EA - People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You by aella

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You, published by aella on February 18, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Before getting mini-famous, I did not appreciate the degree to which people would misrepresent and lie about other people.I knew about it in theory. I occasionally stumbled across claims about people that I later found out were false. I knew, abstractly, that any particular accuser is telling a truth or a lie, but you're not sure which one.But now, I'm in the unique position where people say things about me all the time, and I hear most of it, and I have direct access to whether it's accurate or not. There's something about the lack of ambiguity that has left me startled, here. Something was way off about my models of the world before I had access to the truth of a wide range of accusational samples.In the last few years, I've risen in visibility to the degree it's started to get unpleasant. I've had to give up on the idea of throwing parties at my house where guests are allowed to invite unvetted friends. There are internet pockets dedicated to hating me, where people have doxxed me and my family, including the home addresses of my parents and sister. I’ve experienced one kidnapping attempt. I might have to move. One stalker sent me, on average, three long messages every day for nearly three years. By this point death threats are losing their novelty.Before I was this visible, my model was "If a lot of people don't like you, maybe the problem is actually you." Some part of me, before, thought that if you were just consistently nice and charitable, if you were a good, kind person, people would... see that, somehow? Maybe you get one or two insane people, but overall truth would ultimately prevail, because lies without evidence wither and die. And even if people didn't like or agree with you, they wouldn't try to destroy you, because you can only really incite that level of fury in someone if you were at least a little bit at fault yourself. So if you do find yourself in a situation where lots of people are saying terrible things about you, you should take a look in the mirror.But this sort of thing doesn't hold true at large scales! It really doesn't, and that fact shocks some subconscious part of me, to the degree that even I get kinda large-scale gaslit about myself. I often read people talking about how I'm terrible, and then I'm like damn, I must have been a little too sloppy or aggressive in my language to cause them to be so upset with me. Then I go read the original thing they're upset about and find I was actually fine, and really kind, and what the fuck? I'm not used to disagreements being so clearly black and white! And me in the right? What is this, some cartoon children's book caricature of a moral lesson?And I have a similar shock when people work very hard to represent things I do in a sinister light. There've been multiple writeups about me, either by or informed by people I knew in person, where they describe things I've done in a manner that I consider to be extremely uncharitable. People develop a narrative by speculating on my mental state, beliefs, or intentions ("of course she knew people would have that reaction, she knew that person's background"), by blurring the line between thing I concretely did and vaguer facts about context ("she was central to the party so she was responsible for that thing that happened at it"), and by emphasizing reactions more than any concrete bad behavior (“this person says they felt really bad, that proves you did a terrible thing”).Collectively, these paint a picture that sounds convincing, because it seems like all the parts of the narrative are pointing in the same direction. Individually, however, the claims don’t hold up. (In this case, “someone got upset at a party I attended” is a real fa...