On Justice in the Ratsphere

The following is the transcript of my troop deployment (i.e. ending rant) from episode 98 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

There’s a certain failure mode among rationalists where we think that because we’re good at a lot of things, we will be good at everything. It makes sense, because rationalism really is filled with brilliant polymaths who are able to understand and perform in complex fields to a, quite frankly, astounding degree. However, this can sometimes lead to overconfidence and an unjustified assumption of competence, especially in fields that we don’t tend to have much respect for.

The latest failure of this type concerns Lightcone Infrastructure, the company that maintains Lesswrong and lots of other Stuff Rationalists Like, and two of its leaders, Ben Pace and Oliver Habryka - from what I can tell, two central examples of brilliant polymaths who are good at lots of things. They recently took a foray into writing a journalistic hit piece against a nominally EA organization called Nonlinear. I urge anyone interested in the full story to read TracingWoodgrains’ excellent post about exactly what went wrong here, but the extremely abridged version is that Nonlinear consists of a married couple and one of their brothers traveling the world doing… something EA-related. It’s unclear what. They hired a couple of assistants to travel around with them, and drama ensued. The assistants contacted Lightcone with a number of accusations of mistreatment, including withholding pay, being directed to smuggle illegal drugs, being coerced into eating non-vegan, and other similarly inappropriate things. Ben and Oliver spent, reportedly, six months and a thousand hours looking into the allegations. Except by “looking into the allegations” I really mean “digging up as much dirt as they could against Nonlinear without ever getting their side of the story.” 

This ultimately culminated in a post on the EA forum where Ben laid out all the accusations and endorsed most of them as credible, but included an “epistemic status” note that he was specifically looking for bad information and people should take that into account. Shortly before publication, Ben showed Nonlinear a draft of the post, and Nonlinear told him that a number of the allegations were exaggerated, taken out of context, or straight-up fabricated. Spencer Greenberg also warned them that some of the claims were not true. Nonlinear asked for an additional week to present evidence, but Ben refused and published anyway after correcting one of the mistakes but claiming there wasn’t time to correct others. By all accounts, the post wrecked Nonlinear’s reputation in the rat/EA community. This past week, Nonlinear released their evidence showing multiple inaccuracies in Ben’s post and that a number of the allegations were, in fact, exaggerated, taken out of context, or straight-up fabricated, including, in my opinion, the most inflammatory ones.

Guys, this is not how you do journalism. It’s not how you do justice. It’s how you do rumormongering. The absolute, most important, unwaivable, ironclad rule that you must follow when it comes to accusations of wrongdoing is that you must get both sides of the story. People lie. They remember things incorrectly. They exaggerate. They remove important context. Almost every accuser, and especially the ones who are doing it in bad faith, will try to convince you that they have a credible fear of retaliation so you shouldn’t get the other side’s story. But if you’re only getting one side of the story, you are almost certainly not getting the accurate story. To condemn someone like Lightcone did without even reviewing their evidence is profoundly irresponsible and should not be tolerated. 

Sadly, Ben and Oliver, despite being aware of how inaccurate their initial report was, show very little contrition and mostly stand by their decisions. Ben’s post is still up, and the only edit is a link to Nonlinear’s response. None of the inaccuracies have been corrected, and Oliver has been relentlessly defending Ben’s decision to publish before reviewing Nonlinear’s evidence. This is inexcusable. You cannot try people in the court of public opinion, but disclaim all responsibility to give them due process. The entire project of rationalism is about seeking truth, and Lightcone did not employ a truth-seeking process. They employed a process better described as spreading gossip. Lightcone seems to conceptualize themselves as caretakers of the community, and this was terrible caretaking. Contrary to what they may think, a community norm of spreading unsubstantiated rumors is not going to be helpful. It won’t prevent the next FTX, which is what they seem to be trying to do. All it will do is ruin people’s reputations with no regard for whether it’s deserved. It may very well be that Nonlinear deserves to have their reputation trashed, but this is not the way to show that, and has predictably confused the issue more than it resolved anything.

This is important to me personally because I’ve been the victim of this kind of rumormongering before. I specifically invested in the rationalist community because I didn’t think we pulled this kind of bullshit. When I served on a disciplinary panel for rationalist meetup organizers, I made sure one of our guiding principles was that the accused must be informed of the accusations and given an opportunity to present evidence in their defense. My hope was that this would serve as an example to the broader community. Seeing how Nonlinear was treated here, and in particular how the broader community cheered it on, has eroded a lot of my trust in the rationalist community, and I’m going to be pretty reluctant to invest more after this. I don’t mean to be all “first they came for the Communists…” about this, but if they can do this to Nonlinear - an established organization with millions of dollars - they can damn sure do it to me, and probably to you too. I urge the community to reject the rumor mill and insist on actual truth-seeking processes. If anyone is interested in designing one, my DM’s are open.