Just to clarify, nonlinear has now picked one claim and provided screen shots relevant to it, I’m not sure if you saw that.
I also want to clarify that I gave Ben a bunch of very specific examples of information in his post that I have evidence are false (responding to the version he sent me hours before publication). He hastily attempted to adjust his post to remove or tweak some of his claims right before publishing based on my discussing these errors with him. It’s a lot easier (and vastly less time consuming) to provide those examples in a private one-on-one with Ben than to provide them publicly (where, for instance, issues of confidentially become much more complicated, and where documentation and wording need to be handled with extreme care, quite different than the norms of conversation).
The easiest to explain example is that Ben claimed a bunch of very bad sounding quotes from Glassdoor were about Emerson that clearly weren’t (he hadn’t been at the company for years when those complaints were written). Ben acknowledged somewhere in the comments that those were indeed not about Emerson and so that was indeed false information in the original version of the post.
My understanding, trying to interpret Ben’s comments on this point (if I’m mistaken, please correct me of course), is that Ben thinks it’s not a big deal that he almost included these false claims about Emerson (and would have had I not pointed it out right before publication) because he doesn’t view these as cruxy for his own personal hypotheses.
On the other hand, I view it as a very big deal to make severely negative, public, false claims about another person, and to me this one example is indicative of the process used to generate the post—a process that, from my point of view based on the evidence I’ve seen, led the post to contain a bunch of false claims.
Of course Ben didn’t purposely say anything he knew to be false, but I think Ben and I have different opinions on how bad it is to make public, false, potentially damaging claims about people, and the standard of care/evidence required before making those claims.
Nonlinear says they will provide lots more specific examples in the coming days of what they see as misinformation in the post—of course it will be up to you to judge whether you find their evidence convincing.
From my point of view, it’s best to reserve judgment until the evidence is released, assuming they do it within a reasonable time frame (e.g., a week or two—if they failed to release the evidence promptly that would be another matter).
I see no reason to jump to conclusions or take sides before we’ve seen all the evidence since it sounds like we’ll have access to it very soon.
The crux here is about ‘how bad it is to make public, false, potentially damaging claims about people, and the standard of care/evidence required before making those claims’.
I suspect there are two kinds of people most passionately involved in this dialogue here on EA Forum:
(1) those who have personally experienced being harmed by false, damaging claims (e.g. libel, slander) in the past (which includes me, for example) -- who tend to focus on the brutal downsides of reckless accusations that aren’t properly researched, and
(2) those who have been harmed by people who should have been called out earlier, but where nobody had the guts to be a whistle-blower before—who tend to focus on the downsides of failing to report bad behavior in a quick and effective and public way.
I think if everybody does a little soul-searching about which camp they fall into, and is a little more upfront about their possible personal biases around these issues, the quality of discourse might be higher.
Glassdoor states that 14 of the reviews were about Emerson. I’m not able to view all the reviews to verify this myself. Are you able to confirm that none of those 14 reviews were about Emerson? If that’s the case, it seems like an error that Emerson would benefit from trying to get fixed.
Hi Rebecca. To clarify: that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that in the version Ben showed me hours before publication none of the disparaging Glassdoor comments he used in the post (that he claimed were all about Emerson) were actually about Emerson. He has acknowledged this point. Based on me pointing this out, he hastily fix these mistakes before releasing the public version, hence you won’t find this error in the version of his post above. I use this as an example of just one of a number of what I see as important errors (based on the evidence I have access to) in his draft that was shared with me right before publishing, which made me fear his research was done in a biased, sloppy and/or error prone way, with (from my point of view) not enough care being taken to avoid making false harmful claims.
I agree and disagree. I agree that making false claims is serious and people should take great care to avoid it. And your ultimate conclusion that we should reserve final judgment until we see counter evidence sounds right to me.
But I disagree with holding all misconduct reports to incredibly high standards, such that in a report with as many allegations as this, people feel the report is basically wrong if it includes a few misinterpretations.
In an ideal world, yes, all summaries of patterns of misconduct would not contain any errors. But in reality, I’ve found that almost all allegations of behaviors that turn out to be—for all intents and purposes—true, contain some level of mistakes, misattributions, specific allegations that are overstated.
People who allege misconduct are under intense scrutiny. And absolutely, scrutiny is warranted. But as someone who has reported misconduct and spoken to other people that report misconduct, the expectation of perfection is, to put it mildly, chilling. It means people do not come forward, it means people who do come forward are further traumatized, it means allegations that are 80% truthful are dismissed outright.
Does a third or more of what Ben wrote comport with your general understanding? If so, these allegations are still concerning to me.
And on the Kat screenshots/food question, I do not think they delegitimize what Ben wrote here. At worst, Ben somewhat overstated the food situation. But, my overall impression from those screenshots was what Alice said was basically true. Kat’s framing of what the screenshots say make me doubt Kat’s account more, not less.
I’ll also say as someone who has experienced harassment, that people really underestimate how much bias they have towards their friends accused of misconduct. Friends of the harasser would say things to defend their friend that to most people would seem pretty obviously wrong, like “he probably wasn’t going to follow through on the threat, so him making the threat is not really an issue.”
Thanks Tiresias for your thoughtful comments. I agree with much of what you say but I seemingly have a few important differences of opinion:
“I disagree with holding all misconduct reports to incredibly high standards, such that in a report with as many allegations as this, people feel the report is basically wrong if it includes a few misinterpretations. In an ideal world, yes, all summaries of patterns of misconduct would not contain any errors. But in reality, I’ve found that almost all allegations of behaviors that turn out to be—for all intents and purposes—true, contain some level of mistakes, misattributions, specific allegations that are overstated.”
I agree. I don’t think I was holding the report to an incredibly high standard though. When I read it I was immediately chagrined by the amount and severity of false information (i.e., false as far as I can tell based on the evidence I have access to). I was also distressed that Ben was not seeking out evidence he could have easily gotten from nonlinear.
“People who allege misconduct are under intense scrutiny. And absolutely, scrutiny is warranted. But as someone who has reported misconduct and spoken to other people that report misconduct, the expectation of perfection is, to put it mildly, chilling. It means people do not come forward, it means people who do come forward are further traumatized, it means allegations that are 80% truthful are dismissed outright.”
Good point. I would differentiate between the standard for people privately reporting bad behavior (where I think the bar should be way lower) and large scale investigations that are made public (where I think the bar should be much higher for the claims made—e.g., that the investigator should be very careful not to credulously include damaging false information).
“Does a third or more of what Ben wrote comport with your general understanding? If so, these allegations are still concerning to me.”
I think this framing doesn’t quite work because the post contains some very minor concerns and some very major ones, and I think it’s much more important whether the major concerns are accurate than that the minor concerns are accurate, so counting up the number of inaccuracies doesn’t, I think, reflect what’s important. But based on the evidence I’ve seen, some of the damning claims in his original post seemed to me to be false or missing critical context that make them very misleading.
“And on the Kat screenshots/food question, I do not think they delegitimize what Ben wrote here. At worst, Ben somewhat overstated the food situation. But, my overall impression from those screenshots was what Alice said was basically true. Kat’s framing of what the screenshots say make me doubt Kat’s account more, not less.”
I think people should decide for themselves what they think is true about this after reviewing the evidence. Here is a side-by-side comparison of what Ben says and what Kat says:
Ben: “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.”
Kat: “1. There was vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, mixed nuts, prunes, peanuts, tomatoes, cereal, oranges) which we offered to cook for her. 2. We did pick up vegan food for her.”
“I’ll also say as someone who has experienced harassment, that people really underestimate how much bias they have towards their friends accused of misconduct.”
Absolutely agreed, this is a significant issue to watch out for.
Just to clarify, nonlinear has now picked one claim and provided screen shots relevant to it, I’m not sure if you saw that.
I also want to clarify that I gave Ben a bunch of very specific examples of information in his post that I have evidence are false (responding to the version he sent me hours before publication). He hastily attempted to adjust his post to remove or tweak some of his claims right before publishing based on my discussing these errors with him. It’s a lot easier (and vastly less time consuming) to provide those examples in a private one-on-one with Ben than to provide them publicly (where, for instance, issues of confidentially become much more complicated, and where documentation and wording need to be handled with extreme care, quite different than the norms of conversation).
The easiest to explain example is that Ben claimed a bunch of very bad sounding quotes from Glassdoor were about Emerson that clearly weren’t (he hadn’t been at the company for years when those complaints were written). Ben acknowledged somewhere in the comments that those were indeed not about Emerson and so that was indeed false information in the original version of the post.
My understanding, trying to interpret Ben’s comments on this point (if I’m mistaken, please correct me of course), is that Ben thinks it’s not a big deal that he almost included these false claims about Emerson (and would have had I not pointed it out right before publication) because he doesn’t view these as cruxy for his own personal hypotheses.
On the other hand, I view it as a very big deal to make severely negative, public, false claims about another person, and to me this one example is indicative of the process used to generate the post—a process that, from my point of view based on the evidence I’ve seen, led the post to contain a bunch of false claims.
Of course Ben didn’t purposely say anything he knew to be false, but I think Ben and I have different opinions on how bad it is to make public, false, potentially damaging claims about people, and the standard of care/evidence required before making those claims.
Nonlinear says they will provide lots more specific examples in the coming days of what they see as misinformation in the post—of course it will be up to you to judge whether you find their evidence convincing.
From my point of view, it’s best to reserve judgment until the evidence is released, assuming they do it within a reasonable time frame (e.g., a week or two—if they failed to release the evidence promptly that would be another matter).
I see no reason to jump to conclusions or take sides before we’ve seen all the evidence since it sounds like we’ll have access to it very soon.
Spencer—good reply.
The crux here is about ‘how bad it is to make public, false, potentially damaging claims about people, and the standard of care/evidence required before making those claims’.
I suspect there are two kinds of people most passionately involved in this dialogue here on EA Forum:
(1) those who have personally experienced being harmed by false, damaging claims (e.g. libel, slander) in the past (which includes me, for example) -- who tend to focus on the brutal downsides of reckless accusations that aren’t properly researched, and
(2) those who have been harmed by people who should have been called out earlier, but where nobody had the guts to be a whistle-blower before—who tend to focus on the downsides of failing to report bad behavior in a quick and effective and public way.
I think if everybody does a little soul-searching about which camp they fall into, and is a little more upfront about their possible personal biases around these issues, the quality of discourse might be higher.
Glassdoor states that 14 of the reviews were about Emerson. I’m not able to view all the reviews to verify this myself. Are you able to confirm that none of those 14 reviews were about Emerson? If that’s the case, it seems like an error that Emerson would benefit from trying to get fixed.
Hi Rebecca. To clarify: that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that in the version Ben showed me hours before publication none of the disparaging Glassdoor comments he used in the post (that he claimed were all about Emerson) were actually about Emerson. He has acknowledged this point. Based on me pointing this out, he hastily fix these mistakes before releasing the public version, hence you won’t find this error in the version of his post above. I use this as an example of just one of a number of what I see as important errors (based on the evidence I have access to) in his draft that was shared with me right before publishing, which made me fear his research was done in a biased, sloppy and/or error prone way, with (from my point of view) not enough care being taken to avoid making false harmful claims.
I agree and disagree. I agree that making false claims is serious and people should take great care to avoid it. And your ultimate conclusion that we should reserve final judgment until we see counter evidence sounds right to me.
But I disagree with holding all misconduct reports to incredibly high standards, such that in a report with as many allegations as this, people feel the report is basically wrong if it includes a few misinterpretations.
In an ideal world, yes, all summaries of patterns of misconduct would not contain any errors. But in reality, I’ve found that almost all allegations of behaviors that turn out to be—for all intents and purposes—true, contain some level of mistakes, misattributions, specific allegations that are overstated.
People who allege misconduct are under intense scrutiny. And absolutely, scrutiny is warranted. But as someone who has reported misconduct and spoken to other people that report misconduct, the expectation of perfection is, to put it mildly, chilling. It means people do not come forward, it means people who do come forward are further traumatized, it means allegations that are 80% truthful are dismissed outright.
Does a third or more of what Ben wrote comport with your general understanding? If so, these allegations are still concerning to me.
And on the Kat screenshots/food question, I do not think they delegitimize what Ben wrote here. At worst, Ben somewhat overstated the food situation. But, my overall impression from those screenshots was what Alice said was basically true. Kat’s framing of what the screenshots say make me doubt Kat’s account more, not less.
I’ll also say as someone who has experienced harassment, that people really underestimate how much bias they have towards their friends accused of misconduct. Friends of the harasser would say things to defend their friend that to most people would seem pretty obviously wrong, like “he probably wasn’t going to follow through on the threat, so him making the threat is not really an issue.”
Thanks Tiresias for your thoughtful comments. I agree with much of what you say but I seemingly have a few important differences of opinion:
I agree. I don’t think I was holding the report to an incredibly high standard though. When I read it I was immediately chagrined by the amount and severity of false information (i.e., false as far as I can tell based on the evidence I have access to). I was also distressed that Ben was not seeking out evidence he could have easily gotten from nonlinear.
Good point. I would differentiate between the standard for people privately reporting bad behavior (where I think the bar should be way lower) and large scale investigations that are made public (where I think the bar should be much higher for the claims made—e.g., that the investigator should be very careful not to credulously include damaging false information).
I think this framing doesn’t quite work because the post contains some very minor concerns and some very major ones, and I think it’s much more important whether the major concerns are accurate than that the minor concerns are accurate, so counting up the number of inaccuracies doesn’t, I think, reflect what’s important. But based on the evidence I’ve seen, some of the damning claims in his original post seemed to me to be false or missing critical context that make them very misleading.
I think people should decide for themselves what they think is true about this after reviewing the evidence. Here is a side-by-side comparison of what Ben says and what Kat says:
Ben: “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.”
Kat: “1. There was vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, mixed nuts, prunes, peanuts, tomatoes, cereal, oranges) which we offered to cook for her. 2. We did pick up vegan food for her.”
And here are the screenshots Kat provided to back up her account: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5pksH3SbQzaniX96b/a-quick-update-from-nonlinear
Absolutely agreed, this is a significant issue to watch out for.