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.)
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 :)