FWIW, I think it's possible to cooperate with CEA wherever possible
The point is that it's only possible to collaborate with CEA when they're trying to collaborate with you -- if they're trying to trick you for the private benefit of some of their friends, as happened here, then hearing them out hurts you in expectation (this isn't what would happen to a perfect Bayesian, but we're not perfect Bayesians). Most things they tell you won't be tricks, but the tricks will be sharply -EV.
This isn't just about blacklisting, either. When CEA gives you a positive recommendation (to give someone a grant, for example), you should now consider the possibility that they're doing it against your interests.
It would be nice to collaborate with CEA. Antagonism, to use your word, is much more unpleasant. But, again, we're in this situation because Community Health chose to use our local communities against their own interests in order to prevent Laura from enforcing a legitimate contract claim. That was a hostile act, against Laura and against us, and no one from CEA has even acknowledged any wrongdoing, let alone tried to make up for the harms they've caused. Any honest description of CEA's actions is going to sound antagonistic.
I think "someone filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit" should be kept carefully separate from "someone is a pain" in our social norms, even though people who've filed lawsuits are sometimes annoying to be around even if you're not the one they filed it against. If the penalty for filing a suit is social ostacism, then people are more free to break the terms of the contracts they make, because it's so much more expensive to enforce those contracts than usual.
In EA, where so many of us work for each other, I think this is especially important. People who work together sometimes get into conflicts that require a court to unravel, even if everyone's acting in good faith. So long as the parties can be civil to each other, there's no reason they can't attend the same events in the meantime.
But it is very possible that we still made the organisers feel pressured to make a particular decision.
No one has said they felt pressured -- at least, not in this thread and not to me privately. No one worried that you'd blacklist them for failing to blacklist Laura, or have someone revoke their grants, or take any other coercive action.
What happened was, they trusted you. Specifically, they trusted that the information you gave them would be accurate and not misleading (even though it couldn't be complete), and they trusted that you thought banning Laura would make their event better or safer, based on knowledge and experience they didn't have. When you say that the final decision was theirs, what you're saying is that they didn't have to trust you that way. Of course that's true, but presumably there's some reason they should, or else why make a recommendation in the first place?
"Pressure" is entirely the wrong frame for thinking this. Rather, one wants to ask questions like, "does this person have a clear understanding of what I'm trying to achieve by advising them?", "do I have a clear model of their interests?", and "if they later learned some of the things I'm not telling them, would they feel betrayed?"
I talked to another one of the organizers of the summer camp, after that part of this incident. She was upset: she knew Laura, she didn't expect that anything bad would happen if she came to the event, and she wanted to invite her. But, on the other hand, an authority figure had told her not to, so she didn't. After all, what if they knew better than she did? It was the cleanest reproduction of the Milgram experiment that I've ever seen in real life, and it really hurt her.
Now, it's true that the organizer wouldn't have suffered that way if she'd had a little more moral courage, and followed her own views instead of deferring to Community Health. But this situation should not have required moral courage! Community organizers should be able to trust that when CH blacklists somebody, it's not an attempt to give a third party leverage in a contract dispute.
The proper response is for local communities to stop paying attention to CEA's recommendations. I've been told that EA Germany and the summer camp no longer do, and that's great (ETA: I've since had conflicting reports about EA Germany specifically; it has its own dispute resolution process but sometimes takes advice from CEA as well, but wouldn't have in Laura's specific case). If you're an EA community organizer elsewhere, ask yourself: do you want to be used as a weapon against the people you're organizing? If not, maybe pay less attention to CEA! If our people in Germany had followed that heuristic back in 2024, a lot of pointless suffering could have been avoided.
2) That there are other paid roles in the EA ecosystem that Caroline could reasonably and effectively fill.
Most EAs do not work for EA orgs; they earn money at a normal job and then donate some of it. That's the path I'd recommend for someone with a fraud conviction, even if they weren't as notorious as Caroline.
Surely Kat didn't expect Ben would receive her evidence and do nothing with it?
Why not? According to Nonlinear, they had already told Ben they had evidence, and he'd decided to publish anyway: "He insists on going ahead and publishing this with false information intact, and is refusing to give us time to provide receipts/time stamps/text messages and other evidence". Ben already wasn't doing what Nonlinear wanted; the idea that he might continue shouldn't have been beyond their imagination. Since that's unlikely, it follows that Lightcone shouldn't have believed it, and should instead have expected that Nonlinear's threat was meant the way it was written.
More broadly, I think for any kind of claim of the form "your interpretation of what I said was clearly wrong and maybe bad faith, it should have been obvious what I really meant", any kind of thoughtful response is going to look pedantic, because it's going to involve parsing through what specifically was said, what they knew when they said it, and what their audience knew when they heard it. In this kind of discussion I think your pedantry threshold has to be set much higher than usual, or you won't be able to make progress.
I had all that context when I read it, and the reading you're giving here still didn't occur to me. To me it says, unambigiously, two contradictory things. When I read something like that I try to find a perspective where the two things don't actually conflict. What I landed on here was "they won't sue Ben so long as he removes the parts they consider false and libelous, even if what's left is still pretty harsh". "Nonlinear won't sue so long as Ben reads the evidence, no matter what he does with it" isn't quite ruled out by the text, but leaves a lot of it unexplained: there's a lot of focus on publishing false informationin that email, much more than just that one line. It doesn't really seem to make logical sense either: if some of Ben's post is libelous, why would his looking at contradictory evidence and deciding not to rewrite anything make it better?
Anyway, that's my thought process on it; if I'd got that email -- again, knowing nothing about you folks except what you wrote in the rebuttal post, and I guess that one subthread about nondisparagement agreements from the original -- then I'd certainly have taken it as a threat, contingent on publishing without changes. I hope it helps illustrate how Lightcone could take it the same way.
(searching for "libel" in the original thread also gives me this comment, making the same point three months ago, so I guess I am not adding anything new to the discourse after all. Oh well, there are probably some other people who read this thread but not that one).
...if published as is we intend to pursue legal action for libel against Ben Pace personally and Lightcone for the maximum damages permitted by law.
It seems to me that you and Emerson are trying to have it two ways. On the one hand, the email clearly says that you only wanted time. On the other hand, the email also clearly says that if Ben gave you that time and then didn't respond the way you wanted, you were still going to sue him. "we'd threatened to sue if he published" is a much more accurate summary of that email than "We said we would sue if they didn't give us time to share the evidence with them. " IMO.
(note, I haven't read Ben's original piece, just your rebuttal)
Again, Catherine says it doesn't. Who on the EA Germany side would know for sure?
The point is that it's only possible to collaborate with CEA when they're trying to collaborate with you -- if they're trying to trick you for the private benefit of some of their friends, as happened here, then hearing them out hurts you in expectation (this isn't what would happen to a perfect Bayesian, but we're not perfect Bayesians). Most things they tell you won't be tricks, but the tricks will be sharply -EV.
This isn't just about blacklisting, either. When CEA gives you a positive recommendation (to give someone a grant, for example), you should now consider the possibility that they're doing it against your interests.
It would be nice to collaborate with CEA. Antagonism, to use your word, is much more unpleasant. But, again, we're in this situation because Community Health chose to use our local communities against their own interests in order to prevent Laura from enforcing a legitimate contract claim. That was a hostile act, against Laura and against us, and no one from CEA has even acknowledged any wrongdoing, let alone tried to make up for the harms they've caused. Any honest description of CEA's actions is going to sound antagonistic.
I think "someone filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit" should be kept carefully separate from "someone is a pain" in our social norms, even though people who've filed lawsuits are sometimes annoying to be around even if you're not the one they filed it against. If the penalty for filing a suit is social ostacism, then people are more free to break the terms of the contracts they make, because it's so much more expensive to enforce those contracts than usual.
In EA, where so many of us work for each other, I think this is especially important. People who work together sometimes get into conflicts that require a court to unravel, even if everyone's acting in good faith. So long as the parties can be civil to each other, there's no reason they can't attend the same events in the meantime.
No one has said they felt pressured -- at least, not in this thread and not to me privately. No one worried that you'd blacklist them for failing to blacklist Laura, or have someone revoke their grants, or take any other coercive action.
What happened was, they trusted you. Specifically, they trusted that the information you gave them would be accurate and not misleading (even though it couldn't be complete), and they trusted that you thought banning Laura would make their event better or safer, based on knowledge and experience they didn't have. When you say that the final decision was theirs, what you're saying is that they didn't have to trust you that way. Of course that's true, but presumably there's some reason they should, or else why make a recommendation in the first place?
"Pressure" is entirely the wrong frame for thinking this. Rather, one wants to ask questions like, "does this person have a clear understanding of what I'm trying to achieve by advising them?", "do I have a clear model of their interests?", and "if they later learned some of the things I'm not telling them, would they feel betrayed?"
Are you sure this is still true? Caroline claimed above that CEA no longer shares that information.
I talked to another one of the organizers of the summer camp, after that part of this incident. She was upset: she knew Laura, she didn't expect that anything bad would happen if she came to the event, and she wanted to invite her. But, on the other hand, an authority figure had told her not to, so she didn't. After all, what if they knew better than she did? It was the cleanest reproduction of the Milgram experiment that I've ever seen in real life, and it really hurt her.
Now, it's true that the organizer wouldn't have suffered that way if she'd had a little more moral courage, and followed her own views instead of deferring to Community Health. But this situation should not have required moral courage! Community organizers should be able to trust that when CH blacklists somebody, it's not an attempt to give a third party leverage in a contract dispute.
The proper response is for local communities to stop paying attention to CEA's recommendations. I've been told that EA Germany and the summer camp no longer do, and that's great (ETA: I've since had conflicting reports about EA Germany specifically; it has its own dispute resolution process but sometimes takes advice from CEA as well, but wouldn't have in Laura's specific case). If you're an EA community organizer elsewhere, ask yourself: do you want to be used as a weapon against the people you're organizing? If not, maybe pay less attention to CEA! If our people in Germany had followed that heuristic back in 2024, a lot of pointless suffering could have been avoided.
Most EAs do not work for EA orgs; they earn money at a normal job and then donate some of it. That's the path I'd recommend for someone with a fraud conviction, even if they weren't as notorious as Caroline.
Why not? According to Nonlinear, they had already told Ben they had evidence, and he'd decided to publish anyway: "He insists on going ahead and publishing this with false information intact, and is refusing to give us time to provide receipts/time stamps/text messages and other evidence". Ben already wasn't doing what Nonlinear wanted; the idea that he might continue shouldn't have been beyond their imagination. Since that's unlikely, it follows that Lightcone shouldn't have believed it, and should instead have expected that Nonlinear's threat was meant the way it was written.
More broadly, I think for any kind of claim of the form "your interpretation of what I said was clearly wrong and maybe bad faith, it should have been obvious what I really meant", any kind of thoughtful response is going to look pedantic, because it's going to involve parsing through what specifically was said, what they knew when they said it, and what their audience knew when they heard it. In this kind of discussion I think your pedantry threshold has to be set much higher than usual, or you won't be able to make progress.
I had all that context when I read it, and the reading you're giving here still didn't occur to me. To me it says, unambigiously, two contradictory things. When I read something like that I try to find a perspective where the two things don't actually conflict. What I landed on here was "they won't sue Ben so long as he removes the parts they consider false and libelous, even if what's left is still pretty harsh". "Nonlinear won't sue so long as Ben reads the evidence, no matter what he does with it" isn't quite ruled out by the text, but leaves a lot of it unexplained: there's a lot of focus on publishing false information in that email, much more than just that one line. It doesn't really seem to make logical sense either: if some of Ben's post is libelous, why would his looking at contradictory evidence and deciding not to rewrite anything make it better?
Anyway, that's my thought process on it; if I'd got that email -- again, knowing nothing about you folks except what you wrote in the rebuttal post, and I guess that one subthread about nondisparagement agreements from the original -- then I'd certainly have taken it as a threat, contingent on publishing without changes. I hope it helps illustrate how Lightcone could take it the same way.
(searching for "libel" in the original thread also gives me this comment, making the same point three months ago, so I guess I am not adding anything new to the discourse after all. Oh well, there are probably some other people who read this thread but not that one).
But then, from the next paragraph of that same email:
It seems to me that you and Emerson are trying to have it two ways. On the one hand, the email clearly says that you only wanted time. On the other hand, the email also clearly says that if Ben gave you that time and then didn't respond the way you wanted, you were still going to sue him. "we'd threatened to sue if he published" is a much more accurate summary of that email than "We said we would sue if they didn't give us time to share the evidence with them. " IMO.
(note, I haven't read Ben's original piece, just your rebuttal)