Hi all, I wanted to chime in because I have had conversations relevant to this post with just about all involved parties at various points. I’ve spoken to “Alice” (both while she worked at nonlinear and afterward), Kat (throughout the period when the events in the post were alleged to have happened and afterward), Emerson, Drew, and (recently) the author Ben, as well as, to a much lesser extent, “Chloe” (when she worked at nonlinear). I am (to my knowledge) on friendly terms with everyone mentioned (by name or pseudonym) in this post. I wish well for everyone involved. I also want the truth to be known, whatever the truth is.
I was sent a nearly final draft of this post yesterday (Wednesday), once by Ben and once by another person mentioned in the post.
I want to say that I find this post extremely strange for the following reasons:
(1) The nearly final draft of this post that I was given yesterday had factual inaccuracies that (in my opinion and based on my understanding of the facts) are very serious despite ~150 hours being spent on this investigation. This makes it harder for me to take at face value the parts of the post that I have no knowledge of. Why am I, an outsider on this whole thing, finding serious errors in the final hours before publication? That’s not to say everything in the post is inaccurate, just that I was disturbed to see serious inaccuracies, and I have no idea why nobody caught these (I really don’t feel like I should be the one to correct mistakes, given my lack of involvement, but it feels important to me to comment here since I know there were inaccuracies in the piece, so here we are).
(2) Nonlinear reached out to me and told me they have proof that a bunch of claims in the post are completely false. They also said that in the past day or so (upon becoming aware of the contents of the post), they asked Ben to delay his publication of this post by one week so that they could gather their evidence and show it to Ben before he publishes it (to avoid having him publish false information). However, he refused to do so.
This really confuses me. Clearly, Ben spent a huge amount of time on this post (which has presumably involved weeks or months of research), so why not wait one additional week for Nonlinear to provide what they say is proof that his post contains substantial misinformation? Of course, if the evidence provided by nonlinear is weak, he should treat it as such, but if it is strong, it should also be treated as such. I struggle to wrap my head around the decision not to look at that evidence. I am also confused why Ben, despite spending a huge amount of time on this research, apparently didn’t seek out this evidence from Nonlinear long ago.
To clarify: I think it’s very important in situations like this not to let the group being criticized have a way to delay publication indefinitely. If I were in Ben’s shoes, I believe what I would have done is say something like, “You have exactly one week to provide proof of any false claims in this post (and I’ll remove any claim you can prove is false) then I’m publishing the post no matter what at that time.” This is very similar to the policy we use for our Transparent Replications project (where we replicate psychology results of publications in top journals), and we have found it to work well. We give the original authors a specific window of time during which they can point out any errors we may have made (which is at least a week). This helps make sure our replications are accurate, fair, and correct, and yet the teams being replicated have no say over whether the replications are released (they always are released regardless of whether we get a response).
It seems to me that basic norms of good epistemics require that, on important topics, you look at all the evidence that can be easily acquired.
I also think that if you publish misinformation, you can’t just undo it by updating the post later or issuing a correction. Sadly, that’s not the way human minds/social information works. In other words, misinformation can’t be jammed back into the bottle once it is released. I have seen numerous cases where misinformation is released only later to be retracted, in which the misinformation got way more attention than the retraction, and most people came away only with the misinformation. This seems to me to provide a strong additional reason why a small delay in the publication date appears well worth it (to me, as an outsider) to help avoid putting out a post with potentially substantial misinformation. I hope that the lesswrong/EA communities will look at all the evidence once it is released, which presumably will be in the next week or so, in order to come to a fair and accurate conclusion (based on all the evidence, whatever that accurate final conclusion turns out to be) and do better than these other cases I’ve witnessed where misinformation won the day.
Of course, I don’t know Ben’s reason for jumping to publish immediately, so I can’t evaluate his reasons directly.
Disclaimer: I am friends with multiple people connected to this post. As a reminder, I wish well for everyone involved, and I wish for the truth to be known, whatever that truth happens to be. I have acted (informally) as an advisor to nonlinear (without pay) - all that means, though, is that every so often, team members there will reach out to me to ask for my advice on things.
Note: I’ve updated this comment a few times to try to make my position clearer, to add some additional context, and to fix grammatical mistakes.
(Copying over the same response I posted over on LW)
I don’t have all the context of Ben’s investigation here, but as someone who has done investigations like this in the past, here are some thoughts on why I don’t feel super sympathetic to requests to delay publication:
In this case, it seems to me that there is a large and substantial threat of retaliation. My guess is Ben’s sources were worried about Emerson hiring stalkers, calling their family, trying to get them fired from their job, or threatening legal action. Having things be out in the public can provide a defense because it is much easier to ask for help if the conflict happens in the open.
As a concrete example, Emerson has just sent me an email saying:
Given the irreversible damage that would occur by publishing, it simply is inexcusable to not give us a bit of time to correct the libelous falsehoods in this document, and 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. The legal case is unambiguous and publishing it now would both be unethical and gross negligence, causing irreversible damage.
For the record, the threat of libel suit and use of statements like “maximum damages permitted by law” seem to me to be attempts at intimidation. Also, as someone who has looked quite a lot into libel law (having been threatened with libel suits many times over the years), describing the legal case as “unambiguous” seems inaccurate and a further attempt at intimidation.
My guess is Ben’s sources have also received dozens of calls (as have I received many in the last few hours), and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Emerson called up my board, or would otherwise try to find some other piece of leverage against Lightcone, Ben, or Ben’s sources if he had more time.
While I am not that worried about Emerson, I think many other people are in a much more vulnerable position and I can really resonate with not wanting to give someone an opportunity to gather their forces (and in that case I think it’s reasonable to force the conflict out in the open, which is far from an ideal arena, but does provide protection against many types of threats and adversarial action).
Separately, the time investment for things like this is really quite enormous and I have found it extremely hard to do work of this type in parallel to other kinds of work, especially towards the end of a project like this, when the information is ready for sharing, and lots of people have strong opinions and try to pressure you in various ways. Delaying by “just a week” probably translates into roughly 40 hours of productive time lost, even if there isn’t much to do, because it’s so hard to focus on other things. That’s just a lot of additional time, and so it’s not actually a very cheap ask.
Lastly, I have also found that the standard way that abuse in the extended EA community has been successfully prevented from being discovered is by forcing everyone who wants to publicize or share any information about it to jump through a large number of hoops. Calls for “just wait a week” and “just run your posts by the party you are criticizing” might sound reasonable in isolation, but very quickly multiply the cost of any information sharing, and have huge chilling effects that prevent the publishing of most information and accusations. Asking the other party to just keep doing a lot of due diligence is easy and successful and keeps most people away from doing investigations like this.
As I have written about before, I myself ended up being intimidated by this for the case of FTX and chose not to share my concerns about FTX more widely, which I continue to consider one of the worst mistakes of my career.
My current guess is that if it is indeed the case that Emerson and Kat have clear proof that a lot of the information in this post is false, then I think they should share that information publicly. Maybe on their own blog, or maybe here on LessWrong or on the EA Forum. It is also the case that rumors about people having had very bad experiences working with Nonlinear are already circulating around the community and this is already having a large effect on Nonlinear, and as such, being able to have clear false accusations to respond against should help them clear their name, if they are indeed false.
I agree that this kind of post can be costly, and I don’t want to ignore the potential costs of false accusations, but at least to me it seems like I want an equilibrium of substantially more information sharing, and to put more trust in people’s ability to update their models of what is going on, and less paternalistic “people are incapable of updating if we present proof that the accusations are false”, especially given what happened with FTX and the costs we have observed from failing to share observations like this.
A final point that feels a bit harder to communicate is that in my experience, some people are just really good at manipulation, throwing you off-balance, and distorting your view of reality, and this is a strong reason to not commit to run everything by the people you are sharing information on. A common theme that I remember hearing from people who had concerns about SBF is that people intended to warn other people, or share information, then they talked to SBF, and somehow during that conversation he disarmed them, without really responding to the essence of their concerns. This can take the form of threats and intimidation, or the form of just being really charismatic and making you forget what your concerns were, or more deeply ripping away your grounding and making you think that your concerns aren’t real, and that actually everyone is doing the thing that seems wrong to you, and you are going to out yourself as naive and gullible by sharing your perspective.
[Edit: The closest post we have to setting norms on when to share information with orgs you are criticizing is Jeff Kauffman’s post on the matter. While I don’t fully agree with the reasoning within it, in there he says:
Sometimes orgs will respond with requests for changes, or try to engage you in private back-and forth. While you’re welcome to make edits in response to what you learn from them, you don’t have an obligation to: it’s fine to just say “I’m planning to publish this as-is, and I’d be happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments.”
[EDIT: I’m not advocating this for cases where you’re worried that the org will retaliate or otherwise behave badly if you give them advance warning, or for cases where you’ve had a bad experience with an org and don’t want any further interaction. For example, I expect Curzi didn’t give Leverage an opportunity to prepare a response to My Experience with Leverage Research, and that’s fine.]
This case seems to me to be fairly clearly covered by the second paragraph, and also, Nonlinear’s response to “I am happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments” was to respond with “I will sue you if you publish these concerns”, to which IMO the reasonable response is to just go ahead and publish before things escalate further. Separately, my sense is Ben’s sources really didn’t want any further interaction and really preferred having this over with, which I resonate with, and is also explicitly covered by Jeff’s post.
So in as much as you are trying to enforce some kind of existing norm that demands running posts like this by the org, I don’t think that norm currently has widespread buy-in, as the most popular and widely-quoted post on the topic does not demand that standard (I separately think the post is still slightly too much in favor of running posts by the organizations they are criticizing, but that’s for a different debate).]
I think it is reasonable to share information without providing people the opportunity to respond if you’re worried they’ll abuse your generosity (which may indeed have been Ben’s reasoning here), but I’m generally against the norm of not waiting for a response if the main reason is “can’t be bothered” *.
I guess my reasoning here is the drama can consume a community if it let it, so I would prefer that we choose our norms to minimise unnecessary drama.
(I don’t want this comment to be taken as a defense of Nonlinear leadership in relation to these claims. I want to be clear that I am very disappointed with what they have admitted even if we were to imagine that nothing else claimed is true. I should mention that I interned at Nonlinear and was subsequently invited to collaborate with them on Superlinear, but I turned this down because of some of the rumours I was hearing).
I’ll add that I’m more sympathetic to the victim of something deciding to just post it than a third party bc third parties are generally more able to bear that burden.
This case seems to me to be fairly clearly covered by the second paragraph, and also, Nonlinear’s response to “I am happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments” was to respond with “I will sue you if you publish these concerns”
I don’t understand how people would be at greater risk of retaliation if the post was delayed by a week?
I also want to make sure people realise that there’s a huge difference between “I will stalk you / call your family / get you fired” and “I will sue you” in terms of what counts as threats/intimidation/retaliation [edit: e.g. if Alice had threatened to sue Nonlinear that wouldn’t be considered retaliation, whereas threatening to call their family would be worrying], so I don’t think Emerson’s email is a particularly strong confirmation that the “large and substantial threat of retaliation” is real.
If Ben is worried about losing 40 hours of productive time by responding to Nonlinear’s evidence in private, he doesn’t have to. He could just allow them to put together their side of the story, ready for publishing when he publishes his own post. Similarly, if he’s worried about them manipulating him with their charisma, he could just agree to delay and then stop reading/responding to their messages. This way readers can still read both sides of the story at once, rather than read the most juicy side, tell all their friends the latest gossip, and carry on with their lives as the post drops off the frontpage.
I don’t understand how people would be at greater risk of retaliation if the post was delayed by a week?
It is a lot easier to explain to your employer or your friends or your colleagues what is happening if you can just link them to a public post, if someone is trying to pressure you. That week in which the person you are scared of has access to the post, but the public does not, is a quite vulnerable week, in my experience.
I also want to make sure people realise that there’s a huge difference between “I will stalk you / call your family / get you fired” and “I will sue you” in terms of what counts as threats/intimidation/retaliation, so I don’t think Emerson’s email is a particularly strong confirmation that the “large and substantial threat of retaliation” is real.
I think threatening a libel lawsuit with the intensity that Emerson did strikes me as above “calling my family” in terms of what counts as threats/intimidation/retaliation, especially if you are someone who does not have the means for a legal defense (which would be true of Ben’s sources for this post). Libel suits are really costly, and a quite major escalation.
If Ben is worried about losing 40 hours of productive time by responding to Nonlinear’s evidence in private, he doesn’t have to. He could just allow them to put together their side of the story, ready for publishing when he publishes his own post.
Emerson’s email says explicitly that if the post is published as is, that he would pursue a libel suit. This seems to rule out the option of just delaying and letting them prepare their response, and indeed demands that the original post gets changed.
I think threatening a libel lawsuit with the intensity that Emerson did strikes me as above “calling my family” in terms of what counts as threats/intimidation/retaliation, especially if you are someone who does not have the means for a legal defense
I think there’s different versions of “call your family” that suggests different levels of escalation.
Tell your family compromising facts about you (bad and scary, but probably less scary than having to mount a legal defense)
Threaten your family, implicitly or explicitly (the type of thing that predictably leads people to being terrified)
Thank you for taking the time to clearly and patiently explain these dynamics. They’re not obvious to me, as someone who’s never experienced anything similar.
Does Lightcone have liability insurance? Or any kind of legal insurance or something similar that covers the litigation costs involved in defamation lawsuits? I think posts like these are important, it would be sad if there wasn’t a way to easily protect whistleblowers from having to spend a lot of money fighting a defamation case.
My current model is that we have enough money to defend against a defamation lawsuit like this. The costs are high, but we also aren’t a super small organization (we have a budget of like $3M-$4M a year), so I think we could absorb it if it happened, and my guess is we could fundraise additionally if the costs somehow ballooned above that.
I looked a bit into liability insurance but it seemed like a large pain, and not worth it given that we are probably capable of self-insuring.
I might be confused here, but it sure seemed easy to hand over money, but hard to verify that the insurance would actually kick in in the relevant situation, and wouldn’t end up being voided for some random reason.
There is a reason courtrooms give both sides equal chances to make their case before they ask the jury to decide.
It is very difficult for people to change their minds later, and most people assume that if you’re on trial, you must be guilty, which is why judges remind juries about “innocent before proven guilty”.
This is one of the foundations of our legal system, something we learned over thousands of years of trying to get better at justice. You’re just assuming I’m guilty and saying that justifies not giving me a chance to present my evidence.
Also, if we post another comment thread a week later, who will see it? EAF/LW don’t have sufficient ways to resurface old but important content.
Re: “my guess is Ben’s sources have received dozens of calls”—well, your guess is wrong, and you can ask them to confirm this.
You also took my email strategically out of context to fit the Emerson-is-a-horned-CEO-villain narrative. Here’s the full one:
It is very difficult for people to change their minds later, and most people assume that if you’re on trial, you must be guilty, which is why judges remind juries about “innocent before proven guilty”.
This is one of the foundations of our legal system, something we learned over thousands of years of trying to get better at justice. You’re just assuming I’m guilty and saying that justifies not giving me a chance to present my evidence.
Trials are public as well. Indeed our justice system generally doesn’t have secret courts, so I am not sure what argument you are trying to make here. In as much as you want to make an analogue to the legal system, you now also have the ability to present your evidence, in front of an audience of your peers. The “jury” has not decided anything (and neither have I, at least regarding the dynamics and accusations listed in the post).
I am not assuming you are guilty. My current best guess is that you have done some pretty bad things, but yeah, I haven’t heard your side very much, and I will update and signal boost your evidence if you provide me with evidence that the core points of this post are wrong.
Also, if we post another comment thread a week later, who will see it? EAF/LW don’t have sufficient ways to resurface old but important content.
You could make a new top-level post. I expect it would get plenty of engagement. The EAF/LW seems really quite capable of resurfacing various types of community conflict, and making it the center of attention for a long time.
You also took my email strategically out of context to fit the Emerson-is-a-horned-CEO-villain narrative. Here’s the full one:
I shared the part that seemed relevant to me, since sharing the whole email seemed excessive. I don’t think the rest of the email changes the context of the libel suit threat you made, though readers can decide that for themselves.
Just a quick note that my read of the full email does not really change the context of the libel suit threat, or Habryka’s claims, especially given much of the missing information from the email was already in a public comment by Kat.
I also agree that if Nonlinear provided substantive evidence in a top-level post that dramatically changed the narrative of this story, e.g. change my personal credence of each of these claims to <15%, it would receive significant attention, such as staying on the front page on the community tab for at least 1 week, gain >150 karma etc.
If you can share (publicly or privately) strong evidence contradicting “claims [...] that wildly distort the true story” (emphasis mine), I pre-commit to signal boosting.
For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t be surprised if you do have strong counter-evidence to some claims (given the number of claims made, the ease with which things can be lost in translation, your writing this email, etc.). But, as of right now, I would be surprised if my understanding of the important stuff—roughly, the items covered in Ben’s epistemic state and the crossing of red lines—was wildly distorted. I hope that it is.
[EDIT, Nov 13: it sounds like the Nonlinear reply might be in the 100s of pages. This might be the right move from their point of view, but reading 3-figure pages stretches my pre-commitment above further than I would have intended at the time. I’d like to amend the commitment to “engaging with the >=20 pages-equivalent that seems most relevant to me or Nonlinear, or skimming >=50 pages-equivalent.” If people think this is breaking the spirit of my earlier commitment, I’ll seriously consider standing by the literal wording of that commitment (engaging with ~everything). Feel free to message about this.]
I’d also be pleased to find out that my understanding is wrong!
I don’t think they’re in a position to show that a lot of hurt didn’t accrue to the employees, but maybe they can show some ways in which they clearly signaled that they wouldn’t try to ruin their employees or intimidate them, such as
Texts where they told Alice/Chloe “I understand that you had a horrible experience here, and it’s totally fine for you to tell other people that this working/living environment was awful and you’ve been really hurt by it, and also here’s a way in which I’m going to make sure you’re better off for having interacted with us”
Any writing where Emerson says “I have used vicious and aggressive business tactics in the past, but to be clear if this work-slash-family situation really burns you, I will not come after you with these tactics even if I strongly disagree with your interpretations of what happened”
Or generally some “philosophy of how to behave with allies” doc written by Emerson that says something like “Here are the 48 Laws of Power, and here is my explanation why you should never use these tactics if you want to be trustworthy, and here’s why we would never use them in an EA/x-risk/etc context”
Then that could change my mind on the intimidation aspect a bunch. I think in general intimidation/fear is often indirect and implicit, so it’s going to be hard to disprove, but if there was clear evidence about why that wouldn’t happen here, then I could come to believe that Alice/Chloe/others had managed to trick themselves into being more worried than they needed to be.
The nearly final draft of this post that I was given yesterday had factual inaccuracies that (in my opinion and based on my understanding of the facts) are very serious
Why am I, an outsider on this whole thing, finding serious errors in the final hours before publication?
I was disturbed to see serious inaccuracies
Can you give some examples of the serious errors you found?
Yes, here two examples, sorry I can’t provide more detail:
-there were claims in the post made about Emerson that were not actually about Emerson at all (they were about his former company years after he left). I pointed this out to Ben hours before publication and he rushed to correct it (in my view it’s a pretty serious mistake to make false accusations about a person, I see this as pretty significant)!
-there was also a very disparaging claim made in the piece (I unfortunately can’t share the details for privacy reasons; but I assume nonlinear will later) that was quite strongly contradicted by a text message exchange I have
To confirm: I had a quickly written bit about the glassdoor reviews. It was added in without much care because it wasn’t that cruxy to me about the whole situation, just a red flag that suggested further investigation was worth it, that someone else suggested I add for completeness. The reviews I included were from after the time that Emerson’s linkedin says he was CEO, and I’m glad that Spencer corrected me.
If I’m remembering the other one, there was also a claim that I included not because it was itself obviously unethical, but because it seemed to indicate a really invasive social environment, and when I think information has been suppressed I have strong heuristics suggesting to share worrying information even if it isn’t proven or necessarily bad. Anyway, Spencer said he was confident in a very different narrative of events, so I edited it the comment to be more minor.
In general I think Spencer’s feedback on this and other points improved the post (though he also had some inaccurate information).
To me, this is the biggest red flag in this whole situation. My work has been written about by journalists, with both negative spins and actual factual inaccuracies and whenever this happens, my first response is: here is where you are wrong, and here is the truth. Which, I know, because it’s about me and I know what happened (at least according to me).
If someone doesn’t believe me and they want the “receipts”, I can provide these later, but I don’t need them to dispute the claim in the first place. I understand this piece has a lot of information and responding to everything can take time but again, but the broad strokes shouldn’t take this long.
In fact, it seems that Nonlinear already had a chance to dispute some of the claims when they had their lengthy interview with Ben and it seems that they did because the piece says, multiple times, that there are conflicting claims from both parties about what happened. I’m unclear Nonlinear want to clarify and prove these in their favor or if they want to dispute additional claims that they have not disputed before. Either way, the vagueness is concerning and in my experience, it is a sign of possibly buying more time to figure out a spin.
Could this be an instance of the rationalist tendency to “decouple”?
From one perspective, Ben is simply “Sharing information about nonlinear.” What’s wrong with providing additional information? It’s even caveated with a description of one’s epistemic status and instruction on how to update accordingly! Why don’t we all have such a “low bar for publicly sharing critical info about folks in the EA/x-risk/rationalist/etc ecosystem”?
From another perspective, Ben has chosen to “search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders” and then—without inviting or even permitting the accused party to share their side of the story in advance—share it in a public space full of agents whose tendency to gossip is far stronger than their tendency to update in an appropriately Bayesian manner (i.e. human beings).
I suspect Ben does in fact have some understanding of the political dimension of his decision to share this post, but I think his behaviour is more understandable when you consider that he’s embedded in a culture that encourages people to ignore the political consequences of what they say.
without inviting or even permitting the accused party to share their side of the story in advance
You may have missed the section where I had a 3hr call with them and summarized what they told me? It’s not everything we’d want but I think this sentence is inaccurate.
I suspect Ben does in fact have some understanding of the political dimension of his decision to share this post
Of course I do! I thought about it a bunch and came to the conclusion that it’s best to share serious and credible accusations early and fast.
From another perspective, Ben has chosen to “search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders” and then—without inviting or even permitting the accused party to share their side of the story in advance—share it in a public space full of agents whose tendency to gossip is far stronger than their tendency to update in an appropriately Bayesian manner (i.e. human beings).
I’m confused—wouldn’t you consider the “Conversation with Nonlinear” section to be letting the accused party share their side of the story in advance?
Possibly naive question: if Non-Linear have material that undeniably rebuts these accusations and they only need to sort it out/organize for presentation, why not publish it in a disorganized/scrambled format, sort it out later and then publish clean/sorted out version? In this way, they will at least show that they’re not scheming anything and are honest about why they asked Ben to delay the post.
I don’t know, but I know that negotiating confidentiality is a major part that often takes a lot of calendar time. They might have emails or text chats from people that they would like to share, but they first need to get permission to share, or at least provide adequate warning. This can definitely take a few days in my experience.
It might simply take a lot of time to track it all down. If there was one big Google Doc with all of the relevant information in a disorganized/scrambled format (and it didn’t have other information, such as someone’s social security number), then it might make sense to share the messy information and organize it later. But what is more likely is that there are tidbits of information scattered across dozens of email threads, chat groups, slack channels, Google Calendars, etc., and that merely copying and pasting a bunch of stuff into a messy Google Doc would take many, many hours.
That’s an interesting idea, but presenting information badly is a good way of ensuring people tune out when you present your final version.
I wonder about versions of this scheme where someone holds an unorganised version in escrow to be released alongside the organised version?
However, I’m not really sure if that would work either. Suppose you might have relevant texts where it isn’t clear whether they contain confidential information or not. Like in some cases, you may actually need to have a discussion about what is okay to share and what is not. Just quickly dumping a bunch of information out there is an easy way to accidentally do further harm.
Disclaimer: Previously interned at Nonlinear. This comment previously said that I didn’t have knowledge of what information Nonlinear is yet to release, but then I just realised that I actually do know a few things.
They also said that in the past day or so (upon becoming aware of the contents of the post), they asked Ben to delay his publication of this post by one week so that they could gather their evidence and show it to Ben before he publishes it (to avoid having him publish false information). However, he refused to do so.
This is really weird to me. These allegations have been circling for over a year, and presumably Nonlinear has known about this piece for months now. Why do they still need to get their evidence together? And even if they do—just due to extraneous circumstances—why do they feel so entitled to the piece being held for a week, when they have had ample time to collect their side of the story.
To be clear I only informed them about my planned writeup on Friday.
(The rest of the time lots of other people involved were v afraid of retaliation and intimidation and I wanted to respect that while gathering evidence. I believe if I hadn’t made that commitment to people then I wouldn’t have gotten the evidence.)
With regards to #2, I shared your concern, and I thought Habryka’s response didn’t justify that the cost of a brief delay was sufficient if there was a realistic chance of evidence being provided to contradict the main point of this post.
However, upon reflection, I am skeptical that such evidence will be provided. Why did Nonlinear not provide at least some of the proof they claim to have, in order to justify time for a more comprehensive rebuttal? Or at least describe the form the proof will take? That should be possible, if they have specific evidence in mind. Also, a week seems like longer time than should be needed to provide such proof, which increases my suspicion that they’re playing for time. What does delaying for a week do that a 48h delay would not?
Edit: Nonlinear has begun posting some evidence. I remain skeptical that the bulk of the evidence supports their side of the narrative, but I no longer find the lack of posting evidence as a reason for additional suspicion.
Hi all, I wanted to chime in because I have had conversations relevant to this post with just about all involved parties at various points. I’ve spoken to “Alice” (both while she worked at nonlinear and afterward), Kat (throughout the period when the events in the post were alleged to have happened and afterward), Emerson, Drew, and (recently) the author Ben, as well as, to a much lesser extent, “Chloe” (when she worked at nonlinear). I am (to my knowledge) on friendly terms with everyone mentioned (by name or pseudonym) in this post. I wish well for everyone involved. I also want the truth to be known, whatever the truth is.
I was sent a nearly final draft of this post yesterday (Wednesday), once by Ben and once by another person mentioned in the post.
I want to say that I find this post extremely strange for the following reasons:
(1) The nearly final draft of this post that I was given yesterday had factual inaccuracies that (in my opinion and based on my understanding of the facts) are very serious despite ~150 hours being spent on this investigation. This makes it harder for me to take at face value the parts of the post that I have no knowledge of. Why am I, an outsider on this whole thing, finding serious errors in the final hours before publication? That’s not to say everything in the post is inaccurate, just that I was disturbed to see serious inaccuracies, and I have no idea why nobody caught these (I really don’t feel like I should be the one to correct mistakes, given my lack of involvement, but it feels important to me to comment here since I know there were inaccuracies in the piece, so here we are).
(2) Nonlinear reached out to me and told me they have proof that a bunch of claims in the post are completely false. They also said that in the past day or so (upon becoming aware of the contents of the post), they asked Ben to delay his publication of this post by one week so that they could gather their evidence and show it to Ben before he publishes it (to avoid having him publish false information). However, he refused to do so.
This really confuses me. Clearly, Ben spent a huge amount of time on this post (which has presumably involved weeks or months of research), so why not wait one additional week for Nonlinear to provide what they say is proof that his post contains substantial misinformation? Of course, if the evidence provided by nonlinear is weak, he should treat it as such, but if it is strong, it should also be treated as such. I struggle to wrap my head around the decision not to look at that evidence. I am also confused why Ben, despite spending a huge amount of time on this research, apparently didn’t seek out this evidence from Nonlinear long ago.
To clarify: I think it’s very important in situations like this not to let the group being criticized have a way to delay publication indefinitely. If I were in Ben’s shoes, I believe what I would have done is say something like, “You have exactly one week to provide proof of any false claims in this post (and I’ll remove any claim you can prove is false) then I’m publishing the post no matter what at that time.” This is very similar to the policy we use for our Transparent Replications project (where we replicate psychology results of publications in top journals), and we have found it to work well. We give the original authors a specific window of time during which they can point out any errors we may have made (which is at least a week). This helps make sure our replications are accurate, fair, and correct, and yet the teams being replicated have no say over whether the replications are released (they always are released regardless of whether we get a response).
It seems to me that basic norms of good epistemics require that, on important topics, you look at all the evidence that can be easily acquired.
I also think that if you publish misinformation, you can’t just undo it by updating the post later or issuing a correction. Sadly, that’s not the way human minds/social information works. In other words, misinformation can’t be jammed back into the bottle once it is released. I have seen numerous cases where misinformation is released only later to be retracted, in which the misinformation got way more attention than the retraction, and most people came away only with the misinformation. This seems to me to provide a strong additional reason why a small delay in the publication date appears well worth it (to me, as an outsider) to help avoid putting out a post with potentially substantial misinformation. I hope that the lesswrong/EA communities will look at all the evidence once it is released, which presumably will be in the next week or so, in order to come to a fair and accurate conclusion (based on all the evidence, whatever that accurate final conclusion turns out to be) and do better than these other cases I’ve witnessed where misinformation won the day.
Of course, I don’t know Ben’s reason for jumping to publish immediately, so I can’t evaluate his reasons directly.
Disclaimer: I am friends with multiple people connected to this post. As a reminder, I wish well for everyone involved, and I wish for the truth to be known, whatever that truth happens to be. I have acted (informally) as an advisor to nonlinear (without pay) - all that means, though, is that every so often, team members there will reach out to me to ask for my advice on things.
Note: I’ve updated this comment a few times to try to make my position clearer, to add some additional context, and to fix grammatical mistakes.
(Copying over the same response I posted over on LW)
I don’t have all the context of Ben’s investigation here, but as someone who has done investigations like this in the past, here are some thoughts on why I don’t feel super sympathetic to requests to delay publication:
In this case, it seems to me that there is a large and substantial threat of retaliation. My guess is Ben’s sources were worried about Emerson hiring stalkers, calling their family, trying to get them fired from their job, or threatening legal action. Having things be out in the public can provide a defense because it is much easier to ask for help if the conflict happens in the open.
As a concrete example, Emerson has just sent me an email saying:
For the record, the threat of libel suit and use of statements like “maximum damages permitted by law” seem to me to be attempts at intimidation. Also, as someone who has looked quite a lot into libel law (having been threatened with libel suits many times over the years), describing the legal case as “unambiguous” seems inaccurate and a further attempt at intimidation.
My guess is Ben’s sources have also received dozens of calls (as have I received many in the last few hours), and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Emerson called up my board, or would otherwise try to find some other piece of leverage against Lightcone, Ben, or Ben’s sources if he had more time.
While I am not that worried about Emerson, I think many other people are in a much more vulnerable position and I can really resonate with not wanting to give someone an opportunity to gather their forces (and in that case I think it’s reasonable to force the conflict out in the open, which is far from an ideal arena, but does provide protection against many types of threats and adversarial action).
Separately, the time investment for things like this is really quite enormous and I have found it extremely hard to do work of this type in parallel to other kinds of work, especially towards the end of a project like this, when the information is ready for sharing, and lots of people have strong opinions and try to pressure you in various ways. Delaying by “just a week” probably translates into roughly 40 hours of productive time lost, even if there isn’t much to do, because it’s so hard to focus on other things. That’s just a lot of additional time, and so it’s not actually a very cheap ask.
Lastly, I have also found that the standard way that abuse in the extended EA community has been successfully prevented from being discovered is by forcing everyone who wants to publicize or share any information about it to jump through a large number of hoops. Calls for “just wait a week” and “just run your posts by the party you are criticizing” might sound reasonable in isolation, but very quickly multiply the cost of any information sharing, and have huge chilling effects that prevent the publishing of most information and accusations. Asking the other party to just keep doing a lot of due diligence is easy and successful and keeps most people away from doing investigations like this.
As I have written about before, I myself ended up being intimidated by this for the case of FTX and chose not to share my concerns about FTX more widely, which I continue to consider one of the worst mistakes of my career.
My current guess is that if it is indeed the case that Emerson and Kat have clear proof that a lot of the information in this post is false, then I think they should share that information publicly. Maybe on their own blog, or maybe here on LessWrong or on the EA Forum. It is also the case that rumors about people having had very bad experiences working with Nonlinear are already circulating around the community and this is already having a large effect on Nonlinear, and as such, being able to have clear false accusations to respond against should help them clear their name, if they are indeed false.
I agree that this kind of post can be costly, and I don’t want to ignore the potential costs of false accusations, but at least to me it seems like I want an equilibrium of substantially more information sharing, and to put more trust in people’s ability to update their models of what is going on, and less paternalistic “people are incapable of updating if we present proof that the accusations are false”, especially given what happened with FTX and the costs we have observed from failing to share observations like this.
A final point that feels a bit harder to communicate is that in my experience, some people are just really good at manipulation, throwing you off-balance, and distorting your view of reality, and this is a strong reason to not commit to run everything by the people you are sharing information on. A common theme that I remember hearing from people who had concerns about SBF is that people intended to warn other people, or share information, then they talked to SBF, and somehow during that conversation he disarmed them, without really responding to the essence of their concerns. This can take the form of threats and intimidation, or the form of just being really charismatic and making you forget what your concerns were, or more deeply ripping away your grounding and making you think that your concerns aren’t real, and that actually everyone is doing the thing that seems wrong to you, and you are going to out yourself as naive and gullible by sharing your perspective.
[Edit: The closest post we have to setting norms on when to share information with orgs you are criticizing is Jeff Kauffman’s post on the matter. While I don’t fully agree with the reasoning within it, in there he says:
This case seems to me to be fairly clearly covered by the second paragraph, and also, Nonlinear’s response to “I am happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments” was to respond with “I will sue you if you publish these concerns”, to which IMO the reasonable response is to just go ahead and publish before things escalate further. Separately, my sense is Ben’s sources really didn’t want any further interaction and really preferred having this over with, which I resonate with, and is also explicitly covered by Jeff’s post.
So in as much as you are trying to enforce some kind of existing norm that demands running posts like this by the org, I don’t think that norm currently has widespread buy-in, as the most popular and widely-quoted post on the topic does not demand that standard (I separately think the post is still slightly too much in favor of running posts by the organizations they are criticizing, but that’s for a different debate).]
I think it is reasonable to share information without providing people the opportunity to respond if you’re worried they’ll abuse your generosity (which may indeed have been Ben’s reasoning here), but I’m generally against the norm of not waiting for a response if the main reason is “can’t be bothered” *.
I guess my reasoning here is the drama can consume a community if it let it, so I would prefer that we choose our norms to minimise unnecessary drama.
(I don’t want this comment to be taken as a defense of Nonlinear leadership in relation to these claims. I want to be clear that I am very disappointed with what they have admitted even if we were to imagine that nothing else claimed is true. I should mention that I interned at Nonlinear and was subsequently invited to collaborate with them on Superlinear, but I turned this down because of some of the rumours I was hearing).
I’ll add that I’m more sympathetic to the victim of something deciding to just post it than a third party bc third parties are generally more able to bear that burden.
agreed
I don’t understand how people would be at greater risk of retaliation if the post was delayed by a week?
I also want to make sure people realise that there’s a huge difference between “I will stalk you / call your family / get you fired” and “I will sue you” in terms of what counts as threats/intimidation/retaliation [edit: e.g. if Alice had threatened to sue Nonlinear that wouldn’t be considered retaliation, whereas threatening to call their family would be worrying], so I don’t think Emerson’s email is a particularly strong confirmation that the “large and substantial threat of retaliation” is real.
If Ben is worried about losing 40 hours of productive time by responding to Nonlinear’s evidence in private, he doesn’t have to. He could just allow them to put together their side of the story, ready for publishing when he publishes his own post. Similarly, if he’s worried about them manipulating him with their charisma, he could just agree to delay and then stop reading/responding to their messages. This way readers can still read both sides of the story at once, rather than read the most juicy side, tell all their friends the latest gossip, and carry on with their lives as the post drops off the frontpage.
It is a lot easier to explain to your employer or your friends or your colleagues what is happening if you can just link them to a public post, if someone is trying to pressure you. That week in which the person you are scared of has access to the post, but the public does not, is a quite vulnerable week, in my experience.
I think threatening a libel lawsuit with the intensity that Emerson did strikes me as above “calling my family” in terms of what counts as threats/intimidation/retaliation, especially if you are someone who does not have the means for a legal defense (which would be true of Ben’s sources for this post). Libel suits are really costly, and a quite major escalation.
Emerson’s email says explicitly that if the post is published as is, that he would pursue a libel suit. This seems to rule out the option of just delaying and letting them prepare their response, and indeed demands that the original post gets changed.
I think there’s different versions of “call your family” that suggests different levels of escalation.
Tell your family compromising facts about you (bad and scary, but probably less scary than having to mount a legal defense)
Threaten your family, implicitly or explicitly (the type of thing that predictably leads people to being terrified)
Thank you for taking the time to clearly and patiently explain these dynamics. They’re not obvious to me, as someone who’s never experienced anything similar.
Does Lightcone have liability insurance? Or any kind of legal insurance or something similar that covers the litigation costs involved in defamation lawsuits? I think posts like these are important, it would be sad if there wasn’t a way to easily protect whistleblowers from having to spend a lot of money fighting a defamation case.
My current model is that we have enough money to defend against a defamation lawsuit like this. The costs are high, but we also aren’t a super small organization (we have a budget of like $3M-$4M a year), so I think we could absorb it if it happened, and my guess is we could fundraise additionally if the costs somehow ballooned above that.
I looked a bit into liability insurance but it seemed like a large pain, and not worth it given that we are probably capable of self-insuring.
I’m pretty surprised it seemed like a large pain. In my experience it’s been easy to secure.
I might be confused here, but it sure seemed easy to hand over money, but hard to verify that the insurance would actually kick in in the relevant situation, and wouldn’t end up being voided for some random reason.
Yeah, that can be significant work.
God bless your clear thinking and strong stance-taking, Habryka.
There is a reason courtrooms give both sides equal chances to make their case before they ask the jury to decide.
It is very difficult for people to change their minds later, and most people assume that if you’re on trial, you must be guilty, which is why judges remind juries about “innocent before proven guilty”.
This is one of the foundations of our legal system, something we learned over thousands of years of trying to get better at justice. You’re just assuming I’m guilty and saying that justifies not giving me a chance to present my evidence.
Also, if we post another comment thread a week later, who will see it? EAF/LW don’t have sufficient ways to resurface old but important content.
Re: “my guess is Ben’s sources have received dozens of calls”—well, your guess is wrong, and you can ask them to confirm this.
You also took my email strategically out of context to fit the Emerson-is-a-horned-CEO-villain narrative. Here’s the full one:
Trials are public as well. Indeed our justice system generally doesn’t have secret courts, so I am not sure what argument you are trying to make here. In as much as you want to make an analogue to the legal system, you now also have the ability to present your evidence, in front of an audience of your peers. The “jury” has not decided anything (and neither have I, at least regarding the dynamics and accusations listed in the post).
I am not assuming you are guilty. My current best guess is that you have done some pretty bad things, but yeah, I haven’t heard your side very much, and I will update and signal boost your evidence if you provide me with evidence that the core points of this post are wrong.
You could make a new top-level post. I expect it would get plenty of engagement. The EAF/LW seems really quite capable of resurfacing various types of community conflict, and making it the center of attention for a long time.
I shared the part that seemed relevant to me, since sharing the whole email seemed excessive. I don’t think the rest of the email changes the context of the libel suit threat you made, though readers can decide that for themselves.
Just a quick note that my read of the full email does not really change the context of the libel suit threat, or Habryka’s claims, especially given much of the missing information from the email was already in a public comment by Kat.
I also agree that if Nonlinear provided substantive evidence in a top-level post that dramatically changed the narrative of this story, e.g. change my personal credence of each of these claims to <15%, it would receive significant attention, such as staying on the front page on the community tab for at least 1 week, gain >150 karma etc.
If you can share (publicly or privately) strong evidence contradicting “claims [...] that wildly distort the true story” (emphasis mine), I pre-commit to signal boosting.
For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t be surprised if you do have strong counter-evidence to some claims (given the number of claims made, the ease with which things can be lost in translation, your writing this email, etc.). But, as of right now, I would be surprised if my understanding of the important stuff—roughly, the items covered in Ben’s epistemic state and the crossing of red lines—was wildly distorted. I hope that it is.
[EDIT, Nov 13: it sounds like the Nonlinear reply might be in the 100s of pages. This might be the right move from their point of view, but reading 3-figure pages stretches my pre-commitment above further than I would have intended at the time. I’d like to amend the commitment to “engaging with the >=20 pages-equivalent that seems most relevant to me or Nonlinear, or skimming >=50 pages-equivalent.” If people think this is breaking the spirit of my earlier commitment, I’ll seriously consider standing by the literal wording of that commitment (engaging with ~everything). Feel free to message about this.]
I’d also be pleased to find out that my understanding is wrong!
I don’t think they’re in a position to show that a lot of hurt didn’t accrue to the employees, but maybe they can show some ways in which they clearly signaled that they wouldn’t try to ruin their employees or intimidate them, such as
Texts where they told Alice/Chloe “I understand that you had a horrible experience here, and it’s totally fine for you to tell other people that this working/living environment was awful and you’ve been really hurt by it, and also here’s a way in which I’m going to make sure you’re better off for having interacted with us”
Any writing where Emerson says “I have used vicious and aggressive business tactics in the past, but to be clear if this work-slash-family situation really burns you, I will not come after you with these tactics even if I strongly disagree with your interpretations of what happened”
Or generally some “philosophy of how to behave with allies” doc written by Emerson that says something like “Here are the 48 Laws of Power, and here is my explanation why you should never use these tactics if you want to be trustworthy, and here’s why we would never use them in an EA/x-risk/etc context”
Then that could change my mind on the intimidation aspect a bunch. I think in general intimidation/fear is often indirect and implicit, so it’s going to be hard to disprove, but if there was clear evidence about why that wouldn’t happen here, then I could come to believe that Alice/Chloe/others had managed to trick themselves into being more worried than they needed to be.
For me personally, the full email appears worse in full than summarized.
Can you give some examples of the serious errors you found?
Yes, here two examples, sorry I can’t provide more detail:
-there were claims in the post made about Emerson that were not actually about Emerson at all (they were about his former company years after he left). I pointed this out to Ben hours before publication and he rushed to correct it (in my view it’s a pretty serious mistake to make false accusations about a person, I see this as pretty significant)!
-there was also a very disparaging claim made in the piece (I unfortunately can’t share the details for privacy reasons; but I assume nonlinear will later) that was quite strongly contradicted by a text message exchange I have
To confirm: I had a quickly written bit about the glassdoor reviews. It was added in without much care because it wasn’t that cruxy to me about the whole situation, just a red flag that suggested further investigation was worth it, that someone else suggested I add for completeness. The reviews I included were from after the time that Emerson’s linkedin says he was CEO, and I’m glad that Spencer corrected me.
If I’m remembering the other one, there was also a claim that I included not because it was itself obviously unethical, but because it seemed to indicate a really invasive social environment, and when I think information has been suppressed I have strong heuristics suggesting to share worrying information even if it isn’t proven or necessarily bad. Anyway, Spencer said he was confident in a very different narrative of events, so I edited it the comment to be more minor.
In general I think Spencer’s feedback on this and other points improved the post (though he also had some inaccurate information).
If the disparaging claim is in the piece, it makes no sense to me that you can’t specify which claim it is.
I think the idea is that it was in a draft but got edited out last-minute? That seems to be corroborated by Ben’s comment.
To me, this is the biggest red flag in this whole situation. My work has been written about by journalists, with both negative spins and actual factual inaccuracies and whenever this happens, my first response is: here is where you are wrong, and here is the truth. Which, I know, because it’s about me and I know what happened (at least according to me).
If someone doesn’t believe me and they want the “receipts”, I can provide these later, but I don’t need them to dispute the claim in the first place. I understand this piece has a lot of information and responding to everything can take time but again, but the broad strokes shouldn’t take this long.
In fact, it seems that Nonlinear already had a chance to dispute some of the claims when they had their lengthy interview with Ben and it seems that they did because the piece says, multiple times, that there are conflicting claims from both parties about what happened. I’m unclear Nonlinear want to clarify and prove these in their favor or if they want to dispute additional claims that they have not disputed before. Either way, the vagueness is concerning and in my experience, it is a sign of possibly buying more time to figure out a spin.
Could this be an instance of the rationalist tendency to “decouple”?
From one perspective, Ben is simply “Sharing information about nonlinear.” What’s wrong with providing additional information? It’s even caveated with a description of one’s epistemic status and instruction on how to update accordingly! Why don’t we all have such a “low bar for publicly sharing critical info about folks in the EA/x-risk/rationalist/etc ecosystem”?
From another perspective, Ben has chosen to “search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders” and then—without inviting or even permitting the accused party to share their side of the story in advance—share it in a public space full of agents whose tendency to gossip is far stronger than their tendency to update in an appropriately Bayesian manner (i.e. human beings).
I suspect Ben does in fact have some understanding of the political dimension of his decision to share this post, but I think his behaviour is more understandable when you consider that he’s embedded in a culture that encourages people to ignore the political consequences of what they say.
You may have missed the section where I had a 3hr call with them and summarized what they told me? It’s not everything we’d want but I think this sentence is inaccurate.
Of course I do! I thought about it a bunch and came to the conclusion that it’s best to share serious and credible accusations early and fast.
I’m confused—wouldn’t you consider the “Conversation with Nonlinear” section to be letting the accused party share their side of the story in advance?
Possibly naive question: if Non-Linear have material that undeniably rebuts these accusations and they only need to sort it out/organize for presentation, why not publish it in a disorganized/scrambled format, sort it out later and then publish clean/sorted out version? In this way, they will at least show that they’re not scheming anything and are honest about why they asked Ben to delay the post.
What am I missing?
I don’t know, but I know that negotiating confidentiality is a major part that often takes a lot of calendar time. They might have emails or text chats from people that they would like to share, but they first need to get permission to share, or at least provide adequate warning. This can definitely take a few days in my experience.
Makes sense, thanks
It might simply take a lot of time to track it all down. If there was one big Google Doc with all of the relevant information in a disorganized/scrambled format (and it didn’t have other information, such as someone’s social security number), then it might make sense to share the messy information and organize it later. But what is more likely is that there are tidbits of information scattered across dozens of email threads, chat groups, slack channels, Google Calendars, etc., and that merely copying and pasting a bunch of stuff into a messy Google Doc would take many, many hours.
That’s an interesting idea, but presenting information badly is a good way of ensuring people tune out when you present your final version.
I wonder about versions of this scheme where someone holds an unorganised version in escrow to be released alongside the organised version?
However, I’m not really sure if that would work either. Suppose you might have relevant texts where it isn’t clear whether they contain confidential information or not. Like in some cases, you may actually need to have a discussion about what is okay to share and what is not. Just quickly dumping a bunch of information out there is an easy way to accidentally do further harm.
Disclaimer: Previously interned at Nonlinear. This comment previously said that I didn’t have knowledge of what information Nonlinear is yet to release, but then I just realised that I actually do know a few things.
This is really weird to me. These allegations have been circling for over a year, and presumably Nonlinear has known about this piece for months now. Why do they still need to get their evidence together? And even if they do—just due to extraneous circumstances—why do they feel so entitled to the piece being held for a week, when they have had ample time to collect their side of the story.
To be clear I only informed them about my planned writeup on Friday.
(The rest of the time lots of other people involved were v afraid of retaliation and intimidation and I wanted to respect that while gathering evidence. I believe if I hadn’t made that commitment to people then I wouldn’t have gotten the evidence.)
Thanks—more sympathetic to the ask in that case, though I don’t think you were obliged to wait.
With regards to #2, I shared your concern, and I thought Habryka’s response didn’t justify that the cost of a brief delay was sufficient if there was a realistic chance of evidence being provided to contradict the main point of this post.
However, upon reflection, I am skeptical that such evidence will be provided. Why did Nonlinear not provide at least some of the proof they claim to have, in order to justify time for a more comprehensive rebuttal? Or at least describe the form the proof will take? That should be possible, if they have specific evidence in mind. Also, a week seems like longer time than should be needed to provide such proof, which increases my suspicion that they’re playing for time. What does delaying for a week do that a 48h delay would not?
Edit: Nonlinear has begun posting some evidence. I remain skeptical that the bulk of the evidence supports their side of the narrative, but I no longer find the lack of posting evidence as a reason for additional suspicion.