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.
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.