(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.
(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.