Ah perhaps I misunderstood you then -- it sounds like this quote was specifically your own takeaway from reading Ben's original article, rather than a characterization of the article itself. It's possible that I'm seeing your position a bit better now -- previously I thought you largely agreed with Ben's article, but on another reread of your comment it seems that you generally hold significantly more moderate view on Nonlinear. (Although your other comment implies that you do believe "Ben's account holds up", so I remain confused.)
Just read your comment again and there were a few things that I felt strong disagreement toward. One was you saying that
The stories from Chloe and Alice painted a picture of Non-Linear. A close, ambitious, high-stress, often renegotiated environment."
This feels like a pretty big euphemism for Ben's piece, which paints Nonlinear as cruel and abusive.
Thinking about this more, my guess is that by "uncollaborative" you were specifically referring to Nonlinear's threat to file for libel against Ben. I agree you could call it that, but I don't see it as disproportionate given the adversarial nature of Ben's investigation and the massive cost it has had on Nonlinear. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this point.
I'm not really sure what we're arguing at this point. My initial reply was about how collaborative Nonlinear had been, which I don't think you've addressed and isn't particularly related to whether Ben said true things. I'd also add that in my view Ben posting without getting Nonlinear's side of the story was itself pretty uncollaborative, and so the "retaliation" against him (in the form of criticizing him for the way he wrote his post) to me seems entirely justified.
Ok, so it sounds like a crux for you is that Ben in fact had high confidence in what he was relaying from Alice being true. In a dispute like this I don't think you can do very good due diligence when avoiding the people who are most likely to have counter-evidence; even if it is well-intentioned, it's a sort of conscious confirmation bias. Ben sort of admits to using poor epistemics in his disclaimer (at the top of his original post) about how to update from reading his post, but doesn't seem to update much on this himself (?), which seems like an error to me particularly when the stakes are this high. Perhaps it's unnecessary, but I will also point out that deliberately using poor epistemics feels pretty contrary to the spirit of rationality, which for good reason has fought for truth and against poor epistemics.
(I further argue against the premise of the disclaimer and Ben posting without hearing both sides here).
Hm, a lot I disagree with here, but a crux is that I think you're not really replying to TracingWoodgrain's original point, which was that Ben knew there might be significant evidence contradicting much of his post but decided not to wait for it and published anyways (which TW considers to be a bad norm). Instead you seem to be changing frame to "did Ben publish anything which he knew for sure wasn't true", which is quite different, particularly in this case where evidence is deliberately not being looked at.
Just to clarify, I was specifically referring to untrue things that the employees said, not Ben (and likewise retaliation against the employees, not against Ben).
If the line you're taking is that "Ben technically only relayed information given to him by Alice, while admitting that she might be unreliable", I don't think that's very tenable. Publishing like that is implicitly an endorsement, and unlike you I suspect most people ignored the disclaimer, because it would be strange for someone to publish such damaging things that they actually weren't sure were true. This comment I made on Ben's original post also touches on this.
This squares very starkly in contrast with Nonlinear's perception of things. It seems to me that all the work in your comment is being done by the "we did not believe them on" bit, which is very subjective and frankly would be ridiculous in something like fair trial -- it would be like saying "the defense is not allowed to bring witnesses or make a case, because despite them claiming that they'll make a strong case, we (the prosection) just don't believe them". You can argue about whether Nonlinear's eventual response was satisfactory (though their evidence seems compelling to me), but I'm not seeing your case on this point in particular.
There's a lot in here but I was immediately confused by "Nonlinear seem to move pretty quickly from collaborate mode to conflict mode. Quicker than I do, at least". My understanding is that they were hearing about their ex-employees saying damaging untrue things for over a year but chose not to retaliate partly because they didn't want to hurt their ex-employees' reputations, until Ben forced their hand with his deliberately one-sided "Sharing Information" post. That sounds fairly (some might say overly) collaborative to me.
Edit: Here by "retaliate" I mean defending themselves in the way they did with this post, which does have the side effect of harming Alice and Chloe's reputations. Even then, they purposefuly decided not to de-anonymize their employees, and have a section on how they don't consider them to have had ill intentions.
I've been wondering about the decision theory of having a "risk profile", e.g. "200 microcovids per week", and at least under some simplistic but not unreasonable assumptions I don't think it makes sense.
Let's say we just have one activity A which yields some fixed positive utility U but has a certain probability p of giving you covid which has a large cost C. Then the expected utility of A is simply E = U - pC. If E > 0 then you should just do A as much as possible, otherwise not at all. There's no cap on total covid risk. (OTOH the "risk profile" method would recommend doing A about 200e-6/p... (read 194 more words →)
Ok, so I'm guessing your position is that a) you, having read Nonlinear's reply, continue to believe that most of what Ben relayed from Alice was true, and b) if a few things turn out to be untrue it's not a big deal because it doesn't change the overall story, and in any case Ben admitted that Alice might be unreliable.
I'm not entirely sure how you weigh (a) and (b) but it makes more sense to me if your crux is (a), that most of Alice's claims are true. For that, I'm not sure where to start; as far as I've seen they all seem to be false. I guess we could... (read more)