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-[TODO—
- * Kelsey in meatspace tells me that Vassar has a benefactor that she can't name; I'm retarded enough to not infer that it's him and she was obfuscating for compliance
- ...
-]
+Later, talking in person at "Arcadia", Kelsey told me that someone (whose identity she would not disclose) had threatened to sue over the report about Michael, so REACH was delaying its release for the one-year statute of limitations. As far as my interest in defending Michael went, I counted this as short-term good news (because the report wasn't being published) but longer-term bad news (because the report must be a hit piece if Michael's mysterious ally was trying to hush it).
+
+When I mentioned this to Michael on Signal on 3 August 2019, he replied:
+
+> The person is me, the whole process is a hit piece, literally, the investigation process and not the content. Happy to share the latter with you. You can talk with Ben about appropiate ethical standards.
+
+In retrospect, I feel dumb for not guessing that Michael's mysterious ally was Michael himself. I count this kind of situation as another reason to be [annoyed at how norms protecting confidentiality](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#privacy-constraints) distort information; Kelsey apparently felt obligated to obfuscate any names connected to potential litigation, which led me to the infer the existence of a nonexistent person (because I naïvely assumed that if Michael had threatened to sue, Kelsey would have said that). I can't say I never introduce this kind of disortion in my communications (for I, too, am bound by norms), but when I do, I feel dirty about it.
+
+As far as appropriate ethical standards go, I didn't particularly approve of silencing critics with lawsuit threats, even while I agreed with Michael that "the process is the punishment." I imagine that if the REACH wanted to publish a report about me, I would expect to defend myself in public, having faith that Speech would carry the day against a corrupt community center—or for that matter, against /r/SneerClub.
+
+This is arguably one of my more religious traits. Michael and Kelsey are domain experts and probably know better.
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-[TODO: complicity and friendship]
+I had a phone call with Michael in which he took issue with Anna having described Ziz as having threatened to kill Gwen, when that wasn't a fair paraphrase of what Ziz's account actually said.[^ziz-gwen-account] In Michael's view, this was tantamount to indirect attempted murder using the State as a weapon to off her organization's critics: Anna casting Ziz as a Scary Bad Guy in [the improv scene of social reality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) is the kind of maneuver that contributes to the legal system ruining weird people's lives with spurious charges because weird gets [cast as villains in the act](https://unstableontology.com/2018/11/17/act-of-charity/).
+
+[^ziz-gwen-account]: The relevant passage from [one of Ziz's memoir posts](https://archive.ph/an5rp#selection-419.0-419.442) is:
+
+ > I said if they were going to defend a right to be attacking me on some level, and treat fighting back as new aggression and cause to escalate, I would not at any point back down, and if our conflicting definitions of the ground state where no further retaliation was necessary meant we were consigned to a runaway positive feedback loop of revenge, so be it. And if that was true, we might as well try to kill each other right then and there.
+
+ Talking about murder hypothetically as the logical game-theoretic consequence of a revenge spiral isn't the same thing as directly threatening to kill someone. I wasn't sure what exact words Anna had used in her alleged paraphrase; Michael didn't remember the context when I asked him later.
+
+I told Michael that this made me think I might need to soul-search about having been complicit with injustice, but I couldn't clearly articulate why.
+
+I figured it out later (Subject: "complicity and friendship"). I think part of my emotional reaction to finding out about Ziz's legal trouble was the hope that it would lead to less pressure on Anna. I had been nagging Anna a lot on the theme of "rationality actually requires free speech", and she would sometimes defend her policy of guardedness on the grounds of (my paraphrase—), "Hey, give me some credit, oftentimes I do take a calculated risk of telling people things. Or I did, but then ... Ziz."
+
+I think at some level, I was imagining being able to tell Anna, "See, you were so afraid that telling people things would make enemies, and you used Ziz as evidence that you weren't cautious enough. But look, Ziz _isn't going to be a problem for you anymore_. Your fear of making enemies actually happened, and you're fine! This is evidence in favor of my view that you were far too cautious, rather than not being cautious enough!"
+
+But that was complicit with injustice, because the _reason_ I felt that Ziz wasn't going to be a problem for Anna anymore was because Ziz's protest got SWATted, which didn't have anything to do with the merits of Ziz's claims against Anna. I still wanted Anna to feel safer to speak, but I now realized that more specifically, I wanted Anna to feel safe _because_ Speech can actually win. Feeling safe because one's enemies can be crushed by the state wasn't the same thing.
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff