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.
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: