We are working hard on a point-by-point response to Ben’s article, but wanted to provide a quick example of the sort of evidence we are preparing to share:
Her claim: “Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.”
The truth (see screenshots below):
There was vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, mixed nuts, prunes, peanuts, tomatoes, cereal, oranges) which we offered to cook for her.
We were picking up vegan food for her.
Months later, after our relationship deteriorated, she went around telling many people that we starved her. She included details that depict us in a maximally damaging light—what could be more abusive than refusing to care for a sick girl, alone in a foreign country? And if someone told you that, you’d probably believe them, because who would make something like that up?
Evidence
The screenshots below show Kat offering Alice the vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, cereal, etc), on the first day she was sick. Then, when she wasn’t interested in us bringing/preparing those, I told her to ask Drew to go pick up food, and Drew said yes. Kat also left the house and went and grabbed mashed potatoes for her nearby.
Initially, we heard she was telling people that she “didn’t eat for days,” but she seems to have adjusted her claim to “barely ate” for “2 days”.
It’s important to note that Alice didn’t lie about something small and unimportant. She accused of us a deeply unethical act—the kind that most people would hear and instantly think you must be a horrible human—and was caught lying.
We believe many people in EA heard this lie and updated unfavorably towards us. A single false rumor like this can unfairly damage someone’s ability to do good, and this is just one among many she told.
We have job contracts, interview recordings, receipts, chat histories, and more, which we are working full-time on preparing.
This claim was a few sentences in Ben’s article but took us hours to refute because we had to track down all of the conversations, make them readable, add context, anonymize people, check our facts, and write up an explanation that was rigorous and clear. Ben’s article is over 10,000 words and we’re working as fast as we can to respond to every point he made.
Again, we are not asking for the community to believe us unconditionally. We want to show everybody all of the evidence and also take responsibility for the mistakes we made.
We’re just asking that you not overupdate on hearing just one side, and keep an open mind for the evidence we’ll be sharing as soon as we can.
It could be that I am misreading or misunderstanding these screenshots, but having read through them a couple of times trying to parse what happened, here’s what I came away with:
On December 15, Alice states that she’d had very little to eat all day, that she’d repeatedly tried and failed to find a way to order takeout to their location, and tries to ask that people go to Burger King and get her an Impossible Burger which in the linked screenshots they decline to do because they don’t want to get fast food. She asks again about Burger King and is told it’s inconvenient to get there. Instead, they go to a different restaurant and offer to get her something from the restaurant they went to. Alice looks at the menu online and sees that there are no vegan options. Drew confirms that ‘they have some salads’ but nothing else for her. She assures him that it’s fine to not get her anything.
It seems completely reasonable that Alice remembers this as ‘she was barely eating, and no one in the house was willing to go out and get her nonvegan foods’ - after all, the end result of all of those message exchanges was no food being obtained for Alice and her requests for Burger King being repeatedly deflected with ‘we are down to get anything that isn’t fast food’ and ‘we are down to go anywhere within a 12 min drive’ and ‘our only criteria is decent vibe + not fast food’, after which she fails to find a restaurant meeting those (I note, kind of restrictive if not in a highly dense area) criteria and they go somewhere without vegan options and don’t get her anything to eat.
It also seems totally reasonable that no one at Nonlinear understood there was a problem. Alice’s language throughout emphasizes how she’ll be fine, it’s no big deal, she’s so grateful that they tried (even though they failed and she didn’t get any food out of the 12⁄15 trip, if I understand correctly). I do not think that these exchanges depict the people at Nonlinear as being cruel, insane, or unusual as people. But it doesn’t seem to me that Alice is lying to have experienced this as ‘she had covid, was barely eating, told people she was barely eating, and they declined to pick up Burger King for her because they didn’t want to go to a fast food restaurant, and instead gave her very limiting criteria and went somewhere that didn’t have any options she could eat’.
On December 16th it does look like they successfully purchased food for her.
My big takeaway from these exchanges is not that the Nonlinear team are heartless or insane people, but that this degree of professional and personal entanglement and dependence, in a foreign country, with a young person, is simply a recipe for disaster. Alice’s needs in the 12⁄15 chat logs are acutely not being met. She’s hungry, she’s sick, she conveys that she has barely eaten, she evidently really wants someone to go to BK and get an impossible burger for her, but (speculatively) because of this professional/personal entanglement, she lobbies for this only by asking a few times why they ruled out Burger King, and ultimately doesn’t protest when they instead go somewhere without food she can eat, assuring them it’s completely fine. This is also how I relate to my coworkers, tbh—but luckily, I don’t live with them and exclusively socialize with them and depend on them completely when sick!!
Given my experience with talking with people about strongly emotional events, I am inclined towards the interpretation where Alice remembers the 15th with acute distress and remembers it as ‘not getting her needs met despite trying quite hard to do so’, and the Nonlinear team remembers that they went out of their way that week to get Alice food—which is based on the logs from the 16th clearly true! But I don’t think I’d call Alice a liar based on reading this, because she did express that she’d barely eaten and request apologetically for them to go somewhere she could get vegan food (with BK the only option she’d been able to find) only for them to refuse BK because of the vibes/inconvenience.
I should also add that this (including the question of whether Alice is credible) is not very important to my overall evaluation of the situation, and I’d appreciate it if Nonlinear spent their limited resources on the claims that I think are most shocking and most important, such as the claim that Woods said “your career in EA would be over with a few DMs” to a former employee after the former employee was rumored to have complained about the company.
I’d appreciate it if Nonlinear spent their limited resources on the claims that I think are most shocking and most important, such as the claim that Woods said “your career in EA would be over with a few DMs” to a former employee after the former employee was rumored to have complained about the company.
I agree that this is a way more important incident, but I downvoted this comment because:
I don’t want to discourage Nonlinear from nitpicking smaller claims. A lot of what worries people here is a gestalt impression that Nonlinear is callous and manipulative; if that impression is wrong, it will probably be because of systematic distortions in many claims, and it will probably be hard to un-convince people of the impression without weighing in on lots of the claims, both major and minor.
I expect some correlation between “this concern is easier to properly and fully address” and “this concern is more minor”, so I think it’s normal and to be expected that Nonlinear would start with relatively-minor stuff.
I do think it’s good to state your cruxes, but people’s cruxes will vary some; I’d rather that Nonlinear overshare and try to cover everything, and I don’t want to locally punish them for addressing a serious concern even if it’s not the top concern. “I’d appreciate if Nonlinear spent their limited resources...” makes it sound like you didn’t want Nonlinear to address the veganism thing at all, which I think would have been a mistake.
I’m generally wary of the dynamic “someone makes a criticism of Nonlinear, Nonlinear addresses it in a way that’s at least partly exculpatory, but then a third party steps in to say ‘you shouldn’t have addressed that claim, it’s not the one I care about the most’”. This (a) makes it more likely that Nonlinear will feel pushed into not-correcting-the-record on all sorts of false claims, and (b) makes it more likely that EAs will fail to properly dwell on each data point and update on it (because they can always respond to a refutation of X by saying ‘but what about Y?!’ when the list of criticisms is this danged long).
I also think it’s pretty normal and fine to need a week to properly address big concerns. Maybe you’ve forgotten a bunch of the details and need to fact-check things. Maybe you’re emotionally processing stuff and need another 24h to draft a thing that you trust to be free of motivated reasoning.
I think it’s fine to take some time, and I also think it’s fine to break off some especially-easy-to-address points and respond to those faster.
I’d have thought “Emerson boasted about paying someone to stalk an enemy” was the most shocking claim. (Not that you said otherwise.) It surprises me how little the discussion has been focused on that. Whether or not it’s worse, it is way weirder than “threatened to get an employee blacklisted for saying bad things about them”.
I find the idea of doing that absolutely awful and I’ve never done anything like that. Unfortunately, it’s a lie there is no possibility of defending myself from, since it’s hearsay from an anonymous source.
To clarify, do you mean you have never asked/recruited someone to stalk, intimidate, or harass someone else, or do you mean you have never boasted about it?
I can tell you that someone was quite actively scared of you doing something like this, and believed you to have said it to them. I wasn’t there myself so I cannot confirm whether it’s a mishearing or whatever.
There’s a broader question that I am often confused about regarding whether it’s good or bad to think carefully about how to really deceive someone, or really hurt someone, even if it’s motivated defensively. Then people can be unsure about the boundaries of whether you’ll use it against them. If someone were to tell you that they know general skills to get people fired, or get people swatted, or get people on immigration black-lists for certain countries, this information inherently makes them a more worrying person to be in conflicts with. Even if they say they’d only do it when it was justified. It’s one reason why I find myself trying to avoid simple games of deception like Werewolf, I’d prefer to not have practiced lying in general, so that my friends and allies have less reason to think I’m good at deception.
My current guess is that you can wield some of these normally-unethical weapons if you also have sent pretty credible signals about what principles you use to decide whether to use them, and otherwise it’s not much good to figure out how you would really hurt someone, as it predictably leads to people being very scared and intimidated.
It also seems totally reasonable that no one at Nonlinear understood there was a problem. Alice’s language throughout emphasizes how she’ll be fine, it’s no big deal [...] I do not think that these exchanges depict the people at Nonlinear as being cruel, insane, or unusual as people.
100% agreed with this. The chat log paints a wildly different picture than what was included in Ben’s original post.
Given my experience with talking with people about strongly emotional events, I am inclined towards the interpretation where Alice remembers the 15th with acute distress and remembers it as ‘not getting her needs met despite trying quite hard to do so’, and the Nonlinear team remembers that they went out of their way that week to get Alice food—which is based on the logs from the 16th clearly true! But I don’t think I’d call Alice a liar based on reading this
Agreed. I did update toward “there’s likely a nontrivial amount of distortion in Alice’s retelling of other things”, and toward “normal human error and miscommunication played a larger role in some of the Bad Stuff that happened than I previously expected”. (Ben’s post was still a giant negative update for me about Nonlinear, but Kat’s comment is a smaller update in the opposite direction.)
I think a crux in this is what you think the reason is for Alice being so unassertive towards Kat in the messages—was it because she’s worried, based on experience, about angering her employers and causing negative consequences for herself, e.g. them saying she’s being too difficult and refuse to help her at all, or some other, more favourable to Kat and Emerson, reason?
Yeah, though if I learned “Alice is just not the sort of person to loudly advocate for herself” it wouldn’t update me much about Nonlinear at this point, because (a) I already have a fair amount of probability on that based on the publicly shared information, and (b) my main concerns are about stuff like “is Nonlinear super cutthroat and manipulative?” and “does Nonlinear try to scare people into not criticizing Nonlinear?”.
Those concerns are less directly connected to the vegan-food thing, and might be tricky to empirically distinguish from the hypothesis “Alice and/or Chloe aren’t generally the sort of people to be loud about their preferences” if we focus on the food situation.
(Though I cared about the vegan-food thing in its own right too, and am glad Kat shared more details.)
We definitely did not fail to get her food, so I think there has been a misunderstanding—it says in the texts below that Alice told Drew not to worry about getting food because I went and got her mashed potatoes. Ben mentioned the mashed potatoes in the main post, but we forgot to mention it again in our comment—which has been updated
The texts involved on 12/15/21:
I also offered to cook the vegan food we had in the house for her.
I think that there’s a big difference between telling everyone “I didn’t get the food I wanted, but they did get/offer to cook me vegan food, and I told them it was ok!” and “they refused to get me vegan food and I barely ate for 2 days”.
Also, re: “because of this professional/personal entanglement”—at this point, Alice was just a friend traveling with us. There were no professional entanglements.
I think that there’s a big difference between telling everyone “I didn’t get the food I wanted, but they did get/offer to cook me vegan food, and I told them it was ok!” and “they refused to get me vegan food and I barely ate for 2 days”.
This also updates me about Kat’s take (as summarized by Ben Pace in the OP):
Kat doesn’t trust Alice to tell the truth, and that Alice has a history of “catastrophic misunderstandings”.
When I read the post, I didn’t see any particular reason for Kat to think this, and I worried it might be just be an attempt to dismiss a critic, given the aggressive way Nonlinear otherwise seems to have responded to criticisms.
With this new info, it now seems plausible to me that Kat was correct (even though I don’t think this justifies threatening Alice or Ben in the way Kat and Emerson did). And if Kat’s not correct, I still update that Kat was probably accurately stating her epistemic state, and that a lot of reasonable people might have reached the same epistemic state.
Yes, that is incorrect. One of many such factual inaccuracies and why we told Ben to give us a week. The exact date is not simple to explain, since she gradually began working with us, but we will clarify ASAP.
Yeah, I mis-wrote there, will update that line in the post (though I say it correctly a few paragraphs later[1]). They traveled together between those dates.
From my perspective it’s fairly ambiguous at what point Alice started “working” for Nonlinear.
On the call with me, Kat said (roughly verbatim) “If you asked each of me/Emerson/Drew at what point Alice became an employee, we’d each give three different answers.” Kat said that her answer was at the end of February when they claim that they started paying Alice $1k/month, and that was when Kat started giving her Nonlinear tasks and negotiated things like vacation time.
Emerson said he didn’t know that was happening and thought he was just giving Alice a gift, and Alice reports after she quit he said he’d never thought of her as an employee.
Alice herself reports that the first conversation she had with Emerson, at EAG, lasting 4 hours, they explicitly discussed working together and salary. She says she walked away from that conversation believing they’d agreed that if she were to work for him, she would need $2.5k-$3k/month in salary to make ends meet, and was generally expecting to eventually work with Nonlinear when they travelled.
So as I say, IMO it’s quite confusing when they started being an employee in different people’s minds, but my current guess would be end-of-February when Kat thinks she started managing her would be a reasonable choice.
Added: In this December 28th comment Kat Woods says that they “are also incubating a promising woman for an as-yet-unspecified charity”, which is Alice. So I think it’s accurate to think of her as in their incubator at least at that point.
Alice joined as the sole person in their incubation program. She moved in with them after meeting Nonlinear at EAG and having a ~4 hour conversation there with Emerson, plus a second Zoom call with Kat. Initially while traveling with them she continued her previous job remotely, but was encouraged to quit and work on an incubated org, and after 2 months she quit her job and started working on projects with Nonlinear.
I think it’s telling, that Kat thinks that the texts speak in their favor. Reading them was quite triggering for me because I see a scared person, who asks for basic things, from the only people she has around her, to help her in a really difficult situation, and is made to feel like she is asking for too much, has to repeatedly advocate for herself (while sick) and still doesn’t get her needs met. On one hand, she is encouraged by Kat to ask for help but practically it’s not happening. Especially Emerson and Drew in that second thread sounded like she is difficult and constantly pushed to ask for less or for something else than what she asked for. Seriously, it took 2.5 hours the first day to get a salad, which she didn’t want in the first place?! And the second day it’s a vegetarian, not vegan, burger.
The way Alice constantly mentioned that she doesn’t want to bother them and says that things are fine when they are clearly not, is very upsetting. I can’t speak to how Alice felt but it’s no wonder she reports this as not being helped/fed when she was sick. To me, this is accurate, whether or not she got a salad and a vegetarian burger the next day.
Honestly, the burger-gate is a bit ridiculous. Ben did report in the original article that you disputed these claims (with quite a lot of detail) so he reported it accurately. To me, that was enough to not update too much based on this. I don’t think it warranted the strongly worded letter to the Lightcone team and the subsequent dramatic claims about evidence that you want to provide to clear your name.
I don’t think it warranted the strongly worded letter to the Lightcone team and the subsequent dramatic claims about evidence that you want to provide to clear your name.
It sounds like you’re interpreting Nonlinear folks as saying that the burger incident was the only false claim in Ben’s piece?
My interpretation is that Nonlinear objects to many claims in the piece but published this one (“one example of the evidence we’re gathering...”) in response to encouragement that they give examples of claims they object to. Probably because this was some combination of quicker to respond to / Nonlinear thought it looked better for them / easier for outsiders to understand.
That seems fair, but I don’t have any other concrete information, so for now, that’s my position based on the information I have. It may change on whatever else becomes available but I am skeptical of the value of any additional material that Nonlinear present because it seems that they covered all their main concerns already during their call with Ben and because this attempt to “provide evidence” backfired and in my opinion gives more credibility to Alice, not less. If this is an example of a “100% provable false claim” and a reason to call Alice a “bald-faced liar”, then the letter was absolutely disproportionate.
The claim in the post was “Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.”. (Bolding added)
If you look at the chat messages, you’ll see we have screenshots demonstrating that:
1. There was vegan food in the house, which we offered her.
2. I personally went out, while I was sick myself, to buy vegan food for her (mashed potatoes) and cooked it for her and brought it to her.
I would be fine if she told people that she was hungry when she was sick, and she felt sad and stressed. Or that she was hungry but wasn’t interested in any of the food we had in the house and we didn’t get her Burger King.
But I think that there’s a big difference between telling everyone “I didn’t get the food I wanted, but they did get/offer to cook me vegan food, and I told them it was ok!” and “they refused to get me vegan food and I barely ate for 2 days”
I have sympathy for Alice. She was hungry (because of her fighting with a boyfriend [not Drew] in the morning and having a light breakfast) and she was sick. That sucks, and I feel for her. And that’s why I tried (and succeeded) in getting her vegan food.
In summary. “Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.”. (Bolding added) This makes us sound like terrible people.
What actually happened: she was sick and hungry, and we offered to cook or bring over the vegan options in the house, then went out and bought and cooked her vegan food. We tried to take care of our sick friend (she wasn’t working for us at the time), and we fed her while she was sick.
I encourage you to read the full post here, where I’m trying to add more details and address more points as they come up.
Each time I see this comment pasted (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) I need to figure out whether to read through it to look for changes from the other times. What would you think of linking to your existing comments instead of pasting multiple duplicate comments?
(Also this one (6, 7) but since that’s only two it’s less of an issue)
Many people like me might only read one or two of these replies, and I at least find it easier to see the full thing written out even if there’s a lot of repetition.
Minor issue but I personally prefer in most cases to see things in t he body rather than have to follow a link, then having to find my way back to the original discussion afterwards.
I think it might be helpful to imagine what the forum would look like if this were a typical approach?
Also, consider what it does to the tree of the discussion: every duplicate comment forks the tree. Imagine I think there is something false in the comment that I think it’s readers should know. I write it on the first copy that appears, but every later copy will not have my response. I could try and track the copy-pasting and duplicate my response as well, but that requires manual tracking and is also even more noisy.
I’d be particularly interested in evidence against claims that nonlinear staff enforced (or encouraged) policies that prevent whistleblowing or the spread of negative information about nonlinear and its staff, (though my guess is that countering these claims is going to be a lower priority than some of the other more shocking ones).
It’s worth noting that empathetic members on the forum seem to recognize that Alice, as evidenced by her messages, is someone earnestly seeking assistance while being mindful not to cause any disruptions. Regrettably, individuals who have experienced psychological abuse often tend to exhibit such behaviors—expressing excessive apologies and striving to avoid any form of disturbance or trouble. While I lack formal training in psychology, I am prompted to consider whether a qualified practitioner might discern traits indicative of co-dependency and narcissistic abuse within the communicated messages. This, naturally, remains open to interpretation.
Of more substantial note, however, is the observation that the initial responses have been directed towards seemingly inconsequential elements. This particular approach is reminiscent of tactics employed in portrayals of legal proceedings within dramatic television series, where the objective is to unveil minor falsehoods in an attempt to cast doubt upon the credibility of a witness. The implication is that if one can establish a falsehood in a trivial matter, it follows that untruths may similarly permeate more significant claims.
What the Nonlinear team may potentially underestimate is the discerning nature of the audience assembled within this forum. Comprising educated, intelligent, and seasoned individuals, they are not easily swayed by manipulative techniques. The community holds truth and high ethical standards in high regard. To maintain discourse at a level commensurate with the forum’s expectations, addressing the most substantial allegations may be a more prudent course of action.
On December 15, as your screenshots seem to illustrate that you were not able to provide her hot (vegan) food, despite >2 hours of text messaging with both Kat and Drew.
I can’t speak for Elliot but happy to help you dig that hole for yourself. Did she eat on the 15th? Or rather, did any of you help her eat proper nutritious meals that are appropriate for a sick vegan? On the 15, or the 16?
Again, it’s rediculous to keep discussing this as it seems not to be a crux for people but it’s so revealing that you think you are in the right here.
One example of the evidence we’re gathering
We are working hard on a point-by-point response to Ben’s article, but wanted to provide a quick example of the sort of evidence we are preparing to share:
Her claim: “Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.”
The truth (see screenshots below):
There was vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, mixed nuts, prunes, peanuts, tomatoes, cereal, oranges) which we offered to cook for her.
We were picking up vegan food for her.
Months later, after our relationship deteriorated, she went around telling many people that we starved her. She included details that depict us in a maximally damaging light—what could be more abusive than refusing to care for a sick girl, alone in a foreign country? And if someone told you that, you’d probably believe them, because who would make something like that up?
Evidence
The screenshots below show Kat offering Alice the vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, cereal, etc), on the first day she was sick. Then, when she wasn’t interested in us bringing/preparing those, I told her to ask Drew to go pick up food, and Drew said yes. Kat also left the house and went and grabbed mashed potatoes for her nearby.
See more screenshots here of Drew’s conversations with her.
Initially, we heard she was telling people that she “didn’t eat for days,” but she seems to have adjusted her claim to “barely ate” for “2 days”.
It’s important to note that Alice didn’t lie about something small and unimportant. She accused of us a deeply unethical act—the kind that most people would hear and instantly think you must be a horrible human—and was caught lying.
We believe many people in EA heard this lie and updated unfavorably towards us. A single false rumor like this can unfairly damage someone’s ability to do good, and this is just one among many she told.
We have job contracts, interview recordings, receipts, chat histories, and more, which we are working full-time on preparing.
This claim was a few sentences in Ben’s article but took us hours to refute because we had to track down all of the conversations, make them readable, add context, anonymize people, check our facts, and write up an explanation that was rigorous and clear. Ben’s article is over 10,000 words and we’re working as fast as we can to respond to every point he made.
Again, we are not asking for the community to believe us unconditionally. We want to show everybody all of the evidence and also take responsibility for the mistakes we made.
We’re just asking that you not overupdate on hearing just one side, and keep an open mind for the evidence we’ll be sharing as soon as we can.
It could be that I am misreading or misunderstanding these screenshots, but having read through them a couple of times trying to parse what happened, here’s what I came away with:
On December 15, Alice states that she’d had very little to eat all day, that she’d repeatedly tried and failed to find a way to order takeout to their location, and tries to ask that people go to Burger King and get her an Impossible Burger which in the linked screenshots they decline to do because they don’t want to get fast food. She asks again about Burger King and is told it’s inconvenient to get there. Instead, they go to a different restaurant and offer to get her something from the restaurant they went to. Alice looks at the menu online and sees that there are no vegan options. Drew confirms that ‘they have some salads’ but nothing else for her. She assures him that it’s fine to not get her anything.
It seems completely reasonable that Alice remembers this as ‘she was barely eating, and no one in the house was willing to go out and get her nonvegan foods’ - after all, the end result of all of those message exchanges was no food being obtained for Alice and her requests for Burger King being repeatedly deflected with ‘we are down to get anything that isn’t fast food’ and ‘we are down to go anywhere within a 12 min drive’ and ‘our only criteria is decent vibe + not fast food’, after which she fails to find a restaurant meeting those (I note, kind of restrictive if not in a highly dense area) criteria and they go somewhere without vegan options and don’t get her anything to eat.
It also seems totally reasonable that no one at Nonlinear understood there was a problem. Alice’s language throughout emphasizes how she’ll be fine, it’s no big deal, she’s so grateful that they tried (even though they failed and she didn’t get any food out of the 12⁄15 trip, if I understand correctly). I do not think that these exchanges depict the people at Nonlinear as being cruel, insane, or unusual as people. But it doesn’t seem to me that Alice is lying to have experienced this as ‘she had covid, was barely eating, told people she was barely eating, and they declined to pick up Burger King for her because they didn’t want to go to a fast food restaurant, and instead gave her very limiting criteria and went somewhere that didn’t have any options she could eat’.
On December 16th it does look like they successfully purchased food for her.
My big takeaway from these exchanges is not that the Nonlinear team are heartless or insane people, but that this degree of professional and personal entanglement and dependence, in a foreign country, with a young person, is simply a recipe for disaster. Alice’s needs in the 12⁄15 chat logs are acutely not being met. She’s hungry, she’s sick, she conveys that she has barely eaten, she evidently really wants someone to go to BK and get an impossible burger for her, but (speculatively) because of this professional/personal entanglement, she lobbies for this only by asking a few times why they ruled out Burger King, and ultimately doesn’t protest when they instead go somewhere without food she can eat, assuring them it’s completely fine. This is also how I relate to my coworkers, tbh—but luckily, I don’t live with them and exclusively socialize with them and depend on them completely when sick!!
Given my experience with talking with people about strongly emotional events, I am inclined towards the interpretation where Alice remembers the 15th with acute distress and remembers it as ‘not getting her needs met despite trying quite hard to do so’, and the Nonlinear team remembers that they went out of their way that week to get Alice food—which is based on the logs from the 16th clearly true! But I don’t think I’d call Alice a liar based on reading this, because she did express that she’d barely eaten and request apologetically for them to go somewhere she could get vegan food (with BK the only option she’d been able to find) only for them to refuse BK because of the vibes/inconvenience.
I should also add that this (including the question of whether Alice is credible) is not very important to my overall evaluation of the situation, and I’d appreciate it if Nonlinear spent their limited resources on the claims that I think are most shocking and most important, such as the claim that Woods said “your career in EA would be over with a few DMs” to a former employee after the former employee was rumored to have complained about the company.
I agree that this is a way more important incident, but I downvoted this comment because:
I don’t want to discourage Nonlinear from nitpicking smaller claims. A lot of what worries people here is a gestalt impression that Nonlinear is callous and manipulative; if that impression is wrong, it will probably be because of systematic distortions in many claims, and it will probably be hard to un-convince people of the impression without weighing in on lots of the claims, both major and minor.
I expect some correlation between “this concern is easier to properly and fully address” and “this concern is more minor”, so I think it’s normal and to be expected that Nonlinear would start with relatively-minor stuff.
I do think it’s good to state your cruxes, but people’s cruxes will vary some; I’d rather that Nonlinear overshare and try to cover everything, and I don’t want to locally punish them for addressing a serious concern even if it’s not the top concern. “I’d appreciate if Nonlinear spent their limited resources...” makes it sound like you didn’t want Nonlinear to address the veganism thing at all, which I think would have been a mistake.
I’m generally wary of the dynamic “someone makes a criticism of Nonlinear, Nonlinear addresses it in a way that’s at least partly exculpatory, but then a third party steps in to say ‘you shouldn’t have addressed that claim, it’s not the one I care about the most’”. This (a) makes it more likely that Nonlinear will feel pushed into not-correcting-the-record on all sorts of false claims, and (b) makes it more likely that EAs will fail to properly dwell on each data point and update on it (because they can always respond to a refutation of X by saying ‘but what about Y?!’ when the list of criticisms is this danged long).
I also think it’s pretty normal and fine to need a week to properly address big concerns. Maybe you’ve forgotten a bunch of the details and need to fact-check things. Maybe you’re emotionally processing stuff and need another 24h to draft a thing that you trust to be free of motivated reasoning.
I think it’s fine to take some time, and I also think it’s fine to break off some especially-easy-to-address points and respond to those faster.
Well put, Rob—you changed my mind
Yep this changed my mind as well—thank you!
I’d have thought “Emerson boasted about paying someone to stalk an enemy” was the most shocking claim. (Not that you said otherwise.) It surprises me how little the discussion has been focused on that. Whether or not it’s worse, it is way weirder than “threatened to get an employee blacklisted for saying bad things about them”.
I find the idea of doing that absolutely awful and I’ve never done anything like that. Unfortunately, it’s a lie there is no possibility of defending myself from, since it’s hearsay from an anonymous source.
To clarify, do you mean you have never asked/recruited someone to stalk, intimidate, or harass someone else, or do you mean you have never boasted about it?
Neither!
I can tell you that someone was quite actively scared of you doing something like this, and believed you to have said it to them. I wasn’t there myself so I cannot confirm whether it’s a mishearing or whatever.
There’s a broader question that I am often confused about regarding whether it’s good or bad to think carefully about how to really deceive someone, or really hurt someone, even if it’s motivated defensively. Then people can be unsure about the boundaries of whether you’ll use it against them. If someone were to tell you that they know general skills to get people fired, or get people swatted, or get people on immigration black-lists for certain countries, this information inherently makes them a more worrying person to be in conflicts with. Even if they say they’d only do it when it was justified. It’s one reason why I find myself trying to avoid simple games of deception like Werewolf, I’d prefer to not have practiced lying in general, so that my friends and allies have less reason to think I’m good at deception.
My current guess is that you can wield some of these normally-unethical weapons if you also have sent pretty credible signals about what principles you use to decide whether to use them, and otherwise it’s not much good to figure out how you would really hurt someone, as it predictably leads to people being very scared and intimidated.
‘or get people swatted, or get people on immigration black-lists for certain countries,’
I find it pretty hard to come up with a realistic scenario where these would ever be justified.
100% agreed with this. The chat log paints a wildly different picture than what was included in Ben’s original post.
Agreed. I did update toward “there’s likely a nontrivial amount of distortion in Alice’s retelling of other things”, and toward “normal human error and miscommunication played a larger role in some of the Bad Stuff that happened than I previously expected”. (Ben’s post was still a giant negative update for me about Nonlinear, but Kat’s comment is a smaller update in the opposite direction.)
I think a crux in this is what you think the reason is for Alice being so unassertive towards Kat in the messages—was it because she’s worried, based on experience, about angering her employers and causing negative consequences for herself, e.g. them saying she’s being too difficult and refuse to help her at all, or some other, more favourable to Kat and Emerson, reason?
Yeah, though if I learned “Alice is just not the sort of person to loudly advocate for herself” it wouldn’t update me much about Nonlinear at this point, because (a) I already have a fair amount of probability on that based on the publicly shared information, and (b) my main concerns are about stuff like “is Nonlinear super cutthroat and manipulative?” and “does Nonlinear try to scare people into not criticizing Nonlinear?”.
Those concerns are less directly connected to the vegan-food thing, and might be tricky to empirically distinguish from the hypothesis “Alice and/or Chloe aren’t generally the sort of people to be loud about their preferences” if we focus on the food situation.
(Though I cared about the vegan-food thing in its own right too, and am glad Kat shared more details.)
Yeah makes sense, I meant a crux for the food thing specifically :)
We definitely did not fail to get her food, so I think there has been a misunderstanding—it says in the texts below that Alice told Drew not to worry about getting food because I went and got her mashed potatoes. Ben mentioned the mashed potatoes in the main post, but we forgot to mention it again in our comment—which has been updated
The texts involved on 12/15/21:
I also offered to cook the vegan food we had in the house for her.
I think that there’s a big difference between telling everyone “I didn’t get the food I wanted, but they did get/offer to cook me vegan food, and I told them it was ok!” and “they refused to get me vegan food and I barely ate for 2 days”.
Also, re: “because of this professional/personal entanglement”—at this point, Alice was just a friend traveling with us. There were no professional entanglements.
Agreed.
This also updates me about Kat’s take (as summarized by Ben Pace in the OP):
When I read the post, I didn’t see any particular reason for Kat to think this, and I worried it might be just be an attempt to dismiss a critic, given the aggressive way Nonlinear otherwise seems to have responded to criticisms.
With this new info, it now seems plausible to me that Kat was correct (even though I don’t think this justifies threatening Alice or Ben in the way Kat and Emerson did). And if Kat’s not correct, I still update that Kat was probably accurately stating her epistemic state, and that a lot of reasonable people might have reached the same epistemic state.
The post says
Is that incorrect? When did Alice start working for Nonlinear?
Yes, that is incorrect. One of many such factual inaccuracies and why we told Ben to give us a week. The exact date is not simple to explain, since she gradually began working with us, but we will clarify ASAP.
Yeah, I mis-wrote there, will update that line in the post (though I say it correctly a few paragraphs later[1]). They traveled together between those dates.
From my perspective it’s fairly ambiguous at what point Alice started “working” for Nonlinear.
On the call with me, Kat said (roughly verbatim) “If you asked each of me/Emerson/Drew at what point Alice became an employee, we’d each give three different answers.” Kat said that her answer was at the end of February when they claim that they started paying Alice $1k/month, and that was when Kat started giving her Nonlinear tasks and negotiated things like vacation time.
Emerson said he didn’t know that was happening and thought he was just giving Alice a gift, and Alice reports after she quit he said he’d never thought of her as an employee.
Alice herself reports that the first conversation she had with Emerson, at EAG, lasting 4 hours, they explicitly discussed working together and salary. She says she walked away from that conversation believing they’d agreed that if she were to work for him, she would need $2.5k-$3k/month in salary to make ends meet, and was generally expecting to eventually work with Nonlinear when they travelled.
So as I say, IMO it’s quite confusing when they started being an employee in different people’s minds, but my current guess would be end-of-February when Kat thinks she started managing her would be a reasonable choice.
Added: In this December 28th comment Kat Woods says that they “are also incubating a promising woman for an as-yet-unspecified charity”, which is Alice. So I think it’s accurate to think of her as in their incubator at least at that point.
I write:
I think it’s telling, that Kat thinks that the texts speak in their favor. Reading them was quite triggering for me because I see a scared person, who asks for basic things, from the only people she has around her, to help her in a really difficult situation, and is made to feel like she is asking for too much, has to repeatedly advocate for herself (while sick) and still doesn’t get her needs met. On one hand, she is encouraged by Kat to ask for help but practically it’s not happening. Especially Emerson and Drew in that second thread sounded like she is difficult and constantly pushed to ask for less or for something else than what she asked for. Seriously, it took 2.5 hours the first day to get a salad, which she didn’t want in the first place?! And the second day it’s a vegetarian, not vegan, burger.
The way Alice constantly mentioned that she doesn’t want to bother them and says that things are fine when they are clearly not, is very upsetting. I can’t speak to how Alice felt but it’s no wonder she reports this as not being helped/fed when she was sick. To me, this is accurate, whether or not she got a salad and a vegetarian burger the next day.
Honestly, the burger-gate is a bit ridiculous. Ben did report in the original article that you disputed these claims (with quite a lot of detail) so he reported it accurately. To me, that was enough to not update too much based on this. I don’t think it warranted the strongly worded letter to the Lightcone team and the subsequent dramatic claims about evidence that you want to provide to clear your name.
It sounds like you’re interpreting Nonlinear folks as saying that the burger incident was the only false claim in Ben’s piece?
My interpretation is that Nonlinear objects to many claims in the piece but published this one (“one example of the evidence we’re gathering...”) in response to encouragement that they give examples of claims they object to. Probably because this was some combination of quicker to respond to / Nonlinear thought it looked better for them / easier for outsiders to understand.
That seems fair, but I don’t have any other concrete information, so for now, that’s my position based on the information I have. It may change on whatever else becomes available but I am skeptical of the value of any additional material that Nonlinear present because it seems that they covered all their main concerns already during their call with Ben and because this attempt to “provide evidence” backfired and in my opinion gives more credibility to Alice, not less. If this is an example of a “100% provable false claim” and a reason to call Alice a “bald-faced liar”, then the letter was absolutely disproportionate.
The claim in the post was “Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.”. (Bolding added)
If you look at the chat messages, you’ll see we have screenshots demonstrating that:
1. There was vegan food in the house, which we offered her.
2. I personally went out, while I was sick myself, to buy vegan food for her (mashed potatoes) and cooked it for her and brought it to her.
I would be fine if she told people that she was hungry when she was sick, and she felt sad and stressed. Or that she was hungry but wasn’t interested in any of the food we had in the house and we didn’t get her Burger King.
But I think that there’s a big difference between telling everyone “I didn’t get the food I wanted, but they did get/offer to cook me vegan food, and I told them it was ok!” and “they refused to get me vegan food and I barely ate for 2 days”
I have sympathy for Alice. She was hungry (because of her fighting with a boyfriend [not Drew] in the morning and having a light breakfast) and she was sick. That sucks, and I feel for her. And that’s why I tried (and succeeded) in getting her vegan food.
In summary. “Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.”. (Bolding added) This makes us sound like terrible people.
What actually happened: she was sick and hungry, and we offered to cook or bring over the vegan options in the house, then went out and bought and cooked her vegan food. We tried to take care of our sick friend (she wasn’t working for us at the time), and we fed her while she was sick.
I encourage you to read the full post here, where I’m trying to add more details and address more points as they come up.
Each time I see this comment pasted (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) I need to figure out whether to read through it to look for changes from the other times. What would you think of linking to your existing comments instead of pasting multiple duplicate comments?
(Also this one (6, 7) but since that’s only two it’s less of an issue)
Many people like me might only read one or two of these replies, and I at least find it easier to see the full thing written out even if there’s a lot of repetition.
Minor issue but I personally prefer in most cases to see things in t he body rather than have to follow a link, then having to find my way back to the original discussion afterwards.
Unless it’s pages long then I prefer a link.
I think it might be helpful to imagine what the forum would look like if this were a typical approach?
Also, consider what it does to the tree of the discussion: every duplicate comment forks the tree. Imagine I think there is something false in the comment that I think it’s readers should know. I write it on the first copy that appears, but every later copy will not have my response. I could try and track the copy-pasting and duplicate my response as well, but that requires manual tracking and is also even more noisy.
Thanks I didn’t think of that.
Maybe a bit of inconvenience for people like me is worth it to prevent potential mess like you say.
I’d be particularly interested in evidence against claims that nonlinear staff enforced (or encouraged) policies that prevent whistleblowing or the spread of negative information about nonlinear and its staff, (though my guess is that countering these claims is going to be a lower priority than some of the other more shocking ones).
It’s worth noting that empathetic members on the forum seem to recognize that Alice, as evidenced by her messages, is someone earnestly seeking assistance while being mindful not to cause any disruptions. Regrettably, individuals who have experienced psychological abuse often tend to exhibit such behaviors—expressing excessive apologies and striving to avoid any form of disturbance or trouble. While I lack formal training in psychology, I am prompted to consider whether a qualified practitioner might discern traits indicative of co-dependency and narcissistic abuse within the communicated messages. This, naturally, remains open to interpretation.
Of more substantial note, however, is the observation that the initial responses have been directed towards seemingly inconsequential elements. This particular approach is reminiscent of tactics employed in portrayals of legal proceedings within dramatic television series, where the objective is to unveil minor falsehoods in an attempt to cast doubt upon the credibility of a witness. The implication is that if one can establish a falsehood in a trivial matter, it follows that untruths may similarly permeate more significant claims.
What the Nonlinear team may potentially underestimate is the discerning nature of the audience assembled within this forum. Comprising educated, intelligent, and seasoned individuals, they are not easily swayed by manipulative techniques. The community holds truth and high ethical standards in high regard. To maintain discourse at a level commensurate with the forum’s expectations, addressing the most substantial allegations may be a more prudent course of action.
Just to identify a crux, do you think it’s acceptable that someone in your duty of care doesn’t eat hot food for a day whilst they are sick?
Can you explain? She did eat.
On December 15, as your screenshots seem to illustrate that you were not able to provide her hot (vegan) food, despite >2 hours of text messaging with both Kat and Drew.
I can’t speak for Elliot but happy to help you dig that hole for yourself. Did she eat on the 15th? Or rather, did any of you help her eat proper nutritious meals that are appropriate for a sick vegan? On the 15, or the 16?
Again, it’s rediculous to keep discussing this as it seems not to be a crux for people but it’s so revealing that you think you are in the right here.