In light of that statement, I thought the paraphrase in the article was misleading. "[S]omehow prove statistically which side was right" leads readers who aren't familiar with the source's work to imagine that she has an unreasonable faith in the power of statistics to resolve all questions, whereas voicing skepticism of [false balance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance) is eminently reasonable. "Somehow" implies vagueness, but pointing out data sources that bear on some question is supplying a specific "how."
-[When I complained about this to the journalist](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P8GuwYdy6foSzyZog/conversations-with-cade-metz-on-the-rationalists#24_June_2025), he didn't seem embarrassed. "I had to boil down what she said to plain English," he said, recounting that the source had objected when he said his coverage would represent both views of the public figure. When I continued to insist that it seemed like a bad paraphrase when compared to what the source had told me later, he said, "Is that necessarily what she said to me?"
+[When I complained about this to the journalist](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P8GuwYdy6foSzyZog/conversations-with-cade-metz-on-the-rationalists#24_June_2025), he didn't seem embarrassed. "I had to boil down what she said to plain English," he said. I said that it hadn't worked. He said it did. He recounted that the source had objected when he said his coverage would represent both views of the public figure. When I continued to insist that it seemed like a bad paraphrase when compared to what the source had told me later, he said, "Is that necessarily what she said to me?"
-And in absolute fairness, maybe it wasn't, _necessarily_. I of course was not present for the conversation between the journalist and the source; I don't have the recording, if there was one. Even if the source can be assumed to be an authority about what she _meant_ to say, I cannot with absolute certainty rule out the scenario where the "somehow prove statistically which side was right" line was a reasonable paraphrase of the words she had literally said at the time and that her reconstruction three years later of what she remembered saying was unintentionally injecting more nuance after the fact. If the journalist had reasonably paraphrased the words that were said to him at the time and the source didn't object during the fact check call, then he was innocent in his soul. Even if his readers walked away with a distorted impression of what the source believed, the miscommunication wasn't his fault.
+And in absolute fairness, maybe it wasn't, _necessarily_. I of course was not present for the conversation between the journalist and the source; I don't have the recording, if there was one. Even if the source can be assumed to be an authority about what she _meant_ to say, I cannot with absolute certainty rule out the scenario where the "somehow prove statistically which side was right" line was a reasonable paraphrase of the words she had literally said at the time and that her reconstruction three years later of what she remembered saying was unintentionally injecting more nuance after the fact. The source hadn't objected during the fact check call. If the journalist had reasonably paraphrased the words that were said to him at the time, then he was innocent in his soul. Even if his readers walked away with a distorted impression of what the source believed, the miscommunication wasn't his fault.
-I still think this episode _looks bad for him_ and that he should have been _embarrassed_. Potential sources deciding whether they should talk to him are mostly worried about the risk that their views will end up being miscommunicated, not whose fault a miscommunication would be if it happened. Unlucky accidents do not impinge upon the innocence of one's soul under the moral law, but the moral law is unmercifully permissive about everyone else's right to _avoid unlucky people_.
+I still think this episode _looks bad for him_ and that he should have been _embarrassed_, because there should have been generalizable policy changes that could have prevented this class of error—perhaps, thinking more carefully about whether a paraphrase that makes a subject look unreasonable is truly a fair paraphrase before going to print with it. Potential sources deciding whether they should talk to the journalist are mostly worried about the risk that their views will end up being miscommunicated, not whose fault a miscommunication would be if it happened. Unlucky accidents do not impinge upon the innocence of one's soul under the moral law, but the moral law is unmercifully permissive about everyone else's right to _avoid unlucky people_.
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-And that's why accidentally misleading people should be embarrassing: because the desire to avoid such embarrassment motivates a counterfactual reduction in such incidents of people being misled, notwithstanding that it was an accident.
+And that's why accidentally misleading people should be embarrassing: because the desire to avoid such embarrassment motivates a counterfactual reduction in such incidents of people being misled, notwithstanding that it was an accident and totally unintentional.[^unintentional]
+
+[^unintentional]: Some theorists would question whether the presence of motivations that make accidents more likely calls into question [whether they should be analyzed as truly unintentional](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie), but discussion of such a controversial and speculative view is beyond the scope of this post.
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff