were accused at Nonlinear aren't able to keep their privacy. 

The guy (Ben Pace) who published the allegations isn't keeping his privacy.

But the people who are at the heart of the whole controversy, whose allegations are the whole thing we've been discussing at length, are protected by the forum moderators? Why? 

This is a genuine question. I don't understand the ethical or rational principles that you're applying here.

I appreciate the detailed response! 

I don't like that this sounds like this is only (or mostly) about tone.

The core of it, for me, is that Nonlinear was in a brutally difficult position. I've been on the receiving end of dogpiles from my own community before, and I know what it feels like. It's excruciating, it's terrifying, and you all-but see your life flashing before your eyes. Crisis communication is very, very, very difficult, particularly when people are already skeptical of you. Nonlinear's response to Ben was as he was on the verge of fundamentally changing the trajectory of their reputations and would not be swayed from his course, and their response to the community was in a similarly high-pressure frame.

The pressure and stress of a position like that makes it very hard for me to apply someone's behavior in those circumstances to other settings. A normal person acts very differently under intense pressure than in regular situations, so when I think someone is put in an unfair situation (as I do of Nonlinear) I'm reluctant to pass too much judgment from the sidelines. We don't know how the Nonlinear people would have reacted had those concerns been brought up in a measured, reasonable matter, because that did not happen.

In short: it's less about tone, more about the pragmatic reality that at the bottom of a dogpile, tactical communication ability and grace under pressure matter immensely in ways that are hard to apply to regular situations.

Chloe isn't a large outlier in any relevant way of personality, except perhaps she was significantly below average at standing up for her interests/voicing her boundaries (for which it might even be possible that it was selected for in the Nonlinear hiring process)

I think it's likely that Chloe is not a large outlier, but the rumor mill is incredibly destructive and spending a year working alongside someone who does seem like more of an outlier to spread rumors is not a productive or healthy way to handle interpersonal work conflicts. I think it's useful for whistleblower-type stuff to come to light, but not through whisper networks, and I think Alice and Chloe's rumor-mill response to the situation worsened it in material ways that are important to establish.

At the same time, I feel like, as a private individual, it's okay to come away with confident beliefs (one way or the other) from this whole thing.

I don't disagree with this. People come to strong opinions about all sorts of things on the basis of much weaker evidence than is available about this stuff at this point. I just wanted to establish my feeling that at the community level as a whole, the errors in the way things were handled mean that a retraction and a change of process moving forward are appropriate, and people collectively reacted in mixed-to-negative ways to the two people who in my judgment were most correct about the initial situation (Spencer and Geoffrey) in ways that should inform their judgment moving forward.

When you say "it's clearly the right call to wait a week or two until we have another round of counter-evidence before jumping to conclusions", is this a deliberate or accidental echo of the similar request from Nonlinear which you denied?

Like, on the deliberate way of reading this, the subtext is "While Lightcone did not wait a week or two for counter-evidence and still defends this decision, you should have waited in your case because that's the standard you describe in your article." Which would be a hell of a thing to say without explicitly acknowledging that you're asking for different standards. (And would also misunderstand TracingWoodgrains's actual standard, which is about the algorithm used and not how much clock time is elapsed, as described in their reply to your parent comment.) Or on the accidental way of reading this, the subtext is "I was oblivious to how being publicly accused of wrongdoing feels from the inside, and I request grace now that the shoe is on the other foot." Either of these seems kind of incredible but I can't easily think of another plausible way of reading this. I suppose your paragraph on wanting to take the time to make a comprehensive response (which I agree with) updates my guess towards "oblivious".

Since the time I have started looking into this, you have:

• incorrectly described the nature of people you talked with around Nonlinear [LW(p) · GW(p)], for which you subsequently apologized.
• incorrectly claimed Nonlinear might be sponsored by Rethink Priorities [EA(p) · GW(p)], which you subsequently retracted.
• made likely-incorrect assumptions about libel law [LW(p) · GW(p)], which I subsequently clarified.
• incorrectly predicted what journalists would think of your investigative process [LW(p) · GW(p)], after which we collaborated on a hypothetical to ask journalists, all of whom disagreed with your decision.
• in our direct messages about this post prior to publication, provided a snippet of a private conversation about the ACX meetup board decision where you took a maximally broad interpretation of something I had limited ways of verifying, pressured me to add it as context to this post in a way that would have led to a substantially false statement on my part, then admitted greater confusion to a board member while saying nothing to me about the same, after which I reconfirmed with the same board member that the wording I chose was accurate to his perception.
• agreed that the claim about vegan food as written, which Spencer tried to correct prior to publication, was substantially incorrect.

I appreciate that you publicly update when you get things wrong, but the frequency with which you make these mistakes serves as strong evidence to me that I had sufficient information to make this post.

The specific falsehoods, while useful, are not the core of my point. The core of my point is that a process aimed at finding only the negative, in which a great majority of your time is spent gathering evidence from one side of a situation and sympathizing with one party to it, will necessarily lead to a post aimed at something other than truth-seeking and a trial in the court of public opinion without due process. The journalistic standard I advocate for and you disagree with stands independent of any subsequent factual claims. The primary source documents I include in this post stand as useful evidence independent of any new evidence that gets introduced, and would have materially changed the interpretation of every one of the points in the section you dispute.

I stand by my post, and its timing, in full.

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 [LW(p) · GW(p)] 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 [LW · GW] 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 [LW(p) · GW(p)]. 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.

Ben is working on a response, and given that 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. If in a week or two people still think the section of "Avoidable, Unambiguous falsehoods" does indeed contain such things, then I think an analysis like this makes sense

This was three months ago. I have not seen the anticipated response. Setting aside the internal validity of your argument above, the promised counterevidence did not arrive in anything like a reasonable time.

TracingWoodgrains clearly made the right call in publishing, rather than waiting for you.

Can you explain more how "they were not able to live apart from the family unit while they worked with them" is true if Alice went to live in the EA hotel for three weeks while working for them without them doing anything to the contrary?

I'd be curious to hear your other examples here as well. I think the counterevidence is strong on each point I examine.

Someone asked me privately whether it would change my overall view if I learned that none of the claims that NL and Spencer offered evidence against during the 3 days (and/or 21hr) they had the list were false. I don't think it would, unless I also learned that LC was rightly completely confident of this at the time, which is quite a high bar given how little time there had been for NL to present their side.

Another response to a private question: is there any way to run an investigation like this if you absolutely can't share the claims with the accused ahead of time and wait for them to give counter-evidence?

I do think you can make a post that (a) compiles public evidence, (b) presents new evidence, and/or (c) presents your personal experience while getting your facts sufficiently correct that a defamation lawsuit would be an unreasonable escalation and unlikely to succeed. When signal-boosting someone else's accusations, however, especially if any of it involves taking their word for things, this is far harder and I expect almost always impossible.

If you have a hard constraint that you can't run something by the accused before publishing, I think you have two main options:

A. Support the accuser in getting their own story out: helping them draft it, gathering supporting evidence, helping them figure out which claims to lead with and which to drop, proofreading, emotional support, etc.

B. Write something that contains only what you can fully defend. "Here are screenshots Pat shared with us of a conversation with Org that we found troubling." If Pat is willing to go as far as forging evidence, and is good at it, then you're just screwed, but I'm assuming you're willing to take the risk that they're not doing that.

I think I am also more skeptical than you about how much Nonlinear's counterclaims exonerate them

I mention this in the post and realize this is a frustrating frame for the Lightcone people who worked hard on this story, but I really just don't care a ton about Nonlinear qua Nonlinear. It's a small charity org with an unconventional structure working in a general area (AI safety) a lot of rationalists see as important and I have ambiguous feelings on in terms of the efficacy of charity work. I don't have a lot of weight as to where people should land on whether their claims "exonerate" them in a true sense, particularly because the stakes feel a lot more like "roommate drama" stakes than "FTX" ones to me.

What I do care very much about is that the rationalist/EA community not fall into the same callout/dogpiling/"cancel" cultural traps I've seen repeat in so many other subcultures. Spending six months to gather only negative information about someone -- particularly someone in your own community, where your opinion will carry a lot of weight -- before presenting it in public is bad, full stop. It works in a courtroom because there is a judge there, but the court of public opinion demands different norms. 

Doing so and then being in such a hurry to present it that you won't even pause when someone not under investigation brings in hard evidence against one of your claims and tells you you're making a mistake? That only compounds the issue. 

the risks of the adversarial slowdown, or threatening/pressuring witnesses into silence

Part of this feels like a byproduct of having spent six months gathering negative information about them. You all were in an extraordinarily adversarial frame towards them, where my sense is that you all (at least Ben) emotionally felt they were something akin to monsters wearing human skinsuits, some sort of caricature of cartoon villains. From my own outside-community view, you all seem like decent, flawed people with the same broadly praiseworthy, somewhat flawed philosophy. 

More than that, though: the witnesses were already not silent. They'd spent a year being anything but silent. They'd spent the better part of six months feeding information to Ben, who had it and could do what he felt he ought with it independent of Nonlinear's actions. "Please give us a week to present evidence" paired with reassurance that they're not trying to stop you from publishing altogether contains a clear hard deadline with a clear request and gives no reason to indicate an indefinite delay. 

I push towards publication a lot of things a lot of people would really rather we not publish (on BARPod). I don't have quite the proximity to them you guys had to Nonlinear (which goes both ways--you were more reachable by whatever their response was, but you also shared a great deal of context and had a lot more room for cooperation). They can't do anything to indefinitely delay publication. When we're satisfied with the story, we put it up. It is not in their control. When it comes to the publication of your own piece on your own site, you hold all the cards.

risks of the adversarial slowdown

I'm not sure what you mean here? If LC had said "ok, we'll consider all the evidence you provide by [datetime] and update our post as we see appropriate" what are you worried about?

threatening/pressuring witnesses into silence

This seems possible to address with precommitments? I think LC and the sources could have agreed on and included something like "to protect our sources from retaliation aimed at keeping the serious allegations in this post from becoming public, we have agreed with them that from the time we first share a draft with NL we will not honor any requests our sources make to withdraw claims." And then made sure NL knows this and that LC is serious about it.

I am skeptical of the gender angle, but I think it's being underdiscussed that, based on the balance of evidence so far, the person with the biggest, most effective machine gun is $5000 to the richer and still anonymous, whereas the people hit by their bullets are busy pointing fingers at each other. Alice's alleged actions trashing Nonlinear (and 20-some former people???) seem IMO much worse than anything Lightcone or Nonlinear is being even accused of.

(Not that this is a totally foregone conclusion - I noticed that Nonlinear didn't provide any direct evidence on the claim that Alice was a known serial liar outside of this saga.)

Hey, Roko! Sincere thanks for alerting me to this situation, as well as motivating a petty “There are a million better ways to disagree with them; let’s see what I can do” urge when I saw your post about it. I wouldn’t have noticed or responded to this all without that prompting.

As for quokkas and machine guns, I don’t disagree that someone can be one or the other, but—well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t think Ben is an attractive, poly, highly sociosexual woman. As a more general archetype, I think there’s a distinct sort of first-principles thinking that can lead someone to do a lot of harm without precisely meaning any of it.

This felt unnecessarily gendered to me.  There are obviously masculine manipulative sociopaths.

I considered going into actual malice and think Harte-Hanks is a close enough parallel to have a lot of worthwhile things to say on that front, but I thought it was important to establish those two points given Oliver's comment on the matter. 

I disagree with this but I found this a novel and compelling perspective. I agree that discouraging people from using legal tools to defend themselves can pretty strongly push towards insularity and creates opportunities for greater forms of exploitation, which is something I am quite concerned about these days.

I do think at least for me, libel suits are a very uniquely bad aspect of the law (especially in countries like the UK where the standards for libel are much lower), and their effects also seem particularly in-conflict with what I see as the central mission and values of the rationality and EA communities. I do think you make a decent case for a broad general norm here, and I would be interested in exploring it more.

The Amish famously will never seek recourse in the secular legal system, no matter how bad the wrong or what the circumstances are. Does anyone here admire this aspect of the Amish culture?

I do think that this is admirable.

Cults also famously use all kinds of pressure tactics to prevent members from seeking out the law. This is bad.

I agree that this is bad.

But there’s a critical point here: whether the pressure to eschew lawsuits and similar legal-system tactics boils down to “if you do this, we don’t consider you a member of this community anymore”, or whether instead it’s something more severe. In the case of cults, it does tend to be much worse than that! (Even if it’s just the threat of expulsion combined with various psychological pressure tactics to convince the member that expulsion is intolerably horrible.)

I think that it’s almost always impossible for one member of a community to involve the law in a dispute with another community member and for them both to remain in the community thereafter. Sometimes this is perfectly fine and is the normative outcome—for example, suppose that Dave physically assaults Ellen while they’re playing D&D at their local gaming club, and Ellen calls the police, and presses charges against Dave. Is Dave going to continue as a member of the gaming club? No way. And nor should he! But, conversely, if Dave is minding his own business, and Ellen calls the police on him because she finds him vaguely alarming for unclear reasons (perhaps bigotry of some sort), and Dave ends up being hassled (or worse) by the cops even though he did nothing wrong—well, then it’s Ellen who can expect to be disinvited from the club’s meetings thenceforth. Either way, you generally don’t involve the law in your community disputes and then expect all parties involved to remain community members in good standing. It’s simply an unrealistic expectation.

Your conclusion doesn't follow.  A community is fully in its rights to use social pressure to discourage things it disagrees with (like libel suits), and others are fully in their rights to do those discouraged things anyway if they're willing to bear the social costs.

Cults also famously use all kinds of pressure tactics to prevent members from seeking out the law. This is bad. We should not be like this.

This is fallacious reasoning. It equivocates social discouragement with the far more extreme pressure tactics of cults. It also equivocates "discouraging libel suits" with "prevent from seeking out the law". And it implies that only cults do this kind of discouragement.

Separately, comparing Habryka to a cult-leader is a remarkable and remarkably unfounded non-sequitur.

When a community mistreats its members badly enough, it is important that the law be there as an escape hatch

I agree. But actually using the law is equal to making a statement that the community is too dysfunctional to solve the problem internally. (If that is true, it is a correct statement to make. If that is false, it is an incorrect statement to make.) There should be an option to escalate and people should not escalate needlessly.

As I see it, there are basically three things that can happen now:

Option 1 -- a few weeks later Ben (or someone else) will write an equally convincing response, which again will make most people update dramatically.

Option 2 -- Ben will write a public apology, admitting that he was wrong about most or all things. Then we will collectively brainstorm about how to make it up for Nonlinear and all individuals named, and how to make sure this never happens again.

Option 3 -- silence. This would be the most disappointing option, and because it doesn't have a clear trigger, I guess unless by the end of January I get some information like "a thorough rebuttal is being written and it's at least 40% done, some people have seen the working version and they think it is solid", I will assume that this is what actually happened. In such case, either some high-profile person (Habryka?) will write the public apology on community's behalf, and we continue like in Option 2... or I will conclude that we indeed are a dysfunctional community and I will be really sad about it. Also, in this case, I would approve of the lawsuit.

It's the fact that these options realistically exist that makes it different from the cult analogy in my opinion. And if you decide to escalate before these options are exhausted, that's kinda like jurisdiction shopping. You can be treated as a part of the community, or you can be treated as a faceless corporation, but you can't just choose whatever is more convenient for you at the moment. (And yeah, maybe the community sucks and it's not worth being its part.)

I appreciate the response! A lot of people have been saying in passing that the section doesn't contain unambiguous falsehoods, but have provided few specifics. Going through:

• The number of former employees - there's nothing ambiguous here.
• "not able to live apart" - some people have claimed that "lived apart for six weeks with no issues" does not disprove "not able to live apart," a claim that still confuses me.
• salary - the written contract and the conversations beforehand are pretty clear.
• spent through financial runway/outstanding salary -- they have Alice on record saying she hasn't been paid in months with timed transactions demonstrating otherwise. The outstanding money was not salary, and the reason they provide for it being outstanding (her inexplicably switching away from their public reimbursement system, with them paying as soon as she informed them) makes perfect sense.
• expecting financial independence - their consistent "Project Manager" messaging makes sense to me. What am I missing here?
• nobody willing to get vegan food - All parties to the controversy concur that the article was incorrect here.
• didn't mind polyamory "on the other side of the world", but couldn't stand it right next to her - their conflict was not about polyamory and Kat made poly dating recommendations
• "variety of illegal drugs" -> ADHD meds

What, specifically, am I missing? 

As for power dynamics and coercion, there are messy power dynamics all around here! We are writing all of this, and the investigation was published, on a site administered by the person doing the investigating. Books could be written about the power dynamics inherent in someone that influential in your community spending six months gathering negative information on you. If a powerful person is going to publish falsehoods that destroy your reputation, even if you're independently wealthy the power dynamics are much more complicated than you seem to suggest.

Regardless, I'm glad you like my writing style and very much appreciate that final line.

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-20T21:02:03.386Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

salary - the written contract [is] pretty clear.

I think the contract is valid ^[1] in as much as it was signed before the relevant time period. However, Kat has still not verified when the contract was signed (or whether it was signed at all), which I would still really appreciate a response on.

1. ^{^}

   edit: valid in the sense of "valid evidence on the dispute of expectations setting, immoral behavior, and violations of common-sense ethics". I am not trying to make a claim here of legal validity. The legal issue here is likely to be quite complex and depends on details I don't have access to. 

Replies from: ymeskhout, tracingwoodgrains

↑ comment by ymeskhout · 2023-12-21T00:03:12.589Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-21T00:32:00.395Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I added a footnote. I meant valid in the sense of "valid evidence". I didn't intend to make a claim of legal validity. Legally the contract might be considered valid or invalid depending on a bunch of details I don't have access to (for example, I don't even know what the relevant jurisdiction of this contract would be).

↑ comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-12-20T22:56:37.591Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It would be interesting as an aside to know whether the contract was signed, but it's not actually particularly material to what makes a legal contract. (Again, not a lawyer, but I am studying for my Contracts final right now instead of my Civil Procedure one). The core question is whether an offer was made and accepted, and performance (that is: acting according to the terms of the contract) is a pretty reliable way to demonstrate acceptance. 

I have no knowledge of whether the contract was signed, but that a written contract exists, that she worked according to the terms in the contract, and that they paid her according to the same terms all serve as strong evidence of a valid contract. Information about signatures adds little one way or another.

Replies from: pktechgirl, habryka4

↑ comment by Elizabeth (pktechgirl) · 2023-12-20T23:58:15.496Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'd agree with you if the contract had been shared ahead of time (instead of six days after starting), or signed, or if she'd continue to work after accepting the payment specified in the contract. But she didn't get paid until she left (which Kat says was her choice, since she ran payroll), which sounds very consistent with an ongoing salary dispute. 

Replies from: tracingwoodgrains

↑ comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-12-21T00:08:47.585Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I can accept that there was an ongoing dispute. I cannot accept that Chloe had any grounds on which to dispute it. They told her what compensation would be going in; they provided a contract consistent with that; she accepted the job knowing precisely what the compensation was. To be blunt, I think it speaks very poorly of someone to accept a position and then immediately dispute the compensation they accepted and, having been in very similar positions myself, have no sympathy whatsoever for Chloe in the dispute. She is in the wrong and should not have accepted the job if she was not satisfied with the compensation package.

Replies from: habryka4, pktechgirl

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-21T00:47:19.376Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't think you currently have access to evidence that would allow you to come to as confident of a conclusion as you seem to be, unless you have access to private evidence I or others don't have access to. 

For example, it seems totally plausible that Chloe explicitly objected, in writing, to the contract sent to her, and that there was other communication in which a materially different basis for an agreement was established (I do not know whether that is the case, but I certainly can't rule it out from the evidence provided).

Replies from: tracingwoodgrains

↑ comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-12-21T00:51:10.041Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Written contracts are the means to resolve those disputes. That is the specific, precise function they serve. Your argument here strikes me as an invisible-dragon one, particularly given the time both sides have spent presenting evidence. I believe my level of confidence is precisely appropriate to the situation: a contract existed; it was discussed in advance; it was fulfilled; now it is doing precisely what contracts do and settling a dispute. The burden of proof has entirely shifted from Nonlinear here.

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-21T03:32:18.197Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If I send you a contract, and you send back a response "that contract is unfair and does not capture our pre-existing agreement, I do not agree to it", then of course that contract has not taken effect. This seems really clear to me (and is also legally really not very ambiguous). 

Signing a contract is the central tool we have for communicating that indeed we agree on the matter at hand. As such, refusing to sign a contract also definitely matters for both the ethical and legal interpretations of the situation, especially if accompanied with someone saying so explicitly. Are you currently saying you are confident that Chloe did not explicitly verbally or in writing disagree with the contract? (I don't know such facts either way, but it seems good to get predictions on the record)

Replies from: tracingwoodgrains

↑ comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-12-21T03:44:56.010Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I am currently saying I am confident you a) have to meet a steep burden of proof to demonstrate any flaws you speculate in the contract as it stands, a burden I have intense doubts you can or will meet and b) do not know what you are talking about with contract law and are fixated on tangential details. Until and unless you can meet that burden of proof, you do not have a leg to stand on.

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-21T03:49:39.822Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Do you agree that if there was a contract proposed, that one party refused to sign, and communicated that they do not think the contents of the contract reflect previous agreements, before performing the work that the contract was asking for, that this would then have a material effect on both the ethical and legal implications of the contract? 

(Of course this would definitely not demonstrate that any specific interpretation of the contract that was not present in the unsigned written contract would now become the most central ethically and legally relevant interpretation. What contract was actually formed seems likely to be messy in that case and would require engaging a lot with the details.)

Replies from: tracingwoodgrains

↑ comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-12-21T03:59:17.492Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If they refused to sign the contract presented to them at the start of work and then continued to perform that work, it would be a bizarre decision that would put them in a legally ambiguous spot. That is, since you are keen on getting a direct answer to a contrived hypothetical: yes, that strange sequence, for which neither you nor NL has provided any evidence, would decrease the likelihood that a court would find a legally enforceable contract existed, but acceptance in the form of continuing to do the work in question would weigh the other direction.

You’re straining at gnats on this and other points, and I don’t see much value to continuing this line of inquiry. I look forward to seeing Ben’s response to NL and appreciate the time you’ve taken to respond so far; inasmuch as you can provide hard evidence for points like this I will be keen to see it.

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-21T04:03:10.793Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks, I appreciate the answer to my question! I agree that I think at this point it probably isn't the best use of our time to continue this line of inquiry, at least for now and unless additional evidence arises (or one of us thinks of a particularly important additional consideration).

↑ comment by Elizabeth (pktechgirl) · 2023-12-21T07:09:36.924Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

But the contract was shared after she started (after flying to a foreign country?). I don't know how much that weakens its supremacy, but surely it's more than zero. Postnups are easier to break than pre-nups, pre-nups are easier to break when sprung at the last minute. 

We also haven't seen evidence Chloe agreed to the deal Kat screenshotted, or even her reaction to it. The fact that she didn't pay herself seems like a costly signal of belief she was entitled to more. Maybe that's because Kat was inconsistent, maybe she hallucinated, but the current evidence doesn't disambiguate that. 

Do I think it was smart for either party to let Chloe start (and fly to a foreign country?) without a written agreement? Definitely not. The dispute now is the exact thing contracts are supposed to prevent. But I would really like to see more evidence before concluding Kat was clear and Chloe imagined a better deal. 

Replies from: tracingwoodgrains

↑ comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-12-21T12:20:54.139Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That’s where the discussion prior to hiring is important for me, and there it was clearly laid out that the compensation would be $1k/month plus cost of living. If there were material inconsistencies between that and the actual contract, I’d be sympathetic, but I just didn’t see any.

I do agree that getting into writing earlier over later is better and that (inasmuch as we understand the timing) starting with no written agreement was imprudent, but it doesn’t sway me on the broader picture there.

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-21T00:01:33.899Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

and that they paid her according to the same terms

Note that Chloe was not paid her stipend monthly. She was paid one sum of $5,500 at the very end of her employment with Nonlinear (according to Nonlinear she was supposed to pay herself as she was in charge of payroll and chose not to do so). So it looks like she did not implicitly accept payment of $1000/mo throughout her employment. 

I totally agree that there still could have been a more implicit contract that was established via a mixture of the written contract, informal and verbal communication, but I think we have less evidence about the details of that verbal communication (we have some, and I appreciate the transcript and text messages that Nonlinear has shared).

Replies from: tracingwoodgrains

↑ comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-12-21T00:23:55.984Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I concur with @ymeskhout [LW · GW] and overall recommend more wariness when speaking about legal principles. The timing of pay, particularly if they willingly withheld any, would be material if she raised a contract dispute in court, but given her apparent control over that timing and her ultimate acceptance of the pay is unlikely to have much weight in anything as things stand, and doesn't really raise fairness concerns unless she asked for the stipend earlier and got rebuffed.

An "implicit contract that was established via a mixture of the written contract and verbal communication" isn't really a thing the way you're conceptualizing it—generally speaking, verbal communication before a written contract just isn't particularly important.

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-21T00:43:50.838Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Verbal or informal communication before a signed contract isn't particularly important. Informal or verbal communication absolutely matters for determining the validity of an unsigned contract. 

Also, "implied/implicit contract" is a totally normal term: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/implied_contract 

But also, as I said below (and now in a footnote) I was not trying make a legal argument (indeed, I don't even know in what jurisdiction this whole situation was happening). I was trying to make an argument on common-sense ethics ground and norms of reasonable conduct. Sorry for the ambiguity.

Replies from: tracingwoodgrains

↑ comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-12-21T01:08:44.429Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It is a totally normal term, yes, just not one that was germane to the question at hand. 

In terms of making a legal versus ethical argument, I think contracts should be seen primarily as legal tools to settle disputes, such that talking about "valid" contracts outside the legal sense is not particularly useful.