I want to try to paraphrase what I hear you saying in this comment thread, Holly. Please feel free to correct any mistakes or misframings in my paraphrase.
I hear you saying...
Lightcone culture has a relatively specific morality around integrity and transparency. Those norms are consistent, and maybe good, but they’re not necessarily shared by the EA community or the broader world.
Under those norms, actions like threatening your ex-employees’s carrer prospects to prevent them from sharing negative info about you are very bad, while in broader culture a “you don’t badmouth me, I don’t badmouth you” ceasefire is pretty normal.
In this post, Ben is accusing Nonlinear of bad behavior. In particular, he’s accusing them of acting particularly badly (compared to some baseline of EA orgs) according to the integrity norms of lightcone culture.
My understanding is that the dynamic here that Ben considers particularly egregious is that Nonlinear allegedly took actions to silence their ex-employees, and prevent negative info from propagating. If all of the same events had occurred between Nonlinear, Alice, and Chloe, except for Nonlinear suppressing info about what happened after the fact, Ben would not have prioritized this.
However, many bystanders are likely to miss that subtlety. They see Nonlinear being accused, but don’t share Lightcone’s specific norms and culture.
So many readers, tracking the social momentum, walk away with the low-dimensional bottom line conclusion “Boo Nonlinear!”, but without particularly tracking Ben’s cruxes.
eg They have the takeaway “it’s irresponsible to date or live with your coworkers, and only irresponsible people do that” instead of “Some people in the ecosystem hold that suppressing negative info about your org is a major violation.”
And importantly, it means in practice, Nonlinear is getting unfairly punished for some behaviors that are actually quite common in the EA subculture.
This creates a dynamic analogous to “There are so many laws on the book that technically everyone is a criminal. So the police/government can harass or imprison anyone they choose, by selectively punishing crimes.” If enough social momentum gets mounted against an org, they can be lambasted for things that many orgs are “guilty” of[1], while the other orgs get off scott free.
And furthermore, this creates unpredictability. People can’t tell whether their version of some behavior is objectionable or not.
So overall, Ben might be accusing Nonlinear for principled reasons, but to many bystanders, this is indistinguishable from accusing them for pretty common EA behaviors, by fiat. Which is a pretty scary precedent!
Ok. Given all that, is there particular thing that you wish Ben (or someone) had done differently here? Or are you mostly wanting to point out the dynamic?
I want to try to paraphrase what I hear you saying in this comment thread, Holly. Please feel free to correct any mistakes or misframings in my paraphrase.
I hear you saying...
Lightcone culture has a relatively specific morality around integrity and transparency. Those norms are consistent, and maybe good, but they’re not necessarily shared by the EA community or the broader world.
Under those norms, actions like threatening your ex-employees’s carrer prospects to prevent them from sharing negative info about you are very bad, while in broader culture a “you don’t badmouth me, I don’t badmouth you” ceasefire is pretty normal.
In this post, Ben is accusing Nonlinear of bad behavior. In particular, he’s accusing them of acting particularly badly (compared to some baseline of EA orgs) according to the integrity norms of lightcone culture.
My understanding is that the dynamic here that Ben considers particularly egregious is that Nonlinear allegedly took actions to silence their ex-employees, and prevent negative info from propagating. If all of the same events had occurred between Nonlinear, Alice, and Chloe, except for Nonlinear suppressing info about what happened after the fact, Ben would not have prioritized this.
However, many bystanders are likely to miss that subtlety. They see Nonlinear being accused, but don’t share Lightcone’s specific norms and culture.
So many readers, tracking the social momentum, walk away with the low-dimensional bottom line conclusion “Boo Nonlinear!”, but without particularly tracking Ben’s cruxes.
eg They have the takeaway “it’s irresponsible to date or live with your coworkers, and only irresponsible people do that” instead of “Some people in the ecosystem hold that suppressing negative info about your org is a major violation.”
And importantly, it means in practice, Nonlinear is getting unfairly punished for some behaviors that are actually quite common in the EA subculture.
This creates a dynamic analogous to “There are so many laws on the book that technically everyone is a criminal. So the police/government can harass or imprison anyone they choose, by selectively punishing crimes.” If enough social momentum gets mounted against an org, they can be lambasted for things that many orgs are “guilty” of[1], while the other orgs get off scott free.
And furthermore, this creates unpredictability. People can’t tell whether their version of some behavior is objectionable or not.
So overall, Ben might be accusing Nonlinear for principled reasons, but to many bystanders, this is indistinguishable from accusing them for pretty common EA behaviors, by fiat. Which is a pretty scary precedent!
Am I understanding correctly?
“guilty” in quotes to suggest the ambiguity about whether the behaviors in question are actually bad or guiltworthy.
Yes, very good summary!
Ok. Given all that, is there particular thing that you wish Ben (or someone) had done differently here? Or are you mostly wanting to point out the dynamic?