Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Recently, Ben Pace wrote a well-intentioned blog post mostly based on complaints from 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees who 1) wanted more money, 2) felt socially isolated, and 3) felt persecuted/oppressed.
Of relevance, one has accused the majority of her previous employers, and 28 people of abuse—that we know of.
She has accused multiple people of threatening to kill her and literally accused an ex-employer of murder. Within three weeks of joining us, she had accused five separate people of abuse: not paying her what was promised, controlling her romantic life, hiring stalkers, and other forms of persecution.
We have empathy for her. Initially, we believed her too.
We spent weeks helping her get her “nefarious employer to finally pay her” and commiserated with her over how badly they mistreated her.
Then she started accusing us of strange things.
You’ve seen Ben’s evidence, which is largely the word of two people and a few misleadingly cropped screenshots. Below, we provide extensive evidence (contracts, recordings, screenshots, etc) demonstrating that the post’s claims are false, misleading, or are catastrophizing normal things. This post is a summary; we also include a ~200 page appendix of additional evidence. We also present a hypothesis for how Ben got so much wrong.
Two ways you can read this: 1) stop whenever you’re convinced because you’ve seen enough falsehoods that you no longer think their remaining claims are likely to be true, or 2) jump to the specific claims that are most important to you, and look at the evidence we provide for them. You can see summary tables of the key claims and evidence here, here, and here.
Our request as you read on: consider this new evidence you haven’t seen yet with a scout mindset, and reflect on how to update on the accuracy of the original claims.
It’s messy, sorry. Given the length, we’re sure we’ve made mistakes—please do let us know. We’re very happy to receive good faith criticism—this is what makes EA amazing.
Finally, we want to note that we have a lot of empathy for Alice and Chloe. We believe them when they say they felt bad, and we present a hypothesis for what caused their negative emotions.
Short summary overview table
| Claim | What actually happened |
|---|---|
| Alice claimed: they asked me to travel with illegal drugs. | - False. It was legal medicine—from a pharmacy. - Ben knew this and published it anyway. |
| Alice claimed: I was running out of money, so I was scared to quit because I was financially dependent on them (“[I] had €700 in [my] account”* etc.) | - Alice repeatedly misrepresented how much money she had. She actually had a separate bank account/business generating (according to her) ~$3,000 a month in passive income. - Alice told us she was an independent business owner, so she either lied to Ben, Ben misled his readers about this, or she lied to us about the business. |
| Chloe claimed: they tricked me by refusing to write down my compensation agreement | - False. We did write it down. We have a work contract and interview recordings. And when she realized this accusation was false, instead of apologizing, she tried to change the topic—“it’s not about whether I had a contract or salary.”* - We told Ben we had proof, and he refused to look at it and published this anyway. |
| Alice claimed: they paid me next to nothing and were financially controlling | We were the opposite of “financially controlling”*: - We gave her almost complete control over a ~$240,000 budget we had raised. - We even let her choose her own pay.
|
| Alice/Chloe claimed Nonlinear failed to pay them. Later, they denied ever claiming this. | - Alice/Chloe accused us many times of not paying them—a serious accusation. We proved this was false. - Ben tried to walk this back last minute, saying “I no longer believe this is true”* - However, he didn’t remove all the references to this accusation—each one is proof that they were going around telling people this falsehood. - Even our friends thought we didn’t pay Alice anything (due to the rumors that Alice spread). - So they lied, got caught, and are now lying again by saying they never told the first lie. - Instead of apologizing and questioning Alice/Chloe’s other claims based on them being caught telling him provably false and damaging information, Ben shifted the topic—“the real issue is about the wealth disparity between her and Emerson”* |
| Alice claimed: They refused to get me food when I was sick, starving me into giving up being vegan | False. People heard this and thought we were monsters. We ran around for days getting her food, despite all 3 of us being sick or injured. We also had vegan food in the house that she liked, which Kat offered to cook for her (but she declined the offer). |
| Alice claimed: we were not able to live apart from them | - Strange, false accusation: Alice spent 2 of the 4 months living/working apart (dozens of EAs can verify she lived/worked in the FTX condos, which we did not live at) |
| Chloe claimed: they told me not to spend time with my romantic partner | - Also a strange, false accusation:we invited her boyfriend to live with us for 2 of the 5 months. We even covered his rent and groceries. - We were just about to invite him to travel with us indefinitely because it would make Chloe happy, but then Chloe quit. |
| Alice/Chloe claimed: we could only talk to people that Kat/Emerson invited to travel with us, making us feel socially dependent | - False. Chloe herself wrote the invite policy explicitly saying they were encouraged to invite friends/family. - They regularly invited people who joined us (e.g. Chloe’s boyfriend joined for 40% of the time) |
| Alice claimed: they told me not to see my family, making me socially dependent and isolated | - Bizarre, false accusation given that Alice spent 1 of the 4 months with her family - Kat encouraged her to set up regular calls with her family, and she did. |
| Alice/Chloe claimed: I was paid $1,000 per month (and kept implying this was all she was paid, saying it was “tiny pay” or “low pay”) | - The $1k/month was a stipend on top traveling the world all-expenses-paid, which was the majority of the value (~$58k of the ~$70k estimated value of the compensation package) - It’s not the same as a salary, but it’s the comp Chloe signed up for and we clearly communicated. And when Alice asked for pure cash, we said “sure” and even let her choose how much she paid herself. - It’s also misleading. Imagine somebody goes to the EA Hotel and then loudly shouts, “they only paid me $100 a month”. The biggest thing the EA Hotel provides is room & board. |
Alice/Chloe painted a picture of poverty and isolation, which simply does not match the exotic, socially-rich lifestyle they actually lived.
| Claim | What actually happened |
| Alice: You didn’t pay me! | - We paid Alice consistently on time and she herself often said “Thanks for paying me so fast!” - Once she accused us of not paying but she just hadn’t checked her bank account. - Another time she accused us of not paying her for “many months” when she’d received her stipend just 2 weeks prior. - She said she had to “strongly request” her salary, when really, she just hadn’t filled out the reimbursement system for months - We have text messages & bank receipts and she’s still telling people this. |
| Chloe claimed: I was expected to do chores around the house because I was considered low value | - This was part of her job—she was an assistant. We were very upfront, and have interview recordings showing she knew this before she accepted the job. - Imagine applying to be a dishwasher, hating washing dishes, then writing a “tell all” about how you felt demeaned/devalued because the restaurant “expected” you to wash dishes. |
| Chloe: I felt like they didn’t value me or my time (she implied she spent all her time doing assistant work) | - Chloe spent just ~10% of her time on assistant work (according to her own time tracking), the rest was high level ops & reading - We allocated 25% of her time to professional development (~$17,000 a year) - This is basically unheard of for any job, much less an assistant. - She got to read/develop any skills she wanted 2 hours a day (leadership, M&E, hiring, etc) - a dream to many EAs. - Kat showed so much gratitude that Chloe actually asked her to stop expressing gratitude. She said it made her feel Kat only valued her for her work. So Chloe accuses us of both valuing her work too much and too little. - It’s not that Kat didn’t value Chloe’s assistant work, it’s that Chloe didn’t seem to value assistant work, so constantly felt diminished for doing it (despite having agreed to do it when we hired her) - Base rate: ~50% of people feel undervalued at work. |
| Alice: Kat threatened my career for telling the truth | - False. Alice had spent months slandering Kat by spreading falsehoods that were damaging our reputation (see the numerous pages of evidence below). - Kat reached out multiple times, trying to hear her side, share her own, and make some attempts at conflict resolution. Alice refused. - However, despite being attacked, Kat had not defended herself by sharing the truth about what really occurred (which would have made Alice look very bad) - Kat communicated to Alice: Please stop attacking me. I don’t want to fight. If you don’t stop attacking me, I’ll have to defend myself. I haven’t yet told the truth about what you did, and if I do, it will end your career (paraphrased) - Alice painted herself as the victim and Kat out as the attacker, despite Alice being the attacker for months, who had been harming Kat by telling lies. - Why didn’t Kat defend herself? 1) She felt compassion for Alice. She was clearly struggling and needed professional help, not more discord. 2) She was terrified of Alice. Alice had accused 28+ people of abuse—wouldn’t you be scared knowing that? She was worried Alice would escalate further. Which she did anyway. |
| Saying “if you keep sharing your side, I’ll share mine—and that will end your career” is unethical and retaliatory | - Everybody agrees that if somebody is spreading damaging falsehoods about you that it can be good and ethical to share your side and correct the record. - If the truth would hurt the slanderer’s own career, you should still be able to share the truth - In fact, warning the slanderer first is often preferable to going public with the truth without warning them—it at least gives them a chance to stop. - The question is: did Alice spread falsehoods or “just share her negative experience”? (numerous pages of evidence below) - There’s a double standard here: if you share your experience and you’re lower status, that’s “brave”, but if you do the same thing and you’re higher status, that’s “retaliation”. This epistemic norm will predictably lead to inaccurate beliefs and unethical outcomes. |
This post is long, so if you read just one illustrative story, read this one
Ben wrote: “Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be very dangerous for her personally.”
This conjures up vivid images of Kat as a slavemaster forcing poor Alice to be a cocaine smuggler, risking life in prison. Is it true?
Parts of the story Alice didn’t share:
Kat requested Alice bring legal medicine from a pharmacy—specifically antibiotics and one pack of ADHD medicine—not illegal drugs. These medicines are cheap and legal without a prescription in other parts of Mexico we’d visited, and she was already going to a pharmacy anyway.
After arriving, Alice learned that they require a prescription there. When she told Kat and Drew this, they both said “oh well, never mind!”—it wasn’t a big deal. But then Alice just went and got a prescription anyway.
Alice never argued this would be “very dangerous for her personally”:
In direct contradiction of her story, thinking traveling with legal medicine would be too dangerous, she flew with psilocybin mushrooms for herself to Mexico.
Not only that, while in Mexico, she did an actual drug deal for herself—she went out and illegally purchased, then traveled internationally with, actual recreational drugs (cannabis), again completely contradicting her story.
In fact, Alice never told you that she traveled with actual illegal drugs—cannabis/LSD/psilocybin—for herself across most borders we know of. And Kat was the one warning her not to do that! For example, Alice bought psilocybin for herself just before flying out and Kat expressed concern about her traveling with that.
In contrast to her “I’m a sweet, innocent girl who would never take such legal risks as traveling with drugs” framing, Alice was literally an ex-drug dealer and manufacturer. She told us she used to make a lot of money growing and distributing marijuana and psilocybin, but she was smoking so much of her own product that she stopped making money.
So, she traveled across both international borders with actually illegal drugs for herself on these flights, and accused us of asking her to travel with—legal medicine.
Alice took a small request—could you swing by a pharmacy and grab some cheap antibiotics/ADHD medicine? - and she twisted it into a narrative of forcing her to risk prison as a drug mule, that had commenters rushing for their pitchforks.
And it’s worse than that—Ben’s post implied that we largely agreed on the facts of the story, so people condemned us viciously in the comments! But he knew we didn’t agree—when he told us this story we literally laughed out loud because it was so absurd.
We shared much of this information with Ben—he knew it was legal medicine, not illegal drugs—yet he still published this misleading version. We were horrified that Ben published this knowing full well it wasn’t true. We told him we’d share these exact screenshots with him, but he refused to look at them.
It would be bad enough if Alice told this story to one person, but she was going around telling lots of people this! We were hearing from friends Alice started telling stories like this just minutes after she met them, completely unprompted. Saying that the only reason she wasn’t succeeding was because Kat was persecuting her, that we refused to pay her, forced her to do demeaning things, etc.
Ben looked into this because Alice/Chloe spent 1.5 years attacking us—and we didn’t defend ourselves by sharing our side. People only heard stories like the one above.
No wonder people treated us like lepers, disinvited us from events, etc. Can you imagine what that would feel like? For 1.5 years, I’ve lived with fear and confusion (“Why is she still attacking me?”), sleepless nights, fear of what Alice’s next attack might be (justified, apparently), and a sludgy, dark, toxic desolation in my chest at being rejected by my community based on false rumors.
The only thing that gave me hope during this entire thing was believing that EAs/rationalists are good at updating based on evidence, and the truth is on our side.
What is going on? Why did they say so many misleading things? How did Ben get so much wrong?
Ben’s hypothesis—“2 EAs are Secretly Evil”: 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees felt bad because while Kat/Emerson seem like kind, uplifting charity workers, behind closed doors they are ill-intentioned ne’er do wells. (Ben said we’re “predators” who “chew up and spit out” the bright-eyed youth of the community—witch hunter language.)
If what Alice and Chloe told Ben is true, then this hypothesis has merit. Unfortunately, they told him falsehoods. For instance, Alice falsely claims that she couldn’t live/work apart and yet did so for 2 of the 4 months.
Why would she say something so false that she must know is false?
Maybe they’re deliberately lying? We mostly don’t think so, because they wouldn’t keep lying about things we can easily disprove with evidence. Like, Chloe said we tricked her with a verbal contract when she knows we sent her a work contract and we recorded her interviews. So why would she say that?
Maybe they’re just exaggerating and trying to share an emotional truth? Like, Alice felt starved and uncared for, and she’s trying to share that by bending the truth (even though she knows that Kat offered to cook her food, and ended up going out to get her food even though Kat was sick also)?
The thing is, they bend the truth far beyond what anyone would consider normal. For example, with the “they starved me” thing, Alice told Drew she was “completely out of food” just one hour after Kat (also sick) had offered to cook her any of the vegan food in the house that Alice usually loved and ate every day.
This is quite extreme. And there are dozens of similar examples.
So what is going on? Below, we present relevant information to support an alternative hypothesis:
“2 EAs are Mentally Unwell”: They felt bad because, sadly, they had long-term mental health issues, which continued for the 4-5 months they worked for us.
| Relevant mental health history | - Alice has accused the majority of her previous employers, and 28 people—that we know of—of abuse. She accused people of: not paying her, being culty, persecuting/oppressing her, controlling her romantic life, hiring stalkers, threatening to kill her, and even, literally, murder. - They both told us they struggled with severe mental health issues causing extreme negative emotions for much of their lives. Alice said she’d had it for ~90% of her life. She told us that she’d been having symptoms just 4 months before joining us. But she told us then, as she tells people now, she’s totally better and happy all the time. - If she’s been suffering extreme negative emotions for most of her life, it could be that we caused the emotions this time. But it’s more likely a continuation of a longstanding issue. - She was forced to spend a month in a mental hospital. Shortly after, while still getting her bachelor’s, Alice started advertising herself as a life coach to make money. She has offered herself to EAs as a “spiritual guru” claiming she has achieved “unshakeable joy”. - During the period she started accusing us of strange things, she was microdosing LSD every day, only sleeping a few hours a night for weeks, speaking incoherently, writing on mirrors, etc. - She, sadly, claimed to have six separate painful health issues. (When she’s in pain she seems to see ill intent everywhere.) |
| Relevant instances of acting erratically | 1) Alice attempted to steal a Nonlinear project, one that she and 6 other people at Nonlinear had worked on for months. She locked us out of the project and was going around EA claiming it was solely her invention. We told her she could use it if she at least gave Nonlinear some credit for it—it would be insulting to all her colleagues who worked hard on it not to. She kept refusing to share any credit—not even a tiny mention. 2) Alice created a secret bank account and a separate organization (without telling us), and attempted to transfer $240,000 from our control despite being repeatedly told it was not her money and telling people she wasn’t sure if it was her money. However, we do not think she had malicious intent. Our best guess as to why she did this is that she was having an episode and lost touch with reality. 3) While at Nonlinear, Alice worked on a project. Then, weeks after she quit, she continued working on it without telling us, and then demanded we pay her for those weeks she worked after she quit. 5) Alice repeatedly lied about getting job offers to try to extort more money out of us. That or else she made them up as a part of her pattern of delusions. She’s groundlessly claimed to have 4 fabricated job/funding offers that we know of. |
| Key pattern: Alice/Chloe confuse emotions for reality | Example: Alice was saying we literally made her homeless—a very serious accusation. We reminded her of the proof that this was false, and she said “It doesn’t matter, because I felt homeless.” But it really does matter. This is a key pattern of Alice/Chloe’s—they think that feeling persecuted/oppressed means they were persecuted/oppressed, even if they weren’t. |
Why share this? If we refute their claims point by point without explaining the patterns, it’s hard not to think “but they felt bad. Surely you did something bad.” There needs to be a plausible alternative hypothesis for why they felt oppressed.
This info is relevant because mental health issues, particularly having delusions of persecution, explain what happened better:
Hypothesis 1: actual persecution
Hypothesis 2: delusions of persecution
To support Hypothesis 2, we simply must share relevant mental health history.
Of course, just because somebody has frequent delusions of persecution doesn’t mean that they’re all false. We agree. That’s why this doc contains numerous pages of evidence to counter their unsupported claims.
And just because somebody has mental health issues doesn’t mean they’re less worthy of compassion. If they are mentally unwell, knowing that allows us to actually help them. If somebody is experiencing delusions, going after whatever “demon” they claim to see won’t actually help them.
If you learn that someone has made many false accusations, which follow a similar pattern to their previous delusions, and many are quite implausible (e.g. hiring stalkers is a weird accusation), then those patterns are relevant. And if somebody was mentally unwell most of their life, then that’s a relevant explanatory factor for why they felt bad.
Ben admitted in his post that he was warned in private by multiple of his own sources that Alice was untrustworthy and told outright lies. One credible person told Ben “Alice makes things up.”
We are horrified we have to share all this publicly, but Ben, who refused to look at our evidence, left us no choice. We do not want Alice’s accusations to destroy yet more people’s lives and more drama is the last thing EA needs right now, so we do not intend to expand the scope of accusations in this post, but we think it’s important to share a flavor for Alice’s past with the specifics redacted.
However, we want to make sure it’s clear, this is just the tip of the iceberg for the lives Alice has ruined.
Here is an illustration of how many people we know Alice has accused:
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
Alice accused [a previous employer] of [refusing to pay her, stalking her, toxic culture, making her do unethical/illegal things, assault and murder. Yes, she literally accused her former boss of murder.]
Alice accused [a previous employer] of [abuse, toxic culture, sexism]
Alice accused [a previous employer] of [abuse, toxic culture, doing illegal/unethical things, refusing to pay her]
Alice accused [a previous employer] of [being a cult, toxic culture, doing illegal/unethical things]
Alice accused [a previous employer] of [abuse]
Alice accused [a previous employer] of [child abuse, assault, threatening to kill her]
Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
Alice [____] involving [police]
Alice [____] involving [police]
Alice [____] involving [police]
Continuing the pattern, the only public writing I can find of hers outside of social media and the forum is her publicly accusing a person of persecution.
Within weeks of joining us, she accused five separate, unrelated people of abuse. This should have been a major warning sign, but we just thought she’d been unlucky. We hadn’t known her long enough yet to spot the pattern and we were trusting.
These are just the ones we know of from a very shallow investigation. How many would we find if we spent 6 months investigating her? Then we contacted each of these people she accused of abuse and only shared their side? What do they think of Alice?
What would they think if they heard that she was once again accusing a former employer of oppressing her?
We actually completely understand why Ben and most people believed her when she accused us of things—because we believed her too. Within just weeks of first arriving, she told us how:
Her current employer was refusing to pay her and she’d been waiting for months for payment.
They had “unclear boundaries” and were disorganized and unprofessional.
They promised her control of projects then reneged later.
Her previous employer was culty and unethical.
Her boyfriend was trying to control her by pressuring her to stop practicing the type of poly she preferred (“no rules” relationship anarchy)
And we just believed her, because 1) we didn’t hear the other side and 2) who lies about things like that?
Also, Alice is one of the most charming people we’ve ever met. She stares deeply into your eyes and makes you feel like the most special person, like you’ve been friends forever. It’s so easy to believe her when she says these people have been being mean to her for no reason. She believes it herself and makes you feel protective of her.
We ourselves were trying to help her get paid by her “evil employer who was refusing to pay her” and congratulating her for “escaping from her culty ex-employer”.
And then she started accusing us of the same kinds of things.
Of course, she could be just very unlucky. But it’s very rare to be that unlucky. If one person is a jerk to you, then that person’s probably a jerk. If everybody’s “mysteriously mean” to you for “no reason”—she kept saying this—maybe it’s not the other people.
And anybody who knows her will notice that she appears to have endless stories of people “bullying/oppressing/mistreating” her, often for what seem to be strange reasons or no reason at all (e.g. she was “bullied” in university for “being too happy”. She almost got a kid expelled from school for this.)
Alice would randomly get texts saying “You ruined my life. I wish I had never met you.” Apparently Alice had destroyed that person’s marriage. She claimed to have done nothing wrong, as is her pattern.
We also wish we had never met Alice. She seems to hop from community to community leaving a trail of wreckage in her wake.
Shortly after being forced to spend a month in a mental hospital, while still in university, Alice started advertising herself as a life coach to make money. She said she stopped because she’d ruined multiple peoples’ lives. At least, this is what she told us.
It looks like she’s started up again. At a recent EAG she told people that she had figured out “unshakeable joy” years ago and offered to teach EAs. Just before she started accusing us of things that made no sense, she was again offering to be a “spiritual guru” to an EA in the Bahamas. She did not follow through because she spent the next months, according to her, “mentally all over the place”.
In other words, during the same time she’s claiming she was miserable, subjected to the worst experience of her life, she was at the same time offering to teach EAs her secret to “unshakeable joy”.
Many people reached out to us privately after Ben released his article who were afraid to come to our defense publicly because it’s dangerous to defend a witch burning on a pyre lest ye be accused of being a witch yourself. Many EA leaders are quietly keeping their heads down since FTX, because visibility in EA has become dangerous.
We had to redact quotes here because, as one person said, “I’m worried Alice will attack me like she’s attacking you.”
Alice has similarities to Kathy Forth, who, according to Scott Alexander, was “a very disturbed person” who, multiple people told him, “had a habit of accusing men she met of sexual harassment. They all agreed she wasn’t malicious, just delusional.” As a community, we do not have good mechanisms in place to protect people from false accusations.
Scott wrote a post saying that some of Kathy’s accusations were false, “because those accusations were genuinely false, could have seriously damaged the lives of innocent people.”
Of note, we tried to handle this like Scott, who minimized what was shared in public “in order to not further harm anyone else’s reputation (including Kathy’s)”. This is why we avoided publicly saying anything for the last 1.5 years. Also, once we learned about her history of accusations, we were terrified of Alice, because… well, wouldn’t you be?
Multiple people have actually recommended I get a restraining order on her. Unfortunately, given her previous behavior, it’s unlikely that would help.
Scott said: “I think the Kathy situation is typical of how effective altruists respond to these issues and what their failure modes are. … the typical response in this community is the one which, in fact, actually happened—immediate belief by anyone who didn’t know the situation and a culture of fear preventing those who did know the situation from speaking out. I think it’s useful to acknowledge and push back against that culture of fear.”
“Suppose the shoe was on the other foot, and some man (Bob), made some kind of false and horrible rumor about a woman…Maybe he says that she only got a good position in her organization by sleeping her way to the top. If this was false, the story isn’t “we need to engage with the ways Bob felt harmed and make him feel valid.” It’s not “the Bob lied lens is harsh and unproductive”. It’s ‘we condemn these false and damaging rumors.’”
We need to carefully separate two questions: 1) is Alice deserving of sympathy? and 2) did Alice spread damaging falsehoods?
For 1) Yes, we feel sympathy for Alice. Seeing secret ill-intent everywhere must be horrible. We hope she gets professional help.
But if she’s going around saying that we forced her to travel with illegal drugs, we starved her, we isolated her on purpose, we refused to pay her, and other horrible false things, then the story isn’t that she felt isolated or she felt scared, the story is that she told false and damaging rumors.
And we need to not mix up our laudable compassion for all with our need to set up systems to prevent false accusations from causing massive harm. In addition to a staggering misallocation of the community’s time, Alice, Ben, and Chloe hurt me (Kat) so much I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and I cried more than any other time in my life. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t type responses to comments. I wouldn’t wish this experience on anyone.
Why didn’t Ben do basic fact-checking to see if their claims were true? I mean, multiple people warned him?
In sum, Ben appears to have believed Alice/Chloe, unaware of their history, prematurely committed to the “2 EAs are Secretly Evil Hypothesis”, then looked exclusively for confirming evidence.
Crucially, by claiming that they were afraid of retaliation, despite the fact that they’d been attacking us for 1.5 years without us retaliating, Alice/Chloe convinced him that he shouldn’t give us time to provide evidence, that he should just take them at their word. As a result, he shot us in the stomach before hearing our side.
His “fact-checking” seems to have been mostly talking to Alice and Chloe, Alice/Chloe’s friends, and a few outsiders who didn’t know much about the situation.
Imagine applying Ben’s process after a messy breakup: “I heard you had a bad breakup with your ex. To find the truth, I’m going to talk to your ex and her friends and uncritically publicly share whatever they tell me, without giving you the chance first to provide counterevidence, because they told me I shouldn’t let you. Also, I paid them a total of $10,000 before looking at your evidence, so it may be difficult to convince me I wasted all that time and money.”
One example of Ben’s bias: one source told Ben lots of positive things about us. How much of that did Ben choose to include? ~Zero.
A few more examples:
| Claim | What actually happened |
| Ben implied: Kat/Emerson didn’t write things down because they’re dangerously negligent | Actually, when we heard this, we said “What? Yes we did. Just give us time to show you.” (He did not.) |
| Ben: After my call with Kat/Emerson I sent over my notes. Emerson said “Good summary!” (implying Kat/Emerson largely agreed with the facts of the article) | - We were horrified to see that Ben cut off the second part of Emerson’s statement—“Some points still require clarification” and “You don’t want to post false things that if you’d waited a bit, you’d know not to include. This draft is filled with literally dozens of 100% libelous and false claims—and, critically, claims that we can prove are 100% false.” - This was especially damaging because many people thought the story was complete, instead of just being one side. People were so angry at us for things “we admitted to” (we didn’t!) |
| Ben: these are consistent patterns of behavior, so you should avoid Nonlinear because of these patterns | - Ben was so committed to his hypothesis, he didn’t speak to any of the people who worked for us in the 1.5 years since Alice/Chloe left to see if any of these patterns were actual patterns. - 100% of them left overall positive reviews. |
| Ben: Alice was the only person to go through their incubator program | - False. Ben’s “fact-checking” appears to mostly have consisted of asking Alice/Chloe’s friends, he thought Alice was the only person we incubated. Actually, there were 6 others, 100% of whom reported a positive experience. He talked to 0 of them. - Alice & Chloe knew this was false and did not correct it. |
Ben: Emerson’s previous company had a bad culture | - Actually, people liked working for Emerson. His anonymous Glassdoor ratings were similar to the 57th best place to work. - However, not only did he not apologize, despite the facts changing massively, he kept the vibe/conclusion the same. And still, after all this, he included false information! - Side note: the EA Forum, months later, banned someone for sockpuppeting the original unsubstantiated gossip EA Forum thread (based on Alice/Chloe’s falsehoods) - the sockpuppets created even more false consensus. |
| Acknowledging the elephant in the room: a number of reviewers advised us to at least point to the common hypothesis that Ben white-knighted for Alice too hard, given both their personalities and Alice’s background. We’ll leave the pointer, but don’t think it’s hugely appropriate to discuss further. |
Longer summary table
Below you’ll find another longer summary. It’s not comprehensive—the full appendix correcting all the falsehoods (200+ pages) is here. We cover many things in the full appendix that aren’t linked to here.
It’s messy, sorry. We were originally going to literally go sentence by sentence to point out all the inaccuracies, then that got too complicated. There were just too many because Ben didn’t wait to see our evidence. Many claims are partially rebutted in different places and it’s hard to see the big picture.
Ben Gish galloped us by just uncritically sharing every negative thing he heard without fact-checking. Gish galloping means “overwhelming your opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place, which is known as Brandolini’s law.
Read on to consider which hypothesis seems more plausible:
2 EAs are Secretly Evil Hypothesis: 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees felt bad because while Kat/Emerson seem like kind, uplifting charity workers publicly, behind closed doors they are ill-intentioned ne’er do wells. (Ben said we’re “predators” who “chew up and spit out” the bright-eyed youth of the community—witch hunter language.)
2 EAs are Mentally Unwell Hypothesis: They felt bad because, sadly, they had long-term mental health issues, which continued for the 4-5 months they worked for us.
| Claim | What actually happened |
| “Chloe was only paid $1k/month, and otherwise had many basic things compensated i.e. rent, groceries, travel” Ben describes this as—“next to nothing” and “tiny pay” (they kept implying they were only paid $1,000, so many people walked away with that impression) | - We offered a compensation package: all-expenses-paid (jetsetting around the Caribbean) plus a $1,000 a month stipend on top, working for a charity, as a recent college grad. - We estimated this would be around $70,000, but there was never a plan to make it “add up”. It was simple: “We pay for everything—you live the same lifestyle as us.” - This is “next to nothing”? What happened to EA?
- She was living what for many is a dream life. She was so financially comfortable she didn’t even have to think about money - She somehow turns this into blaming Emerson for her forgetting about her own savings. We don’t think she had to spend a penny of her stipend and 100% of it went into her savings. |
| Alice: I was paid next to nothing! | - Alice was in the top 1-0.1% of income globally—working for a charity! - yet she was paid “next to nothing”. - She was allowed to choose how much she got paid and she chose $72,000, annualized. She also had a separate business making, according to her, around $36,000 a year. That adds up to $108,000 annualized income. - Even before she got the pay raise just 3 months into her job, her comp was $12k stipend, room, board, travel, and medical adding up to around $73k total per year, plus $36k per year from her business. That’s $109k total, living virtually the same lifestyle as us. - This was a huge increase in pay for her—her previous jobs were ~minimum wage. |
| Alice: They asked me to help around the house even when I was sick. This is abuse! | She neglected to mention that
|
| Chloe’s first story: I was packing and Kat/Emerson just sat there on their laptops, working on AI safety instead of helping | This was her job. She was explicitly hired to do “life ops” so that Kat and Emerson could spend more time on AI safety. She knew this before she took the job and we have interview transcripts proving it. |
| Chloe’s second story: Emerson snapped at me | Emerson shouldn’t have done that. But also, Chloe snapped at Emerson sometimes too. It was a really stressful travel day for everybody. This was not an ongoing pattern and the only time we recall this happening. Kat checked in the next day and Chloe said she actually loved the chaos of traveling and it was just that she’d had a bad sleep the night before. |
| Chloe’s third story: Kat threw out all of my hard work right in front of me, showing that my work hours are worth so little | - Chloe got the wrong product and Kat just hadn’t told her till then because she was trying to protect her feelings since she’d worked so hard on it. Chloe knew this and still published this story. - Chloe got so much appreciation from Kat that Chloe actually asked her to do it less. |
| Chloe: I had unclear work boundaries and was pressured into working on a weekend (implies this was a regular occurrence) | “My boss offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean island St. Barths, which required one hour of work to arrange the boat and ATV rentals (for me to enjoy too). But it was one hour on a weekend, so I complained, and it never happened again.” |
| Chloe: I was put into complex situations and told I could do it | - This is not actually bad - We said in the job ad that you would be a good fit if “It’s hard to phase you. You like the challenge of tackling complex problems instead of feeling stressed out about them”— - This is some of the best public evidence of her being mentally unwell. These are not overwhelming tasks for most people. |
| Alice: they told me not to talk to locals! | Strange accusation. She asked “How can I increase my impact?” and we said, “you might try spending less time with random bartenders and more time with all the high-level EAs Kat introduced you to”. She continued to talk to locals all the time she was with us, which was totally fine by us. |
| Alice: the Productivity Fund ($240,000) was mine | - We have in writing in multiple places that Alice was the project manager of the Productivity Fund, a project under Nonlinear. - We never did anything to make her think it was hers. She was still attending Nonlinear weekly meetings. We were still reimbursing her for expenses. We never sent her the money. We never sent her a grant agreement. We told her to not make a separate bank account for the money (she did anyway in secret). We threw a party and toasted her promotion (not grant or new charity) in front of many people. We told her if she wanted to do something outside of the scope of the project, she’d have to get our permission. Chloe, our operations manager, was handling all of her ops. - The only thing she has to show it was “hers” is her word, where she remembers a conversation very differently than Emerson or Kat. - This is one of at least 4 separate times we know of where she’s said she was offered money/employment when she wasn’t. |
| Alice/Chloe complain about “unclear boundaries” as if we kept them unclear as part of a nefarious plot. | If they wanted clear boundaries, they should have applied to Bureacracy Inc, not a tiny nomadic startup with a tiny budget. Our job ad said to expect “flexibility, informality” and “startup culture”. |
| Chloe: A tiny startup with a tiny budget did very little accounting! | - Chloe was literally hired to do accounting - We did all of the accounting that we are legally and practically required to do, to the best of our knowledge |
Chloe: I gained no professional advancement from my 5 months there! | A strange accusation given that: |
| Alice: I couldn’t work for months afterward, I was so upset. | - We have multiple text messages of her telling us that she’d been working that entire time. She told us she hadn’t even taken weekends off. - Perhaps relevant: she was trying to get more money from us by saying she’d continued working. But when talking to Ben, she’d get money saying that she hadn’t worked. - Either way, she lied to Ben or she lied to us. |
| Alice/Chloe: Emerson told us stories of him being a shark | - Emerson shared stories about how he almost died in shark attacks to help Alice/Chloe defend themselves against shark attacks. They then painted Emerson as a shark. - A different Nonlinear team member heard the same stories, but spent weeks taking notes and was grateful! |
| Alice: I got constant compliments from the founders that ended up seeming fake. | Strange accusation. Alice was in a dark place and interpreted compliments as evidence that Kat/Emerson were secretly evil. |
| Alice: Emerson said, “how much value are you able to extract from others in a short amount of time?”—he openly advocates exploiting people! | He said “to have productive conversations, ask good questions to maximize learning/value per second” |
| Chloe: I was pressured into learning to drive | - Chloe was an enthusiastic consenting adult for the independence it gave her (“I was excited to learn how to drive”) - She regularly drove on her own for fun - She was told many times that she didn’t have to drive if she didn’t want to. We’d just pay for Ubers for her. She always insisted she did. - We spent 1 hour a day for 2 months patiently teaching her in parking lots. She had tons of supervised practice. - Ben said she risked “substantial risk of jail time in a foreign country” (sounds terrifying). False, it was just a $50 fine, the same amount you’d be fined for jaywalking (we told him this. The article is filled with falsehoods he refused to correct). - She once decided to stop driving. She didn’t even tell Kat/Em because it was so not a big deal. She just told Drew, and he was like “cool”. She started driving around a week later because she missed driving. Drew didn’t talk to her about it and Em/Kat didn’t even know so there was no pressure to start again. |
| Ben: Alice/Chloe are “finally” speaking out. They couldn’t speak out for fear of retaliation. and didn’t want anyone to know until. | - False. Alice/Chloe spent the last 1.5 years telling many people in EA, which seriously damaged Nonlinear’s reputation. - Chloe and Alice have been attacking us that whole time—without us retaliating against them! They report being worried about us hiring stalkers, doing spurious lawsuits, or otherwise legally dubious actions. None of those things happened. |
| Ben: 12 years ago in a dispute Emerson used “intimidation tactics” | - Someone tried to steal Emerson’s company, throwing his 25 employees on the street, with a legal loophole. Emerson said he would countersue and actually share his side (he hadn’t). Ben frames this as Emerson is the evil attacker, not the defender. Everything Emerson does is “intimidation” tactics, it doesn’t matter if he’s the one getting knifed in the chest. - This is another instance of the double-standard: somebody is allowed to sue Emerson & share their side, but if Emerson does the same, Ben frames it as unethical and “retaliatory”. |
| Ben: “I think standard update rules suggest not that you ignore the information, but you think about how bad you expect the information would be if I selected for the worst, credible info I could share” | - The most common criticisms ex-employees have of their orgs is low pay, feeling not valued enough by management, and a “toxic” work culture. - Most of Ben’s article is totally run-of-the-mill criticisms (but presented as very serious) - Base rate: ~50% of people feel undervalued at work. - Base rate: 71% of EAs claim to have a mental illness. - The probability that 2 (of 21) people who work for any EA org felt this way is extremely high |
| “But you threatened to sue Lightcone if they didn’t give you a week to gather your evidence” | - We did that because we had tried everything else, yet Ben kept, unbelievably, refusing to even look at our evidence. What were we supposed to do? He was about to publish reputation-destroying things he would know were false if he just waited to see the evidence. - Despite the fact that he published numerous things he knew were false (e.g. verbal agreement, accounting, vegan food, legal medicine, & many more), we decided not to sue because we think that would increase p(doom). |
| What are we doing differently in the future? | - We’ve spent ages analyzing this and trying to figure out what happened and what we can do differently. - We asked Alice and Chloe multiple times to share their side and do some conflict resolution and they refused - The accusations are almost entirely false, misleading, or catastrophizing normal things, so we cannot improve on that front. Nevertheless, some things we are doing differently are: - Not living with employees & all employees being remote. - Not using that compensation structure again. - Hiring assistants who’ve already been assistants, so they know they like it. |
| Alice/Chloe: Nonlinear, a charity startup, had an entrepreneurial and creative problem-solving culture. However, this is actually a bad thing, because sometimes that leads to people feeling pressured and overwhelmed | - Accurate. We did have a culture of “being entrepreneurial and creative in problem-solving”. The fact that they applied to work at a startup and considered this to be bad is strange. Others have said this is the best part about being around us, our “contagious mindset around problem-solving” -The things they felt “pressured” into are disproven elsewhere. Evidence/read more, evidence #2, evidence #3, evidence #4, evidence #5 |
| “But Alice seems so open and nice” | Why does Alice get away with telling falsehoods so much? - It takes months to catch her in enough falsehoods to see the pattern. In the meantime, she seems so joyful. - She bounces from jobs/communities quickly. Her longest job is 13 months, so by the time you start catching on, she’s already gone. - She (well, part of her) believes what she says and she’s genuinely kind, so she’s convincing. - She builds trust by quickly telling you things that seem very personal—“wow, she must really like and trust me to be telling me all this!”—about how other people have oppressed her, which triggers protective instincts. |
To many EAs, this would have been a dream job
Alice/Chloe/Ben painted a picture of Alice/Chloe having terrible jobs and they barely survived those few months they were with us. Now, I do not deny that Alice and Chloe suffered, and I deeply wished they hadn’t. But a lot of people would have loved these jobs. Look at the job ad—“you get paid to see the world and live in endless summer, since we only stay in places where it’s warm and sunny.”
Clearly aspects of the job didn’t work for Alice (wanted 100% control and nothing less) and Chloe (found being an assistant to be beneath her). However, I’d like to describe the job to the people who would have liked it.
Chloe beat out 75 other “overqualified” (which she described herself as being) EAs who applied for Chloe’s job—getting an EA job is hard.
Imagine a job where you’re always in beautiful, sunny, exotic places. Part of the year is spent in various EA Hubs: London, Oxford, Berkeley, San Francisco. Part of the year you explore the world: Venice, the Caribbean, Rome, Paris, the French Riviera, Bali, Costa Rica.
You’re surrounded by a mix of uplifting, ambitious entrepreneurs and a steady influx of top people in the AI safety space. In the morning, you go for a swim with one of your heroes in the field. In the evening, a campfire on a tropical beach. Jungle hiking. Adventure. Trying new foods. Surfing. Sing-a-longs. Roadtrips. Mountain biking. Yachting. Ziplining. Hot tub karaoke parties. All with top people in your field.
Your group has a really optimistic and warm vibe. There’s this sense in the group that anything is possible if you are just creative, brave, and never give up. It feels really empowering and inspiring.
Chloe’s job was a lot of operations people’s dream job. She got to set up everything from scratch, instead of having to work with existing sub-optimal systems. She was working on big, challenging operations puzzles that were far above the usual entry-level admin stuff that you’d get as a person who just graduated from uni.
About 10% of the time was doing laundry, groceries, packing, and cooking—and she has to do many of those things for herself anyways! At least this is on paid time, feels high impact, and means she’s not sitting in front of the computer all day. Also, everybody starts somewhere, and being in charge of setting up all of the operations for an org is a pretty great place to start, even if it does also include doing some pretty simple tasks. As a job straight out of university, this is a pretty plush job. And getting a job in EA is hard.
And she gets two hours a day of professional development. Paid! She spends the time learning things like management, lean methodology, measuring impact, etc. She gets to choose basically whatever it is she wants to learn. Getting paid to read whatever you want for 2 hours a day would be a dream for many EAs.
Even more people would have loved Alice’s job, especially entrepreneurial types. When Alice arrived, just as a friend, she was encouraged to read a book a day on entrepreneurship, to quickly skill up. She started working with us building a product that seemed likely to be very high impact. Especially since it was a project that was meant to help do decentralized, automated prioritization research, so she’d be able to use the product herself to find the idea she wanted to start.
She had tons of freedom on strategy and she was very quickly given more responsibility. Within a few weeks of starting, she was managing an intern. She received hours of mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs every single day. She was quickly introduced to a huge percentage of all the major players in the field, to help her design the product better.
Then, within just a few months of starting, she was given nearly complete control of $240,000 - so much control that she could also choose how much she got paid! Imagine being quickly given so much financial and strategic freedom. As long as it falls within the scope of the department, you have control over nearly a quarter million dollars. Whatever you want to pay yourself out of that budget, you can. If you do a good job, that $240,000 could rapidly expand to $2-3 million a year.
Especially given that there’s a chance in half a year or so that you could spin out and be an entirely separate organization. Or hand it off to somebody else after gaining invaluable experience launching a really big project, all the while with the guidance and guardrails of an experienced entrepreneur.
Sure, it’s an unorthodox payment arrangement. But, man, you are certainly living a glamorous lifestyle. Always in sunny, exotic, places. Living in beautiful homes. Going on adventures in bioluminescent bays, yachting, kayaking, and snorkeling in tropical reefs. And you’re living that glam life while working for a charity. Not bad.
And, I mean, you had been considering living at the EA Hotel, where you’d be living in much less nice conditions, wouldn’t see the sun for half the year, and wouldn’t get nearly the exposure to experienced entrepreneurs and top people in the field. Maybe you’d get a stipend of max $150 a month.
Anyways, for you, it’s not about the money. You’re an aspiring charity entrepreneur, for goodness sake! That’s not a career you go into for the money. It’s about the impact and the life you’re living. And you want a job where you’re seeing the world and doing your best to save it.
Sure, maybe when you’re older, you’ll get a job that pays more and stays in one place so you can put down more roots, but right now you’re young. You want to explore. You’re living the dream and seeing the world.
You could maybe get a job with higher pay, though your previous jobs were ~minimum wage, and Nonlinear is paying you a lot more than that, so maybe not. But none would involve the travel. None would involve the adventure.
You want to go snorkeling in tropical reefs with EA leaders but also work in Oxford and have deep conversations with your favorite EA researchers at lunch. You want to pet the cats in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul while you’re also building something really high impact. You want to be investing so much into your personal growth that you get to spend a quarter of your time just learning. You want adventure and impact.
Again—this doesn’t mean everybody would like the job. However, to paint this job as “inhumane” or as if Alice was “a fully dependent and subservient house pet”—is a dark, paranoid view of the warm, positive, uplifting environment we created.
Alice was constantly given more and more responsibility. She was given more freedom than almost any EA job and then told everybody she was kept in metaphorical shackles. She made Ben (and everybody else in the community she spent the last year telling) think that she was essentially a slave, kept under the oppressive hold of a controlling and isolating group of abusers.
[Emerson’s note: Kat paid herself $12,000 a year—half of minimum wage—for most of her charity career because she took the drowning child argument seriously. Not $1,000 a month on top of all-expenses-paid travel, adventures, villas, and restaurants - $1k/month total. In Canada’s most expensive city. Sharing a single always-damp towel with her partner. Kat doesn’t usually bring this up because she doesn’t want to make people feel bad who won’t or can’t do the same, but I think it’s important information about her character. Say what you will about her, but she deeply cares about altruism.]
But through some combination of mental illness, daily LSD use, and a society that uncritically rewards anyone claiming to be a victim, she turned financial freedom into financial servitude. She turned gratitude into manipulation.
Yes, Alice suffered. Chloe did too. Nobody is doubting that. The question is what caused the suffering. Because for most people, having to work for an hour on a weekend, then clearing it up with your boss and it never happening again isn’t a cause for months of depression.
For most people, having a separate business bringing in $3,000 a month and being able to choose your own pay is financial freedom, not servitude.
For most people who applied to these jobs, they would be considered great jobs. And if they found out they didn’t like it, they’d just quit and do something else. They wouldn’t demand a public lynching.
Sometimes people are depressed and see everything as bad and hostile. Sometimes people are sleep deprived, taking LSD every day, in chronic pain, and start seeing plots everywhere. Sometimes people have been struggling with mental health issues for their entire life.
This was not an objectively bad job that caused them psychological harm. It was a woman who kept forgetting she was an assistant and feeling outraged when asked to do her job. She felt she was overqualified and turned that resentment on her employers. It was a woman who’s struggled with severe mental illness for over 90% of her life and continued to do so while she was with us.
Sharing Information on Ben Pace
Since the article was published, an alarming number of people in the community have come forward to report worrying experiences with Ben Pace, and report feeling frightened about speaking out because of what Ben might do to them.
As just one example, one woman had a deeply traumatic experience with Ben but is afraid to say anything, because he runs LessWrong and is surrounded by so many powerful people in the community who would defend him. She’s worried if she comes forward that he’ll use his power to hurt her career, both directly by attacking her again, or indirectly, by making sure none of her posts get onto the front page. (We’ve heard multiple reports of people having a conflict with one of the Lightcone team and then suddenly, their posts just never seem to be on the front page anymore. We don’t know if this is true.)
She asked me to not share it with Ben because she’s frightened of him, but she said it was finally time to be strong and speak up now, as long as she was fully anonymized. She couldn’t live with herself if she allowed another person to be hurt by Ben the way Ben hurt her. I ask you to please respect her privacy and if you know her, not bring this up unless she does.
She’s been struggling with mental health issues since he attacked her, unable to sleep or eat. She still, after all this time, just randomly breaks down crying on sidewalks. She even considered leaving effective altruism. She no longer feels safe at Lightcone events and no longer goes to them, despite missing the many good people in the rationalist community. It’s shaken her trust in the community and talking about it still makes her visibly upset.
She told me to not talk to Ben about it, because he takes absolutely no responsibility for the harm he’s done, and has explicitly told her so. And he shows a friendly face to people, which is how he gets away with it, all the while professing simply an interest in truth. But he’ll be smiling at you and friendly, all the while having the intention to stab you in the back. One source reported that “Ben is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
People who knew what happened to this woman confirmed that what Ben had done to her was “horrifying” and “they couldn’t believe he would do that to a person”. They were shocked at his lack of concern for her suffering and confirmed that he would probably really hurt her career if she came forward with her information.
She knows of at least one other person who’s had really worrying experiences with him. Where deep and preventable harm was happening and he just didn’t seem to care. He actually blamed the person who was being hurt! She hasn’t brought it up with the person much because she doesn’t want to stir up old hurts. She can tell it still hurts them, but they’ve managed to move on and remember the things they really care about.
She had heard about what had happened to this person before, but she thought it was probably just a one-off thing and it wouldn’t happen to her. She wishes she had paid more attention so she could have avoided her own traumatic experience. She’s still suffering. She’s still lying awake each night, replaying, over and over, the nightmare of what Ben did to her.
Another person reports “I wish I had never met Ben. He hurt me more than I even thought was possible. I highly recommend not being friends with him and if you see him at a party, I would just subtly avoid him. I hope he gets better and stops doing to others what he did to me, but as far as I’ve heard, he’s still completely in denial about the harm he’s caused and has no intention of changing.”
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This information above is true to the best of my knowledge. What other worrying things might I find if I spent months investigating like Ben did?
However, this is completely unfair to Ben. It’s written in the style of a hit piece. And I believe you should not update much on Ben’s character from this.
Like Ben did to us, I did basically no fact-checking.
Like Ben did to us, I assumed ill-intent.
Like Ben did to us, I unfairly framed everything using emotional language to make Ben seem maximally nefarious.
Like Ben did to us, I uncritically shared anonymous accusations. Since they’re anonymous, Ben can’t even properly defend himself, which is why courts don’t accept anonymous hearsay.
Ask legal history scholars what happens when courts allow anonymous hearsay: kangaroo courts and mob justice.
Like Ben did to us, I didn’t give him a proper chance to respond to these accusations before publishing them.
I mentioned none of his many very good qualities.
I interviewed none of the people who like Ben, and exclusively focused on the testimonies of a small number of people who don’t like him.
I even left out the good things these people said about Ben, like he did to us. It reads very differently when it’s not just negative.
I used culture-war optimized language (victim/oppressor) to turn people’s brains off.
I used wording that was technically accurate but implied “a lot of people are saying”, like Ben did to us.
I’m not yet worried about these “patterns” about Ben because I don’t know if they are patterns. I haven’t heard his side. And I refuse to pass judgment on someone without hearing their side.
Further, through using emotional and one-sided language, I made it sound like it was incredibly obvious that what Ben did was awful and you’d be a monster to disagree. However, given what I know about these allegations, I think 35-75% of EAs would think that they’re not nearly as bad as the witnesses made them out to be. The other 35-75% would think it was clearly and deeply unethical. It would depend on each allegation and how it was presented.
It would be a matter of debate, not a matter of public lynching.
At least, it would be if we presented it in an even-handed manner, investigating both sides, looking for disconfirming evidence, and not presuming guilt until proven innocent.
Also, in case you’re worried about these people, they all say they’re OK. All of the situations are either being taken care of or have ended and they’re no longer suffering and do not want to pursue further actions to prevent Ben from doing it to other people.
I could do this for anybody. Just to give one example: almost everybody has had “bad breakups” and if you only speak to “disgruntled exes” you will get a warped, distorted view of reality.
I don’t think Ben should even have to respond to these. It would also be a very expensive use of time, since in his follow-up post, he said he’s now available for hire as an investigative journalist for $800,000 a year.
At that hourly rate, he spent perhaps ~$130,000 of Lightcone donors’ money on this. But it’s more than that. When you factor in our time, plus hundreds/thousands of comments across all the posts, it’s plausible Ben’s negligence cost EA millions of dollars of lost productivity. If his accusations were true, that could have potentially been a worthwhile use of time—it’s just that they aren’t, and so that productivity is actually destroyed. And crucially, it was very easy for him to have not wasted everybody’s time—he just had to be willing to look at our evidence.
Even if it was just $1 million, that wipes out the yearly contribution of 200 hardworking earn-to-givers who sacrificed, scrimped and saved to donate $5,000 this year.
I am reminded of this comment from the EA Forum: “digging through the threads of previous online engagements of someone to find some dirt to hopefully hurt them and their associated organizations and acquaintances is personally disgusting to me, and I really hope that we don’t engage in similar sort of tactics…though I don’t think it’s a really worry because the general level of decency from EAs at least seems to be higher than the ever lowering bar journalists set.”
As a community, if we normalize this, we will tear ourselves apart and drown in a tidal wave of fear and suspicion.
This is a universal weapon that can be used on anybody. What if somebody exclusively only talked to the people who didn’t like you? What if they framed it in the maximally emotional and culture-war way? Have you ever accidentally made people uncomfortable? Have you ever made a social gaff? Does the idea of somebody exclusively looking for and publishing negative things about you make you feel uneasy? Terrified?
I actually played this game with some of my friends to see how easy it was. I tried to say only true things but in a way that made them look like villains. It was terrifyingly easy. Even for one of my oldest friends, who is one of the more universally-liked EAs, I could make him sound like a terrifying creep.
I could do this for any EA org. I know of so many conflicts in EA that if somebody pulled a Ben Pace on, it would explode in a similar fashion.
But that’s not because EA orgs are filled with abuse. It’s because looking exclusively for negative information is clearly bad epistemics and bad ethics (and so is not something I would do). It will consistently be biased and less likely to come to the truth than when you look for good and bad information and try to look for disconfirming evidence.
And it will consistently lead to immense suffering. Knowing that somebody in the community is deliberately looking for only negative things about you, then publishing it to your entire community? It’s a suffering I wouldn’t wish on anybody.
EA’s high trust culture, part of what makes it great, is crumbling, and “sharing only negative information about X person/charity” posts will destroy it.
----
In the preceding pages and our extensive appendix we presented evidence supporting an alternative hypothesis:
2 EAs are Secretly Evil Hypothesis: 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees felt bad because while Kat/Emerson seem like kind, uplifting charity workers, behind closed doors they are ill-intentioned ne’er do wells.
2 EAs are Mentally Unwell Hypothesis: They felt bad because, sadly, they had long-term mental health issues, which continued for the 4-5 months they worked for us.
Below we share concluding thoughts.
So how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?
Imagine that you are a sophomore in college. It’s midwinter, and you’ve been feeling blue and anxious. You sit down with your new therapist and tell him how you’ve been feeling lately.
He responds, “Oh, wow. People feel very anxious when they’re in great danger. Do you feel very anxious sometimes?”
This realization that experiencing anxiety means you are in great danger is making you very anxious right now. You say yes. The therapist answers, “Oh, no! Then you must be in very great danger.”
You sit in silence for a moment, confused. In your past experience, therapists have helped you question your fears, not amplify them.
The therapist adds, “Have you experienced anything really nasty or difficult in your life? Because I should also warn you that experiencing trauma makes you kind of broken, and you may be that way for the rest of your life.”
He briefly looks up from his notepad. “Now, since we know you are in grave danger, let’s discuss how you can hide.
Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind
EA is becoming this therapist.
EA since FTX has trauma. We’re infected by a cancer of distrust, suspicion, and paranoia. Frequent witch burnings. Seeing ill-intent everywhere. Forbidden questions (in EA!) Forbidden thoughts (in EA!)
We’re attacking each other instead of attacking the world’s problems.
Anonymous accounts everywhere because it’s not safe anymore, too easy to get cancelled.
People afraid to come to the defense of the accused witch lest they be accused (as Scott Alexander said).
High impact people and donors quietly leaving, turned off by the insularity and drama.
Well, did a bunch of predators join overnight or is it more that we have trauma?
If you were new to EA and you looked at the top posts of all time and saw it was anonymous gossip from 2 (of 21) people who worked for a tiny charity for a few months, what would you think this community values? What is its revealed preference?
Would that community seem healthy to you? If you weren’t already part of this community, would that make you want to join?
People spent hours debating whether a person in a villa in a tropical paradise got a vegan burger delivered fast enough—would you think this community cared about scope sensitivity and saving the world (like we normally do)?
“First they came for one EA leader, and I did not speak out --
because I just wanted to focus on making AI go well.
Then they came for another, and I did not speak out --
because surely these are just the aftershocks of FTX, it will blow over.
Then they came for another, and I still did not speak out --
because I was afraid for my reputation if they came after me.
Then they came for me—and I have no reputation to protect anymore.”
So, what do we do? We have a choice to make:
Are we fragile—continuing to descend into a spiral of PTSD madness with regular lynchings?
Are we resilient—continuing to do good despite the trauma?
Or are we antifragile—can we experience post-traumatic growth and become stronger?
Can this be the last EA leader lynching, and the beginning of the EA community becoming stronger from what we’ve learned post-FTX? If we want to do the most good, we must be antifragile.
Alice, Chloe, or Ben mean well and are trying to do good, so we will not demand apologies from them. We are all on the same team. We wish them the best, we hope they’re happy, and we hope they learn from this.
As Tim Urban of Wait But Why said: “In a liberal democracy, the hard cudgel of physical violence isn’t allowed. You can’t burn villains at the stake. But you can burn their reputation and livelihood at the stake. This is the soft cudgel of social consequences. It only works if everyone decides to let it work. If enough people stand up for the target and push back against the smear campaign, the soft cudgel loses its impact.”
Conclusion: a story with no villains
I wish I could think that Alice, Ben, and Chloe were villains.
They hurt me so much, I couldn’t sleep. I cried more than any other time in my life.
My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t type responses to comments, and people attacked me for this, saying my not responding immediately was evidence I was a witch.
Alice, Ben, and Chloe show absolutely no remorse and I don’t predict they’re going to stop. They’re in too deep now. They can’t change their minds.
Although I certainly hope they do. If they updated I think the community would applaud them, because that takes epistemic courage similar to Geoffrey Hinton updating on AI.
And yet, despite all the harm they’ve done to me and the community, I can see their good intentions clear as day. So why are they hurting us if they have such good intentions?
Most harm done by good people is either accidental or because they think they’re fighting the bad guys. And they’ve full-on demonized us.
Demonizing somebody is the best way for good people to hurt other good people. Hence them calling us “predators”, going after the “bright-eyed” youth of the community, “chewing them up and spitting them out”. This is the language of a witch hunter, not a truthseeking rationalist.
Chloe explicitly says she can’t empathize with us at all. Reflect on this.
I don’t think they’re villains. But they think we are. And you’re allowed to do all sorts of things to people if they’re bad.
And that’s just what happened. Alice/Chloe had been telling everyone, Ben heard about it, and… monsters don’t deserve fair trials! They’ll just use their time to manipulate the system. And the two young women were afraid of retaliation!
Sure, they’d been telling lots of people in the community their false narratives for over a year and none of their strange fears of us “hiring stalkers” or “calling their families” had happened. But that doesn’t matter. You don’t stop while saving a community to check and see if there’s actually a witch. He’s the hero saving the collective from the nefarious internal traitors who must be purged.
Chloe isn’t a villain. She’s a woman who didn’t like her entry level job and wanted more money. She was a fresh graduate who felt entitled to something better. She struggled with mental health issues and blamed her feelings of worthlessness and overwhelm on Emerson and I. She took totally normal things and catastrophized them. Her story probably wouldn’t have been a scandal if it weren’t for our community’s PTSD around FTX.
Alice isn’t a villain. She’s an incredible human being who has struggled with mental health issues her entire life, and one of the symptoms is delusions of persecution—people trying to control her. This is why we’re #27 and #28 on her list of 28 people she’s accused of abuse (that we know of).
Imagine being able to choose how much you got paid and having a whole separate income stream (unrelated to your job) and yet feeling financially controlled? Imagine seeing ill-intentions everywhere?
That sounds horrible. I genuinely hope she gets the help she needs.
And finally, we’re not villains either. We paid our team what we said we’d pay them. We set it up so that they socialized with more people than the average person. We valued their time so much that we paid for Chloe to spend two hours a day doing professional development. I valued Chloe’s time so much that she asked me to stop sharing my gratitude as much. When Alice asked for a raise 3 months into her job, we let her choose her pay. We continue to have good experiences with the vast majority of people we work with.
We were not faultless. Emerson should not have snapped on that travel day and he should have apologized immediately. I should have scheduled a weekly meeting right after the conference instead of not properly talking to Alice about work stuff for three weeks, letting the misunderstanding last for so long.
But overall, it wasn’t that the job was bad or they were mistreated. They felt oppressed for some other reason. Maybe it was that Chloe hated being an assistant and found normal assistant work demeaning. Maybe it was because Alice was microdosing LSD nearly every day, sleeping just a few hours a night, and has a lifelong pattern of seeing persecution everywhere. Maybe it’s just because they’ve both struggled to be happy most of their lives and continued to do so for the 4-5 months they were with us. We’ll leave it to them and their loved ones to figure it out.
This combined poorly with our community being traumatized by FTX, being hyper-vigilant for another potential SBF. It also combined with poor epistemics because of the (unfounded) concern about retaliation. And it certainly didn’t help that Ben had already committed to paying them $10,000 before seeing our evidence.
This was a tragedy of errors. It was a bunch of well-intentioned and fallible humans trying to do good in the world. A recipe for trouble, really.
And there will be other conflicts in EA. I know of countless EA conflicts that if somebody pulled a Ben Pace, only looking for negative information attacking one side, would explode in a similarly spectacular fashion.
This doesn’t mean EA is rife with abuse, it just means that EA is rife with humans
Humans with strong moral emotions and poor social skills on average. We should expect a lot of conflict.
We need to find a better way to deal with this. Our community has been turning on itself with increasing ferocity, and we need to find a better way to recover from FTX.
Let’s do what EA does best: optimize dispassionately, embody scout mindset, and interpret people charitably.
Remember:
Almost nobody is evil.
Almost everything is broken.
Almost everything is fixable.
Let’s fix this.
If you are disturbed by what happened here, here are some ways you can help
How do we prevent the methodology of exclusively seeking and publishing negative information, without fact checking, from becoming an acceptable norm? This methodology will predictably lead to incorrect conclusions because wild accusations will always be more viral than boring bank receipts and work contracts. Because looking for disconfirming evidence is vital for truth-seeking and scout mindset.
Currently, the original post is one of the most upvoted posts of all time on EA Forum and LessWrong, so now one of the first things people see about EA is a gossip column whose claims have been debunked. This reflects poorly on our ethics, epistemics, and priorities.
Consider if your vote on this post, the original post (EA Forum, LessWrong), and Ben’s victory lap post (EA Forum, LessWrong), reflect your beliefs.
Contribute to the discourse in the comments. It can be scary to say what you believe in these sorts of threads, but that’s also why it’s especially impactful to do so.
Given what they have done, a number of people expressed to us that they think Alice/Chloe are a danger to the health of the community and should not be anonymized. We will leave that to the community to decide.
Publicly or privately say that you would respect Ben massively if he updated on this new information. Right now, he paid $10,000 and received massive karma, so the psychological pressure for him to dig in and never change his mind is immense. However, if Ben pulled a Geoffrey Hinton and was able to update based on new information despite massive psychological pressure against that, that would be an act of impressive epistemic virtue. As a community, we want to make it so that people are rewarded for doing the right but hard thing, and this is one of those times.
Acknowledgments
A big thank you to Spencer Greenberg, Neel Nanda, Nuño Sempere, Geoffrey Miller, Vlad Firoiu, Manuel Allgaier, Luca De Leo, Matt Berkowitz, River Bellamy, and others for providing insightful feedback (though they do not necessarily agree with/endorse anything in this post).
- Sharing Information About Nonlinear by (7 Sep 2023 6:51 UTC; 432 points)
- Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by (19 Dec 2023 12:00 UTC; 346 points)
- Practically A Book Review: Appendix to “Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims” by (3 Jan 2024 23:16 UTC; 314 points)
- Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by (LessWrong; 19 Dec 2023 12:00 UTC; 175 points)
- 's comment on Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims by (14 Dec 2023 16:59 UTC; 88 points)
- 's comment on Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims by (13 Dec 2023 22:52 UTC; 49 points)
- 's comment on Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by (19 Dec 2023 16:58 UTC; 44 points)
- 's comment on Sharing Information About Nonlinear by (12 Dec 2023 18:39 UTC; 35 points)
- 's comment on Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims by (LessWrong; 17 Dec 2023 2:00 UTC; 15 points)
- 's comment on Open Thread: October—December 2023 by (20 Dec 2023 1:17 UTC; 4 points)
- 's comment on Open Thread: October—December 2023 by (20 Dec 2023 3:06 UTC; 4 points)
Hey folks, a reminder to please be thoughtful as you comment.
The previous Nonlinear thread received almost 500 comments; many of these were productive, but there were also some more heated exchanges. Following Forum norms—in a nutshell: be kind, stay on topic, be honest—is probably even more important than usual in charged situations like these.
Discussion here could end up warped towards aggression and confusion for a few reasons, even if commenters are generally well intentioned:
Some of the allegations this post responds to, and the new allegations in the post, are serious and upsetting. People who have gone through similar experiences may find engaging with this topic especially stressful.
Power dynamics and alleged mistreatment is rightly an emotionally loaded topic, and can be difficult to discuss objectively.
Differences in personal culture and experiences can lead to hard-to-articulate disagreements over acceptable versus unacceptable behaviour.
Regarding this paragraph from the post:
For the time being, please do not post personal information that would deanonymize Alice or Chloe. The moderation team is currently discussing how we might deal with this.
Also, don’t vote using multiple accounts, and don’t engage in vote brigading. We will be monitoring voting activity. We had to ban users for voting violations on the “Sharing Information About Nonlinear” post, and we would like to avoid issuing bans again.
Out of curiosity, if, after reviewing the available evidence, it appears that Alice and Chloe indeed fabricated a number of accusations against Nonlinear and exhibited a pattern of behavior of doing similar things elsewhere, would you reverse the request to keep them anonymous?
If what Nonlinear is saying is true, then Alice and Chloe have the potential to be very destructive to others in the community.
I would strongly caution against doing so. Even if it turns out to be seemingly justified in this instance (and I offer no view either way whether it is or not), I cannot think of a more effective way of discouraging victims/whistleblowers from coming forward (in other cases in this community) in future situations.
I think norms should strongly push against taking seriously any public accusation made anonymously in most circumstances. I feel like we have taken a norm that was appropriate to a very limited set of circumstances and tried to make a grand moral principle out of it, and it doesn’t work. Giving some anonymity to victims of sexual assault/harassment, in some circumstances, makes sense because it’s a uniquely embarrassing thing to be a victim of due to our cultural taboos around sex. Anonymity might be appropriate for people revealing problems at their current employer. Or it might be appropriate in industries that are generally more amoral, for conduct I would expect most employers to want to commit—e.g. I would want people to be able to anonymously disclose that a doctor is biased in favor of prescribing drugs pushed by the pharma sales rep who buys him the fanciest lunches, because I think most doctors want to supplement their incomes by taking pharma bribes. But if people have legitimate fears about retaliation by unrelated employers within the EA ecosystem then we have lost the plot so thoroughly that we should probably burn the whole thing down.
If someone is going to make false accusations, the rest of us have a right to know that about their character and avoid dealing with them. A person making false accusations is in fact a predator; describing themself as a victim doesn’t change that. Mental illness doesn’t change that. I have a family member with mental health issues similar to what Kat has described of Alice. In my experience this person is a genuinely bad person, despite many professions of good intent. This person leaves a trail of wreckage in their wake wherever they go. I don’t introduce friends or significant others to them without a warning. It would be unfair to my friends/SOs to do otherwise. If I were in a position to warn their prospective employers, I would consider myself duty-bound to warn them as well.
If the accusations are true I don’t see how it possibly hurts their reputation to have their identities attached to them, except that it makes similarly abusive employers less likely to hire them. Which I wouldn’t exactly consider a negative if I were in their shoes.
I don’t know who Chloe is in real life (nor Alice for that matter), but based on what I’ve read, it seems really really off to me to say that she has the potential to be destructive to others in the community. [Edit: I guess you’re not outright saying that, but I’m reading your comment as “if all that Nonlinear are saying about Chloe is true, then...,” and my take on that is that apart from their statements of the sort of “Chloe is so mentally unhealthy that she makes things up” (paraphrased), none of the concrete claims are obviously red flags to me. It’s certainly not great to say things in misleading ways, but it can happen in the heat of battle. Also, I want to flag that we haven’t heard Chloe’s reply to Nonlinear’s presentation, so I don’t consider it established that she’s less reliable than, e.g., the typical person, or Nonlinear themselves. On the compensation dispute for instance, I can see interpretations where it made sense for Chloe to feel misled – see also the fact check exercise someone has done.]
I think something has gone wrong for someone to even bring up this point. (I can see where you’re coming from regarding Alice, if claims about her are correct.) I feel like we wouldn’t be entertaining that possibility if Nonlinear hadn’t lumped Chloe and Alice together and written their post in a unfairly-narrativizing style.
Update: 1h after posting this comment (and long after the edit I made above), this post currently sits at −5 karma and 9 voters. Will be interesting to see where it ends up. I continue to think that something has gone wrong.
It’s a fair point that we should treat Alice and Chloe separately and that deanonymizing one need not imply that we should deanonymize the other.
Yeah.
Let’s assume Nonlinear are completely right about how they describe Chloe and Alice. I’d summarize their perspective as follows:
Alice-as-described-by-Nonlinear is likely to be destructive in other contexts as well because that is a strong pattern with her generally. :(
By contrast,
Chloe-as-described-by-Nonlinear is significantly less likely to be destructive in other contexts. While Nonlinear claim that Chloe is entitled, it’s still the case that her beef with them is largely around the tensions of living together (primes her to expect equal-ness and friendship) combined with her having to do tasks for them that make her feel like her time isn’t being valued. (Plus things around the vagueness of her role and her being repeatedly negatively surprised by things they expect of her or ways they treat her.)
Even if you take Nonlinear’s account at face value, it seems like you’d have a lot of uncertainty about the claim “Chloe is likely to be destructive in other contexts.”
Lastly, I again want to flag that I don’t consider it established that Chloe is entitled or unreliable. ((To some degree, the same caveats may also apply to claims about Alice, but I haven’t focused on that much because it seems like Nonlinear have a lot of anonymized evidence?, and it’s hard to argue with that..., plus even Ben acknowledged that Alice feels like less reliable a source than Chloe.)) I don’t think someone has to be entitled to feel devalued doing assistant-type tasks for others. It really depends on how you’re treated. It’s a bit suspicious that an assistant feeling unvalued is framed as “the assistant didn’t like being an assistant.” Sure, this could be true. But it could also be true that the assistant simply didn’t like aspects of how they were treated, and these things can be subtle and not easy to explain, but we all know that there are “horrible bosses” and “entitled bosses,” so it’s not like this is a complaint with a very low base rate. For these reasons, I’m still quite skeptical of many of the claims against Chloe, even though I’d say the Nonlinear document has updated me in their direction somewhat.
Edit to add: In case some people lack some of the relevant context, this is Chloe in her own words. I think she comes across well and in a purely vibes-based way, I trust her narration more than I trust the Nonlinear texts. (Not to mention that Nonlinear in their document simply cut out or selectively quoted/re-stated/paraphrased passages in her stories/accounts to make it seem less compelling. Like, a lot of her specific complaints there feel like they aren’t addressed well or at all by Nonlinear. Update: see my comment here for examples.)
I think if we deanonymise now, there’s a strong chance that the next whistleblower will remember what happened as “they got deanonymised” and will be reluctant to believe it won’t happen to them. It kind of doesn’t matter if there’s reasons why it’s OK in this case, as long as they require digging through this post and all the comments to understand them. People won’t do that, so they won’t feel safe from getting the same treatment.
Forgive me, but you are issuing a moderation notice about the comment section, when the main post involves the most egregious possible retaliation against a critic of an organisation, which you have personally backed up in the comments. I would have thought your position should be to criticise the egregious retaliation in harsh terms
The intention is not to endorse the quoted paragraph, but to ask people not to deanonymize Alice/Chloe. In line with our policies on revealing personal information on the Forum
Yeah I think we are talking past each other. Will posted in response to my comment that Kat’s post is not deranged. He has subsequently said we should avoid aggression or confusion. The context here is that kat retaliated to Ben’s critique by calling him abusive/predatory. This is clearly unacceptable conduct for the forum, but has not been noted been criticised. Why?
Brief update: I am still in the process of reading this. At this point I have given the post itself a once-over, and begun to read it more slowly (and looking through the appendices as they’re linked).
I think any and all primary sources that Kat provides are good (such as the page of records of transactions). I am also grateful that they have not deanonymized Alice and Chloe.
I plan to compare the things that this post says directly against specific claims in mine, and acknowledge anything where I was factually inaccurate. I also plan to do a pass where I figure out which claims of mine this post responds to and which it doesn’t, and I want to reflect on the new info that’s been entered into evidence and how it relates to the overall picture.
It probably goes without saying that I (and everyone reading) want to believe true things and not false things about this situation. If I made inaccurate statements I would like to know that and correct them.
As I wrote in my follow-up post, I am not intending to continue spear-heading an investigation into Nonlinear. However this post makes some accusations of wrongdoing on my part, which I intend to respond to, and of course for that it is relevant whether the things I said are actually true.
I hope to write a response sometime this week, but I am not committing to any deadlines.
Not sure if it’s worth mentioning, but I hope that people reading this are aware of what Kat writes at the bottom of the appendices:
Many of the things that are quotes next to my name are not things I said and not things that I would endorse, and I believe the same is true of many sentences in quotation marks attributed to Alice/Chloe.
I had missed that; thank you for pointing it out!
While using quotation marks for paraphrase or when recounting something as best as you recall is occasionally done in English writing, primarily in casual contexts, I think it’s a very poor choice for this post. Lots of people are reading this trying to decide who to trust, and direct quotes and paraphrase have very different weight. Conflating them, especially in a way where many readers will think the paraphrases are direct quotes, makes it much harder for people to come away from this document with a more accurate understanding of what happened.
Perhaps using different markers (ex: “«” and “»”) for paraphrase would make sense here?
Fair point! I’ve moved the note about quotation marks to the top of the appendix to help avoid misunderstandings. Sorry about that! This is just a massive post and a million details and I just missed this. Hopefully now it’ll be better.
The “«” and “»” suggestion is one that could be done mostly with a search-and-replace – having the more at the top of the appendix is not enough if it also applies to the post itself. This significantly affects how trustworthy I would consider the post to be (and I say that as someone sympathetic to your situation).
My attention continues to be on the question of whether my post was accurate and whether this post debunks the claims and narratives shared in mine. To minimize public attention costs and also to preserve my own sanity, I am aiming to engage with Nonlinear’s response in a way that focuses only on the clearest and most direct critiques of my post. I’m currently focusing on 2-3 of the claims in their response that most contradict my post, investigating them further, and intend to publish the results of that.
Once I’ve finished that process and shared my thinking (including making edits to my original post to correct any mistakes), I’ll engage more with the rest of the comments and what the appropriate norms are and whether I should’ve done things substantially differently, but in the meantime I think my efforts are better spent figuring out what is actually true about the relationship Nonlinear had with its employees.
I am trying to avoid writing my bottom line, and reduce any (further) friction to me changing my mind on this subject, which is a decent chunk of why I’m not spending time arguing in the comments right now (I expect that to give me a pretty strong “digging in my heels” incentive).
(...that said, I think Dialogues are pretty great for respectful discussions about high-stakes topics, and I am definitely more open to having dialogues with people who think I clearly messed up or want to discuss some particular issue. Though it’s still probably worth waiting on those until after I’ve sorted out the object level.)
I am currently quite skeptical about the narratives presented in this post for a number of reasons, not least because the post repeatedly fails to engage with or even accurately describe what I wrote. There are many strawman accusations that it successfully knocks down, which you will notice if you compare the claims that Kat rebukes with what I actually wrote in the original. I also question a number of the factual claims and I am investigating those.
Regarding timing, it’d be great to get something out this week, but also it’s literally 5 days away from Christmas. I don’t strongly expect to post before Christmas Eve, and I don’t want to disrupt my and others’ vacation days by posting in between then and the New Year, so if I’ve not written a post by EOD on the 23rd by then I will not post until the New Year (no earlier than Jan 2nd).
I hope that while you’re investigating this, you talk to us and ask us for any evidence we have. We’re more than happy to share relevant evidence and are willing to set reasonable deadlines for how long it’ll take for us to send it to you.
We also don’t want to waste more people’s time on going back and forth publicly about the evidence when you can easily check with us first before publishing.
I also recommend you talk to us and see our evidence before you write the post. If you’ve already written the post, it’s hard to update afterward when you get more information. And it’s hard to write an accurate post before you’ve seen all the relevant information.
We did not share all of the relevant evidence because it was already hundreds of pages long and we tried to prioritize. We have more evidence that might be relevant to your post.
I think this is smart and appreciate it.
I strongly think much of the commentary could have been removed in favour of adding more evidence
I read this post and about half of the appendix.
(1) I updated significantly in the direction of “Nonlinear leadership has a better case for themselves than I initially thought” and “it seems likely to me that the initial post indeed was somewhat careless with fact-checking.”
(I’m still confused about some of the fact-checking claims, especially the specific degree to which Emerson flagged early on that there were dozens of extreme falsehoods, or whether this only happened when Ben said that he was about to publish the post. Is it maybe possible that Emerson’s initial reply had little else besides “Some points still require clarification,” and Emerson only later conveyed how strongly he disagreed with the overall summary once he realized that Ben was basically set on publishing on a 2h notice? If so, that’s very different from Ben being told in the very first email reply that Nonlinear’s stance on this is basically “good summary, but also dozens of claims are completely false and we can document that.” That’s such a stark difference, so it feels to me like there was miscommunication going on.)
At the same time:
(2) I still find Chloe’s broad perspective credible and concerning (in a “this is difficult work environment with definite potential for toxicity” rather than “this is outright abusive on all reasonable definitions of the word”). The replies by Nonlinear leadership didn’t change my initial opinion here by too much because there are features of how Kat and Emerson are presenting their side of things that make me think “ah, I see it: not surprised Chloe felt negative emotions about her perceived standing in relation to them.” (Admittedly, I think if I applied more charitable priors here, I could see alternative explanations like “the negative features I believe I see here are best explained by Kat and Emerson feeling hurt and upset by things Chloe said, so they come across as defensive and one-sided in return, but they’d be better able to see and re-state Chloe’s perspective if they were more distanced from the events, and may have been better at seeing Chloe’s perspective earlier, before they all had a falling out.”)
To elaborate on (1):
If Nonlinear’s description of Alice is even halfway accurate, then I feel like Ben should have decided not to air any of her claims altogether, and only gone with Chloe as the single source. This would have made clear that the picture is one of mostly just one person. This would probably have changed the forcefulness of the post by quite a bit, which would’ve been less immediately condemning towards Nonlinear (making the resulting discussion fairer).
I also thought some of the replies Nonlinear gave towards Chloe seemed more persuasive than I would’ve expected. (At the same time, I think many of their replies seemed roughly what I would have expected, and in fact seem arguably revealing to me in some ways – see my point below on “(2).” [I guess the people who disagree with me will think I’m still influenced by the priors I’ve formed from the previous discussion, and that it’s hard to be objective after having initially formed a negative-leaning view.])
To elaborate on (2)
I didn’t like the repeated mentions of phrases like “this would have been your dream day!” or “to many [...], this would have been their dream job!.” Sure, I get where this is coming from: Contrasted with accusations of not feeding people well or not paying them enough money, it makes sense to highlight that the role had lots of perks. At the same time, the lengths to which they went to highlight this, and the talk about hanging out with other high-status community heroes, gave me too much of a feeling that they almost expected Chloe and Alice to feel indebted towards them. I can see how this attitude would lead to difficult dynamics in a setting where you’re co-living and forming “what-can-feel-like-friendships” with people you also expect to do all sorts of tasks for you.
Relatedly, it’s begging the question to self-describe your group with “Your group has a really optimistic and warm vibe. There’s this sense in the group that anything is possible if you are just creative, brave, and never give up. It feels really empowering and inspiring.” It’s fair if Kat or Emerson perceived their group that way, but, evidently, Chloe felt very different about it. So, it feels like it’s not hearing her perspective when they describe things like that. This is a strange disconnect. (As another commenter pointed out, there’s a similar disconnect with posting the pictures of social fun and tropic scenery, without at least pointing out that it’s not actually what most of the discussion was about. I get the desire to share pictures, fwiw, but I think this could’ve been embedded with a framing that acknowledges the disconnect issue.) (Also relatedly: On “warm vibes,” I’m remembering some of the screenshots in the food-ordering discussion made me feel like “I can see why Chloe wouldn’t necessarily feel like they’re being super warm towards her.” Not in a way that’s too bad or anything, but, Idk, something about how much value is put on productivity and the ability to negotiate, as opposed to, e.g., going out of one’s way to make sure Chloe feels comfortable voicing whenever she struggles with something or needs something when she’s sick or feeling low. [I’m not claiming that all employers need to be particularly warm or proactive about encouraging their employees to become better at asking for their basic needs to be met; I’m just pointing out that it’s problematic if there’s a mismatch between self-perceived warmth vibes and actual effect one has on others, combined with risky work setups like isolated travels and co-working with people who do tasks for you, and blurring potential-for-friendship and professional interactions.]) Overall, there just feels like too little engagement with the possibility that Chloe’s experience was maybe predictable and not out of the ordinary, i.e., that Chloe wasn’t entitled or disgruntled to react the way she did.
I thought some of the short-summary replies to Chloe seemed uncharitable to the point of being mean. For instance, this part: “CHLOE: I had unclear work boundaries and was pressured into working on a weekend (implies this was a regular occurrence). NONLINEAR: “My boss offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean island St. Barths, which required one hour of work to arrange the boat and ATV rentals (for me to enjoy too). But it was one hour on a weekend, so I complained, and it never happened again.” I remember reading Chloe’s account of this incident and it felt very different to me. When I read Chloe’s account, I could easily see where she was coming from. I admit that it’s okay to use hyperbole in a summary. Maybe they thought it’s okay because everyone can see that this is meant somewhat hyperbolically. However, the following is a case where it’s more unambiguously mean-spirited rather than just hyperbolic: “Complex situations she herself cites: ordering a taxi, asking for a ride, packing suitcases. [...] This is some of the best public evidence of her being mentally unwell. These are not overwhelming tasks for most people.” I feel like this is very unfair. Having read Chloe’s descriptions, I’d say it fails to engage with what makes these things complicated (people having various strong preferences about specifics related to the tasks, and you have juggle all of them and make everyone happy, while taking care of other constraints + brain fog from having worked too much before the weekend you’re supposed to have off).
“So how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?” Maybe this is a minor point, but I don’t like this style of “writing things as though it’s now conclusively established that Ben and Chloe were in the wrong, so we can move on to lessons learned given that specific conclusion.” It feels premature. I also didn’t like this part: “I wish I could think that Alice, Ben, and Chloe were villains.” Ben and Chloe get tainted by association with Alice. The points made by Nonlinear against Alice are way more concerning-if-true than the points made against Chloe or Ben. (I’m not sure about the degree to which they are contested because some of it goes well beyond earlier things that were said about Alice, and people who know more context about Alice, which doesn’t describe me at all, haven’t had the chance to comment on this.)
Overall, I thought it’s simply implausible that the most Nonlinear leadership could come up with in terms of “things we could’ve done differently” (see their appendix on this) is stuff like “Emerson shouldn’t have snapped at Chloe during that one stressful day” or “we shouldn’t have have lived together with employees who weren’t previously assistants because, apparently, such employees cannot handle it and will think we’re friends.” (I’m being admittedly a bit unfair/hyperbolic here; also, note that there were like two or three other short items.) To be more fair, I realize that when you’re faced with lots of false accusations (and I agree many of the claims now seem dubious to me and probably uncalled for!), it’s understandable to focus mostly on defending yourself and on highlighting how outrageous everything is. However, I think there are several reasons to also focus a lot on what one could’ve done better. One: I think there’s almost always something one can learn from conflicts, even if one is genuinely 98% percent in the right and dealing with a person who has an unhealthy relationship to their own negative emotions that turn them into a wrecking ball of toxicity. Secondly, it’s sometimes hard to be right about things like that, so one kind of has a duty, when “fighting back,” to make sure one isn’t the one “in the wrong” rationalizing one’s negative perspective of the other party. Thirdly, and very related to the previous point, I feel like pointing out what one could’ve done differently is some of the more reliable types of evidence one can readily give in favor of not being someone who looks at things in a one-sided and distorted fashion. So, even if this is just about making sure one’s defense is credible, it’s strategically smart to inspect and point out what didn’t go well. Lastly, I noticed that the post and appendix by Nonlinear is quite well-written in terms of persuasive rhetoric across a number of dimensions, which makes me think that them not including a more comprehensive takeaways/”lessons learned” section is unlikely to be a simple strategic mistake (not realizing that this sort of thing is something that readers in the audience would look out for). Instead, it feels like maybe more a genuine display of their belief that they’re close to infallible. If this is the case, it’s easy to see why this attitude increases the potential for things to not go well interpersonally.
Even though many the things in my elaboration of “(2)” are negative about Nonlinear, I want to emphasize again that this post made me update positively about them and that I think it’s unfortunate how the initial presentation and resulting discussion was too one-sided. I appreciate the length of this post; it must have been very stressful and anxiety-inducing to feel compelled to write it. (I’m overall inclined to think that it was positive for them/their reputation to write it.)
I just noticed that Kat posted the following on Facebook Dec 13 @11:34 PST (after older thoughtful messages such as this one, and the ones from Yarrow, David Mathers, OllieBase, etc). It seems like Kat disregarded the community’s concerns and doubled down on her original PR strategy (including painting Alice and Chloe with the same brush):
I neither upvoted nor downvoted, so I’m a bit miffed at “75%” as a metric of support. Edit: I see some aren’t shy about downvoting though. Looks like Kat unfriended me on Facebook around the same time as this downvote. I think this is unfortunate, because I still think Kat is an EA at heart and that she could improve as a person by handling this situation differently.
Yeah, at least several comments have much more severe issues than tone or stylistic choices, like rewording ~every claim by Ben, Chloe and Alice, and then assuming that the transformed claims had the same truth value as the original claim.
I’m in a position very similar to Yarrow here: While I think Kat Woods has mostly convinced me that the most incendiary claims are likely false, and I’m sympathetic to the case for suing Ben and Habryka, there was dangerous red flags in the responses, so much so that I’d stop funding Nonlinear entirely, and I think it’s quite bad that Kat Woods responded the way they did.
To give some more context on this:
Let’s take the claim that it was discouraged to talk to friends or family (this was one of the things were I thought Nonlinear’s reply seemed more convincing than I would have expected, but still leaves me with uncertainty rather than settling everything for sure).
Nonlinear links to a screenshot with a policy named “Internal: policy for inviting guests.” The policy mentions “friends and family.” Nonlinear frame this as follows. Chloe was lying to claim that she was discouraged from talking to them, because the policy says otherwise. Because she was lying about it, we should discount what she says on other issues.
I’m thinking “maybe, but there are other possibilities.”
Firstly, I’m curious what the following phrase is about “the above roughly reflects the priority list as well.” Is “the priority list” a separate thing? Or is this talking about a ranking of priorities from top to bottom? Even if there’s no intended ranking from top to bottom, I feel like it’s not outlandish to come away with the impression that “friends and family” was maybe added somewhat grudgingly rather than enthusiastically, since another section in the screenshot justifies having visitors with “it can have an extremely high impact to have different people join us” and compares it to a “constant EAG.” (These things apply a lot less to family or EA-disinterested friends.)
Also, sometimes written policies don’t capture implicit sentiments. It’s possible for a policy to say “it’s okay/encouraged to do x” while simultaneously there’s some social pressure in the group to do very little x.
The discussion about the screenshot made it seem like the screenshot settles everything.
Instead, I’d have thought it’s more balanced to say something like “this screenshot at the very least shows that it wasn’t our official policy to discourage these things, so Chloe/Alice should have mentioned this for fairness reasons.”
This on its own, maybe. But Chloe’s boyfriend was invited to travel with us for 2 of the 5 months she was with us, and we were about to invite him to travel with us indefinitely, free of charge. That’s a hard to fake signal that she was more than welcome to invite friends and family.
We also show text messages of us encouraging them to invite people over. We even have text messages showing me encouraging Chloe to see her boyfriend sooner and her saying no. Alice invited multiple friends to travel with us. When Chloe quit one of her friends was visiting us for 2-4 weeks (can’t quite remember). To be fair, that friend we invited. But if she’d invited him, we would have been thrilled.
Their portrayal of us saying that only me and Emerson could invite people to travel with us is clearly established to be false.
On this point, your reply seems very compelling to me. ((Though it’s at least imaginable that Chloe would point out ways in which this is misleading – e.g., maybe her bf had “EA potential” or got along well with Emerson or you and some other friends of hers didn’t, and maybe someone made comments about her other friends. Idk.))
I think it’s important to not hold people to unreasonable standards when they try to present a lot of evidence. If this (the invites allowed list) is one of only few instances where it’s overstated how important a particular piece of evidence is, then that’s still totally compatible with a high degree of objectivity!
I overall felt like there were some other places where I was uncertain how much to update, while your wording “wanted” me to make a very big update. But I also think these things can be hard to judge.
I closely read the whole post and considered it carefully. I’m struggling to sum up my reaction to this 15,000-word piece in way that’s concise and clear.
At a high level:
Even if most of what Kat says is factually true, this post still gives me really bad vibes and makes me think poorly of Nonlinear.
Let me quickly try to list some of the reasons why (if anyone wants me to elaborate or substantiate any of these, please reply and ask):
Confusion, conflation, and prevarication between intent and impact.
Related to the above, the self-licensing, i.e. we are generally good people and generally do good things, so we don’t need to critically self-reflect on particular questionable actions we took.
The varyingly insensitive, inflammatory, and sensationalist use of the Holocaust poem (truly offensive) and the terms “lynching” (also offensive) and “witch-burning”.
Conflation between being depressed and being delusional.
Glib dismissal of other people’s feelings and experiences.
The ridiculous use of “photographic evidence”, which feels manipulative and/or delusional to me.
Seeming to have generally benighted views on trauma, abuse, power dynamics, boundaries, mental health, “victimhood”, resilience, narcissism, DARVO, what status means for accusations of bad behaviour, culture wars, sexism/misogyny, sexual violence, etc.[1]
The hollow-sounding professions of empathy and good will toward Alice, Chloe, and Ben while attempting to maximally character assassinate them, threatening to de-anonymize Alice and Chloe, and retaliating against Ben.
Retaliating against Ben.
General lack of self-awareness and self-reflection; engaging in a heroes/villains or angels/demons framing while paying lip service to not doing that.
Insensitively and unnecessarily bringing up Kathy Forth as an argumentation pawn and not showing concern for (or mentioning) the fact that she died by suicide.
Grandstanding about truth-seeking, scout mindset, and rationality.
Suspicious deflection away from the matter at hand to to “the world’s problems”.
Arguing that Ben’s investigation was a waste of time and (therefore) money.
Implying (or seeming to) that the fate of EA may hang in the balance over this issue.
Diagnosing people’s concern about Nonlinear as an overreaction to FTX/Alameda and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Random fun fact: I am quoted in The Coddling of the American Mind and Jonathan Haidt sent me a signed copy, which was very nice of him to do. Still, I find the book pretty cringe. It’s not that he doesn’t have a point… But, anyway, that’s a topic for another post.
In my experience, observing someone getting dogpiled and getting dogpiled yourself feel very different. Most internet users have seen others get dogpiled hundreds of times, but may never have been dogpiled themselves.
Even if you have been dogpiled yourself, there’s a separate skill in remembering what it felt like when you were dogpiled, while observing someone else getting dogpiled. For example, every time I got dogpiled myself, I think I would’ve greatly appreciated if someone reached out to me via PM and said “yo, are you doing OK?” But it has never occurred to me to do this when observing someone else getting dogpiled—I just think to myself “hm, seems like a pretty clear case of unfair dogpiling” and close the tab.
In any case, I’ve found getting dogpiled myself to be surprisingly stressful, relative to the experience of observing it—and I usually think of myself as fairly willing to be unpopular. (For example, I once attended a large protest as the only counter-protester, on my own initiative.)
It’s very easy say in the abstract: “If I was getting dogpiled, I would just focus on the facts. I would be very self-aware and sensitive, I wouldn’t dismiss anyone, I wouldn’t say anything bad about my accusers (even if I had serious negative information about them), I wouldn’t remind people about scout mindset or anything like that.” I think it takes an unusual person to maintain that sort of equanimity when it feels like all of their friends are abandoning them and their career is falling apart. It’s not something most of us have practice with. And I hesitate to draw strong inferences about someone’s character from their behavior in this situation.
[Note: I’m using the term “dogpiled” because unlike terms like “cancelled”, “called out”, “scapegoated”, “brought to justice”, “mobbed”, “harassed”, etc. it doesn’t have any valence WRT whether the person/group is guilty or innocent, and my point is orthogonal to that.]
I agree with the points made in this comment. It’s important to remember that people getting dogpiled on can feel pretty awful about it. It reminded me of this Sam Harris podcast interview with a documentary fillmmaker who described her experience of being “cancelled” as being worse than her experience of being kidnapped.
That said, I don’t know how well they address the original comment they’re replying to. The post we’re looking at was posted three months after the impetus for it, so while I do see that the whole experience is very stressful and can make it difficult to be charitable on the spot, the extended period to craft a reply means it’s possible to overcome one’s initial impulses and figure out how to respond. Ultimately, if this post chooses to adopt certain rhetorical tactics (for good or bad), I think Kat and the Nonlinear term do need to take responsibility for these tactics. And to my understanding, they have—for instance, in this comment Kat says that some of the controversial decisions around inclusion of stuff in the post were things that the team discussed and decided on.
Apart from the 3 month period, this also had multiple reviewers. It would quite surprising if none or only a few of these pushbacks by Yarrow or others in the comment section were raised. So (along with Kat’s comment that there was a lot of internal debate) I think it is better to model these decisions as intentional and considered, rather than due to “loss of equanimity”.
To add on to this vibe of “getting dogpiled is an unusually stressful experience that is probably hard to imagine accurately”, I feel a bit strange to be reading so many “reasoned” comments about how specific improvements in replies/wordings could have been decisively accurate/evident, as though anything less seems like a negative sign.
I relate to that logically as an observer, but at the same time I don’t particularly think the whole sea of suggestions are meaningfully actionable. I think a lot of time and thought went into these posts, virtually any variant would still be vulnerable to critique because we have limited time/energy, let alone the fact that we’re human beings and it’s more than okay to produce incomplete/flawed work. Like what expectations are we judging others by in this complex situation, and would we really be able to uphold our own expectations, let alone the combined expectations of hundreds of people in the community? It’s insanely hard to communicate all the right information in one go, and that’s why we have conversations. Though this broader discussion of “what’s the real story” isn’t one that I consider myself entitled to, nor do I think we should all be entitled to it just because we’re EAs.
This is a really good comment. It gets at a tough issue. Someone wise once told me: when we feel unsafe, we want to be right. A consequence of this is that if we want someone to admit wrongdoing, or even just to admit the validity of a different perspective, we have to make it safe for them to do so. We can’t just dogpile them. It’s clear that Kat feels unsafe and wants to be right. And, in a way, we are dogpiling her.
However, it also must be said that someone admitting wrongdoing, or admitting the validity of a different perspective, isn’t the only goal for a community faced with an instance of alleged harm. Preventing future harm is an even more important goal. If someone credibly accused of doing harm to another person can’t overcome their need to be right, the community must explore different options for preventing other people from coming to harm in the future. These options include (but aren’t limited to) exclusion from the community.
I agree with this. I think overall I get a sense that Kat responded in just the sort of manner that Alice and Chloe feared*, and that the flavor of treatment that Alice and Chloe (as told by Ben) said they experienced from Kat/Emerson seems to be on display here. (* Edit: I mean, Kat could’ve done worse, but it wouldn’t help her/Nonlinear.)
I also feel like Kat is misrepresenting Ben’s article? For example, Kat says
I just read that article and don’t remember any statement to that affect, and searching for individual words in this sentence didn’t lead me to a similar sentence in Ben’s article on in Chloe’s followup. I think the closest thing is this part:
I, too, was mentally tallying up benefits. Plane tickets, hotel fees and other perks might be that costly, but the business required her to travel so it seems like we shouldn’t treat it dollar-for-dollar like normal compensation.
More importantly I feel like there’s misdirection. Chloe’s claim was that a verbal agreement existed and wasn’t fully upheld; Kat rewrites this into a different claim, then labels it “False.”
No, you don’t get to do this. When your reputation is on the line and you’re being scrutinized, I expect you to be on your best behavior.
Ben’s article draws a sharp distinction between the reputations of Alice and Chloe, but Kat’s article lumps them together as “Alice/Chloe” 27 times (tbf, Ben also groups them about 19 times, but Kat’s lumping seems less appropriate to me, on average)
Kat says there were 21 Nonlinear employees but Ben refers to “their two in-person employees” as if there are only two plus Kat, Emerson and Drew. I assume the difference is made up by remote and former employees. But if Alice and Chloe were the only two in-person employees and had no relation to each other, Kat’s implication that they both lied or (in Chloe’s case) gave misleading accounts would be surprising if true.
Kat, if you’re reading this―I think you mean well, and my charitable reading is that (1) you are a proper EA at heart, (2) you have social skills but also some bad social habits, and (3) you wrote this from an emotional place that compromised your objectivity, which caused you to choose a highly defensive PR strategy in which you exaggerated the positions of Ben/Alice/Chloe in order to make them sound less reasonable. (Edit: or rather, to make their positions easier to refute. And let’s keep in mind that Ben did a “search for negative information” and did not build a “balanced case”.)
I might let that slide if it was just one employee who had a bad experience at every previous job, but there were two, plus Ben’s judgement and “many” anonymous sources. Plus, I agree with Ben that the policy “I don’t say bad things about you, you don’t say bad things about me” is not a good policy; “I speak charitably of you, you speak charitably of me” is the most I think one could reasonably ask for. So what you needed to do was reflect upon what mistakes you and Emerson made, and what you can do to begin to repair your reputations (e.g. recognize faults and apologize), and then do that. I wonder if you’re so convinced of your own innocence that you can’t see that the red flags that were discussed were actually red....
Kat reworded every claim made by Alice/Chloe/Ben, so I checked a few more:
Kat says “Alice/Chloe claimed Nonlinear failed to pay them. Later, they denied ever claiming this.” Now I’m really confused, like, did Ben publish more than one article? The one I read didn’t make it sound like that. It did indicate that Alice may have communicated poorly or deceptively (“catastrophic miscommunications”, Kat reportedly said), but I can’t find any claim from Chloe about not being paid.
Kat said “Chloe claimed: they told me not to spend time with my romantic partner”. It does seem a bit odd that Ben’s article doesn’t mention Chloe’s romantic partner being there for two months, since it does say “Alice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/visitors that Nonlinear invited.” But since this part is a combination of what Alice and Chloe said, it’s not strictly accurate to say “Chloe claimed she was advised not to spend time with her romantic partner”, or to say “told” (which sounds like an order) rather than “advised”.
Kat said that Chloe said “I felt like they didn’t value me or my time”. I can’t find any statement to that effect in Ben’s article or Chloe’s big comment, but it did remind me of something: “Alice reported that she would get these compliments near-daily. She eventually had the sense that this was said in order to get something out of her. She reported that one time, after a series of such compliments, the Kat Woods then turned and recorded a near-identical series of compliments into their phone for a different person.” Kat’s response was basically that Nonlinear was generous and that “Kat showed so much gratitude that Chloe actually asked her to stop expressing gratitude”. But after what Alice said, I feel like Kat may have missed the point of whatever the paraphrase “they didn’t value me” was intended to refer to.
Kat said that Alice said that “Kat threatened my career for telling the truth”. There is a similar clause in Ben’s article, but it comes across differently: “Kat Woods’ texts that read to me [Ben] as a veiled threat to destroy someone’s career for sharing negative information about her.”
Kat refers to “Ben’s hypothesis − 2 EAs are Secretly Evil”. I don’t think that’s accurate (edit: but Kat likely does see it this way.)
My read on this is that a lot of the things in Ben’s post are very between-the-lines rather than outright stated. For example, the financial issues all basically only matter if we take for granted that the employees were tricked or manipulated into accepting lower compensation than they wanted, or were put in financial hardship.
Which is very different from the situation Kat’s post seems to show. Like… I don’t really think any of the financial points made in the first one hold up, and without those, what’s left? A She-Said-She-Said about what they were asked to do and whether they were starved and so on, which NL has receipts for.
[Edit after response below: By “hold up” I meant in the emotional takeaway of “NL was abusive,” to be clear, not on the factual “these bank account numbers changed in these ways.” To me hiring someone who turns out to be financially dependent into a position like this is unwise, not abusive. If someone ends up in the financial red in a situation where they are having their living costs covered and being paid a $1k monthly stipend… I am not rushing to pass judgement on them, I am just noting that this seems like a bad fit for this sort of position, which I think NL has more than acknowledged, and if they misled NL about their financial security, that further alleviates NL of some responsibility]
Ok, so maybe it’s just a shitty job offer despite the apparent perks? Maybe it is for many people. That doesn’t mean adults shouldn’t be trusted to understand what they’re getting into and use their agency to pull the plug. Regrets after the fact are not the same as manipulation or deception on NL’s part.
And this would still be fine if Ben’s post just said “There are EA orgs making job offers that I think put their employees in vulnerable positions, so people should be more careful about accepting them.” I would even agree to that kind of post, especially if it came after talking to NL about its job offers (which they already apparently said at the time that they’ve reconsidered after the experiences they had).
But what it said was “These people are predators who chew up and spit out bright eyed altruists.” And that feels like a very strong judgement to make, and makes me glad that Kat posted the details about the financial stuff even if it wasn’t claimed directly in Ben’s post to be the result of deception. Because if it’s not… why was it brought up at all? Dislike of the job offers feel like a clash of vibes and difference of opinion on best practice, not predatory action.
But what people are left with from Ben’s post is an impression that there was a pattern of abuse and predatory action, and the financial aspect is really important for that. That impression is not solely on Ben’s shoulders; even if Ben’s article is written largely from the perspective of what he believed from what he saw. I think if NL is even half-correct in these rebuttals, Ben was clearly influenced to some degree to reach that conclusion by Chloe and Alice… not even necessarily intentionally, which is why I hesitate to use the word “manipulated,” but just by the nature of how people who feel victimized will naturally selectively tell their side of the story.
This generally applies to the rest of your bullet points, so yeah, I think Ben’s hypothesis that “2 EAs are Secretly Evil” is a pretty good summation of his post’s takeaways, given the assertions he made at the end.
I feel like this response ignores my central points ― my sense that Kat misrepresented/strawmanned the positions of Chloe/Alice/Ben and overall didn’t respond appropriately. These points would still be relevant even in a hypothetical disagreement where there was no financial relationship between the parties.
I agree that Ben leaves an impression that abuse took place. I am unsure on that point; it could have been mainly a “clash of personalities” rather than “abuse”. Regardless, I am persuaded (partly based on this post) that Kat & Emerson have personalities that are less honest, kind and self-reflective than typical EAs, so that probably few EAs would be happy working for Nonlinear as “part of the family”. But to judge properly, I think I’d have to hear what other remote/former employees think about NL.
I think there should be a norm against treating paraphrases as quotes. What it said was “I expect that if Nonlinear does more hiring in the EA ecosystem it is more-likely-than-not to chew up and spit out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world. I relatedly think that the EA ecosystem doesn’t have reliable defenses against such predators.”
And I disagree, and used one example to point out why the response is not (to me) a misrepresentation or strawman of their positions, but rather treating them as mostly a collection of vague insinuations peppered with specific accusations that NL can only really respond to by presenting all the ways they possibly can how the relationship they’re asserting is not supported by whatever evidence they can actually present.
For goodness sake, one of your points is in the distinction between “told” and “advised.” What, exactly, do you expect NL to say to clarify that distinction that’s more important than the rebuttal of pointing out they invited the boyfriend to travel with them for 2 months? “No, we didn’t say that, nor did we advise it?” There’s no evidence they did say it or “advise” it in the first place! How does a simple denial better rebut either the claim itself or the underlying implications?
I think it would be absurdly unfair to take for granted that the non-financial aspects are represented in a non-misleading way if the financial aspects are misrepresented, which is part of why I highlighted that particular point.
What Ben was told by Alice and Chloe seems to me at this point basically entirely a set of “technically true but ultimately misleading” things, along with some strictly false accusations by Alice/Chloe. I’m confused by the insistence that these rebuttals are strawmanning their positions when their positions are themselves dependent on an overarching relationship and vibe and emotional experience, and not a specific set of claims backed by evidence of wrongdoing.
It would be a different story if they had provided their own proof and then NL ignored that proof to instead disprove a different set of things.
I generally agree, but boy am I confused by your issue with my summarizing that paragraph with that quote. He directly calls them predators. He directly asserts they chewed up and spat out young altruists. If you disagree with either of those, or think there’s some meaningful nuance my quote missed, I’d ask you to explain why.
I expect them to say “advised”. This isn’t Twitter, and even on Twitter I myself use direct quotes as much as possible despite the increased length, for accuracy’s sake. Much of this situation was “(s)he said / she said” where a lot of the claims were about events that were never recorded. So how do we make judgements, then? Partly we rely on the reputations of everyone involved―but in the beginning Kat and Ben had good reputations while (after Ben’s post) Alice & Chloe were anonymous, with only Chloe appearing to have a good reputation. So what then? Well, the community verifies what it can. The miswordings were verifiable.
It reminds me of a weird final exam I once took, which was worth something like 2⁄3 of my total grade and had 10 questions. 9 were about material that wasn’t taught in the class at all! So I answered about 1.3 of the 10, and… got a B+ in the course! How?? Presumably the instructors realized they made a mistake afterward and couldn’t just fail everyone, so they graded people based on that one question and a few quizzes.
That’s kind of like this. When much of the story is invisible to us, we judge based on what’s visible. How can we do otherwise? So Kat could’ve taken advantage of that by posting an impeccable defense that functionally countered the original narrative. They suggested K&E lacked honesty? Well, Kat could demonstrate perfect honesty in all verifiable respects. They suggested K&E were retributive? Kat could’ve conveyed a strong sense of kindness. The fact that she didn’t do these things reads as her “real” personality showing. “A leopard can’t change its spots.”
Sorry, it’s just that in the past I’ve talked to lots of climate dismissives and I’ve become sensitive to their many tactics even in unrelated situations. One of them is misquoting.
It sounds like what you would be more convinced by is a short, precise refutation of the exact things said by the original post.
But I feel the opposite. That to me would have felt corporate, and also is likely impossible given the way the original allegations are such a blend of verified factual assertions, combined with some things that are technically true but misleading, may be true but are hearsay, and some things that do seem directly false.
Rather than “retaliatory and unkind,” my main takeaway from the post was something like “passive-aggressive benefit of the doubt” at worst, while still overall giving me the impression that Kat believed Ben was well intentioned but reckless. There are some parts that border on or are bad faith, like presuming that Ben’s reactions to evidence against his conclusions must be X or Y thing to justify posting anyway...
But even given that, I think the readers insisting this post should have just stuck to sterile fact-disputing can be both correct on some level, while still lacking in empathy of what it’s like to be in the position NL has been put in. I’m not saying it’s a perfect post, but the degree of tone policing in the face of claims like “they starved me” is kind of bizarre to me.
No worries, very understandable!
While I agree that these are both helpful, I would have been most excited to see a clear separation between careful direct refutations (“here are several clear examples where Ben’s post contained demonstrably false claims”) and fuzzier context (“here is an explanation why this specific claim from Ben’s post, while arguably literally true, is pretty misleading”).
(But this is hard!)
Agreed that would have been better!
Which financial claims seem to you like they have been debunked? When I read through the summary of the financial situation in Ben’s original post, the content seems to hold up quite well:
If you think these claims have been debunked, can you say where and in which way they are wrong?
There is one small thing in here that Nonlinear dispute, but do not provide hard evidence for, which is that her outstanding salary/reimbursements were paid back this quickly in part due to her strongly requesting it. I currently still believe this is true, though of course Nonlinear disputing it is some evidence.
However, I don’t see any evidence against any of the other claims in these two paragraphs. This still seems like a quite good summary of the situation.
Edit: I think Jeff below makes a valid point that it matters a good amount whether the late payment was for “salary” or “reimbursement” and I would consider the claim that it was reimbursement instead of salary a relatively direct contradiction with the relevant sentence.
The original post uses the low amount of money in Alice’s bank account as a proxy for financial dependence and wealth disparity, which could often be an appropriate proxy but here elides that Alice also owned a business that additionally produced passive income, though there’s disagreement about whether this was in the range of $600/month (your estimate) or $3k/month (what NL claims Alice told them and shows a screenshot of Emerson referencing).
Being owed salary is very different from being owed reimbursements. We have a very strong norm (backed up legally) of paying wages on time. Companies that withhold wages or don’t pay them promptly are generally about to go out of business or doing something super shady. On the other hand, reimbursements normally take some time, and being slow about reimbursements would be only a small negative update on NL.
NL claims the reimbursements were late because Alice stopped filing for reimbursement, and once she did these were immediately paid. If NL is correct here (and this seems pretty likely to me) then this falls entirely on Alice and shouldn’t be included in claims against NL.
Another debunked financial claim: Ben’s original post has:
Nonlinear provided screenshots of:
An employment agreement stating $1k/month + expenses
NL texting Chloe before she started that the stipend was $1k/month and Chloe confirming
A transcript of the employment interview where NL told Chloe it was a $1k/month stipend + expenses, which they thought was about as valuable as a $70k/year salary.
Thank you!
I think in as much as the reimbursement claim is true, I agree with you that presenting it as “salary” was not to the level of accuracy that I think should be aimed for in posts like this, and I agree changes the interpretation of the facts a good amount.
I do think we currently just have Kat’s word to go for it, and I am curious whether I can get some confirmation or clarification from Alice on this, but I am currently also reasonably confident that the payment should be described as reimbursement and not salary.
I also am quite sad that Ben didn’t include mention of Alice’s side business in the post. I think it was definitely worth including. My current model is that NL is heavily exaggerating the size of that side-business, but it still would have been good to include (and we have notes from a call that mention the side business, so we did know about it). I also think nothing in the post directly contradicts that or heavily implied the absence of such a business (especially given that my current belief is that it basically didn’t make any money).
Consider the hypothesis that Alice lied to us about how much money the business was making. (I actually remember her telling me it brought in $5,000 a month. We chose the $3,000 because that seemed more charitable and was what Emerson remembers her telling him). Or that she lied to you about how much it made. Or both.
Everybody already agrees that she gives unreliable testimony. There’s also a clear motive. When she’s talking to you, she’s trying to seem maximally like a helpless victim, because otherwise she wouldn’t get the $5,000 or the support. When she was talking to us, she was trying to seem maximally successful as an entrepreneur so we would incubate her.
Again, we did not promise any payment for anything until quite late in the process, and I think this came up before any kind of reward for any of this was discussed. I think this is misrepresenting the situation pretty badly.
I do not think such generalizations should currently assumed to be common-knowledge. I think a huge fraction of the testimony she has given is accurate. There are a few places in which things Alice says do seem contradicted by things you are showing and saying.
The same is also true in reverse, where many claims in your post and appendix about (for example) stuff that Ben knew at different points in time, or claims you are making about what Ben or Alice or Chloe said are also demonstrably false.
In-aggregate I would still very substantially update if Alice claimed that something was true. I also do not think she lives up to my standards of precision and accuracy, but I would definitely not describe that in a kind of blanket statement as you do here.
Yes, I am considering that. I think it’s quite plausible she exaggerated how much money her business was making. I think that’s bad, but also isn’t something particularly terrible (I’ve seen many people do it over the years, and I think it’s pretty bad, but sadly also not uncommon). I also think it’s plausible you are misremembering or distorting the numbers she told you.
My current best guess is that she said some vague things to you about how much money it was making, which were probably exaggerated. Given the broader context and evidence, I would be quite surprised if the $3000 or $5000 is correct, and that she lied to Ben about by substantially downplaying how much money came from the business, though it is not impossible (I would give it like 10%-15%).
FWIW I think I don’t care how much money she actually made. I care how much money she said she made to NL, and how much she told Ben that she told NL she was making.
If she insinuated high to NL to get the job and then did not own up to that when talking to Ben, that is very hard for me to forgive. Even setting aside the idea that NL might not have hired her in the first place if she accurately represented both her skills and her financial dependence, thus avoiding this whole mess in the first place… it basically treated Ben as an arrow to be fired at people who she felt wronged by, and once again led in an additional way to this whole more recent mess.
And unless I’m misremembering, there’s at least a bit of evidence that Emerson believed she was making ~36k a year and said as much to her, which presumably was not corrected by her after, but even if it was… yeah, it doesn’t look great for Alice here, by my lights.
Edited above comment to clarify:
By “hold up” I meant in the emotional takeaway of “NL was abusive,” to be clear, not on the factual “these bank account numbers changed in these ways.” To me hiring someone who turns out to be financially dependent into a position like this is unwise, not abusive. If someone ends up in the financial red in a situation where they are having their living costs covered and being paid a $1k monthly stipend… I am not rushing to pass judgement on them, I am just noting that this seems like a bad fit for this sort of position, which I think NL has more than acknowledged, and if they misled NL about their financial security, that further alleviates NL of some responsibility.
Sorry for not making that more clear. To be extra clear, my takeaway here is “Ben seems like he was led to believe a particular narrative by selective information and the usual emotional spin of only hearing one side.” Not “Ben got specific facts wrong.”
Perhaps something missed from your list. The lack of moral seriousness regarding the value of the money being spent. I can imagine my global development and animal welfare colleagues, would be pretty displeased to learn that nonlinear has received over 500,000 USD in funding.
From reading into this discussion, including the linked appendix document. There’s no reason for me to think that they were ready to receive this amount of money, or likely to use it effectively.
I agree with this though it is unfortunately much the same in lots of longtermism/AI safety. Also, if I am not mistaken, Emerson funds a lot of Nonlinear himself.
I don’t understand why people downvote you, if not out of bad faith. Cause they give no evidence that money is used well. And so far you are the only one pointing this out. So unless these people work in these communities and feel personally attacked, there’s no point downvoting the truth.
If anyone can provide evidence that this hot tub money was used for good purposes I’d love to see it. Otherwise don’t be dishonest and don’t downvote.
I down voted because it isn’t directly relevant to the dispute. High-spending in longtermist EA communities is a question that has been frequently discussed on this forum without consensus views. I don’t think restarting that argument here is productive.
Thanks for providing context here, similar to Vaipan, I wasn’t sure why people were disagree/downvoting me.
I’m a professional nanny and I’ve also held household management positions. I just want to respond to one specific thing here that I have knowledge about.
It is upsetting to see a “lesson learned” as only hiring people with experience as an assistant, because a professional assistant would absolutely not work with that compensation structure.
It is absolutely the standard in professional assistant type jobs that when traveling with the family, that your travel expenses are NOT part of your compensation.
When traveling for work (including for families that travel for extensive periods of time) the standard for professionals is:
Airfare, non-shared lodgings (your own room) and food are all covered by your family and NOT deducted from your pay. Ditto any expenses that are required for work such as taxis, tickets to places you are working at. etc.
-Your work hours start when you arrive at the airport.(Yes, you charge for travel time)
You charge your full, standard hourly rate for all hours worked.
You ALSO charge a per diem because you are leaving the comfort of being in your own home / being away from friends and pets and your life.
You are ONLY expected to work for the hours that are pre-arranged that you are on the clock. (You may be OFFERED but not demanded to work more hours.)
If you are expected to be available outside of pre scheduled hours then you charge an “on call” rate for any hours they want you generally available for them.
If these hours add up to more than 45 hours/week, you charge your overtime rate.
For a professional to take three job as described they would have to pay six figures (NOT INCLUDING travel, room, board, related travel expenses). “Getting to travel to exotic locales” might be a perk, but it is NOT compensation.
The people who will NOT require this are: young people too inexperienced to know better, exploited immigrants, and poor non-professionals taking the job out of desperation.
(ETA There is some wiggle room here. Like maybe you charge your per diem rate for travel time instead of your hourly (are the kids with you when you are traveling?), or if your job is ALWAYS traveling you probably don’t have a per diem, etc.
Also, I want to note that it is VERY COMMON for non-evil well-meaning people to not realize this. )
This got a lot of upvotes so I want to clarify that this kind of arrangements isn’t UNUSUALLY EVIL. Nanny forums are filled with younger nannies or more desperate nannies who get into these jobs only to immediately regret it.
When people ask my opinion about hiring nannies I constantly have to show how things they think are perks (live in, free tickets to go places with the kids) don’t actually hold much value as perks. Because it is common for people to hold that misconception.
It is really common for parents and families to offer jobs that DON’T FOLLOW professional standards. In fact the majority of childcare jobs don’t. The educated professionals don’t take those jobs. The families are often confused why they can’t find good help that stays.
So I look at this situation and it immediately pattern matches to what EDUCATED PROFESSIONALS recognize as a bad situation.
I don’t think that means that NL folks are inherently evil. What they wanted was a common thing for people to want. The failure modes are the predictable failure modes.
I think they hold culpability. I think they “should have” known better. I don’t think (based on this) that they are evil. I think some of their responses aren’t the most ideal, but also shoot it’s a LOT of pressure to have the whole community turning on you and they are responding way better than I would be able to.
From the way they talk, I don’t think they learned the lessons I would hope they had, and that’s sad. But it’s hard to really grow when you’re in a defensive position.
> When people ask my opinion about hiring nannies I constantly have to show how things they think are perks (live in, free tickets to go places with the kids) don’t actually hold much value as perks.
Off topic: I understand thinking housing would be valued by employees, but do people honestly think that tickets to children’s activities are valuable to caretakers? Like even if someone would value the activity in their off hours, which seems like a big if, surely the parents understand that it’s not a leisure activity when you’re watching small children?
Switch “watching children” with “working as an assistant” and you’ll see why I don’t think travel /activity expenses is at all a valuable payment method, even to people who would otherwise enjoy those activities.
In my reading of the post and the appendix, the point Kat seemed to be making was not that professional assistants would be cheaper, but that professional assistants would have a better upfront idea of what they were getting into, and therefore be less likely to retroactively feel that this was a bad decision. This is consistent with the idea that having that upfront idea could also come with demanding higher compensation upfront before entering into the arrangement; what Kat was trying to guard against was regretting it after agreeing to it.
In a section of the appendix Kat says that she currently has a (remote) assistant charging $50/hour and it seems to be working well:
It sounds like most of the things objected to were physical or otherwise in-person tasks, so I don’t think this makes sense as a comparison.
Just wanted to ask a quick question: It sounds like you’re describing the conditions when someone who normally works with a family is asked to come on a trip with them, rather standards terms for nanny’s travelling with digital nomad families? (Which may not be common enough to be a thing).
I guess the reason I’m asking is because those are two quite distinct asks: one is asking you to uproot your normal life, with the nanny still presumably having to pay rent on their usual place.
In contrast, the other ask is looking for people who are keen on a particular lifestyle and who can avoid paying rent altogether.
Anyway, please let me know if I’m wrong here.
I do not think it is necessarily morally wrong to try to find a win win situation where you employ someone who really just has a passion for travel. But I think it is a generally bad idea. That situation tends towards exploitation, and it is hard to see it when you are in your own point of view.
This job also required that a young person just out of college choose to spend over 80% of their “income” on a luxurious travel budget.
Yes, but also there is a similar issue for live in nannies, where a professional live in nannies will not charge that much less hourly even when room and board are provided by the family. (They will charge slightly less) This is because it is not actually fun or nice to live with your bosses, and having a live-in is considered more a perk for the FAMILY than the nanny.
Meanwhile many well-meaning but uninformed bosses think their room is worth a lot of money to the nanny because it is expensive to the family.
For example, I live in the Bay and I would RATHER pay $1000/mo to rent a room in grouphouse than stay in my bosses’ extremely expensive fancy house for free, even though my bosses’ mortgage for that room is very expensive to them.
Similarly, a boss spending $5000 to take you to Costa Rica is not giving you $5000 of value. You aren’t choosing where you are going or what the money is spent on. Maybe they really value beachfront property, but if you were in charge of expenses you’d rather choose a less expensive Airbnb but put more towards experiences or whatnot. Your bosses want to go to the theater but you don’t really like the theater. They pay $100 on a ticket for you, but you wouldn’t have paid anything to go.
So even if you have an employee who really loves that they get to travel for work, the vast majority of money you spend getting them to come along doesn’t… Transfer very well.
This is on top of issues like all your roommate disputes being with people who have absolute authority to win. You don’t like the house temperature? Too bad. You don’t like their loud death metal workout music? Too bad.
You also better not have a partner, or want to sleep around, or ever stay out late partying, or use substances, etc. It seems like the NL folks were laid back on this, but often families think your professional demeanor is your actual whole personality. (Think how many parents get upset when teachers post pictures on the beach in a nonsexy swimming suit)
The exception to this is generally immigrants who have come to the country specifically to work and send money home. They are generally happy to have a free place to stay.
Also children and sometimes bosses do not understand that sometimes you are off the clock and not working. So children will want your attention and engagement if you are around even when you’re “off”, and bosses might not respect your time off and ask you to do little tasks or last minute jobs when you aren’t working.
If you were away at your own house, then your time off is completely yours, but if you’re a live in then they might pull stuff like “Hey could you watch the kids for half an hour so I can run pick up some milk?” and next thing you know they consider your “time off” to be just a suggestion.
Agreed. If you’re calculating equivalent compensation, you need to apply a steep discount to work-provided perks to adjust for the restrictions. That said, it also makes sense to take into account the benefits of networking/career capital in order to figure out whether the whole deal offered is fair. I’ll leave that for others to debate, was just trying to get clarification on your specific point.
Disclaimer: Previously interned remotely at Non-Linear
I drew a random number for spot checking the short summary table. (I don’t think spot checking will do justice here, but I’d like to start with something concrete.)
This seems to be about this paragraph from the original post:
There aren’t any other details in the original post specifically from Chloe or specifically about her partner, including in the comment in Chloe’s words below the post. The only specific detail about romantic partners I see in the original post is about Alice, and it plausibly fits the “romantic partners” piece of this summary. (“Alice was polyamorous, and she and Drew entered into a casual romantic relationship. Kat previously had a polyamorous marriage that ended in divorce, and is now monogamously partnered with Emerson. Kat reportedly told Alice that she didn’t mind polyamory “on the other side of the world”, but couldn’t stand it right next to her, and probably either Alice would need to become monogamous or Alice should leave the organization.”)
Both links in the summary table go to the same place, which says:
As far as I can tell, “They told me not to spend time with my boyfriend so I was kept socially dependent” is not a direct quote or paraphrase. (Maybe I’d use ~tildes~ for a device like this.) Rather, it picks out one possible contributor to Ben’s summary paragraph.
Taking the screenshots at face value, they establish that as of February, Kat and Emerson thought Chloe’s boyfriend might have high enough potential for an extended invite (Emerson: “i’m open to it” “he seems eager to help build shit”), and as of May, Kat was not telling Chloe not to spend time with him. (Chloe was with Nonlinear from January to July.)
From my perspective, this is between “not responsive to the complaint” and “evidence for the spirit of the complaint”. It seems an overreach to call “They told me not to spend time with my boyfriend...” a “sad, unbelievable lie” “discrediting [Chloe] as a reliable source of truth” when it is not something anyone has cited Chloe as saying. It seems incorrect to describe “advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’” as in “direct contradiction” with any of this, which instead seems to affirm that traveling with Nonlinear was conditioned on “high potential” or being among the “highest quality people”. Finally, having initially considered inviting Chloe’s boyfriend to travel with them would still be entirely consistent with later deciding not to; encouraging a visit in May would still be consistent with an overall expectation that Chloe not spend too much time with her boyfriend in general for reasons related to his perceived “quality”.
Edit: the summary table also says “We were just about to invite him to travel with us indefinitely because it would make Chloe happy, but then Chloe quit [in July].” This would fit with not inviting him in February and later being reluctant for “quality” reasons.
I feel like I’m confused by what you would find more convincing here given that there was no evidence in the first place that they did say something like that?
Like would them saying “No we didn’t” actually be more persuasive than showing an example of how they did the opposite?
Or like… if we take for granted that words that someone might interpret that way left their mouth, at what point do we stop default trusting the person who clearly feels aggrieved by them and seems willing to exaggerate or lie when they then share those words to others?
There are plenty of context in which the thing alleged is not at all abusive, and plenty of contexts where it is. Without reason to believe they were actually keeping them isolated, I’m not sure how much weight to put on it.
I’m not sure if you meant to reply to a different comment, but yes, exactly.
I think what you’re asking is, supposing Nonlinear has after all done nothing remarkable with respect to anyone’s romantic partners, how do I come to believe that? How does Nonlinear present counterevidence or discredit Chloe in exactly the right way such that I’m swayed towards the true conclusion? If they deny it, it’s just their word. If they show me a text conversation, well, no one actually said that they didn’t have that text conversation, so it’s not responsive to the complaint. There’s basically no winning. It’s genuinely, upsettingly unfair.
I mean, in some sense, there has to be such a way, or else I’m hopelessly irrational. Which is, yes, exactly, I think a professional, considerate Nonlinear would not have made this post. They would have done something else.
This is another thought feeding into my wondering how much this kind of “spot checking” really matters. While I’m glad people seem to have appreciated working forward from a particular claim, it would feel way more valuable to work backward from a decision. For me, at least, I don’t think the question “did they keep people isolated in an abusive way” is on any back-chained path, which is good, because I don’t expect to be able to answer that question.
But others are going to want to be convinced or not on different questions. This is why I tried to separate out the parent from my more high-feeling and reactive takes in these other comments. Maybe they can figure out how it fits in to the judgments they need to make.
Very valuable contribution. Crowd sourcing this type of effort seems good.
Maybe! I’m hoping it at least saves people some energy. It’s too late for me, but I confess I’m ambivalent myself about the point of all this. Spot-checking some high level claims is at least tractable, but are there decisions that depend on the outcome? What I care about isn’t whether Nonlinear accurately represented what happened or what Ben said. I was unlikely to ever cross paths with Nonlinear or even Ben beforehand. I want people to get healthy professional experience, and I want the EA community to have healthy responses to internal controversy and bad actors.
Something went wrong long before I started looking at any particular claim. Did they discourage Chloe from spending time with her boyfriend? Was it maybe a unreasonable amount of time, though? Are they being sincere in saying they were happy to see her happy? Is it toxic passive-aggressive behavior to emphasize that they felt that way even though she was distracted and unproductive with him around? Did they fail to invite him on all-expenses-paid world travel? Is Ben Pace a good person?
Like, huh? How did we even get here? Don’t ask your employees to live with you. Don’t engage in social experiments with your employees. Don’t make their romantic partnerships your business. Don’t put people in situations where these are the questions they’re asking. My own suspicion is that everyone, even Nonlinear, would have been better off if Nonlinear had just let this lie and instead gone about earning trust by doing good work with normal working relationships.
“My own suspicion is that everyone, even Nonlinear, would have been better off if Nonlinear had just let this lie and instead gone about earning trust by doing good work with normal working relationships.”
I think I’m not sure this is actually possible without having addressed the original claims. The overriding take I felt from the community after Ben’s post was that they were in exile limbo until their side of the story was shared.
Isn’t Emerson independently wealthy and Nonlinear mostly self-funded? It’s not totally clear to me how that limbo keeps them from getting things done. I guess I don’t fully understand what Nonlinear does—I suppose they “incubate” projects, mostly remotely helping with mentoring and networking? I find the idea a little bewildering together with how they describe their activities, but being on the outs with the EA/AI safety community would be a pretty central obstacle.
So that’s fair and I was probably venting a bit intemperately. I think something like what Stephen Clare outlines is probably better.
I don’t think Nonlinear can get much done if no one wants to work with them. “Incubating AI x-risk nonprofits by connecting founders with ideas, funding, and mentorship” (site) is not really compatible with ‘exile’.
Yeah. Still, I think there’s something I’m groping towards here, which is, like, maybe they should do something else? Sure, you don’t get to be a power broker if you’re in exile. But I don’t see how they were ever going to be able to argue their way back. Even with the perfectly worded response it won’t suddenly make sense to trust them as mentors again; it’s always going to take time and concrete actions to regain confidence. If that means they have to do something other than connecting people with ideas, funding, and mentorship, maybe they should just get started on that other thing.
It at least allows people who now trust them again to choose to work with them and have things to point to as to why.
That may be, but they valued their community connections and the pay-related disputes suggest that their funding was limited.
To recap, I thought Ben’s original post was unfair even if he happened to be right about Nonlinear because of how chilling it is for everyone else to know they could be on blast if they try to do anything. It sounded like NL made mistakes, but they sounded like very typical mistakes of EA/rationalists when they try out new or unusual social arrangements. Since the attitude around me if you don’t like contracts you entered is generally “tough shit, get more agency”, I was surprised at the responses saying Alice and Chloe should have been protected from an arrangement they willing entered (that almost anyone but EAs/rationalists would have told them was a bad idea). It made me think Ben/Lightcone had a double standard toward an org they already didn’t like because of Emerson talking about Machiavellian strategies and marketing.
Idk if Emerson talking about libel was premature. Many have taken it as an obvious escalation, but it seems like he called it exactly right because NL’s reputation is all but destroyed. Maybe if he hadn’t said that Ben would have waited for their response before publishing, and it would have been better. I think it’s naive and irresponsible for Ben/Lightcone to act like a post like Ben’s was all-in-the-family or something and Emerson was the one getting too real. These forums are NL’s constituency. Damaging their reputation in EA is damaging the main reputation that matters.
I did think the original post was witch-hunty. Even if it was all true and balanced (just not able to share smoking guns) re:NL, the effect on readers is to communicate that smallish infractions will out you as not good enough or reveal your unacceptable character. I’m starting a new org and it terrified me that my inevitable mistakes would be unacceptable.“No mistakes allowed” seems like the worst norm imaginable for a community like ours. It actually is okay to make mistakes with org structure and employer-employee relationships and try again.
Where is “around you” where this is the norm? FWIW I think it’s a terrible one.
Rationality/the Bay. I heard it the most regarding polyamory. The good version of it is “people have the freedom to agree to things that could be bad for them or that might turn out bad for the average person”.
Reflecting a bit, I’ll admit that I liked it as a norm in my department in uni (“You want to take a class but don’t have the prerequisites? No problem, it’s your responsibility to understand, not ours”), but still think it has no place in broader society—and in personal and romantic relationships in particular.
In part based on Ben’s followup (which indicated a high level of care) and based on concerning aspects of this post discussed in other comments here, I’m persuaded that Ben’s original post was sufficiently fair (if one keeps in mind the disclaimer that the post was “not from a search to give a balanced picture”), and that most EA orgs don’t need to be afraid of unusual social arrangements as long as they’re written down and expectations are made clear.
(Edit: the discussion between spencerg and Habryka makes me think Ben’s writeup not only could have, but should have, been worded more carefully. Still, I agree with the above paragraph.)
FWIW, my model is also that the original post was received in a too witch-hunty manner, but also I don’t have any great ideas how to share the evidence to all the relevant parties without causing too much of a witch-hunt. I think all the specific statements that Ben made in his post were pretty well-calibrated (and still seem mostly right to me after reading through the evidence), so it’s not like the post called for a witch-hunt.
I’ve been thinking about whether there is some kind of informal court or arbitration system that would allow the social pressure here to be less driven by people trying to individually enact social enforcement, but by something that has more deliberation and moderation built-in, but I don’t yet have a blueprint for something that could work and also wouldn’t take thousands of hours.
If you have any concrete suggestions or edits for Ben’s post on what he could have done to make the effects be less witch-hunty, then I would be curious about that (though, to be clear, my overall assessment continues to be that working with Nonlinear is a bad idea, they should not have tables at EAG, should not receive central EA Funding, and young EAs should be reliable warned before engaging with them more, but like, not more than that. I don’t want people to try to actively harm Kat or Emerson, and I think it’s fine for them to work among themselves, build up an independent reputation and work on stuff they care about, and in as much as that happened, I am sad)
I’m surprised to hear you say this Habryka: “I think all the specific statements that Ben made in his post were pretty well-calibrated (and still seem mostly right to me after reading through the evidence)”
Do you think Ben was well calibrated/right when he made, for instance, these claims which Nonlinear has provided counter evidence for?
“She [Alice] 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. Alice eventually gave in and ate non-vegan food in the house” (from my reading of the evidence this is not close to accurate, and I believe Ben had access to the counter evidence at the time when he published)
“Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free” (from my reading of the evidence Nonlinear provided, it seems Alice was asked to buy ADHD medicine that they believed was legal to buy where she was, and then they told her never mind when she said it required a prescription)
“After being hired and flying out, Chloe was informed that on a daily basis their job would involve driving e.g. to get groceries when they were in different countries.” (my understanding from what I read was that she was told she could take taxis paid for by nonlinear, and it was more like twice per week not daily)
“In summary Alice spent a lot of her last 2 months with less than €1000 in her bank account, sometimes having to phone Emerson for immediate transfers to be able to cover medical costs when she was visiting doctors. At the time of her quitting she had €700 in her account, which was not enough to cover her bills at the end of the month, and left her quite scared. ” (my understanding is that, according to nonlinear, this was not accurate)
“Afterwards, I wrote up a paraphrase of their responses. I shared it with Emerson and he replied that it was a “Good summary!”” [implying that Emerson was saying his characterization was accurate] (my understanding was that part of Emerson’s message was not mentioned, and that Emerson believed Ben’s summary had serious inaccuracies)
Yes, indeed I think in all of these quotes Ben basically said pretty reasonable things that still seem reasonably accurate to me even after reading the whole appendix that Nonlinear provided.
You start with the one that I do think I made the biggest update on, though I also think most of the relevant evidence here was shared back during the original discussion. I am still kind of confused what happened here, and am hoping to dig into it, but I agree that there are some updates for me (and I assume others) here, and I currently think Alice’s summary is overall pretty misleading.
To be clear, in the quoted section Ben is summarizing what Alice told him, and Ben’s original post also directly includes this summary from Kat:
I think with both of these being listed, I am reasonably happy with the presentation and am glad that we included both sides on this.
You also say:
This is inaccurate. I don’t think there is any evidence that Ben had access to that doesn’t seem well-summarized by the two sections above. We had a direct report from Alice, which is accurately summarized in the first quote above, and an attempted rebuttal from Kat, which is accurately summarized in the second quote above. We did not have any screenshots or additional evidence that didn’t make it into the post.
Yep, this still seems accurate to me. As Kat has documented herself she asked Alice to bring Schedule 2 drugs across borders without prescription (whether you need a prescription in the country you buy it is irrelevant, what matters is whether you have one in the country you arrive in), something that can have quite substantial legal consequences (I almost certainly would feel pretty uncomfortable asking my employee to bring prescription medications across borders without appropriate prescription).
I also currently still think that requests for other more recreational drugs were made, and I don’t consider the evidence to have debunked that, and wouldn’t have phrased the original very differently based on the evidence provided (I am hoping to find more concrete evidence for requests for recreational drugs, though it’s hard since as I understand these requests were verbal, if made at all).
Again, the original post also contains this summary of Kat’s position:
This seems like a pretty good summary of what Nonlinear’s current position is, and so I feel pretty good about the details given here.
I don’t see any direct evidence for the daily vs. weekly claim, but I did update a bit on this dimension based on Kat directly claiming otherwise. My current best guess is that it was still multiple times a week, but not daily.
I do currently continue to believe that Chloe was pressured into driving without a license, and felt pressured to learn how to drive in the first place as part of her job. This kind of stuff is hard to arbitrate, and I don’t consider the evidence provided in the Nonlinear appendix here very compelling (it’s mostly just Kat asserting that she didn’t pressure her).
I currently feel a bit sad about the “daily” here, but would write roughly the same thing replacing it with “multiple times a week”.
In her comment, Chloe also explicitly says that getting taxis was hard, and often asking other people to drive her was the only option she saw, making me skeptical that the errands that she was expected to perform as part of her job were actually easily achievable via taxis:
I don’t currently see anything inaccurate in this paragraph.
I do think it’s currently sad that Ben’s post didn’t also mention Alice’s company, though my understanding is that she had made hard commitments to herself and her family to never withdraw any funds from that until it was properly self-sustaining, and had communicated those commitments to Kat and Emerson. It is still true that she did not have that money in her bank account in a direct way, and that she really didn’t want to withdraw that money for pretty reasonable reasons. I also think Nonlinear’s summary of Alice making $3000/mo from this company is inaccurate and off by a factor of 4x or 5x. My understanding is that Alice made less than $10k from this company throughout its whole existence (which is not very surprising, making money with that kind of company is very hard, especially if you are only spending a single day a week on it).
Nonlinear talks about the outstanding reimbursements, which Ben also directly included:
The “in part due to her strongly requesting it” part currently feels unclear to me, and I would probably say something slightly different given my current epistemic state. I genuinely believe that Alice was afraid and concerned that Nonlinear would withhold the €2900 from her, and it is clearly the case that she racked up $3000 worth of reimbursements on a $1000 dollar salary, which is pretty scary. The central point for this inclusion was to demonstrate the financial dependence. Saying instead “After she left she was paid back ~$3000 of outstanding reimbursements, which she was concerned Nonlinear might withhold from her or dispute being legitimate, which did help her financial situation” seems like it gets the same point across and captures my current epistemic state better.
I think it would have been better to say that she was paid back $3000 in outstanding reimbursements instead of salary, but I don’t think it makes a huge difference.
Yeah, I think it was a bad move to not include the follow-up of “some points still require clarification”, but to be clear, I did totally interpret Emerson’s email as saying it was basically a good summary. I think it’s still bad to not have included the next sentence, and I was glad that it was corrected in the comments at the time (and I also somewhat think Ben should have updated the post to clarify that point so the correction is more easily visible).
For context, here is Emerson’s message:
Given the agreement-votes on this comment at the time, other people seemed to agree with me that summarizing the above as just a “Good Summary” was a kind of understandable mistake to make, and that this email did not successfully convey that Emerson disagreed with the points in the summary as provided,
Overall, yeah, given the messiness of a situation like this, I still feel quite good about basically all the quotes that you highlighted. I have now read the whole appendix to this post, spending over 10 hours going through it, and I can’t find any clear rebuttal to almost any of what I consider the core claims in Ben’s post.
Again, I do think someone might point out some inferences together with evidence in the appendix that might make me think some of the information that we quoted from sources is inaccurate. Both memory is fallible, and I also totally think that both Chloe and Alice had strong feelings here that might have clouded their judgement and memory. But as it stands, having spent a lot of time, I overall genuinely expected Nonlinear to be able to present more counter-evidence than Nonlinear was actually capable of providing, and currently think that any aggregate statements Ben made about probabilities he assigns to various behaviors, and the epistemic statuses he attached to statements made by Alice and Chloe, to still be quite well-calibrated and to capture the situation quite well.
It has still been less than a week, and the appendix is really massive, so if someone has clear rebuttals of things Ben said in the post, especially things that are not quotes or paraphrasings of Alice, but things that Ben directly claimed were true or where he expressed his epistemic state, I would be very interested in that. I have found a bit, but overall not very much.
You say: “This is inaccurate. I don’t think there is any evidence that Ben had access to that doesn’t seem well-summarized by the two sections above. We had a direct report from Alice, which is accurately summarized in the first quote above, and an attempted rebuttal from Kat, which is accurately summarized in the second quote above. We did not have any screenshots or additional evidence that didn’t make it into the post.”
Actually, you are mistaken, Ben did have screenshots. I think you just didn’t know that he had them. I can send you proof that he had them via DM if you like.
Regarding this: “As Kat has documented herself, she asked Alice to bring Schedule 2 drugs across borders without prescription (whether you need a prescription in the country you buy it is irrelevant, what matters is whether you have one in the country you arrive in), something that can have quite substantial legal consequences (I almost certainly would feel pretty uncomfortable asking my employee to bring prescription medications across borders without appropriate prescription).”
It sounds like you’re saying this paragraph by Ben:
“Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free”
is an accurate characterization of this sentiment: she was asked to pick up ADHD medicine in a place where it was believed not to require a prescription, and bring it back to a place where it does require a prescription, but then was told not to worry about it when it was found that it does require a prescription where she was going to pick it up.
To me, the former does a really bad job of capturing the latter, sounding WAY worse ethically. But I’d be curious to know if others agree with me or if they think that Ben’s paragraph captured this in a fair way.
On most of the other points I mentioned, it seems you feel that Ben made mistakes or ommisions, which I agree with:
“I currently feel a bit sad about the “daily” here, but would write roughly the same thing replacing it with “multiple times a week”.”
“I do think it’s currently sad that Ben’s post didn’t also mention Alice’s company”
“Yeah, I think it was a bad move to not include the follow-up of “some points still require clarification”″
On the taxi situation, I can’t speak to what it is like to get taxis in all the areas they lived, though this is one of those things Ben could have checked rather easily by asking where they were that she couldn’t get cabs and trying to book a cab (I don’t believe he bothered to check, but correct me if I’m wrong). When I stayed with all of the involved parties for a few days: Alice, Chloe, Kat, Emerson, and Drew (which was not in Peurto Rico), I got taxis twice, and it was slightly annoying—I spent about 5-10 minutes explaining where exactly to meet me, but was able to successfully get taxis on both of those occasions. Of course, that was just in one place that they lived (I think they were in that location for a couple of weeks if I recall correctly), and it might have been harder in other places, but at least in that location, getting taxis was no more than a minor nuisance.
Update: since it’s so easy to verify the claim about taxis, I just went ahead and checked it myself. My understanding is that Chloe was talking about Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. I used google maps to find and then call three taxi companies in that region. The first two didn’t pick up. The third said to text them, which I did, and they gave me a quote for getting a taxi today to drive 40 minutes (which was $45). It took about 10 minutes of my time (and 20 minutes on the clock, since they took ~10 minutes to give me a quote).
I didn’t realize this earlier, but in their evidence doc, Nonlinear talks about a similar check they did: “Lastly, it was not complicated to get a taxi there. I quickly checked, because sometimes we are in places that are truly remote. But there were three taxi services in the area that could have picked her up or driven her there. I called one of them and they said it would cost $30 and they could come pick me up whenever. And one of the other places where we were living at the time, she literally had to book a taxi for me out there, so I know she knew how and that it was possible.
There just wasn’t Uber there, so she’d have to make a phone call to a taxi.”
I can’t tell if you think Alice gave Ben basically accurate information and didn’t leave out critically important details, or if you think she did leave out critically important details (or directly lied to Ben), but it didn’t matter because Ben’s post was justified regardless.
Sure! DMd you. I might also ping Ben, though want to mostly give him space and time to write a reply and not have to worry about stuff in the comments for now.
No, that’s not what I am saying. I am saying that that paragraph, combined with Kat’s paragraph is a pretty reasonable summary of the evidence, and I think overall I think was pretty good at capturing the gist of the story (like, the two conflicting stories capture my present epistemic state still pretty well, which hasn’t changed very much).
My current model is that Kat is understating the degree to which she was asking Alice to carry drugs across borders, and so your summary (which is basically just a summary of things Kat has said) is also not an accurate summary of my epistemic state.
My current epistemic state is something like “Kat did ask Alice to bring over substantial number of prescription drugs, and probably also some recreational drugs that were illegal to bring across the border. My guess is most of the requests of this type were made in voice. I think the pressure here was substantial enough that I would feel very uncomfortable doing this to an employee of mine, and where if I saw the whole interaction I would think it’s a quite substantial flag, but also that no one did anything so egregious that this thing alone should cause any major repercussions for anyone involved”.
Agree that my epistemic state on this point is also something close to this.
Summarized would be “something like asking her to bring the drugs probably happened, and if so was a mistake that I’d hope was learned from, but the major issue would be if she was pressured to do it, and I’m unsure if I trust the person reporting enough to decide either way without evidence.”
[Edit: I know this is probably a frustrating thing for others to read, but seems worth saying anyway… since making the above comment I’ve had private information shared with me that makes me more confident NL didn’t act in an abusive way regarding this particular issue.]
Ok, I pinged Spencer. He sent me screenshots of text messages he sent Ben that he sent ~2 hours before publication of the post (in the middle of the barrage of comms that Nonlinear was firing off at the time, which included the libel threats), and which Kat posted to the comment thread less than 48 hours after the messages were sent to Ben.
I stand by my summary that everything Ben knew at the time of writing the post, made it into the post. Of course if you send something 2 hours before the post is published, late at night, it’s not going to make it into the post (but it might very well make it into a comment, which it did).
Ben made a bunch of other changes the day of publication. I know that because I pointed out errors in his post that day, and he was correcting them based on me pointing them out (e.g., all of his original quotes from glassdoor that he claimed were about Emerson were not actually about Emerson, which he didn’t realize until I pointed it out, and then he rushed to find new quotes to correct it). I’m sure he had a lot on his mind at that time, so I don’t think it’s egregious that he didn’t add mention of the fact that he had screen shot counter evidence about the “no food while sick stuff”, but it clearly seems to me to be a mistake on his part to not adjust the post or at least acknowledge it in the post. And I know he received the screenshots because he acknowledged getting them. You’re saying it made it into a comment as though Ben gets credit for that—but wasn’t it Kat who posted that comment? He also chose to rush the post out that night despite knowing there was counter evidence. I was honestly shocked he was trying to rush the post out that night because of all the errors I was finding in his post, which I expressed to Ben that day.
Update: I only just saw this point you made, including here for context and because it helps answer what I said: “since publishing this post required coordinating with many (5-10) external sources and witnesses, with many of them having a strong preference for a concrete time for the post to be published and they can plan around, so they can get ready for any potential retaliation and fallout. “
Update 2: “Spencer and Nonlinear knew the claims we were planning to put into the post on this matter roughly a week in-advance.” I’m not sure what you’re basing this on, but this is not accurate. I saw the post on Sept 6 for the first time and Ben published it early morning of Sept 7. During that short gap I sought to help him correct some errors in the post, which he did.
Update 3: the post was indeed being edited in meaningful ways on Sept 6, I know because I was helping Ben identify mistakes he had made and he was making changes based on that (such as the glass door misattribution)
Sorry, I had assumed that Nonlinear had shared with you the document we shared with them before publication of the post. My Slack records indicate Ben had two calls with you in the week before publication, and my guess based on the feedback I see from you paraphrased and copied in the Slack, is that you were aware of the claims in the post.
I might be wrong here and the Slack records could just align in a kind of confusing way (I can’t find the date of your first call with Ben, but am confident there was one more than 24 hours before publication), in which case I apologize.
Yes, Ben was making changes the day of the publication, I don’t think I said otherwise?
I also think sending something 2 hours before publication is again different from that (like clearly we can at least agree that if you had sent it 15 minutes before the publication time that it would not have been reasonable to say that Ben had access to information during the writing of the post that didn’t make it into the post?).
I really would not describe the post as being “rushed out”. The post had been worked on for over 1000 hours. I also think you are overstating “all the errors you were pointing out”. You pointed out two things which to me still seem relatively minor.
I think if Kat hadn’t posted the screenshots in a comment, Ben would have left a comment or edited the post. We really tried pretty hard to include anything that was sent to us, and I think Ben managed to include a lot of information and epistemic nuance in the post, while still maintaining the basics of readability and clarity.
Is it just me or does the number keep going up with every retelling?
When we did a postmortem on it, somewhat over 1000 hours is how high the total staff cost seemed to us, and that was a few months ago.
I think it’s totally plausible that in a few places I or someone else on the team used a lower number that they felt more confident in. In-general the structure of “over X” is something I usually use when I am not sure about X, but want to give a quick lower bound that allows me to move ahead with the argument, so it seems totally possible that in another context I would have said “multiple hundreds of hours” or “300+” hours or something like that, because that was enough to prove the point at hand.
Edit: Oh, I see the links now, didn’t see them when I first wrote the comment.
I think the key difference with that quote and my number is that it just includes Ben’s time, as opposed to total staff time. For example, it omits work done by anyone else on the team (which roughly doubles the total amount of time spent, spread across me, Robert and Ruby), as well as others who we’ve brought on board to help with the post (we worked with 2-3 external collaborators who ended up pairing with Ben for multiple weeks).
My guess is also Ben’s number is a bit low for his own time spent on it, though I think we are now getting into definitions of what counts as “working on it”. We don’t have detailed time tracking, so this is a bit hard to operationalize, but my guess is if you added up all the staff time of Lightcone staff and external collaborators, and removed the project of writing the Nonlinear post, you would indeed end up with somewhat more than a thousand hours of additional free time across those people.
Thanks. I didn’t mean my comment to come across as a “gotcha” question fwiw (not saying that you said it was a gotcha question, but I realized after I commented that it’d be a reasonable interpretation of my comment).
For what it’s worth, I find it extremely plausible that a post like this both took an inordinately large amount of time, and that people will systematically underestimate how much it took before they started doing more accurate time-tracking.
It does seem very sad that the voting on this post seems a bit broken (it also seemed broken on the original Nonlinear post). Like, do people think I am lying about the amount of hours it took? I would be happy to provide the data that I have, or have someone else who is more independent to the Lightcone team provide an estimate. It seems very weird to downvote an answer to a straightforward question like that.
Hmm, well Ben said “(for me) a 100-200 hour investigation” in the first post, then said he spent “~320 hours” in the second. Maybe people thought you should’ve addressed that discrepancy?️ Edit: the alternative―some don’t like your broader stance and are clicking disagree on everything. Speaking of which, I wonder if you updated based on Spencer’s points?
Apologies, that was my fault. I wrote the comment and then I realized that I was demonstrating poor reasoning transparency, so then I hunted down the relevant links. My guess of chronology was that I had the hyperlinks added in after you started commenting, but before your reply was visible.
Sorry if that burned extra time on your end. :)
Ah, cool, I was really surprised when I saw the links on refresh, but they fit so naturally into the comment that I thought they clearly must have been there in the first place.
No worries, it cost me like 3 minutes.
This would make sense to me if Ben had been working to an external deadline, but instead this is directly downstream from Ben’s choice to allocate very little time to draft review and ensuring he had his facts right. It sounds like Spencer sent these text messages <24hr after being sent the draft; how quickly would he have needed to turn around his review to count?
To be clear, we were working to a substantial degree to an external deadline, since publishing this post required coordinating with many (5-10) external sources and witnesses, with many of them having a strong preference for a concrete time for the post to be published and they can plan around, so they can get ready for any potential retaliation and fallout.
There was wiggle room in that date and time, but by the time Spencer sent this, the post and publish-date was really quite locked in.
I think 24 hours before publication would have been enough to include them. Maybe even 12 hours. As I mentioned in other places, we did send Nonlinear (and Spencer) a list of the relevant claims in the final post, including this one, so I think the fact that the literal draft was only shared 24 hours in advance is irrelevant. Spencer and Nonlinear knew the claims we were planning to put into the post on this matter roughly a week in-advance.
For example, in the call that Nonlinear cancelled with us a day before publication, that would have been a pretty good time to share such evidence with us, and if they had given additional evidence then, it would have made it into the post.
But separately from that, I am not sure what you mean by “count”. Spencer claimed that “we had screenshots that didn’t make it into the post”. I think a reasonable reader would infer from that when the post was being written, we had access to those screenshots. By the time Spencer sent these screenshots, the post was no longer being written in any meaningful way.
I don’t really see how this is a defense. The fact that you have promised some third parties to do X does not justify you in doing X if X would otherwise not be morally acceptable. And publishing harmful statements about someone that you have good reason to think are false does not seem morally acceptable.
Yes, this does seem like deciding in advance what side you’re on and who deserves consideration like determining when the post goes up.
It is a defense that in as much as I think anyone working on a post similar to this, mostly independently of skill level, would end up having to make promises to sources of this type, in order to be able to share concerning information publicly.
Of course, if you think posts of this whole reference class are bad, and it was bad for us to even attempt to make a post that tries to publicize the extensive rumors and concerns that we heard about Nonlinear, then I think it’s not a defense.
But if you think people should attempt to spread that kind of information and share it with more parties, then I think this will somewhat inevitable come with constraints like having to keep publication deadlines and coordinating the many stakeholders involved in such a thing.
Like, what is the alternative that you propose we should have done instead? Not made any promises to our sources at all about doing things that protect them from retaliation and limiting the costs on them? I think in that case you don’t get to talk to sources, or you only get to do it for a bit as people get burned and hurt and stop talking to you.
I am pretty sure Ben has published no harmful statements about someone that he thought were false. Indeed, as I have said many times, he seems to have been exceptionally careful with the epistemic states he attached to his statements in his post.
I’m well aware of the difficulties of balancing competing stakeholders giving you feedback late on posts and trying to hit publication timing targets. I think you had several valid options:
Never make commitments about publication date and time in the first place.
Make commitments, but be clear they are provisional. When you receive this information, email your sources saying “hey guys, really sorry but we just received some last-minute info that we need to update on. We’ll circle back to coordinate a new launch date that works for you.”
Give Spencer a reasonable deadline to respond, committing to take into account feedback received before this deadline.
Delete that section and publish on the original schedule.
Edit the section and publish on the original schedule.
I mean, to be clear, we did this the first time Nonlinear disputed the relevant section.
I think this section is really quite clear. We have one report from Alice saying that she quit being vegan. We directly include, in the next paragraph, the fact that Nonlinear disputes this. I really don’t think we misled anyone. The screenshots sent did not actually materially change anything in the paragraphs above, indeed both of the paragraphs are still fully accurate (and in as much as Alice claimed that she did not get food while indeed getting food, that is IMO an important part of the story that seems important for other people to be able to cross-check).
I think the choice of “you have some sources, you cite the sources while being really quite clear that you don’t fully trust your sources, and when a thing gets directly disputed by another source you say that directly” is a reasonable thing to do. Again, as I’ve said an enormous number of times, we never had an intention of fully litigating all of these claims before publication, which would have been completely infeasible time-wise.
The alternative to Ben’s post would have probably been a series of fully anonymous posts with extremely vague high-level accusations that would have been extremely hard to respond to. We tried to make the claims concrete and provide an interface to aggregate information at all.
Like, what kind of edit would you have preferred us to do instead of the above?
I strongly disagree. Alice’s and Nonlinear’s perspectives are portrayed with very different implicit levels of confidence in those paragraphs. Alice’s perspective is stated as a fact—“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food,” not “Alice says nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food.” In contrast, Nonlinear’s perspective is shared as “[Nonlinear] says [x].”
I think most readers who trust Ben to be truthful would assume, from the way those paragraphs were worded, that Alice had much better evidence to support her claims, and that Nonlinear was doing some slightly deceitful reputational management by countering them. But that isn’t what turned out to be the case:
Nonlinear has evidence that on December 15, they had oatmeal, peanuts, almonds, prunes, tomatoes, cereal, an orange, mixed nuts, and quinoa (which Kat offered to cook) in the house.
On the same day, Kat had successfully purchased mashed potatoes for Alice.
On the next day, they apparently went out and purchased both Panda Express vegan noodles and vegan burgers for Alice.
At some point, Emerson went out and tried to purchase Alice more food despite his knee injury, but he couldn’t find the very specific items she requested.
Then, on December 18, it looks like Alice’s first non-vegan meal was a vegetarian pizza she ordered (rather than non-vegan food already in the house). It looks like she ordered it right after Kat reminded her that they already had vegan noodles in the fridge.
On top of all of this, apparently everybody in the house was either sick or injured, but Ben’s post only mentions that Alice was sick.
It seems that Alice/Ben have no evidence to counter any of the points above.
So the original claim that was stated as fact (“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food”) seems very wrong. Which is sad, because it’s a very serious accusation that most people would assume was not made lightly.
Yeah, sorry, I think I was too strong in my language above, though my sense is you are also interpreting my answer to be about a somewhat different question than the one I perceived Larks as asking. To clarify where I think we are on the same page: I am pretty unhappy about that section, and wouldn’t ask Ben to write something different given what I believe today.
The thing I was responding to was whether we misrepresented the evidence that we did have at the time.
On that topic, I do think it was a mistake to omit as many of the “Alice/Chloe claims that X” in the post as we did, and fall back into a neutral third-party way of summarizing the claims, and given that we did, I think it makes sense to hold Ben and Lightcone more responsible for the veracity of statements that did not include an explicit “Alice/Chloe alleges X”.
I also think that there is a pretty reasonable case to be made that we should have waited longer on getting more evidence from Nonlinear. I felt conflicted on this topic then, and feel conflicted now. I really hate that the situation we were in made it quite hard for us to wait longer for Nonlinear to respond to us. I am still not fully sure whether I would wait if I was in this situation again, since the considerations against waiting were also quite strong, though overall I am leaning slightly that waiting would have been the better option (I do not think this forgives or excuses Nonlinear’s attempts at intimidation and threats of retaliation).
However, overall on the question of “did we accurately summarize the evidence available to us”, I think Ben’s post and this section is doing pretty well.
I agree that we frame Alice and Chloe’s evidence as more trustworthy, and in-aggregate, across the whole post, I stand behind that framing, in that I think Alice and Chloe are substantially more reliable sources of evidence than Kat and Emerson. I agree that in this situation I think this went the wrong way around and it looks to me like the vegan food situation seems like it was represented to us in a substantially misleading way, and I am still hoping for me or Ben to follow up with Alice on this topic and figure out whether I am missing something. However, I think on-average the framing of the post was not misleading about the balance of evidence that we had received to that point (including accounting for expected future evidence Nonlinear that we expected Nonlinear might provide).
Some smaller nitpicks on your comment:
It’s true that we don’t share Nonlinear’s perspective with the same authority as Alice and Chloe’s. We did also include a summary directly written from their perspective, which I do think helps:
Another quick comment:
I would give people some time before concluding that. While Ben (and I) are trying really hard to not be dragged into a full-on follow-up investigation of this, I do expect there will be some kind of response to this which includes procuring more evidence. I personally do feel pretty convinced on this point, but I am not updating on Alice or Ben not providing more evidence in coming to that conclusion, since they haven’t responded to anything so far, and I do know that many of the claims in the OP and associated appendix are inaccurate, and those also haven’t been responded to yet (it includes many claims about what Ben believes or what the process of writing Ben’s original post was like, which I am very confident are inaccurate).
Given Chloe is not involved in this claim, do you also stand behind the framing that Alice is more reliable than Kat/Emerson?
I am substantially less confident in that claim, though yeah, I would still overall say I believe it (it’s not super well-operationalized so not super clear what a probability would mean, but like, I guess I am at ~80% that if I knew all the facts and had arbitrary insight into Alice’s, Kat’s and Emersons’ life that I would overall expect Alice to be reporting more accurately than Kat and Emerson)
I’m not sure if Spencer sent you all the screenshots or just some of them, but something along the lines of:
The screenshot Ben received at the time is one of the ones that Kat linked in this comment:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/32LMQsjEMm6NK2GTH/sharing-information-about-nonlinear?commentId=Ejbe8ukX6FhrfRv5C
Importantly the screenshot only covered events on December 15th.
Here is the relevant screenshot:
Kelsey Piper in the thread summarizes these screenshots (together with some other screenshots that Kat shared) as follows:
My guess is this aligned with Ben’s interpretation at the time. The screenshots were relevant evidence, but they did not directly disprove anything in the original article.
Kat then shared further screenshots in the comments, which importantly were not shared with Ben beforehand (unless Spencer failed to forward them to me in my DM with him yesterday), that demonstrated that on the next day Kat did successfully bring her food.
However, the story, in the above screenshot, on December 15th, is that indeed Alice did not get food, despite her requesting it. The screenshots that Spencer sent us appear to fail to include the most relevant part of the conversation, which is that they did indeed fail to get her vegan food
that dayduring that trip.(Edit: Kat disputes this below, sharing some additional screenshots that seem to show that Kat did get food for Alice later that day, which seems important to get right. Though I don’t think Spencer’s screenshot demonstrated this).
Here are the edits I currently agree would have been better, though I think they are minor enough that I don’t currently see it as a major error to not have included them:
I really encourage you to look at the screenshots, Kelsey’s summary, and Kat’s original comment on the Nonlinear post and explain to me how these screenshots falsify part of the post. As we later received more screenshots, it seems like we actually received confirmation that the conversation on that date did indeed not result in Alice getting food.
(Edit: Kat shares some additional screenshots below that do seem to show Alice got food on the 15th, though not from the restaurant trip that was talked about in the screenshot Spencer sent us)
I’m a little bit confused about Kelsey’s summary—it contains a line about rejecting burgers because they were ‘fast food’ that doesn’t seem to be in the original. So I don’t think it can reflect Ben’s state of mind in that way.
If you only had the one screenshot (9:53 to 10:28 timestamps), I agree that you can’t infer that Kat cooked for ‘Alice’, nor is there proof that the discussed burger trip actually took place, though I think they strongly imply it will—certainly Alice seems to think it has been agreed and will occur. However, I find your comment about 15th vs 16th unconvincing because ‘Alice’ explicitly claims a 2 day duration, so food the next day would also contradict this (assuming the 15th is the first day).
Here is another possible version that reflects just the one screenshot:
I think my key objections to the original version is asserts as fact that Nonlinear refused to get her food, vs this being an unverified claim, and that it does not reflect that NonLinear didn’t merely dispute it, they offered evidence.
Just to be clear, that burger trip did indeed not happen that day, if I understand it correctly. What instead happened is that Kat went out a few hours later and got Alice mashed potatoes at a store (which is not really hinted at at all in the screenshots).
Yeah, I think this version is reasonable and I would have preferred to post this version (and somewhat think that we should have updated it ASAP, even after publication).
This is false. Alice got food on December 15th. She got food 2.5 hours after she asked. Actually, she never asked me, I just offered when it seemed like she was struggling.
It says December 16 at 12:14am because I was in Europe at the time, so it’s showing the European time zone. It was Dec 15 at 7:13pm in the local time when this occurred.
She brought up being hungry at 4:53pm. I immediately offered to cook her the food in the house. When she didn’t want any of the food in the house or food from any non-fast food restaurant within a 12 minute drive of home, I went out, while sick myself, and got and cooked her food. The only vegan food that fit her criteria in the store.
The only complaint she can legitimately say is that we did not get her Panda Express as fast as she would have liked (we got it for her the next day). She waited 2.5 hours for food. And she could have had it sooner if she’d wanted any of the food in the house, which she usually ate nearly daily and enjoyed. She just didn’t want that food. She wanted fast food and didn’t get it as fast as she preferred.
I’m currently back on the same time zone, so here’s the same screenshot, but showing the right time zone dates and times
Thank you! This definitely seems like highly relevant evidence.
Can you clarify whether Kelsey’s summary of the December 15th conversation is accurate or inaccurate? It’s totally possible that I am misreading the screenshots, though my best interpretation was indeed the interpretation that Kelsey made in the screenshots.
I would be happy to correct the statement above if I am wrong here.
I do think this issue seems somewhat separate from the question of “did the screenshots that were shared with us materially affect the things Ben wrote?”.
To be clear, this is relevant in as much as the original screenshot was evidence of there being more things you could share here, though I currently maintain that I don’t think the screenshots that were shared with us showed any material error (given that Kelsey also walked away with the same impression of them being consistent).
I also totally care about just setting the record straight and getting the object-level issue right here, and in as much as there isn’t anything very weird going on with the screenshots you sent, I think you provided pretty decent proof here and am changing my mind on the December 15th issue (and think if you had shared those screenshots with us instead, I think it’s pretty likely Ben would have somehow made sure that they made it into the post).
Kelsey’s summary was wrong in a number of important ways.
She missed the fact that we did indeed succeed in getting her vegan food (I found at the nearby store, despite being sick myself). 2.5 hours after we first offered. And it would have been faster if she’d wanted any of the food in the house, or chosen a restaurant that had vegan options for Emerson and Drew to go to.
It doesn’t mention the vegan food that was in the house already that I offered to cook (Alice ate oatmeal almost every day and she loved quinoa. Later when I cooked some up for her, she loved it, like usual, cause quinoa is the Queen of All Foods).
It doesn’t mention that Drew said he would go to any restaurant within a 12 minute drive from our place and she just… didn’t choose a restaurant. She only wanted fast food. So they ended up choosing a restaurant that didn’t happen to have vegan options aside from the usual fries.
A quick look at Google Maps shows that there was over 20 restaurants that fit that criteria in the area. It wasn’t restrictive at all.
She frames it as they didn’t get her the food she wanted “because they [didn’t] want to get fast food.” It’s important to note that Emerson and Drew also are people whose preferences matter. Just because Alice is sick doesn’t mean everybody has to drop their own needs and preferences to get her the very particular food she wants.
She frames it as Emerson and Drew being somehow inconsiderate and shallow, when you could just as easily frame it as Alice not considering the needs or preferences of anybody but herself, expecting everybody to drop everything and go out of their way so she can get the very specific fast food she wants. Then, when she doesn’t get exactly what she wants as fast as she wants, she goes around telling lies about what happened to destroy a charity (e.g. nobody willing to get her food)
As for what Ben knew before publishing, if you look at that screenshot, you can see that:
Drew has offered to pick her up food (“Drew suggested he could otherwise pick up stuff”)
Me and Emerson offered to pick her up food (“Me and Emerson can do it if he can’t”)
I offered to cook her the food in the house (“Could make you some quinoa”)
Ben said in his post that “nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food”. This is absolutely false. Ben had seen this screenshot clearly showing that we were willing to go out and get her food.
Note that she didn’t even ask for food. I just offered because I could see she was in need (“want me to order food?”)
It also said “so she barely ate for 2 days”. It shows in the messages that there was vegan food in the house. So that was clearly not the reason she didn’t eat for days.
She had plenty of options but she wanted fast food in particular.
We got her her first choice of fast food the very next day (remember, she only started asking for food in the evening the previous day. It was also hard to get stuff for her. This was our first experience with covid and we were trying to figure out how to manage it, try to have it not spread, etc etc. It was quite a stressful and overwhelming time.).
Because she didn’t get a very particular fast food as fast as she wanted, she interpreted this as us being heartless people who wouldn’t take care of a sick person in need. She told Ben a false and misleading story about us not being willing to go out and get food for her.
I’m waiting for Ben, or someone else, to make a table of claims, counter claims, and what the evidence shows. Because nonlinear providing evidence that doesn’t support their claims seems to be a common occurance.
Just to give a new example,Kat screenshots herselfreplying “mediating! Appreciate people not talking to loud on the way back[...] ” here, to provide evidence supporting that there was not a substantial discussion that occurred. However, I can only interpret the use of “mediating!” to indicate that there was in-fact a substantial amount of discussion at play.Edit: Retracted as correctly pointed out by @Sean_o_h , I read meditation as mediation.
Uh, the word in that screenshot is “meditating”. She was asking people to not talk too loudly while she was meditating.
That is correct.
Oh thanks for flagging, I will retract it now
Can you clarify what you mean by “very little time”? Haybrka reports spending 1000+ staff hours, and even Ben’s much more conservative estimate of 100-200 hours doesn’t feel fair to me to describe as “very little”
Sorry, I’m trying to talk about the amount of time for ‘adversarial’ fact checking: when Nonlinear knew the accusations and could provide specific counter evidence. I agree he put a ton of time into the project overall.
Just a note that standard practice on these kinds of jobs is that you get a credit card to make purchases with, and are never using your own money that is later reimbursed.
A big reason for this is the massive mismatch in what money is worth. Employers might think covering a $100 grocery trip until you get reimbursed is not a big deal, but to an employee that might have been their own food money or rent.
The standard answer is you either let your employee borrow your credit card, or you give them their own credit card. You can put a lower limit on it to protect yourself, and can also see the credit card statement (which can be paired with receipts if you don’t trust them not to add on extras. I was always careful that my families get all the receipts but they generally just threw them away because they trusted me)
My model has been there should be social enforcement for both poor epistemic practices and rude/unkind communication.
I have been an active commenter in both posts, with a goal of social pressure in mind (i.e. providing accountability and a social pressure to not behave inappropriately towards/with your employees).
I’d be interested to hear meta level criticisms of my approach (e.g. “social pressure is inherently bad”). Because, whilst I don’t want witch hunting that employs poor epistemic practices, I do think social pressure plays an important role in stabilising communities. Perhaps someone can change my mind on this? If you do change my mind, I’ll certainly comment a lot less.
To me it seems like everyone individually applying social pressure is hard to calibrate. Oli seems to be saying that he and Ben did not intend the level of social consequences NL has felt based on what they shared, but rather an update that NL shoudn’t be a trusted EA org. I think that it’s hard to control the impression that people will get when you provide a lot of evidence even if it’s all relatively minor, and almost impossible to control snowballing dynamics in comment sections and on social media when people fear being judged for the wrong reaction, so it just might not be possible for a post like Ben’s to received in a calibrated way.
This sounds right, but the counterfactual (no social accountability) seems worse to me, so I am operating on the assumption it’s a necessary evil.
I live high trust country, which has very little of this social accountability, i.e. if someone does something potentially rude or unacceptable in public, they are given the benefit of the doubt. However, I expect this works because others are employed, full time, to hold people accountable. I.e. police officers, ticket inspectors, traffic wardens. I don’t think we have this in the wider Effective Altruism community right now.
I think this comment will be frustrating for you and is not high quality. Feel free to disagree, I’m including it because I think it’s possible many people (or at least some?) will feel wary of this post early on and it might not be clear why. In my opinion, including a photo section was surprising and came across as near completely misunderstanding the nature of Ben’s post. It is going to make it a bit hard to read any further with even consideration (edit: for me personally, but I’ll just take a break and come back or something). Basically, without any claim on what happened, I don’t think anyone suspects “isolated or poor environment” to mean, “absence of group photos in which [claimed] isolated person is at a really pretty pool or beach doing pool yoga.” And if someone is psychologically distressed, whether you believe this to be a misunderstanding or maliciously exaggerated, it feels like a really icky move to start posting pictures that add no substance, even with faces blurred, with the caption “s’mores”, etc.
In addition to the overall tone of this post being generally unprofessional.
Yeah, I don’t necessarily mind an informal tone. But the reality is, I read [edit: a bit of] the appendix doc and I’m thinking, “I would really not want to be managed by this team and would be very stressed if my friends were being managed by them. For an organisation, this is really dysfunctional.” And not in an, “understandably risky experiment gone wrong” kind of way, which some people are thinking about this as, but in a, “systematically questionable judgement as a manager” way. Although there may be good spin-off convos around, “how risky orgs should be” and stuff. And maybe the point of this post isn’t to say, “nonlinear did a reasonably sufficient job managing employees and can expect to do so in the future” but rather, “I feel slandered and lied about and I want to share my perspective.”
I’ll commit to not commenting more now unless I’ve gotten something really wrong or it’s really necessary or something :’)
I can see where you’re coming from. The photos on their own certainly don’t prove they weren’t isolated. However, it does provide evidence on top of the extensive other evidence (e.g. living/working apart from us 50% of the time, Chloe’s exit interview saying how much she loved meeting so many people, us being in EA hubs a large fraction of the time, screenshots of them hanging out with others in different countries, etc etc).
As for showcasing how they were not poor, the main part of their compensation was room and board and travel, and I think the photos provide some evidence that they were not poor. Of course, we also share a lot of other information proving this.
But you see how they provide approximately no additional evidence, right? Because photos provide no account for how long someone was away or not away, etc. Basically, in both Alice/Chloe’s world and your world, these photos can exist. One of them is just Alice sitting on a beach chair? And to the second point, I don’t believe the claim was that the environment was materially poor (please tell me if I’m wrong).
The first set of photos is to provide some (but certainly not conclusive) evidence that they were not poor or isolated.
The second set of photos is in the section as some evidence that this job would have been a dream job for many people. And I think working on a tropical beach with a dog would be the dream for many.
Since Frances is not commenting more:
This rhetorical strategy is analogous to a prosecutor showing smiling photos of a couple on vacation to argue that he couldn’t have possibly murdered her, or showing flirty texts between a man and woman to argue that he couldn’t have raped her, etc. This is a bad rhetorical strategy when prosecutors use it—and it’s a bad rhetorical strategy here—because it perpetuates misinformation about what abusive relationships look like; namely, that they are uniformly bad, with no happy moments or mitigating qualities.
As anyone who has been in an abusive relationship will tell you, this is rarely what abuse looks like. And you insinuating that Chloe and Alice are lying because there were happy-appearing moments is exactly the kind of thing that makes many victims afraid to come forward.
To be clear: I do not think these photos provide any evidence against the allegations in Ben’s post because no one is contesting that the group hung out in tropical locations. Additionally, having hung out in tropical locations is entirely compatible with the allegations made in the initial post. Ironically, this rhetorical strategy—the photos, the assertion that this was a “dream job”—strikes me as eerily similar to the job ad linked in Ben’s original post (https://web.archive.org/web/20211022160447/https://www.nonlinear.org/operations.html). Probably this did seem like a dream job, which is presumably why Chloe and Alice accepted it. And what’s at issue now is their claim that it wasn’t, a point that these photos do nothing to refute.
I think you meant a defense attorney, not a prosecutor.
We are not using the photos to disprove all allegations made against us. We shared them to provide some (but not all) evidence that they were a) not poor and b) not isolated.
They provide some evidence that they were not poor. The bulk of their compensation was room and board, and we show photos of them living in luxurious conditions. It’s less strong evidence that they weren’t isolated, but it is some evidence.
We also proceed to provide hundreds of pages of evidence showing that this was not a one-off thing, but the default.
I’d like to reiterate that I am disappointed that we’ve provided hundreds of pages of evidence that they lied to you and misled you and have shown no remorse or attempts to improve their behavior, but people are focusing on how they don’t like our tone or our pictures.
I think you cannot and should not expect people to read hundreds of pages about this, as you acknowledge. And I am not going to. The reason I reacted to the photos is just that this is not the kind of evidence an actor acting in good faith typically invokes because: 1) their arguments should speak for themselves, such that this kind of vibes-based attack is rendered unnecessary and 2) this kind of evidence is typically used to wrongly and unfairly undermine an accuser’s credibility. In short, this isn’t an issue of “disliking your tone or pictures,” because the pictures (irrelevant, wrongly biasing) and tone (retaliatory, unapologetic) provide important information about the kind of organization nonlinear is, and what it was like to work there, which is a central part of what is at issue.
I think I’m confused by the claim that the written evidence without the picture evidence would be better than the written + pictures.
To me the photos are only manipulative if they are on their own.
If someone chooses not to read the evidence and only focus on the pictures, then feels manipulated by that...
I don’t really know what to say to that. I am confused by how this is in any way NL’s fault, and why it should imply that less evidence overall would be better.
I think that if we were all completely rational, you’d be right. But we’re not, and I think the photos were included in an attempt to exploit that fact.
If the post just argued “there were s’mores and iguanas; Chloe and Alice must be lying about how bad their experience was!” my brain would go “that argument sucks; obviously people can be unhappy in a land of iguanas.” But the photos hijack my reasoning by conjuring a vivid image of a tropical paradise (brain: “hm, this looks pretty nice! It’s cold here and I wish I was there right now! Maybe this was an awesome job.”)
The reason this is bad is because the photos don’t tell us anything relevant that we didn’t already know; we knew they were hanging out in tropical places and the presence of s’mores has zero bearing on the veracity of Chloe and Alice’s claims. No one ever disputed whether there were s’mores and there having been s’mores is entirely compatible with this job having been a nightmare. The pictures just undermine my ability to immediately recognize that fact.
While I disagree that the photos are hijacking “our” irrationality, I could be persuaded that the photos are harmful toward some people’s, maybe even most people’s, general epistemics around issues like this. But the solution to that seems to me to be people working on improving how their epistemics work, not asking for less evidence to avoid becoming confused?
To me the photos are evidence of a particular, specific set of things. Whether anyone “disputed” those things is irrelevant to me; I have more information than I did without them, and also the photos prevent people from disputing those specific things going forward, or just insinuating or implying otherwise.
(Which, for the record, I think are somewhat entangled in the overall accusations being made and the emotional vibe I picked up from people’s reactions to Ben’s post)
Those specific things are absolutely not exclusive with “this was a nightmare job with abusive people.” I agree that’s a separate thing that can totally co-exist with the job being in other ways a “dream job that many people would enjoy for the experiences it provides.”
If the photos undermines some people’s ability to recognize that it might have also been a nightmare in addition to that reality… again, I’m open to that being an outcome most people will experience, but I don’t think the answer is for NL to provide less evidence overall.
It’s certainly not how I want to be treated when I’m trying to get a clearer picture of a complex situation.
This is just a weird way to think about evidence, imo. I think the original post would’ve been more useful and persuasive (and generated better discourse) if it had been 1/5th as long. Throwing evidence—even high-quality evidence—at people does not always make them reason better, and often makes them reason worse. (I also don’t think it works here to say “just have better epistemics!” because (a) one important sense in which we’re all boundedly rational is that our ability to process information well decreases as the volume of information increases and (b) a writer acting in good faith—who wants you to reach the right conclusions—should account for this in how they present information.)
Critically, as previously stated, I think the photos constitute particularly poor evidence—they have a very low “provides useful information:how likely are they to sway people in ways that are irrational” ratio. This is why my comment wasn’t just “shorten your post so people can understand it better,” but rather “I think these photos will lead to vibes-based reasoning.” (This is also why prosecutors etc etc use this kind of evidence; it’s meant to make the jury think “aw they look so happy together! He couldn’t have possibly done that,” when in reality, the photo of the smiling couple on vacation has ~0 bearing on whether he murdered her.)
I agree in principle with the things you’re saying here. I disagree with these particulars because I disagree that the photos are poor evidence of anything relevant. The only issue at play here is NOT whether NL was abusive, or else I would agree with you.
To be more specific, the photos provide evidence of a unique kind for things like “was this job the kind of job that it’s reasonable to sell as ~$75k in compensation.”
Again, this can be true in addition to it ending up being an abusive environment. But when the discourse around this topic also includes things like “Jobs like this are just fundamentally bad and wrong and predatory etc, and we shouldn’t trust adults to be agentic enough to agree to them and not quit if they dislike them, etc”...
Or when people have takeaways from Alice and Chloe’s assertions that they were were treated basically like Cinderella while the NL leadership got to enjoy the tropical paradise themselves...
I think more evidence is better, yeah. NL is not just trying to counter some claims in some platonic ideal realm of simple facts, they’re fighting a number of narrative battles here, many of them vibes based.
I get that you’re saying this particular move backfired on that level for you, and I’m open to the idea that it was a “strategic” mistake.
But my take is that we are all imperfect reasoners whose epistemics have flaws in them and also that we can improve them, and I have yet to be in a situation where I feel like less information would have been better for me than more so long as that information is relevant, which may in fact be our main crux of disagreement here.
I’m disappointed that much of this document involves attacking the people who’ve accused you of harmful actions, in place of a focus on disputing the evidence they provided (I appreciate that you also do the latter). I also really bounce off the distraction tactics at play here, where you encourage the reader to turn their attention back to the world’s problems. It doesn’t seem like you’ve reflected carefully and calmly about this situation; I don’t see many places where you admit to making mistakes and it doesn’t seem like you’re willing to take ownership of this situation at all.
I don’t have time to engage with all the evidence here, but even if I came away convinced that all of the original claims provided by Ben weren’t backed up, I still feel really uneasy about Nonlinear; uneasy about your work culture, uneasy about how you communicate and argue, and alarmed at how forcefully you attack people who criticise you.
The vast majority of what they gave is disputing the evidence. There is a whole 135 pages of basically nothing but that. You then even refer to it saying:
How can both these be true at once? Either it’s a lot so you don’t have time to go through it all or they haven’t done much in which case you should be able to spend some time looking at it?
I think it’s not actually accurate to say that
as it’s constantly interspersed with stuff like how great it is to work in a hot tub.
I don’t think I, as a reader, am obliged to review all the evidence here and adjudicate with full information. You certainly shouldn’t read my comment as me implying I’ve done that.
This post struck me as unpleasant and off the mark in the ways I describe it, and I think it’s okay for me to just say that.
I want to push back on this framing, and I think it shows a lack of empathy with the position Nonlinear have been put in. (Though I do agree with your dislike of many of the stylistic choices made in this post)
This post is 15K words, and does a mix of attacking the credibility of Ben, Alice and Chloe and disputing the claims with evidence. The linked doc is 58K words, and seems predominantly about collecting an exhaustive array of evidence. Nonlinear have clearly put in a *lot* of work to the linked doc, and try hard to dispute the evidence. So it seems to me that your complaint is really about what aspects Nonlinear chose to make prominent in this post, which in my opinion is a strategic question about how to write a good post, plus some emotional baggage from Nonlinear feeling aggrieved about this whole thing.
From Nonlinear’s perspective (not necessarily mine, to be clear), they have two disgruntled ex-employees who had a bad time, told a bunch of lies about them, and got an incredibly popular and widely read EA Forum post about it. This has destroyed their reputation in EA, and been catastrophic to the org, in a way that they consider ill-deserved. They want to write a post to clear their name. They were very emotionally hurt by this, and extremely reasonably! “Alice, Ben, and Chloe hurt me (Kat) so much I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and I cried more than any other time in my life. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t type responses to comments.”
Zooming out a bit, it seems like we could live in three worlds:
A) Nonlinear did terrible things and were abusive towards Alice and Chloe. Ben’s post was basically true
B) Nonlinear fucked up a fair bit, Ben’s post was sketchy in various ways, no parties look great
C) Nonlinear acted pretty reasonably/understandably throughout, Ben’s post was full of false accusations
Nonlinear seem to be arguing we’re in a mix of B and C, and mostly C (their reflections section seems to be buried [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P4iLZPrQt-dxl9njvz1EvnB8qOBt11DVmtn8PHwFyPw/edit#heading=h.orqsey1n2itd)). I think that if we live in world C (and to a lesser degree B) then attacking the credibility of your critics is pretty reasonable?
If we live in world C then Ben’s post was a gish gallop of many terrible sounding and hard to refute allegations, which gives super bad vibes, and even if they can address 90% of them, people will still care about the final 10%, *and* likely still have the bad vibes of first reading Ben’s post and initially making up their mind’s against Nonlinear. Plus, idk, most people won’t read exhaustive evidence (I expect few readers of this post are reading the long attached doc!) Attacking the credibility of your attackers seems one of the few ways of getting out of that. I further think that, if the list of false allegations Nonlinear gives are truly false, Alice and Chloe really aren’t that credible, made some extremely serious and false allegations, and their overall credibility is a really important part of evaluating this story! And justifies a pretty forceful attack on them.
If we live in world C then “I don’t see many places where you admit to making mistakes and it doesn’t seem like you’re willing to take ownership of this situation at all.” doesn’t really make sense.
Of course, if we live in world A, then Nonlinear are getting rightfully criticised and are fighting dirty against whistleblowers. And their 58K word doc is a gish gallop of their own. It’s a complex situation! But I can totally see where they’re coming from.
(CoI: Kat is a friend of mine, and I received money in the past from Nonlinear’s productivity fund, but no one asked me to write this. I made an alt for this because, given the level of NonLinear hate going around, I feel vaguely uncomfortable about being seen publicly defending them)
We tried to keep it to explaining how their claims were false or misleading, plus including an alternative hypothesis to explain what’s going on. We have a section where we explain the things we’re doing differently in the future.
We only tried to remind people about the bigger problems after we’d established that they’d told dozens of falsehoods and misleading claims about us.
I am disappointed that we’ve provided hundreds of pages of evidence that they lied to you and misled you and have shown no remorse or attempts to improve their behavior, but people are focusing on how we need to apologize for things we didn’t do and improve on things we didn’t do wrong.
I can see where Ollie’s coming from, frankly. You keep referring to these hundreds of pages of evidence, but it seems very likely you would have been better off just posting a few screenshots of the text messages that contradict some of the most egregious claims months ago. The hypothesising about “what went wrong”, the photos, the retaliation section, the guilt-tripping about focusing on this, etc. - these all undermine the discussion about the actual facts by (1) diluting the relevant evidence and (2) making this entire post bizarre and unsettling.
I think you forgot to mention that you also accused the person criticising you of being personally abusive in the post
I have a section called “a story with no villains” and I explain again and again that I don’t think Alice or Chloe are bad people. I think it’s most likely that they are mentally unwell and deserving of compassion. Ben literally calls me a predator out to get the youth.
Yeah and you called him a predator/abuser in response no? And this was, depending on which part of the post/comments you read, confirmed by multiple people/unfair/definitely true/very bad/not bad
Whatever people think about this particular reply by Nonlinear, I hope it’s clear to most EAs that Ben Pace could have done a much better job fact-checking his allegations against Nonlinear, and in getting their side of the story.
In my comment on Ben Pace’s original post 3 months ago, I argued that EAs & Rationalists are not typically trained as investigative journalists, and we should be very careful when we try to do investigative journalism—an epistemically and ethically very complex and challenging profession, which typically requires years of training and experience—including many experiences of getting taken in by individuals and allegations that seemed credible at first, but that proved, on further investigation, to have been false, exaggerated, incoherent, and/or vengeful.
EAs pride ourselves on our skepticism and our epistemic standards when we’re identifying large-scope, neglected, tractable causes areas to support, and when we’re evaluating different policies and interventions to promote sentient well-being. But those EA skills overlap very little with the kinds of investigative journalism skills required to figure out who’s really telling the truth, in contexts involving disgruntled ex-employees versus their former managers and colleagues.
EA epistemics are well suited to the domains of science and policy. We’re often not as savvy when it comes to interpersonal relationships and human psychology—which is the relevant domain here.
In my opinion, Mr. Pace did a rather poor job of playing the investigative journalism role, insofar as most of the facts and claims and perspectives posted by Kat Woods here were not even included or addressed by Ben Pace.
I think in the future, EAs making serious allegations about particular individuals or organizations should be held to a pretty high standard of doing their due diligence, fact-checking their claims with all relevant parties, showing patience and maturity before publishing their investigations, and expecting that they will be held accountable for any serious errors and omissions that they make.
One area where Ben didn’t follow investigative journalism “best practices” (that I had missed early on, but saw mentioned in Kat’s post, and went back and checked) was that he financially compensated his sources ($5,000 each, or $10,000 total). This is frowned upon pretty heavily in investigative journalism (see e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chequebook_journalism). I don’t have any reason to believe this meaningfully distorted the outcomes here (for instance, if the sources had no indication right until the end that Ben would compensate them financially, it is unlikely to have influenced their behavior) but it is a clear departure from an existing norm in the investigative journalism field. I appreciate that Ben disclosed this information; disclosure does address some but not all of the concerns around compensating sources.
I don’t rule out the possibility that the investigative journalism norm against paying sources is flawed, or it doesn’t apply in this case, or that a different set of norms should be applied.
Hmm, this seems like a pretty weak norm. In-particular the Wikipedia article you link says:
And I don’t have a sense that European investigative journalism is worse than U.S. investigative journalism.
Separately, whistleblower prices are quite common in the U.S. as well, for example: https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower
The linked Wikipedia article also has many quotes saying that really the central problem here is disclosure:
Habryka—Note that when the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) offers substantial whistleblower bounties, they do not simply take the whistleblowers’ word for it and start arresting people. They apply huge teams of auditors, lawyers, investigators, and federal agents to see if the whistleblower allegations are good enough to warrant legal action. If in doubt, they might convene a grand jury to see if the evidence is strong enough to take to trial. And they know from bitter experience that if they simply offered bounties to anybody who makes allegations, they would be deluged with false accusations.
Likewise with journalists. Yes, they offer payments in some cases for whistleblowers. But good journalists fact-check, with the expectation that many ‘whistleblowers’ will turn out to be bad actors with dubious agendas.
If we incentivize accusations, we’ll get a lot of false accusations. There has to be some good-faith effort to check if they are actually true.
Yep, I agree that it’s ideal for the prizes to be paid out conditional on them passing fact-checking or leading to a conviction. I think that was hard for various reasons in this case, but it seems clearly better for incentives.
I do think there was quite substantial good-faith effort of fact-checking involved. It might still be the case that it failed, I am still reading the giant 135-page document, but as many have pointed out, this investigation involved hundreds of hours of effort and interviews with over a dozen people, dozens of drafts, and many many fact-checks. So I do object to you implying there wasn’t any such process.
I think implying that the process that was present wasn’t enough and there should have been more, or that there were substantial issues with it, seems like a reasonable critique that I am still thinking about, but I think implying the absence of one seem bad.
My key point about investigative journalist expertise is that amateurs can invest a huge amount of time, money, and effort into investigations that are not actually very effective, fair, constructive, or epistemically sound.
As EAs know, charities vary hugely in their cost effectiveness. Investigative activities can also vary hugely in their time-effectiveness.
Yeah, I can totally imagine there are skills here that make someone substantially more effective at this (I think I have gotten vastly better at this skillset over the last 10 years, for example). As I said, I think criticizing the process seems pretty reasonable, I highly doubt that we went about this in the most optimal way.
Yep, I think we’re in accord on this.
I’m glad you’re taking time to read through the evidence and think on things.
For fact-checking, a basic thing would have been to speak to us and see our evidence. Like, we had interview transcripts and text messages and lot of relevant things. We reached out to Ben multiple times to talk to him and share this.
Ben updated a lot when he spoke to us. There was a lot of things they had told him that turned out to be false. He had reason to think we had more evidence like this, like what we’d already told him about and shared.
He also had all of the information needed to know that we weren’t the retaliatory villains Alice and Chloe painted us out to be, who would attack them for sharing their side. They had been telling bad thing about us for 1.5 years and none of their fears came true.
The only thing we ever did was share our side, which they tried to portray as unethical.
It’s not that Ben didn’t have a process. It’s that his process would predictably lead to incorrect conclusions. Spending less than 1% of the time talking to and trying to understand the other side and spending 99% of the time on one side is soldier mindset, not scout.
I continue to think that our concerns about retaliation were well-placed. Ben did talk to you multiple times, which I think clears the basic bar for due-diligence.
Sadly due to the track record of retaliation that you do seem to have displayed, I continue to endorse not engaging with you further during the investigation, though maybe I will change my mind on that after reading more of the evidence document.
I really wish things were different and we could have collaboratively investigated the accusations, but man, yeah, the libel threat was really bad, as were a bunch of other things that we heard about you and you said to us directly, and also of course we were concerned about retaliation to our sources and didn’t see a way to avoid exposing them to more risk from you without having things public.
There isn’t a track record of retaliation. We didn’t retaliate against your sources. We know who almost all of them are and what they said and nothing happened to them.
Alice’s messages simply show me saying that if she continued sharing her side, I would share mine. Sharing your side is not unethical.
And the examples that people gave of retaliation for Emerson were of him being sued and people sharing their side online, and him replying saying he’s countersue and he’d share his side (which he hadn’t done yet). This isn’t unethical, but a very reasonable thing to do.
For the libel, Ben knowingly said multiple things that were false and damaging, and he said dozens of things that he could have easily known were false if he’d just waited a week out of 6 months.
But we never wanted to sue Ben. We just wanted Ben to give us time to look at the evidence we were more than willing to share with him. I really recommend reading this section, because I think it gets across very well what was happening.
Here’s a quick excerpt:
And the accusation of threatening to hire stalkers is just a really weird accusation. That should be an indicator that somebody is not mentally alright.
I’m really sad too that we couldn’t just talk too. I hope we still might be able to, once you’ve read the document and see that the retaliation reputation was unwarranted. I would really love to talk. I think trying to do conflict resolution in a high stakes, hostile, and public venue is less likely to work than if we can talk face-to-face and have a higher bandwidth conversation.
Honestly, I wish we’d already invented mind reading technology, because I’d just let you read my mind, unfiltered. I know that if you could, you’d see that I really have no negative intentions and I’m really just trying to figure out how to make everybody happy and reduce suffering. This situation is complicated and I certainly can sometimes unintentially cause harm, and I hate that, and I’m always working on trying to prevent that. But I really do just want everybody to be happy, including you. Anyways, for now we don’t have mind-reading technology that’s accurate or cheap enough, so we’ll have to make do with me trying to convey through text that I really am not retaliatory. If you hurt me, I will try to understand you, try to help you understand me, then try to collaboratively problem-solve.
My original comment left a pretty wide window of possibilities open, and your reply falls within that window, so I don’t quite think we disagree a lot. However, in the spirit of nitpicking, I’ll make a couple of points:
Prominence of disclosure matters. The fact that Ben included the information in his post shows that he didn’t intend to hide it; nonetheless, my sense is that he didn’t highlight it as a disclosure / disclaimer / caveat for readers to keep in mind when interpreting the post. He did include other disclaimers around his process and motivation at the start of the post, that I found helpful, and his non-inclusion of payment along with those disclosures gives me the sense that he didn’t consider the distortionary effect of payment as a biasing factor worth highlighting to readers. My guess is that it would be pretty likely for readers to miss it (as I did). I’m genuinely uncertain whether the lack of discussion around this was driven by people not noticing it, or noticing it and not thinking it mattered.
I’m familiar with the broad outlines of the whistleblower law (from this podcast episode). I think there’s a distinction, though, between awarding money after a determination / judgment of harm, versus awarding money as a journalist or investigator who’s trying to report on the situation. I don’t know exactly how Ben perceived his role, and perhaps the point is that he didn’t perceive his role as being strictly one or the other, but a mix.
Yeah, this makes sense. FWIW, my current memory of the situation was that Ben hadn’t made any promises about paying for information until quite late in the process, and the primary purpose of the payment was to enable the publishing of information that was already circling around privately (i.e. in private docs that Alice and Chloe had shared with some others).
Of course, it’s hard to get rid of the incentive, but I think given that it was paying for publishing something that was already largely written up, I do think the immediate incentives here are weaker (though of course in the long run, and also via various more TDT-ish considerations, there is still an effect here).
I also am not super confident in the exact historical details here. Slack records suggest the rewards hadn’t been finalized the week before the post.
Thanks. Do you remember when Ben started discussing the possibility of pay?
Alas, I do not know. I have some internal Slack records suggesting it as a thing to consider in April, but I don’t know when Ben brought it up to Alice or Chloe. I am confident nothing was confirmed until quite close to the post being published, but I don’t know when the idea was first floated (with the only bound I have is that it probably wasn’t before April).
“High-quality information” is key. Ben did not fact check basic things and we’ve provided evidence that a huge amount of the “witnesses testimony” was false or misleading.
If Ben had waited one week out of the 6 months he spent working on this, he would have known this and not trusted the sources. They said dozens of provably false things and we just wanted some time to share it all with him, since they’d accused us of so many things.
We didn’t want ages—we just wanted a week. And Ben had been working on it for 6 months, so it didn’t seem like that much to ask.
Paying people $10,000 to say untrue or misleading information seems bad. People should not be paid until their facts are checked, and if it’s shown that their facts were false, they should not be paid.
Agree that in as much as people were paid directly for propagating inaccurate information, then that seems sad and clearly sets the wrong incentives. I am not currently convinced of that after the initial reading of your evidence document, but I am still reading, and there really is a lot of stuff to process.
In this thread I am trying to have a locally valid discussion on the actual presence of norms against paying for information among investigative journalists. I would prefer if we can keep the discussion here more local since it seems like an interesting and somewhat important question, and I think it would be an important update for me if there were was a consensus among investigative journalists and similar professions that whistleblower prizes and paying for information is a bad idea.
vipulnaik—good point.
This is also why I would be very wary of the EA Community Safety team offering ‘whistleblower support’ (which could boil down to ‘bounties for false accusations’).
Ben says that he was discussing offering it to them months before publishing. [EDIT: he didn’t say he did discuss this with them. He just said he planned to.]
I think it does incentivize them to distort what they say. They were incentivized to make everything sound maximally sad-sounding. Ben said if they did the emotional labor of sharing their sad stories, he’d give them $10,000.
They knew that if their stories hadn’t been very sad (e.g. Alice said she did get food but it just wasn’t her first choice of food) they wouldn’t have received that money. Ben wouldn’t pay for emotional labor if there was no emotional labor to be found, and he wouldn’t pay them money to write an article about how Alice wanted Panda Express faster or how she felt that making over $100,000 a year was “tiny pay”.
Thanks. I don’t see any confirmation from him of actually offering to pay upfront, so barring that further evidence I would not read anything too definite from this.
If he says that he might pay them if he considers it to be sufficiently emotionally difficult for them, it still has the same incentive effects. If anything, an uncertain reward is more motivating and distorting than a certain one.
Especially since it seems likely that Alice tends to tell falsehoods when it will get her money. See here and here. Also, on priors, one of the most common reasons to lie is to get money.
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I mean that I haven’t seen him confirm publicly that he told them that he will or might pay them. The place you linked just talks about his draft plan of what he was thinking of doing (offering money). If he didn’t offer money to them, and they had no other indirect indication (until the process was over) that he was going to give them money, then there would be very little distortionary effect.
Oh, you’re right! I misread. I’ll update my comment to be more accurate.
Although I do think it’s decent odds that if he said that his plan was to discuss whistleblowing fees with them then, that he probably did. But it is much weaker evidence than I originally thought and conveyed.
Yes, when I saw that, I had to wonder whether the payment was offered afterward (as a gift) or in advance (possibly in exchange for information).
(It was offered afterwards)
I’ll concede that your comment which I criticised at the time is coming off better now. I still feel like it was over-claiming, but as I said, I’m now more sympathetic to it.
I agree with @Habryka that this comment is underspecified and likely written without proper review of the appendix linked. I suspect many readers are likely to conflate disputed with debunked, and this comment plays into that. This works so well, and it’s use is so widespread, that it has a name, FUD.
In the comments below, I have asked Spencer Greenberg to specify the most important claims he feels have been repudiated, and why he thinks so. I expect the answer will be genuinely elucidating to me.
ElliotJDavies—I had read earlier versions of the post and the appendix, which is why I felt somewhat confident in commenting on the quality of Ben Pace’s fact-checking (or lack thereof).
I think it is too early to make a call on whether Ben could have done a better job fact-checking things. The linked doc is 135 pages long, and I don’t think you or anyone else really has had time to read it and see how well it actually responds to the specific accusations.
I do think this is a pretty high-stakes situation, and people should be held accountable if they caused harm, but I think you are jumping to conclusions here at a speed that I don’t think can be well-justified.
I am myself still reading the 135 page document and trying to piece together which exact parts of the original post now seem inaccurate to me, and also whether Ben successfully communicated his epistemic state and seemed well-calibrated about the trustworthiness of different claims, which is an operation that I expect will take even very motivated people working on this-full time many hours. Over the coming days, I expect many people to read the linked documents, and piece together which claims have been responded to, which of the evidence provided is easily verifiable vs. hearsay, etc., and I think then we’ll have a much better guess whether there was some problem with fact-checking or accuracy of the original investigation.
Habryka—I read several earlier versions of the documentation. I’m familiar with the contents. I understand that others will want to take their time before reaching judgments. Fair enough.
Ah, that makes more sense. I agree that if you’ve read earlier versions of the documentation, then you are of course in a better position to judge things.
I do think this sentence could use some rephrasing in that case:
Since you are talking about the epistemic state of “most EAs” here, who of course haven’t had advance access to the documentation here, and so aren’t really in a position to have made up their mind on this. I do think it’s fine for you to express a more overall judgement here, and am looking forward to comparing notes and takes when I am in a more similar epistemic state.
Yes, I should have said ‘I hope it will be clear to most EAs that Ben Pace could have done a much better job....’
‘- Alice has accused the majority of her previous employers, and 28 people—that we know of—of abuse. She accused people of: not paying her, being culty, persecuting/oppressing her, controlling her romantic life, hiring stalkers, threatening to kill her, and even, literally, murder.’
The section of doc linked to here does not in fact provide any evidence whatsoever of Alice making wild accusations against anyone else, beyond plain assertions (i.e. there are no links to other people saying this).
[I have not read the whole post and might be missing something]
Yeah, I also felt confused/uneasy about this section and it did not feel like a strong piece of evidence to have a numbered list that only contains stuff like:
This feels especially true since our basic assumption should probably be that cases like this are rarely straightforward, and each bullet point probably should have a lot of nuanced discussion of the situation.
That being said, I am not sure how they would be able to provide evidence for these claims without deanonymizing Alice, which leaves us in an unhappy place, especially given that if these claims were true, that would be relevant information to have.
I’d be keen to hear ideas of how we could see more evidence for these claims.
One obvious one would be having a trustworthy third party could review those claims e.g. the community health team. But there are a lot of difficulties in practice with this solution.
I want to share the following, while expecting that it will probably be unpopular.
I feel many people are not being charitable enough to Nonlinear here.
I have only heard good things about Nonlinear, outside these accusations. I know several people who have interacted with them—mainly with Kat—and had good experiences. I know several people who deeply admire her. I have interacted with Kat occasionally, and she was helpful. I have only read good things about Emerson.
As far as I can tell from this and everything I know/have read, it seems reasonable to assume that the people at Nonlinear are altruistic people. They have demonstrably made exceptional commitments to doing good; started organisations, invested a lot of time and money in EA causes, and helped a lot of people.
Right now, on the basis of what could turn out to have been a lot of lies, their reputations, friendship futures and careers are at risk of being badly damaged (if not already so).
This may have been (more) justified if the claims in the original post were all found and believed to be clearly true. However, that was, and is not, clearly the case at this point in time.
At present, Nonlinear have demonstrably set aside significant time to write a huge response to the claims made against them. From my initial reading they seem to have largely shown that most claims were not accurate, that the sources of the claims were unreliable (and bad actors), that the method of investigation was unfair (as per their example of its use toward Ben).
Despite this, NL have not been shown much support or sympathy. Relatively few (popular) comments appear to say something like “thank you for writing this up… it must have been hard to deal with the accusations… I changed my mind on x based on your evidence....I still don’t think you were correct about y—can you say more there.”
Instead, as I see it, the main, or at least most upvoted, response here has been to critique stylistic mistakes made in their almost impossible task of refuting very damaging claims from anonymous sources in unknown contexts. Or to critique remote work and travel while trying to do good, or various ways they are running their organisation unconventionally etc.
[I admit that I am conflicted on the part about Ben—I agree it could be seen as unfair but it shows how his method was flawed in a very effective way. I can understand critiques of this—but surely a comment that is solely a critique isn’t the best/fairest way to respond to a post like this in this context]
If you face a lot of false accusations, I can’t even imagine how hard it is to find the time and mental strength to produce what has been produced, let alone to respond to all the comments in a measured way.
If, and it is still to be determined, the claims made were largely false, then I think it is incredibly impressive and admirable that NL still made such a great effort to refute them despite the amount of ingratitude, criticism and unkindness that they faced in the comments on the original post.
I can’t help but feel that too many people essentially made their minds up after reading the first post from Ben and are now consciously or unconsciously seeking to maintain their prior negative associations.
I’d like people to imagine what they would do in a similar situation if they were faced with similar accusations. How would you successfully persuade people that you didn’t do the things you were accused of, and that the context was not as portrayed? How would you feel when most of the EA forum community appeared to form a firm impression that you and your organisation were bad, and didn’t thank you for your effort of writing a huge response or really engage the counterclaims.
Nonlinear and their members may have made some mistakes or acted unethically, but the evidence for this is currently in dispute. In light of what they have done previously, here, and more generally, they surely deserve more empathy and positive (or at least neutral) engagement than what they are getting. I imagine that all of us would want the same if put in their circumstances.
As I finish this, I sort of regret starting to write it, and I may regret posting it. I just don’t feel comfortable watching this happen without saying something.
As per my earlier comment, I still need to read Ben’s original post and the full appendix from the response posts in more detail, to feel more confident about my judgement. I could change my mind and decide that Nonlinear etc made more serious mistakes than I thought and that I don’t feel so positive about them anymore. However, I would still like a more charitable response to their efforts and evidence.
I will also admit that I do like to see the best in people, and this has led me astray in the past (e.g., with Gleb). I hope I am not wrong here.
22/12/23 Edit:
I said elsewhere that I would read the arguments from both sides and then make a final decision. I haven’t done that because I didn’t have time, and it didn’t feel like high value. Especially in light of later posts and comments by people who are better qualified. I feel that it is still better (or at least closer to keeping my prior commitment) to state my current position for future readers than to not say anything further. With that in mind, this (copied from elsewhere) is where I ended up:
Before BP post: NL are a sort of atypical, low structure EA group, doing entrepreneurial and coordination focused work that I think is probably positive impact.
After BP post: NL are actually pretty exploitative and probably net negative overall. I’ll wait to hear their response, but I doubt it will change my mind very much.
After NL post: NL are probably not exploitative. They made some big mistakes (and had bad luck) with some risks they took in hiring and working unconventionally. I think they are probably still likely to have a positive impact on expectation. I think that they have been treated harshly.
After this post: I update to be feeling more confident that this wasn’t a fair way to judge NL and that these sorts of posts/investigations shouldn’t be a community norm.
I am still pretty uncertain overall. I definitely think that NL should be more careful and conventional in their hiring and work practices in the future.
I added this as an edit because I didn’t think it warranted a new comment, and a new comment would provoke more engagement and distract more people, etc.
I think it is entirely possible that people are being unkind because they updated too quickly on claims from Ben’s post that are now being disputed, and I’m grateful that you’ve written this (ditto chinscratch’s comment) as a reminder to be empathetic. That being said, there are also some reasons people might be less charitable than you are for reasons that are unrelated to them being unkind, or the facts that are in contention:
Without commenting on whether Ben’s original post should have been approached better or worded differently or was misleading etc, this comment from the Community Health/Special Projects team might add some useful additional context. There are also previous allegations that have been raised.[1]
Perhaps you are including both of these as part of the same set of allegations, but some may suggest that not being permitted to run sessions / recruit at EAGs and considering blocking attendance (especially given the reference class of actions that have prompted various responses that you can see here) is qualitatively important and may affect whether commentors are being charitable or not (as opposed to if they just considered the contents of Ben’s post VS Nonlinear (NL)’s response). Of course, this depends on how much you think the Community Health/Special Projects team are trustworthy with their judgement / investigation, or how likely this is all just an information cascade etc.
It is possible for altruistic people to be poor managers, poor leaders, make bad decisions about professional boundaries, have a poor understanding of power dynamics, or indeed, be abusive. The extent to which people at NL are altruistic is (afaict) not a major point of contention, and it is possible to not update about how altruistic someone is while also wanting to hold them accountable to some reasonable standard like “not being abusive or manipulative towards people you manage”.
The claims in question from Alice/Chloe/Ben are not anonymous, the identities of Alice and Chloe are known to the Nonlinear team.
Independent of my personal views on these issues, I do think the pushback around ‘stylistic mistakes’ are reasonable insofar as people interpret this to be indicative of something concerning about NL’s approach towards managing staff / criticism / conflict (1, 2, 3), rather than e.g. just being nitpicky about tone, though I appreciate both interpretations are plausible.
I think (much) less is more in this case.[2] I think there are parts of this current post that feel more subjective and not supported by facts, and may be reasonably interpreted by a cynical outsider to look like a distraction or a defensive smear campaign. I think these choices are counterproductive (both for a truth-seeking outsider, and for NL’s own interests), especially given the allegations of frame control and being retaliatory.
There are other parts that might similarly be reasonably interpreted to range from irrelevant (Alice’s personal drug use habits), unproductive (links to Kathy Forth), or misleading (inclusion of photos, inconsistent usage of quotation marks, unnecessary paraphrasing, usage of quotes that miss the full context). I disagreed with the approaches here, though I acknowledge there were competing opinions and I wasn’t privy to the internal discussions that lead to the decisions.
I think a cleaner version of this would have probably been something 5 to 10x shorter (not including the appendix), and looked something like:[3]
Apology for harms done
Acknowledgement of which allegations are seen as the most major (much closer to top 3-5 than all 85)
Responses to major allegations, focusing only on factual differences and claims that are backed up by ~irrefutable evidence
Charitable interpretations of Alice/Chloe/Ben’s position, despite above factual disagreement (what kinds of things need to be true for their allegations to be plausibly reasonable or fair from their perspective),
Lessons learnt, and things NL will do differently in future (some expression of self-awareness / reflection)
An appendix containing a list of unresolved but less critical allegations
Disclaimer: I offered to (and did) help review an early draft, in large part because I expected the NL team to (understandably!) be in panic mode after Ben’s post/getting dogpiled, and I wanted further community updates to be based on as much relevant information as was possible.
This footnote added in response to Jeff’s comment: I agree that it’s likely not double counting, because the story there appears to be one where Kat left the working relationship, which is inconsistent with the accounts of Alice / Chloe’s situations, but also makes it unlikely that the “current employee of NL / Kat” hypothesis is correct.
Perhaps hypocritical given the length of this comment
Acknowledging that I have no PR expertise
I was initially concerned that I might be double counting information if that comment turned out to be from Alice or Chloe, but it is dated 2022-11-14 and and I interpret it as being from a current employee. Ben’s post has:
Before Ben’s post, I had heard some good things and many bad things about Nonlinear, to the point that I was trying to figure out who their board members were in case I needed to raise concerns about one or both of the co-founders (I failed to figure it out because they weren’t a registered charity and didn’t have their board members listed on their website either).
I haven’t looked into the evidence here at all, but fwiw the section on ‘sharing information on ben pace’ is deranged. I know you are using this as an example of how unfounded allegations can damage someone’s reputation. But in repeating them, you are also repeating unfounded allegations and damaging someone’s reputation. You are also obviously doing this in retaliation for him criticising you. You could have used an infinite number of examples of how unfair allegations can damage someone’s reputation, including eg known false allegations against celebrities or other people reported in the news, or hypotheticals.
Just share your counter-evidence, don’t in the process try to smear the person criticising you.
For someone who seems to have made at least 20 comments on this post, why haven’t you bothered to at least look into the evidence they provided?
you are replying to John’s first comment on this article.
I think it is totally fine to comment on some of the things in a very long article, without reading the whole article and appendix.
Edited to add: My objection to John’s comment in what I write below lies with the “deranged” part. If John had instead said something like “unnecessary” or “overly escalatory/ad hominem,” then I would not have responded. But “deranged” — dictionary definition: “completely unable to think clearly or behave in a controlled way, especially because of mental illness” (source) — which I take as John implying that the direction Kat has gone in is so completely nonsensical that there can’t possibly be a reasonable explanation, struck me as sufficiently inaccurate for the opening assertion in such a highly upvoted comment that I felt the need to weigh in.
I think Kat could reasonably claim that, from her perspective, Ben has opted out of the social convention around not damaging someone’s reputation through less-than-solid allegations, so she is now fighting fire with fire.
I’m not saying I agree with Kat’s move here [edited to add: and I would personally prefer it if Kat had focused solely on engaging, in a factual manner, with the evidence Ben put forward], but I think there’s a frame in which it makes sense, and therefore it seems unfair to label this move “deranged.”
Retaliation is bad. If you think doing X is bad, then you shouldn’t do X, even if you’re ‘only doing it to make the point that doing X is bad’.
People seem to be using “retaliation” in two different senses: (1) punishing someone merely in response to their having previously acted against the retaliator’s interests, and (2) defecting against someone who has previously defected in a social interaction analogous to a prisoner’s dilemma, or in a social context in which there is a reasonable expectation of reciprocity. I agree that retaliation is bad in the first sense, but Will appears to be using ‘retaliation’ in the second sense, and I do not agree that retaliation is bad in this sense.
(I haven’t followed this thread closely and I do not have object-level views about the Nonlinear dispute. Sharing just in case it helps clear unnecessary misunderstandings.)
So you endorse “always cooperate” over “tit-for-tat” in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
Seems to me there are 2 consistent positions here:
The thing is bad, in which case the person who did it first is worse. (They were the first to defect.)
The thing is OK, in which case the person who did it second did nothing wrong.
I don’t think it’s particularly blameworthy to both (a) participate in a defect/defect equilibrium, and (b) try to coordinate a move away from it.
EDIT: A couple other points
I know the payoff structure here might not be an actual Prisoner’s Dilemma, but I think my point still stands.
David’s consistent use of “doing X” seems important here. If someone does X (e.g. blows the whistle on unethical practices), and someone else does Y in response (e.g. fires the person who blew the whistle), that’s a different situation.
I just mean one shouldn’t end up in a situation where you’re claiming nobody should do X, having just done X. That would be deeply weird of one.
IIRC, Truman said something at the United Nations like “we need to keep the world free from war”, right after having fought one of the largest wars in history (WW2). Doesn’t seem that weird to me.
The preposterous naivety on show in discussions like this make me think EA is not going to work as a thing
I don’t follow. Can you explain how Will Aldred’s comment was preposterously naive?
Exaggeration is fun, but not what this situation calls for. So for me, the only reason I didn’t upvote you was the word “deranged”. Naivety? Everybody’s got some, but I think EAs tend to be below average in that respect.
I’m not sure I would have used Ben as the example had I been writing it, but I think I understand why they did, and I certainly don’t blame them for it. There is no drama where everyone is on the same side, so any real life example would antagonize some readers. Hypothetical examples are always weaker because the reader might think they are unrealistic. And Ben is in no position to complain about people sharing negative one-sided stories on the EA forum.
It’s obvious retaliation for Ben criticising nonlinear in his post.
This word “retaliation” seems to be doing a lot of work in your thinking, so I’d like to disect it a little bit. What exactly do you mean by “retaliation”? One could use retaliation to mean “any time Alice hurts Bob, and later Bob does something that hurts Alice, which he would not have done but for Alice’s initial hurtful action.” If that is your definition, then yes, sure, this is obvious retaliation. So what? Lots of things that are retaliation under this definition are fine, some are even optimal. Every time that a US military unit attacked a Japanese one during ww2 was retaliation for Pearl Harbor under this definition, yet clearly waging war on Japan was correct. I think when you use the word though, you mean it to carry some additional meaning. You seem to think that it is necessarily bad. And that requires a more constricted definition and an argument that nonlinear’s actions satisfy it.
I think the choice to use Ben in particular predictably sheds more heat than light. The fact that any example might have provoked disagreement doesn’t mean they would all have produced the same amount thereof, and I think the choice they made does not reflect an interest in minimizing drama.
I further think that it’s especially important to avoid controversy wherever one possibly can in posts like this, precisely because they’ll predictably antagonize people even when one does; intensity of feeling often motivates people to give the facts less consideration than would be appropriate, and I think the unavoidable level of antagonism is already higher than optimal for getting people to reason with their heads rather than their guts, so to speak.
Disagree.
I think this section illustrated something important, that I would not have properly understood without a real demonstration with real facts about a real person. It hits different emotionally when it’s real, and given how important this point is, and how emotionally charged everything else is, I think I needed this demonstration for the lesson to hit home for me.
I also don’t think this is retaliation. If that was the goal Kat could have just ended the section after making Ben look maximally bad, and not adding the clarifying context.
This is not true. If Kat had just left in the section making Ben look bad, everyone would have been “what? Where is the evidence for this? This seems really bad?”.
The way it is written it still leaves many people with an impression, but alleviates any burden of proof that Kat would have had.
You might still think it’s a fine rhetorical tool to use, but I think it’s clear that Kat of course couldn’t have just put the accusations into the post without experiencing substantial backlash and scrutiny of her claims.
I strongly disagree. You logically have to either believe that the entire post of Ben was equally deranged, or that the section in this post is obviously worse than what Ben wrote, or both.
And yes, you could have used other examples to make the point. But it matters that you can do this with Ben in particular because people may have trusted the initial allegations because Ben wrote them. It seem to me to be a valid part of the argument, and one that Kat is morally justified in making.
‘You logically have to either believe that the entire post of Ben was equally deranged, or that the section in this post is obviously worse than what Ben wrote, or both.’
I don’t get the argument here. Surely there is obviously more reason to trust a report coming from someone who had no known prior beef with the people being accused of misconduct, then one from someone who has massive independent reason to (fairly or unfairly, doesn’t matter) detest the person the accusation is about.
Yeah, I mean that would be an argument for why the section is worse than what Ben did. If you do conclude that, then I think your original comment becomes reasonable. It doesn’t strike me as obvious though, which might be the crux.
Since the anecdotes in the section are real rather than made-up, it seems nontrivial to me that you can write a section like that even if you have prior reason to dislike the person. I agree with your other comment that it’s non-crazy to do some amount of updating based on the section despite Kat saying you shouldn’t update. But I don’t agree that Kat is therefore not “morally allowed” to write it.
So as I understand it, the principle in your comment is that if person X criticises an organisation it is sane/appropriate for someone representing that org to then write ‘we have been told that person X is a sexual predator. Don’t take this literally though, it’s unfair to say this in public, though i just did say it in public. But btw I think it is definitely true’
I think the principle is something like, “if X socially harms Y, then Y is morally justified to pull analogous moves on X to make a point as long as this clearly causes only a fraction of the harm, maybe at most 10% something”. Which I recognize isn’t obvious; you could argue that X harming Y doesn’t give Y any permission to be less than maximally ethical. But that is not how most people assess things most of the time. People are generally not expected to be maximally nice to people who mistreated them. And given how humans work, I think that’s a norm that makes sense.
Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be (even though, as I said, I agree that it doesn’t remove it entirely). This looks to me like a high enough ethical standard given the context.
‘Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be ’
I think this is maybe part of the disagreement. I don’t think that the framing gets rid of most of the harm. People already know sometimes rumors are false or unfair, so just reminding people of this is not really adding much extra new information to the bare accusation itself.
I agree it can be okay/excusable to give in to the urge of taking digs at people who you think have unfairly harmed you. At the same time, I think it can make a big difference whether someone is doing this because of (1) or (2) of the following:
(1) they perceive situations like this as a social game about who manages to get the audience on their side, within which tactics like making insinuations about others’ character or repeating hearsay is fair game as long as it works / if the audience will think it’s okay/excusable/justified, etc.
or whether it’s
(2) while they’re pissed off and tempted to retaliate, they also feel strongly bound to a code of fairness where it’s only really okay to make bad insinuations if you’re very likely to be right, so they’re worried about saying the wrong thing, being biased, etc. I.e., they genuinely consider the possibility that they’re too emotionally invested and in the wrong themselves in the sense of feeling too much negativity about the other party and giving a distorted impression of them.
I interpret John G. Halstead’s point along the lines of “if they were doing (2) instead of (1), why does it look like they’re trying to have their cake and eat it? Why does it look like they’re simultaneously saying that accusations like that (which they chose to repeat/air publicly) are often about things that aren’t actually too bad or shouldn’t be trusted, but also saying that they mostly trust them and think they’re actually bad?”
Right ok. So if Ben tried to murder kat, she would be permitted to cut off his arm?
No, but I think she would be morally permitted to verbally insult him after that, especially if it’s the first time she gets to respond.
My point was you should make norms that ask realistic things of people. It’s not realistic to expect people to be completely emotionally detached toward someone who harmed them. But it is realistic to expect them to keep retaliation to a minimum, which again, I think is the norm that most people actually apply to situations most of the time. And yes, if you construct an example where the initial harm is extreme, then the 10% figure I postulated doesn’t work anymore.
1 toe for ten toes?
I think some of your recent comments raised valuable points but, unfortunately, too many do not follow Forum norms. Specifically, norms around assuming good faith, staying on topic, not being unnecessarily rude or offensive, and avoiding deliberate flamebait.
Some examples:
Give. Me. A. Break.
if Ben tried to murder kat, she would be permitted to cut off his arm?
The preposterous naivety on show in discussions like this
Also noting that this is your 14th comment on this thread, in a very short span of time, and your comments appear to be becoming increasingly rude.
This is a warning. I’ll note that this is your third warning — please be more mindful in the future. In order to avoid breaking norms going forward, please phrase your contributions in a more collaborative manner. Further norm violations could lead to rate-limiting or a ban.
(This was written in reply to the comment above, before your most recent comments)
It seems good to me if the forum team took more action here against this post, for example removing the section on Ben Pace that can clearly be interpreted as retaliatory. I don’t see why we would assume good faith for that part of the post.
The reaction here of the moderation seems a bit unbalanced.
I want to express ambivalence (actual ambivalence, not code for dislike) about this kind of moderation. I take it that if the same points had been expressed using different language, the mods would not have objected. But in my view, the inflammatory tone has discursive value—it signals a level of frustration and anger that is arguably appropriate, given the circumstances, and is difficult to communicate using more staid language.
I also wonder about the value-add of moderators intervening on these kinds of comments, given they tend to get downvoted anyways. And if they don’t, should the mods really be sanctioning them? (Do mods on other websites do this? My impression was that, e.g., the NYT just censors profanity and spam, and allows voting to do the rest.)
To give a little context for this comment, I read the Forum before I was involved in EA, and when I saw comments that were not phrased in a, uh, collaborative manner, my reaction was usually “wow, I’m glad someone is expressing their true feelings about this situation.” It made EA seem a bit more real, honest, and normal. I still basically feel this way. We all have emotional responses—especially to community events—and these emotions usually linger just below the surface of our neatly worded essays. (This is part of what feels off to me about the original post—it’s couched in niceties and formal language, but reads as biting and furious. I think the kind of moderation on display here encourages this kind of tone.)
I am sympathetic to the worry that a lot of online spaces are too rude, mean, unproductive, and so on, but I don’t think the Forum is going to descend into madness if the mods just allow democracy to do its thing here (though I’m not sure!). Conversely, I do think that tone-policing is hard to do even-handedly, and can contribute to weird and disingenuous discussions that I’m not sure are always a good thing, particularly when strong emotions may well be warranted.
Sorry, I don’t think I got this quite right in my initial comment; let me try again:
I think something really messed up is going on here, in that both Ben and Kat’s posts include some serious allegations that are supported by very limited evidence (like “anonymous person said X”). (Other allegations in these posts are supported by good evidence, like screenshots.) These accusations have the potential to seriously harm people’s professional lives, relationships, and mental health. And in both cases, the general message of both posts could be relayed without relying on the anecdotes that aren’t supported by good evidence.
The forum moderators have allowed this mudslinging to occur more or less unchecked. To the extent mods have been involved, their involvement has been limited to telling bystanders not to lose our heads. I think this is very bad! The evidentiary standards these posts are being held to wouldn’t come close to passing muster on Wikipedia (let alone in a newspaper or court). And there’s a reason for that: baselessly smearing people is bad. It is especially bad when the most plausible explanation for the behavior is vengeance. For the mods to then issue a warning for a take saying as much (packaged in combative language) while allowing the libel (packaged in Forum-y language) to go unchecked strikes me as exactly backwards, especially when Forum users can readily police the former (through voting), but cannot police the latter. Given the stakes of these kinds of posts for people’s lives, I really hope this situation prompts some kind of post-mortem about the evidentiary standards posts should be held to.
I don’t view the toe and murder comments as violating forum norms. They are a reductio of what I take to be an absurd argument. I think the comment about preposterous naivety is correct. The post itself obviously violates forum norms and the moderators are defending the post
For the record, my other warnings were for
discussing how someone credibly accused by multiple people of sexual misconduct repeatedly lied and isn’t permanently banned from the forum
-sharing true information about how Emile Torres has harassed me without sharing the supporting evidence for privacy reasons. The comment confirming the warning was heavily downvoted.
Thanks for the feedback! I replied here since it’s unrelated to this post.
It’s not clear the anecdotes in that section are real and not made-up. Kat is dodging questions about it, so for all we know, it could be the case that everyone referenced in that section was a Nonlinear employee who feels bad due to Ben’s post. Some people elsewhere in this thread theorized that it’s Kat describing herself, and strangely but conspicuously, she hasn’t denied it.
Edit: I misread what you were saying. I thought you were saying ‘Kat has dodged questions about whether it was true’, and ‘It’s not clear the anecdotes are being presented as real’.
Actually, Katsaid it was true.Kat is responding to other questions in this thread, but not ones about the “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” section.
It’s not clear that the anecdotes are from someone outside of Nonlinear who had some bad experience with Ben Pace other than Ben publishing the original post about Nonlinear.
It’s not clear whether Kat wants people to think that it’s about some unmotivated third party, or if it’s supposed to be obvious that it’s Kat writing her own experience in third person. She did write in the post that you shouldn’t update on it, but maybe she wants it to be ambiguous, which has the effect of discrediting Ben. She says that if the person it’s referring to said these things publicly, people would disagree 50⁄50 on whether Ben did something bad, which sure does sound a lot like it’s talking about this whole controversy.
Other people in this thread are saying it’s obvious, but I’m really confused.
If it is, in fact, based someone from Nonlinear, then I’d agree that the section is bad. At that point, it would no longer be a valid example of “look, you can do this to anyone”.
I do agree that Ben had less reason to say these things than we did.
However, Alice and Chloe also had a lot of reasons to say terrible things about us. Alice started her smear campaign against us right after she asked for $240,000 and we said no.
They were also incentivized to make everything sound maximally sad-sounding. Ben said if they did the emotional labor of sharing their sad stories, he’d give them $10,000. They knew that if their stories hadn’t been very sad (e.g. Alice said she did get food but it just wasn’t her first choice of food) they wouldn’t have received that money. Ben wouldn’t pay for emotional labor if there was no emotional labor to be found, and he wouldn’t write an article about how Alice wanted Burger King faster.
So you thought it appropriate to in response do a hitpiece on the author of the critique? Is that correct?
Imagine that you’ve heard some bad things about somebody (let’s call him Bob). But you didn’t update much because you didn’t hear both sides and you haven’t done any fact checking. Imagine Bob hears bad things about you and writes a hit piece about you, doing virtually no fact-checking, and destroying your mental health and ability to do good, potentially permanently.
Many people would say it’s completely within your rights to respond by sharing the things you’ve heard about Bob. However, we didn’t. We anonymized it and tried to use it as a way to illustrate how this methodology consistently leads to misleading and unethical outcomes.
He shared anonymous accusations and hearsay and said “update on Nonlinear. They are bad”
We shared anonymous accusations and hearsay and said “don’t update on Ben. You can make anything sound terrible and this methodology will consistently lead to inaccurate and unethical outcomes.”
We could indeed have used somebody else as an example, and if we had a time machine, maybe we’d do that. But I think it’s totally within our rights to use it as an example of how this methodology is deeply flawed and should not be used.
This is bordering on comical. I am going to use your framework to redescribe what you actually did.
“We have been told that Bob is a real predator, bad guy. however, it would be wrong to say that Bob is a real predator, bad guy. I know we just did that but we didn’t mean it. Btw we think it is true that Bob is a real predator.”
We are clearly trying to tell people that they shouldn’t update based on these allegations based on the things we explained in the post (e.g. it’s one-sided, emotionally loaded, etc).
I very much recommend not updating against him, for the reasons I explain in the post. If you do update, then I recommend you also update against Ben for doing this to us.
The thing is though that it is obviously not rational to do zero updating*. And you probably know this, since it is it obvious. So it’s hard not to conclude that you are doing it because at some (possibly not conscious) level you want people to think negatively about Ben, given that you believe he has treated you extremely unjustly and that this lead to the worst experience of your life.
*The problem with rumor is not that rumor is zero evidence, but that if everyone believes all rumors without question, things go very badly overall in predictable ways.
Give. Me. A. Break.
In the comments below you say you personally think the allegations you allude to are true. You obviously thought they are worth sharing.
Tbh this alone basically updates me entirely to the position ‘kat woods is a bad actor’ without even reading the previous debate
I also didn’t like that section at first, but if you read through it carefully you’ll notice that the language is very nebulous and that Kat doesn’t actually commit to very much. She only really claims that it is true that other people said bad things about Ben, not that she agrees that Ben is bad or that he did something bad. The fact that it sounds so bad I think makes Kat’s point pretty well. Her breakdown/defense of Ben afterwards also does a lot to diffuse the mud-slinging. (That said I would have chosen a different example.)
I think they are true but debatable about whether they are bad and the magnitude of the badness. I think most of the allegations would be scissor statements in the EA community about whether they’re bad and there’d be immense debate as to the magnitude of the badness.
I also know that for all of the accusations, either something is being done about it or the person does not want to do anything more about it, and I am respecting their wishes.
Ok so the allegations are true but might not be bad. I’m trying to picture what this might mean given that the victim regularly bursts into tears on the street. On a ten point badness magnitude scale, where are you pegging it?
For the most part, an initial reading of this post and the linked documents did have the intended effect on me of making me view many of the original claims as likely false or significantly exaggerated. With that said, my suggestion would have been to remove some sorts of stuff from the post and keep it only in the linked documents or follow-up posts. In particular, I’d say:
The photos provide a bit of information, but can be viewed as distracting and misleading. I think the value of information they provide is probably sufficient for their inclusion in a linked Google Doc, but including them twice in the post (and once near the top) gives them a lot of salience, and as some of the comments here show, this can cause some readers to switch off or view your post with hostility.
Some of the alternative hypothesis stuff, and the stuff related to claims about Ben Pace, may also have been better suited to a linked Google Doc—something that curious readers could dig into, but that was not given a lot of salience for somebody who was just interested in the core claims. I think there’s some value to these exercises, but it would muddy the waters less if this were less salient, so that readers could focus on the core claims.
Some of the editorialization e.g., around what we should be focusing on, or how much effort was wasted on this, would probably have been best left to a follow-up post, if and after the core claims of this post achieved more widespread acceptance. I do see some value in the editorialization, but it feels a bit premature as its validity is contingent on the core claims in the post being accepted. (I do understand thinking about this and feeling strongly about this; I just think this post isn’t the optimal point for expressing these thoughts).
Now that the post is written and published, I don’t know if it makes sense to make these changes. But my own take is that the post would have been stronger had these changes been made prior to publishing. Curious to hear if others agree or disagree.
Also, I think that not linking to Ben’s post near the top can come across as bad form. I fully understand the desire to not link to a post you consider to be making false and misleading claims, and I also expect readers to have no problem locating the original post, so I expect the lack of a link to not matter materially. But it does come across as bad form (Ben’s post has been updating to link to yours, so there is now a clear asymmetry).
Updated! Just didn’t occur to us. We linked it elsewhere, but it is indeed better to have it near the top. Thanks for pointing it out!
Thanks! I’m guessing many people would have incorrectly guessed it was intentional (as I did) so I’m happy you fixed this.
Thanks! I’m glad you’ve updated based on the evidence.
Regarding the other points, we debated internally a lot about all of those, and I agree that it’s not clear whether we should have done them or not. It was quite a difficult judgment call and I’m not sure if we made the right decision. But now that we have, I guess we’ll have to see what happens.
I am commenting to encourage everyone to think about the real people at the centre of all of the very ugly accusations being made, which I hope is acceptable to do, even though this comment does not directly address the evidence presented by either Lightcone or Nonlinear.
This is getting a lot of engagement, as did Ben Pace’s previous post, and for the people being discussed, this must be incredibly stressful. No matter how you think events actually played out, the following are true:
a) at least one group of people is having unfair accusations made against them, either of creating abusive working conditions and taking advantage of the naivety of young professionals, or of being delusional and unreliable or malicious. Neither of these are easy to deal with.
b) the situation is ongoing, and there is no clear timeline for when things will be neatly wrapped up and concluded.
Given this, and having read several comments speaking to the overwhelming experience of being dogpiled on the internet, I just want to encourage everyone who is friendly with any of the people at the centre of this, including Alice, Chloe, Kat Woods, Emerson and Drew Spartz, Ben Pace, and Habryka to reach out and make sure they are coping well. The goal here is hopefully to get to the truth and to update community norms, and it is far too easy for individuals to become casualties of this process. A simple ‘how ya doing?’ can make a big difference when people are struggling.
I’ve pretty much stayed away from this thread (my family has already exceeded my ability to cope with drama this month/year), but I’d also encourage people to consider that the affected persons have already had to deal with 476 comments when deciding whether authoring comment 477 is worth it.
If you’re in a disagreement with someone, it can be OK to say: “I respectfully disagree with that, but this topic has already taken so much time and caused so much angst that I am going to let you have the last word on this one and move on.” At this point in the discussion, I don’t think anyone should read any negative inferences into a decision to exercise good self-care and step back from further discussion.
Came here to write this, you’ve written it really well. Props.
My basic takeaway from all of this is not who is right/wrong so much as that EA professional organisations should act more like professional organisations. While it may be temporarily less enjoyable I would expect overall the organisations with things like HR professionals, safeguarding policies, regular working hours, offices in normal cities and work/life boundaries to be significantly more effective contributors to EA
I’m less interested in “debating whether a person in a villa in a tropical paradise got a vegan burger delivered fast enough” or “whether it’s appropriate for your boss to ask you to pick up their ADHD medication from a Mexican pharmacy” or “if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary”? Than in interrogating whether EA wouldn’t be better off with more “boring” organisations led by adults with significant professional experience managing others, where the big company drama is the quality of coffee machine in the office canteen.
I think it’s valuable to have social experiments. However, I do think the social experiment of living and working with your employees while traveling has now been experimented with and the results are “it’s very risky”. I’ve been doing it with Emerson and Drew for years now and it’s been fine, but I think we have a really good dynamic and it’s hard to replicate.
As for HR professionals, we had only 3 full-time people at the time, so that would have been too early/small for us to have one.
For safeguarding policies, Chloe was working on creating those. But yeah, she was our first full-time employee where we could even have policies, so it was understandable not to have them yet.
For regular working hours, we did. Chloe only ever worked once on a weekend and never again (she said she didn’t like it, and we set up a policy to never do it again).
For offices in a normal city, I don’t think that should matter much. Rethink Priorities is fully remote last I checked and in all sorts of cities and it’s fine.
As for work/life boundaries, I think the biggest thing was to no live with employees, which we are no longer doing. It’s worked in the past for me but I think it’s just too risky.
Was this practice clearly delineated as an experiment to the participants?
Strong disagree here. I don’t think people realize how cumbersome this type of stuff can be, especially for small organizations and how important it is to not just work during regular working hours in normal offices. HR professionals usually only exists for organizations with >20 people. I don’t know anyone who is highly effective and gets everything done between 9 and 5 from Mon-Fri.
Really? Those are the companies/organizations that are just surviving off inertia and usually die in 5-50 years accomplishing/changing nothing in the mean time but continuing to churn out some widgets, eventually to be replaced by a new company doing it better.
Churning out widgets is accomplishing something if the product is useful or brings pleasure. The implication otherwise feels snobby to me. And the point of EA is to accomplish stuff, not to be at the cutting edge of innovation (though obviously those two goals are related.)
Fair. I think EA has grand aspriations though and wants the impact of Apple/Google/Microsoft and not Bob’s Shoe Store
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all large organizations led by experienced managers, and to the best of my knowledge all three have “HR professionals, safeguarding policies, regular working hours, offices in normal cities and work/life boundaries”.
I think you probably do, or at least know of them, but might not know how they work. Many people at some of the EA charities I’ve worked at/interned for had pretty regular hours and did/do impressive work. Some did/do work a lot more than most people or had irregular hours, of course.
Lewis Bollard said he worked 8 hours/day, and it sounds like they were pretty regular and in-office:
Many EAs also have kids, and work relatively regular hours to accommodate that.
When you have to fit everything into regular hours, you can find ways to make those hours more productive and focused, e.g. being more strict about avoiding distractions.
I completely agree with this. I’ve seen many worse scenarios play out in other organizations due to unprofessionalism, mostly due to lack of experience and the tendency to bootstrap and work in startup mode. While that approach is helpful in some cases, it causes a lot of dysfunction across many organizations and I’d like to see more efforts put into instituting professional norms within EA organizations. This is only a well publicized event—there are many worse ones that I’ve witnessed that aren’t highlighted here. But that brings up another point that a few other commenters mentioned—are we creating an environment that: A) encourages the “move fast and break things” lack of professionalism approach But then: B) condemns them for making mistakes It seems to me that we cannot believe both. Either we supposed the first approach and accept that mistakes will be made, or we do not tolerate mistakes, but then discourage unprofessionalism. That, it seems to me, is the systemic issue surrounding this particular one.
Phrasings like
“if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary”
for what is evidently a fully paid, luxurious work & travel experience to top EA hubs including costs covered for a partner, tanks the quality of the comment.
You make it sound like they were offering a McKinsey-like 80 hour gloabl travel slavery. Nonlinear’s offering seems to resemble more a global travel experience for “young silicon-valley EAs” while hustling on a project they find valuable and networking with top EA managers. Regardless of where the exact truth lies, this unreflected strawman characterisation makes it hard to read your comment as well thought through.
On direct response to the takeaway, I think there’s space and need for both, rigid organisations governed by all sorts of boards and unions as well as dynamic social experiment-like orgs trying out new stuff. They probably have different target groups and it seems perfectly desireable to have a world where we got both options.
Huh? No, that is a succinct and accurate description of a disputed interpretation, and I think Nonlinear’s interpretation is wrong there. They keep saying in their defense that they paid Alice (the equivalent of) $72,000 when they didn’t—it’s really not the same thing at all if 80% of it is comped flights, food, and hotels. At least for me, the amount of cash that would be an equivalent value to Alice’s compensation package is something like $30-40,000.
Though the degree of un-professionalism displayed by all parties involved in this saga is startling, I actually think EA has a great mix of “boring” orgs and fast-and-loose startup-y ones. One organization having ridiculous drama like this, once every few years, out of hundreds of EA orgs existing without incident, might be the right level where we’re balancing mistakes vs excessive bureaucracy. (On the other hand, you could argue the FTX disaster was caused by this kind of thing, and that much harm, even once, outweighs the benefits of reduced bureaucracy in a thousand other orgs.)
I’m glad to see that Nonlinear’s evidence is now public, since Ben’s post did not seem to be a thorough investigation. As I said to Ben before he posted his original post, I knew of evidence that strongly contradicted his post, and I encouraged him to temporarily pause the release of his post so he could review the evidence carefully, but he would not delay.
1) Do you have any concerns the section above on Ben Pace could be considered an ad hominem attack? I.e. attacking someone’s character rather than their claims? [1]
2) How long do you think it would have been reasonable for Ben Pace to wait? With the benefit of hindsight, we can see it has taken nonlinear 96 days to write a response to his post. [2]
3) What specific claims do you think have been rebutted? Perhaps you can quote Ben’s original piece; link to the evidence which disproves it; and include your interpretation of what said evidence shows.
Whilst I think @John G. Halstead comment could have been written better. I agree the question needs to be asked.
It’s taken 1 year and 29 days if considering the first time these comments were made https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L4S2NCysoJxgCBuB6/announcing-nonlinear-emergency-funding?commentId=5P75dFuKLo894MQFf
Hi Elliot. To respond to your questions:
(1) I interpreted the section “Sharing Information About Ben Pace” as making the point that it’s quite easy to make very bad-sounding accusations that are not reliable and that are not something people should update to any significant degree on if one applies a one-sided and biased approach. It sounds like some people interpreted it differently, but I thought the point of the section was quite clear (to me, anyway) based on this part of it: “However, this is completely unfair to Ben. It’s written in the style of a hit piece. And I believe you should not update much on Ben’s character from this.
[...list of reasons why you shouldn’t update given...]
I’m not yet worried about these “patterns” about Ben because I don’t know if they are patterns. I haven’t heard his side. And I refuse to pass judgment on someone without hearing their side”
(2) I think it would have been reasonable for Ben to wait 4 or 5 weeks (e.g., 3 or 4 weeks for them to gather their evidence, 1 or 2 weeks to review it). I assume (though I could be wrong) that Nonlinear could have provided a lot of the key evidence in 3 weeks, though not written it up in long-form prose and organized it as they have done for this post, which is vastly more work than merely providing the raw evidence about each claim for someone to look through. Providing evidence to an investigator takes way less time than doing a full write-up for the EA forum.
(3) I didn’t do a detailed look at every row in the “Short summary overview table”, but for the ones I did look into in more detail, I found Nonlinear’s counter evidence to be compelling. That table is organized by claim and is in an easy-to-navigate structure, so I suggest people take a look for themselves at the evidence Nonlinear provided regarding whatever claims they think are important.
I would have loved to hear in your own words the most important claims that you think have been rebutted, and why you think so. When I look through the appendix document, I see a tangle of screenshots; mildly to moderately related points about these screenshots; and subjective claims about the ex-employees’ personal dispositions. I am not sure if this is because nonlinear is highly dysfunctional, or whether this is practicing a “[...] see what sticks” strategy.
Taking two important claims from Ben’s post. (1) Chloe wasn’t paid what she was promised (2) The employees were asked to transport drugs across a border.
(1) The first thing any union employee, HR person, or employment lawyer will ask: Was there a contract and what does it say?
When I come away from reading the appendix, I am unable to answer this, and my followup question remains also unanswered.
(2) The screenshots and related claims are even more confusing in this case. I’m left with the impression that it was pretty common for the nonlinear team to make these kinds of requests, including to “load up” on antibiotics. This is a pretty strange professional culture, from my perspective. So whilst I can see that the screenshot does not mention any recreational drugs, it’s not updating me negatively towards the likeliness of the claim.
Also, a quick legal note: it’s necessarily legal to fly with drugs, even if you purchased them legitimately. Buying drugs without a prescription in Mexico, and flying them to the US where you require a prescription, would be a crime.
Edit: it looks to me like the Mexican government is trying to shut down illegal pharmacies that dispense these kinds of medications without prescriptions. So they likely would have been both illegal to purchase in Mexico and illegal to import into the US.
We show Chloe’s work contract in the third row of the very first table. We also link to interview transcripts showing that we paid her exactly what she was promised. This is a clear example of Chloe lying.
If you don’t, update based on that, I’m not sure what to say. She knowingly and clearly lied, despite knowing that we had a work contract and interview transcripts showing this. Please consider that you shouldn’t trust somebody who has provably lied to you and the community multiple times.
For #2, you are saying you’re worried about a people who want to buy antibiotics? We travel all the time and it’s often hard to interact with local medical systems since we don’t speak the language. And I get frequent UTIs (if you must know), and very frequently end up being in pain for days because it’s hard to navigate a new medical system where I don’t speak the language, so it just seems pretty good to be prepared and travel with some antibiotics, just in case.
The link you share isn’t saying that pharmacies are illegal, it’s saying that they sometimes sell counterfeit drugs, and that’s illegal. It’s not related to this situation.
Lastly, we thought since she was getting a single pack in a country where it was legal, it was very unlikely that anything would happen traveling with that. I googled it, asked ChatGPT to search for it, and asked a lawyer friend of mine if they’ve ever heard of somebody being arrested for traveling with a single pack of ADHD medicine without a prescription. Nothing showed up (except for going to a place like Japan with famously strict laws around that).
Think about it. The number of people who take ADHD medication who travel with their medicine without remembering to bring their prescription is massive, and you never hear about anybody getting in trouble for it. They’re not looking for people with ADHD who just forgot to bring their prescription. They’re looking for smugglers.
This is all moot though: she went and got herself a prescription. Also, once again, she was travelling with genuinely illegal recreational drugs on both flights for herself. I am very surprised you don’t consider this point to be extremely relevant here.
The whole point Ben was making was that “they were convinced to take actions that could have had severe personal downsides such as jail time in a foreign country, and that these are actions that they confidently believe they would not have taken had it not been due to the strong pressures they felt from the Nonlinear cofounders”.
We didn’t pressure her—we just asked, and when she said she needed a perscription, we said to forget about it. And she would have done it anyways—and did. With her own genuinely illegal recreational drugs. She actually kept half of the ADHD medicine for herself.
Can I confirm I am seeing the correct image. I see a screenshot of a google document. As oppose to contract signed by both parties. Would you be able to confirm this contract was signed by both parties?
It indeed looks like the article I linked was related to counterfeit drugs, and not necessarily dispensing drugs without prescription. Although, I still suspect the reason adderall is accessible in tourist areas, is not related to their inherent legality, but instead some of the themes this article. I will research this further and make edits below.
If I understand these complaints to have been made in 2021, ChatGPT was launched in Nov 2022. Is it possible you are mistaken here?
If I understand you correctly, you were aware that by asking your employee to bring drugs across the border, she would be committing a crime?
Hi Spencer what do you make of the attempted smear of Ben in retaliation for writing the post? Is that sane behaviour?
Are you referring to the part of the post called “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” when you say “attempted smear of Ben in retaliation for writing the post”? If so, I don’t interpret that section the way you might because (from my perspective) it seemed clear that it was trying to make a point about how easy it is to make allegations sound bad when they are flimsy. Especially since the section says:
“However, this is completely unfair to Ben. It’s written in the style of a hit piece. And I believe you should not update much on Ben’s character from this.
[...list of reasons why you shouldn’t update given...]
I’m not yet worried about these “patterns” about Ben because I don’t know if they are patterns. I haven’t heard his side. And I refuse to pass judgment on someone without hearing their side”
I think the thing people are taking issue with is that Ben was used as the particular example to illustrate this—if there was no desire to create a negative impression of him, why was a different or even anonymous example used? You can say ‘here is X information—but don’t treat it as information’, and know that it’s very unlikely people would update 0.0% on the information. I think this seems so self-evident to people that they’re not explaining why they’re not taking the disclaimer at face value.
I also agree with other commenters that it’s actually irrational to update 0.0% on the information anyway.
Another confusing this is that in the comments here Kat says she believes what the person told her—so that is passing judgement on Ben without getting his side. It may not be updating at all on his broader personality (which again seems irrational) but it is passing judgement on his actions in that incident, and without hearing his side of the incident.
I didn’t interpret the original post as saying you should update 0%, just that you should update only a very small amount because it’s flimsy and sloppily reported on evidence.
I tried starting from the beginning of the appendix, and almost immediately encountered a claim for which I feel Nonlinear has overstated their evidence.
Were Alice and Chloe “advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/visitors that Nonlinear invited”? This is split into three separate rebuttals (family, romantic partners, and locals).
Nonlinear provides screenshots demonstrating that they encouraged Alice and Chloe to regularly spend time with their families, and encouraged Chloe to spend time with her boyfriend as well as letting him live with them… and also, in their own words (which I have reproduced verbatim below) they did, in fact, advise Alice to hang out with EAs they knew instead of family once, and instead of locals at least twice.
Their reporting of the family advice:
In the short summary overview table, Nonlinear describes the claim that Alice was advised not to spend time with her family as a “Bizarre, false accusation.” However, the appendix includes the above description of a time when Nonlinear told her to postpone a family visit in order to spend time with EAs Nonlinear had invited to live with them. They say it happened only once, and they provide evidence that they encouraged her to interact with her family on other occasions; I consider this context at least partially mitigating, but I think describing this as a false accusation is misleading.
The advice about locals:
Nonlinear says that they did sometimes advise Alice to spend less time hanging out with locals as opposed to with EAs they introduced her to, but clarify that Alice had asked for advice and said that she wished to maximize her impact. (They subsequently indicate that both Alice and Chloe sometimes hung out with locals and attended local events. Again, this is mitigating context in my view; however, if I take Nonlinear’s description at face value, it would seem to indicate that Alice’s claim was true.)
Based on Nonlinear’s own recounting of events, I think it’s true that Alice and Chloe were advised to prioritize spending time with people who Nonlinear considered to be high-impact, instead of family and locals. (I don’t know whether this also happened with romantic partners, but Nonlinear at least does not report having done so). Nonlinear provides mitigating context, and I do not consider this to be proof that they were abusive as employers, but this makes it difficult for me to trust that their assessments of the evidence will match mine for the rest of the document.
Another random spot check: page 115 of the Google Doc. (I generated a random number between 1 and 135.)
This page is split between two sections. The first starts on page 114:
The quote given in support of this is “I think Emerson is very ambitious and would like a powerful role in EA/X-risk/etc.” In my opinion, the quote and the paraphrase are very different things, especially since, as it happens, that quote is not even from the original post, it’s from a comment.
The Google Doc then goes on to describe the reasons Drew believes that Emerson is not ambitious for status within EA. This is ultimately a character judgement, and I don’t have a strong opinion about who is correct about Emerson’s character here. However, I do not think it’s actually important to the issue at hand, since the purported ambition was not in fact load-bearing to the original argument in any way.
The second section is longer, and goes on for several pages. It concerns Emerson’s previous company, Dose.
Specifically, in the original post, Ben quoted a couple very negative Glassdoor reviews about Dose and about Emerson specifically. He also noted there were “also far worse reviews about a hellish work place which are very worrying, but they’re from the period after Emerson’s LinkedIn says he left, so I’m not sure to what extent he is responsible he is for them.”
According to the Google Doc, Ben’s original post included those reviews and he only removed them after being prompted several times. If that’s true, that seems suboptimal but not horrible: that’s the point of sharing posts with people before sharing them publicly.
Nonlinear’s response also claims that
The link goes to a comment where Kat calculates that average. I double-checked the numbers by averaging all the Emerson-era reviews, and I got a slightly lower number, but probably that was because I did not know exactly when he left and included all of the 2017 reviews in the average. However. One of the reviews says:
and that seems important. Overall, the reviews, even the overall positive ones, appear to have a consensus that there was a huge amount of micromanagement, and a lot of confusion and lack of direction. Which is not a mortal sin, but seems worth keeping in mind.
This claim has no links or sources, and by its nature, will not be in the original post, so I’m not sure how to fact-check it.
This part has no links to sources, so I don’t know what exactly Habryka found or said about it, but in fact there are seven 1-star reviews from this period, out of a total of 35 reviews. (The comment mentioning commissioned reviews was actually not one of them.) Obviously Nonlinear is correct that one anonymous allegation of commissioning reviews is not conclusive, but in my subjective opinion, it seems broadly plausible.
This section also contains a great deal of anger at Ben for his perceived carelessness with Emerson’s reputation. I agree that the anger would be justified if he was in fact careless, but I do not in fact see all that much evidence of that carelessness in this section. Which makes the outrage ring somewhat hollow. It is difficult to take seriously accusations that Ben “frames it in the most outrage-inducing way” when, as far as I can tell, that is what the document I am reading is doing.
Overall, my impression is that the evidence is inconclusive about whether Emerson was a bad boss at Dose. It seems valid for Ben to have included the poor reviews in the original post, though I think he should have also included the fact that there were a bunch of positive reviews.
Reading Lukas_Gloor’s comment (and to a lesser extent, this still helpful one from Erica_Edelman) made me realize what I think is the big disagreement between people and why they are talking past each other.
It comes down to how you would feel about doing Alice/Chloe’s job.
Some people, like the Nonlinear folks and most of those sympathetic to them, think something like the following:
“Why is she such an ungrateful whiner? She has THE dream job/life. She gets to travel the world with us (which is awesome since we can do anything and this is what we chose to do), living in some insanely cool places with super cool and successful people AND she has a large degree of autonomy over what she does AND we are building her up and like 15% of her job is some menial tasks that we did right before she joined and come on it’s fine. How can you complain about the smallest unpleasant thing when the rest of your life rocks and this is your FIRST job out of college when this lifestyle is reserved for multimillionaires? She gets to live the life of a multimillionaire and is surrounded by cool EA people”
Others look at Alice/Chloe’s life and think something like the following:
“Wow, that really sucks to have to follow these people around all the time, doing whatever they want to do, living away from the comfort of your own home. She thought she was going to do operations work for a cool longtermist startup that was expanding but instead, she’s always on the clock, paid very little, and being told that getting to travel alongside them and live like them is a PERK! Run away from these people as fast as possible! How is anyone defending these rich, entitled, exploiters? Of course, she would exaggerate some things, it felt like that!”
Look at Lukas’ comment again and how they each describe a certain experience in St. Barth’s.
From Emerson/Nonlinear’s perspective, they didn’t bring someone on to do some stuff 9-5. They brought someone on to be one of them which includes doing stuff for a couple of hours whenever they pop up and this is just what it’s like to be in a faster pace startup (how Nonlinear describes themself and how Emerson has always lived and how he built his previous companies). It was in the job description. She’s going on this trip too after all and someone has to call the places to organize. Alright, she’s whining again so I’ll just take over, whatever.
From Chloe’s perspective, she’s been following these people around for the past month and always seeing them and wants a break from them and it’s finally her supposed day off so she wants it off but they randomly decide to do a day excursion. Well, that sucks. Now she is forced to spend the day with them AND do stupid planning tasks trying to convince some random guy to let her plan this last minute just because Emerson wants to. She then tells Kat that she doesn’t want to have to work on her weekends.
Look at Erica’s comment. If you think this is like being a remote travelling nanny who should be getting paid extra for the travel but you are getting paid less, it sucks. If you think this is joining some cool remote/travelling charity startup, this is awesome.
This also explains why some people (as Kat would say, 19⁄21 people) who joined Nonlinear under this arrangement had a great time. They got to live a cool life, with a lot of freedom, in cool places. To them, this was a great experience. They got to pocket $12k/year into savings and live like a king.
Essentially, what I think happened is there was a really bad fit (and there are some bad incentives that are also at play here that will take too long to go into with regards to selecting a candidate) and different expectations between the parties. Nonlinear wanted to start adding people to their crew and expanding their team who travelled the world and worked on AI safety and wanting people to slot right into how they do things; taking spontaneous vacations, living in exotic places where it’s always sunny, getting shit done regardless of who’s job it is etc. Alice/Chloe might have thought they wanted it but didn’t know and so they tried it out and they definitely didn’t like it but didn’t feel they could quit (Whether this was true or not. Remember that while they could probably leave whenever, they might not have felt like they could for reasons that are hard to explain).
What should have happened here? Hard to say. I think a gradual ramping up to this is super necessary and hiring people (from Nonlinear’s perspective: adding people to the team) after a couple of interviews that you had never really spent a lot of time with or lived with before is ill-advised. A 1/2-week work trial seems especially necessary here. But Alice/Chloe also needed to be doing some constant introspection from day 1 if they wanted to stay here.
I 100% agree with you that people should be allowed to enter mutually beneficial trades, even when those same trades would be terrible for most people if they entered them. This is really important; there are so many important things we can’t accomplish if every job needs to be safe for the lowest common denominator. And “allowed” includes “allowed to be imperfect at identifying who is a good fit, which means some people will get hurt”. I think the burden on people is somewhat higher when they’re deliberately recruiting people with less life experience, but you still can’t expect perfection.
My guess is Chloe and Alice were unusually fragile, and unusually bad at leaving (and I believed this before Kat’s post). You should expect that almost everywhere, regardless of quality: the people having the worst time are the ones who are unusually sensitive and unusually bad at exiting situations they don’t like. But it seems pretty inevitable that Nonlinear’s recruiting strategy at the time would attract these types (to their credit, they seem to have realized they can’t get the risk acceptably low, and stopped that recruiting).
Why do I think they were near-destined to recruit people like Alice and Chloe?
If you don’t value travel, the job paid poorly (in money). Valuing travel isn’t that weird, but even if you do your tastes are unlikely to perfectly overlap with the core Nonlinear team, so apply some discount for that. This attracts people with little work experience, who will be worse at advocating for themselves.
The job additionally paid in mentoring and social access. Mentoring can be immensely valuable, easily worth giving up tens of thousands of dollars… but if you feature it that prominently, you’re going to attract people who value it more, and a disproportionate number of those are inexperienced, emotionally adrift, or oversensitive to authority figures.
Similarly, there are a small number of people for whom social access can be extremely valuable, and giving up money to get it is a great trade. But it also attracts people looking for social validation, who are going to be more vulnerable.
So dismissing the complaints because Alice and Chloe were “too sensitive” feels a bit like bringing a canary into your coal mine and then dismissing its death. You’re right that the canary is more sensitive than people, but there is still a problem.
100% agree that there are some very bad incentives at play to make it very likely that people who aren’t good fits join this type of arrangement and I agree that Nonlinear shouldn’t be “let off the hook” so to speak. I think there should have been some precautionary things in place from the get go. Lots more things
It sounds like you think that the other 19 employees of nonlinear had the same arrangement (travel with them and be paid $12k/year). I doubt this is true. Probably many of the 19 are being remotely employed.
Many people spend money besides rent+food+travel, so this sounds exaggerated.
Yeah I believe they were the only in person employees—so 0⁄2 not 19⁄21
I can’t speak about the other interns, but I remotely interned at Nonlinear for free because of the potential to contribute/upskill/open up new opportunities. I was working 4 days/week at a programming job and 1-2 days/week at Nonlinear. My internship helped give me the confidence to organise the Sydney AI Safety Fellowship, which was the first thing I organised in terms of my AI Safety movement building.
It looks like they are bought phones, laptops, SIM cards, productivity tools, etc.
I know of only two people who worked at Nonlinear. They were both in person. Both had good experiences.
My current understanding is that almost all employees who participated in this arrangement had a pretty bad time, but I am not confident of this. I am pretty confident it was >50% though (not counting Kat, Emerson or Drew, who were in positions of authority and so we should expect their experience to be quite different).
Thanks for highlighting this crux. I’m not going to say that organisations in the community shouldn’t do things like this again, but everyone needs to be aware that “Here be Dragons”.
I find it interesting and revealing to look at how Nonlinear re-stated Chloe’s initial account of an incident into a shorter version.
First, here’s their shortened version (by Nonlinear):
For comparison, here’s Chloe’s original:
It’s probably best for readers to think first about whether they feel like the summary omits important things. I think it’s fine to omit some things and mostly describe the incident from Kat and Emerson’s perspective. But I think not mentioning the following three things, at least, is pretty bad form and misleading:
There’s a huge difference between
“I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself”
versus
“Emerson asked her to do her usual job, and she said “It’s a weekend”
This difference above really changes the context for
”He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”.”
Basically, for the version where Chloe only said “It’s a weekend,” it’s defensible to interpret Emerson’s reply as a friendly negotiation attempt. By contrast, in the version where Chloe says “I really need the vacation day for myself,” the comment that most readily comes to my hyperbole-prone mind for “But organizing stuff is fun for you!” is “psychopathic.”
(To be fair, it could be that Chloe failed at expressing just how much she needed that day off – I think that’s a common pattern with many people to struggle with voicing their needs and limits. Even so, I think it’s bad form by Nonlinear to not acknowledge this discrepancy of accounts and instead impose their own framing on Chloe’s account. It feels like trying to alter the frame covertly rather than discussing what happened in the open.) (Not to mention that “she said so many times” (about liking to organize trips) is totally beside the point, and pretending otherwise is bizarre. Like, if they can’t even get this right here on the forum after three months of thinking about it, things don’t look good.)
I think it’s not okay to omit relevant context when they summarized the following passage:
”(This is another example of Chloe coming in with the implicit frame that doing her job is abusive. “Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer.” We can empathize with her wishing she could join us before finishing her job, but this was her job. Being an assistant is not abuse.)”
They make it seem like Chloe was complaining about normal work on a normal work day. However, in this story, Chloe had agreed here to work on a weekend and she only expected that she had to organize the trip (St Martin and back) and nothing else. Getting the ATV rentals while everyone else was having coffee was yet another unexpected task on her off day. It’s a very different thing to feel bad about unexpected new tasks coming up on your off day after you already felt like you got talked into doing more than you wanted, than it is to feel bad about normal work while your bosses are resting. It feels unfair not to acknowledge the true source of Chloe’s discontent in this specific story about the cafe.
Chloe doesn’t seem to agree with the following description:
“Then, when she complained, Emerson said “OK” and then just… went and did her job for her.”
Here, what Nonlinear omitted was this contradicting passage in Chloe’s account:
”All ATVs have been rented out—it’s tourist season. I check back in, Emerson says I need to call all the places on the island and keep trying. I call all the places I can find, this is about 10 places (small island). No luck. Eventually Emerson agrees that using a moped will be okay, and that’s when I get relieved from my work tasks.”
It’s strange to omit this. It sounds like Emerson insisted that she made ten phone calls before dropping the idea. To me, it feels quite demanding to ask your assistant to go to such great lengths on what was initially an off day for them (or at all, tbh), especially if you can probably infer based on their mood and behavior that they’re not in the happiest and most energetic of states.
In any case, this is the sort of thing that makes me feel like “Nonlinear are being unfair and somewhat sneaky in their presentation.”
To be clear, I’m not necessarily accusing them of deliberately misrepresenting what Chloe said. They might reasonably reply, “We know Chloe said different things; after all, we linked to her long comment and we think forum readers can read for themselves. We decided to showcase our side of the story, how we remember it.” However, even if that’s how they reply, I think it’s not okay to do things underhandedly like that, especially when they then go on and make strong negative statements about Chloe’s entitlement and bad attitude based on their version of events, without flagging that Chloe disagrees about so much of the context. Doing things underhandedly is manipulative because it hides possible points of disagreement, making it seem like their version of the story is more obviously accurate/objective than it actually is.
This comment sounds very reasonable, but I think it really isn’t. Not because anything you said is false; I agree that the summary left out relevant sections, but because the standard is unreasonably high. This is a 134 page document. I expect that you could spend hours poking one legitimate hole after another into how they were arguing or paraphrasing.
Since I expect that you can do this, I don’t it makes sense to update based on you demonstrating it.
I feel the same way about what happened itself. It seems like Chloe really wanted to have a free day, but Emerson coerced her into working because it was convenient for him, that he probably wouldn’t have insisted if she had argued the point, but that she didn’t have the social courage to do so (which is super understandable, I don’t think I’d have argued in that sitaution). If so, that’s very much not cool from Emerson. It also is completely normal. I would expect that you can find anecdotes like this one from people who are more considerate than average. Not if you meet them for a day, but if you’re with them for several months.
Now if Chloe complained about this and the same thing kept happening, then we’re talking. I think that puts it into the territory of “so bad that it warrants sharing information about it publicly”. And who knows, maybe it did. I mean, here’s it’s just Kat’s word against Chloe’s. But then the problem isn’t quoting inaccurately, it’s that information contained in the doc isn’t true. If I take the doc at face value, I really don’t think the anecdote looks bad for Nonlinear, even with the full context from the quote.
This is also kind of how I feel about much of the comment section. A lot of it seems to apply the standard “did Nonlinear do something seriously wrong”. Yes, of course they did things seriously wrong. When regular people live together, everyone does things seriously wrong all the time. I think the standard we should apply instead is “did they do anything unusually wrong”, meaning unusual given that we’re picking from a several month window. And I’d say the same for this document. You shouldn’t ask “can I find serious errors with this document?” because the answer is bound to be yes, it should be “can I find really egregious errors?” This one doesn’t seem like an egregious error; it seems like one that most people would make many of in a document of this length. (I think that’s true even if they work on it for several months.)
Note that I didn’t go through all the pages of the appendix looking for something particularly worthy of critique. Instead, I remembered that Chloe’s comments in her own words seemed quite compelling to me three months ago, so I wanted to re-read it and compare it to what Nonlinear wrote about this incident. When I did so, I thought “wow this is worse than I thought; this warrants its own comment.” Note that this is one of the only times I went back to source material and compared it directly to Nonlinear’s appendix.
I doubt you can find anecdotes like this from people who are more considerate than average. (But also, I think this would be too high of a standard.)
In any case, I think the gist of your point is reasonable and I might interpret this evidence the same way you do if I had more favorable priors from other places of the discussion.
I just think “Why would you have more favorable priors from other places of the discussion, given that what I pointed out is probably more typical than outlier-y.”
The following isn’t an “egregious error” exactly, but I think the whole document is outlier-y across the dimension of “how forcefully do they try to push a black-and-white narrative?” They tell us strong things about how to interpret Chloe’s motivations when it doesn’t even pass the test of representing her points accurately. I’m concerned about this and it’s one thing that goes into me having less favorable priors than you do when I then go on to evaluate individual anecdotes and their weight.
Good reply. I’m back to feeling a lot of uncertainty about what to think.
I do understand where people are coming from defending Nonlinear. Even if, like me, someone thinks there’s a lot about them that didn’t go well or that doesn’t look good in terms of their processing and reflection skills, it’s still important that the “flagship accusations” [edit: this was a poor choice of words, I should have said “smoking-gun, most outrageous-sounding examples of the accusations.” The original post by Ben – search for “summary of my epistemic state” here – listed four bullet points as the main concerns, and I think 3⁄4 of those still seem obviously strong to me, while the 3rd point is something I’m now more unsure of.] in the original post were mostly wrong, so I’m like, “Did they deserve to go through this public trial?,” maybe not! At the same time, it wouldn’t feel ideal either to pretend like I don’t now have significant concerns about them. And then, what creates additional pressure to keep arguing the point, is that it seems like they’ve succeeded at convincing quite a few people that Chloe might be a malefactor (lending some credibility to initial fears of retaliation), when my best guess is that this isn’t the case at all. To be fair, Chloe is currently protected by anonymity, so you could argue this is the smaller issue. However, some people contemplated de-anonymizing both Chloe and Alice, and I’m truly shocked by the suggestion to de-anonymize Chloe, especially since the message this would be sending is something like, “public judgment that the community considers her a bad actor.” For these reasons, I felt compelled to press the point that I think Nonlinear look bad to me in many ways both regarding initial events under discussion and related to how they now speak about Chloe, even though I’m also sympathetic to the viewpoint of “maybe let it be, they’ve gone through enough.”
(I edited an earlier comment to include this, but it’s a bit buried now, so I wanted to make a new comment.)
I’ve read most of the post and appendix (still not everything). To be a bit more constructive, I want to expand on how I think you could have responded better (and more quickly):
I think (4) and (5) are largely missing, though I do recognize you’re making some good changes and note those about halfway through the appendix document.
While I agree that this would largely have been an effective rebuttal that prevented many people from having the vibes-based reactions they’re having, I think it itself excludes a thing I find rather valuable from this post… namely, that the thing that happened here is one that the community (and indeed most if not all communities) did not handle well and I think are overall unprepared for handling in future circumstances.
Open to hearing ways that point could have been made in a different way, but your post still treats this all as “someone said untrue things about us, here’s the evidence they were untrue and our mistakes,” and I think more mistakes were made beyond just NL or Alice/Chloe.
The evidence collected here doesn’t convince me that Alice and Chloe were lying, or necessarily that Ben Pace did a bad job investigating this. I regret contributing another long and involved comment to this discourse, but I feel like “actually assessing the claims” has been underrepresented compared to people going to the meta level, people discussing the post’s rhetoric, and people simply asserting that this evidence is conclusive proof that Alice and Chloe lied.
My process of thinking through this has made me wish more receipts from Alice and Chloe were included in Ben’s post, or even just that more of the accusations had come in their own words, because then it would be clear exactly what they were claiming. (I think their claims being filtered through first Ben and then Kat/Emerson causes some confusion, as others have noted).
I want to talk about some parts of the post and why I’m not convinced. To avoid cherry-picking, I chose the first claim, about whether Alice was asked to travel with illegal drugs (highlighted by Kat as “if you read just one illustrative story, read this one”), and then I used a random number generator to pick two pages in the appendix (following the lead of other commenters).
I worry that the following will seem maximally negative. But I don’t mean I am strongly convinced of the more negative interpretations I suggest; just that a lot of the screenshots are consistent with Alice and Chloe’s claims being true. This should be read in the spirit of red-teaming or spot-checking, rather than me offering a figured-out narrative.
Was Alice asked to bring drugs across borders illegally?
Ben wrote: ‘Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free”. Privately, Drew said that Kat would “love her forever” if she did this. I bring this up as an example of the sorts of requests that Kat/Emerson/Drew felt comfortable making during Alice’s time there.’
As evidence against this, Kat offers screenshots showing Drew asking Alice to pick up some medicine. When Alice reports that a prescription is needed and says she is too sick to ask around extensively, Drew says not to worry, and hopes she gets better soon.
Does this prove that Alice wasn’t asked to bring drugs across borders illegally?
No: just because on this occasion Drew didn’t push the issue, doesn’t mean she wasn’t asked to do illegal things on other, different occasions.
Note that the exchange is with Drew, who was dating Alice for some of the time, and who as far as I know no-one has made any negative allegations about. This exchange doesn’t have any bearing on whether similar exchanges with Kat or Emerson involved more pressure on Alice. The texts also don’t show whether it would have been legal for her to travel with the medicine to where Nonlinear were based, even if she could purchase it without a prescription where she was.
I realise that it’s actually nigh-on impossible for Nonlinear to prove they never asked Alice to do anything illegal! They’d have to show their entire message history, and even then, Alice could claim that the conversation happened in person. So maybe this is the best evidence they could have included. But just because it’s the best evidence we could hope for, doesn’t mean we should accept it as knock-down, irrefutable evidence that Alice lied; that requires believing that this is the incident Alice was referring to in her conversations with Ben, which is not clear to me.
Spot checks: p 52
From the appendix:
‘Alice says “look at this screenshot—it’s proof that Kat is trying to silence me by withholding my pay!” But Alice strategically cropped this screenshot.’
This is the screenshot that was included in Ben’s original post, when Alice says she is figuring out ‘survival stuff’ and Kat appears to make her silence about her experience a condition of offering her help. In the appendix, Kat shows more context; she shows that she proactively reached out to Alice, suggested some free accommodation (like the EA hotel) and a mental health resource. She comments:
“This, by the way, is a perfect example of how Alice spreads falsehoods. They’re mostly lying by omission. She’ll say something that is true (the cropped screenshot), but not show the rest. And the rest will totally flip the sign of the whole accusation.”
I disagree that the rest flips the sign of the accusation. I think these messages are consistent with Kat’s story: that Alice was mentally unwell and spreading (false) bad stories, and Kat genuinely wanted to help her while preventing her from spreading lies. I also think they’re consistent with Alice’s story; that Kat had found out that Alice was telling (true) stories about bad experiences she’d had at Nonlinear, and Kat was trying to persuade her to stop. If you want to persuade someone to stop telling negative stories about you —whether true or false —being helpful and friendly is a good way to do it! Ime it’s much harder to say negative things about someone who is being explicitly very generous to you.
I guess something that confuses me here about Kat’s story is, if Alice was telling lies because of mental illness or a lack of contact with reality, then I’m not sure why Kat expected a commitment from her to mean anything anyway.
I think it’s right that Ben’s claim that Alice was “in a position of strong need” was stretching it: she does say she’s safe, and ‘figuring out basic survival stuff’ *could* mean being very needy, but could also mean something less extreme than that.
Spot check: p. 104
from the appendix:
”Kat: It’s incredibly unwise to date your colleague/roommate/boss’s brother who has a different relationship orientation, but it’s up to you.
Alice: Kat’s trying to force me to not be poly!”
Here Kat gives some evidence that she’s not anti-poly and would never try to interfere with someone’s dating life:
‘For example, around the time Alice alleges that Kat said she couldn’t be poly around her, Kat suggested that Alice might like dating two of her poly friends coming to visit who she knows are looking for a third to form a triad. Also, we’ve invited many poly people to travel with us. Including Alice, who was practicing polyamory the entire time she lived with us. We knew she was poly before she even arrived and were 100% fine with it. She started polyamorously sleeping with multiple of our friends within a week of joining us in Puerto Rico. So clearly we don’t mind having poly people live with us.’
To say ‘we can’t be anti-poly because we invited polyamorous Alice to travel with us’ is begging the question, since Alice claimed that Kat asked her to stop being poly and wasn’t ’100% fine with it’.
The other parts aren’t strong evidence that Kat did not have the conversation Alice reported. Someone can have a bias or discomfort without that affecting them literally all the time. Lots of people in the EA and AI safety community are poly, so it would be difficult for Nonlinear to avoid asking poly people to travel with them.
I think it’s reasonable for Kat to discourage Alice from dating Drew —albeit arguably hypocritical, given that Kat and Emerson are a couple and also colleagues, so they clearly can’t think it’s inappropriate in all cases.
Again, there is probably no way that Kat could actually prove that she never told Alice she shouldn’t be poly! But again, just because this is the best evidence we could reasonably hope for, doesn’t mean it’s actually that strong.
General thoughts
This is all tricky, because my impression is that this was always very much about…vibes? (Which partly comes from the fact that I heard about it from Alice and Chloe, rather than Ben’s post). It’s understandable that lots of discussion has been about legible, concrete things: how much were they paid? Were they asked to bring illegal drugs across borders or not? But that legible stuff has always seemed less central than ‘there were just super toxic interpersonal dynamics at play’. And that’s tricky either way: if Alice and Chloe are telling the truth, it’s tricky because it’s really hard to express ‘why was it so bad’ (I thought Chloe’s comment about her experience on the weekend day trip was really useful here). And if Kat and Emerson are telling the truth, it’s hard to argue against a vibe, or to argue that the vibe came from unreasonable interpretations or expectations on the part of Alice and Chloe. In general, it just seems really, really hard to think clearly about situations like this. My sympathies to everyone involved.
Places I think people messed up and where improvement is needed
The Nonlinear Team
The Nonlinear team should have gotten their replies up sooner, even if in pieces. In the court of public opinion, time/speed matters. Muzzling up and taking ~3 months to release their side of the story comes across as too polished and buttoned up.
Not being selective enough about who they took into a very unorthodox work/living environment. I don’t think this type of work/living arrangement is always bad (though I do think that NL shouldn’t try it again, nor do I think a nomadic lifestyle is the most effective one generally). Still, I do think it needs to grow a lot more organically and have lower commitment tests that build up to this arrangement. Taking in a new employee to this environment is ill-advised. I’m happy to see that Nonlinear no longer lives with or travels with their employees.
I think Emerson’s threat of a libel lawsuit encourages a bad norm. He went to it far too fast and it escalated things too quickly.
Ben Pace
I think it is pretty reasonable to assume that ~1000-10000 hours and possibly more were spent by the community due to his original post (I am including all the reading and all the commenting in both posts) and a lot more time by all those doing the investigating and debunking. I also think it’s reasonable to assume that at least 10% of this time was likely to be spent and thus Ben should have put a lot more effort into fact-checking, waiting for evidence, etc.
I think Ben really messed up with not letting Nonlinear respond. I think it would have been reasonable for Ben to give Nonlinear, say, exactly one week to provide the evidence they wanted with a promise to read/review it and decide if he felt it was worthwhile to edit the post before publishing. A “search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders, not from a search to give a balanced picture of its overall costs and benefits.” definitely seems to be the wrong way to approach this.
The EA Forum comment section
There is far too much “I haven’t read the post or the evidence but the vibes/tone feel off so I am not going to bother reading what they wrote and I will continue to have my negative opinions” going on and not nearly enough grappling with the substance of what they wrote.
People should spend more time reading/reflecting than trying to comment right away.
People seem to really gravitate towards drama. These posts have some of the highest number of comments on any forum posts on the forum.
The EA community/the Community Health team
How could this not have been sent to the Community Health team for them to perform a private and thorough investigation with a conclusion at the end? It would have saved a lot of people a lot of time and reputational damage.
Strong disagree.
A) Sure, all else equal speed would have been better. But if you take the hypothesis that NL is mostly innocent as true for a moment. Getting such a post written about you must be absolutely terrible. If it was me, I’d probably not be in a good shape to write anything in response very quickly.
B) Taking their time to write one long thorough rebuttal is probably better for everyone involved than several rushed responses. I think this reduces the total time me and every other concerned observer will spend on this drama.
Good point
I will again link to my original comments on this issue:
I think there are a few different types of updates to make from this post, but I don’t think Nonlinear has provided any evidence that they are unlikely to retaliate (and indeed, the degree to which past employees seemed threatened into not sharing any negative information about Nonlinear was my biggest warning flag about the organization). I think one of the central criticisms of this post in the comments is the degree to which it does seem optimized to retaliate.
The threats of retaliation were straightforwardly the central reason why we didn’t delay publishing, and I still stand by that decision. If you want me or Ben to do something else in the future, please give me an alternative that prevents undue threats of retaliation. We had talked to Nonlinear and did try to integrate the things they said as best as we can into the post, which like, included a whole section that did indeed argue against various parts that Alice and Chloe said.
How about you email them something like
“We are afraid of undue retaliation but also think it would be good for you guys to provide some counter-evidence for us to include. Therefore, we are going to delay publishing the post by 168 hours from the time of this email to give you time to collect evidence and send to us before we post. We don’t commit to updating the post based on your evidence but will consider it to make the post as truthful as possible. However, if we get the sense that you are spending this time threatening people and preparing retaliation instead of gathering evidence/screenshots, we will post immediately”
I also want to add that it’s not like Lightcone is some feeble powerless organization. Lightcone (and by extension, you + Ben) have a decent amount of power/status in EA. What exactly are you afraid of Emerson/Nonlinear doing?
As i said, I think Emerson threatening the libel lawsuit was dumb.
I don’t think we were in a position to reliably find out about them retaliating and threatening people. A lot of our sources were very afraid and IMO had decent evidence to back up why they were afraid.
Also, to be clear, we did share most of our evidence with them before publication, and we did give them a round to respond, which is what like half of Ben’s post consists of (the whole summary of Nonlinear’s response to the evidence we were presenting was unsurprisingly the result of us sharing the evidence with them). We didn’t share the full post, since that included some information that seemed too risky to share, and some of our sources only wanted shared directly publicly and not to Nonlinear first.
I don’t understand how the thing that you are asking us to do is that different from what we did. At least in my Slack I have an email we were planning to send out 7 days before publishing (Ben can confirm whether indeed this email was sent out, but I am at 90% it happened):
We then had a long call with them 3 days later. Before that called we shared a redacted draft. We incorporated the things they said into the post directly, in the relevant section.
We sent them the summary, to which they replied with:
(to be clear, I am just copying from Slack logs here, so don’t have access to the exact dates and originals, which are in Ben’s email inbox)
We then responded saying “No, sorry, we are still planning to publish this week”:
At this point Emerson and Kat escalated, sent us many emails, called everyone on my team on their phones, and threatened a libel suit. They also cancelled another call they had scheduled with us before publication.
As you can see, we didn’t blind ourselves to evidence from Nonlinear, and I think we gave reasonable warning. Maybe you think we should have given another 1-week extension?
I don’t see a super principled argument for giving two weeks instead of one week. Maybe you think we should have shared the full post with them before publishing, even though many of our sources explicitly requested that we please not do that? I think that would have been a bad idea. I think sharing what we did was roughly the right call, though I do think it would have been better to give Nonlinear more direct access to more of the full post (though again, preferences from our sources, which importantly were many more than Alice and Chloe, made that hard).
It feels really cruxy to me whether you or Ben received any actual evidence of whether Alice or Chloe had lied or misrepresented anything in that 1 week.
Because to me the actual thing I felt from reading the original post’s “Response from Nonlinear” was largely them engaging in some kind of justification or alternative narrative for the overall practices of Nonlinear… but I didn’t care about that, and honestly it felt like it kind of did worse for them because it almost seemed like they were deflecting from the actual claims of abuse.
To me, if you received 0 evidence that there were any inaccuracies in the accusations against Nonlinear in that 1 week, then I think they really dropped the ball in not prioritizing at least something to show that you shouldn’t trust the original sources. Maybe they just thought they had enough time to talk it out, and maybe it really was just like, woah, we need to dig through records from years ago, this is going to take longer than we expected.
But if you did receive some evidence that maybe Alice and Chloe had lied or exaggerated at all… to me that would absolutely justify waiting another week for more evidence, and being much more cautious about everything else you had heard. And if you didn’t, that’s where I personally would be like “You need to show me something that makes me doubt these reports ASAP.”
I get that worries about retaliation can be scary, particularly if the person in question is being described as effectively a ruthless sociopath who will do anything to crush opposition, including hiring stalkers(?!) and such. But in that situation, my take is not “if this happens at least our public post will be out,” it’s “if this happens it’s time to publish and call the police.”
What feels weird to me is the middle-ground area of “These people are dangerous and might retaliate” and “But as long as we post this soon we’re all safe.” It feels like something people facing the mafia might think, like people would break into homes and wipe hard drives or kidnap people before they could publish.
And if that’s the level of Evil that Alice and Chloe described them as… well, at the very least I’m sympathetic to being “manipulated” if that turns out not to be true. But as a “figuring out how to deal with these situations going forward as a community,” I think it makes sense to treat that as “we were emotionally manipulated” and not “we did due diligence,” unless again Nonlinear did nothing to prove any falsehoods in that first week.
Ben had a call with Kat in which they disputed lots of things, which indeed Ben summarized in the final post and included. I don’t think there was anything substantial that Ben knew that didn’t make it into the post when the post was written.
I did not (and continue not to) take Kat and Emerson’s character judgement of Chloe and Alice at face value, and I don’t think them claiming that things were inaccurate was appropriate reason to delay publication (I think in basically all of my hypotheses they would claim that, so it’s really very little bayesian evidence).
Ben summarized his epistemic state on the trustworthiness of various parties reasonably well in the post:
Ben was really extremely exceptionally transparent about his epistemic state in this situation, including in the trustworthiness of the reports. So you can judge for yourself whether publishing given that epistemic state was reasonable (with the alternative I think not really being a delay, but likely substantial retaliation towards our sources, and us running out of time we had budgeted for this project, which I think should be treated as a high-likelihood of the original post never being published at all)
It’s misleading to frame the argument as “them claiming things were inaccurate was appropriate reason to delay publication.” The appropriate reason to delay publication was their evident willingness to compile specific counter-evidence within a week. Of course subjects of hostile articles will always claim inaccuracies, but it matters whether they can credibly claim ability to provide contrary information. “Very last-minute screenshots” simply should not be a thing when working on an investigative piece of this magnitude—if you’re doing investigative work, you have a duty to do it right, not call it short based on the “time [you] had budgeted” and publish whatever you have.
Here’s my standard: epistemic disclaimers do not matter much when it comes to articles impugning reputations. What matters is presenting all available information accurately to the best of your ability. Your claim that the alternative was not a delay simply does not hold water: whether the alternative was a delay or no publication at all was fully within your control. There’s no reason to suspect any retaliation would be greater without publication than with publication; your time budget is nobody’s concern but your own. If the post contained a single meaningful falsehood at publication that could have been prevented by reviewing the information the subject of the article was actively preparing for you, publication at the chosen time was unreasonable no matter how many disclaimers Ben included.
This is a universal statements that’s clearly inaccurate. The relevance of the falsehoods to the central case really matters (if it turns out that a source got a number off by a single irrelevant digit, or it go the name of a city wrong that could have just been omitted, etc.). Any article of this size will have some inaccuracies in them. I agree that there should still be a pretty harsh tradeoff towards accuracy, though in situations like this with very credible evidence that information was being heavily suppressed from being shared (which I still believe), it is also a high priority to get anything out.
It would be terrible if someone had evidence of fraud at FTX, but didn’t have the time to publish it because in order to make their case they had to spend thousands of hours getting each individual detail of their story exactly right.
Separately, it is totally normal, and I don’t see an alternative, that sometimes the thing you do is directly and accurately report what a source has told you. You don’t endorse what the source said, but you just directly state it.
Journalists aren’t responsible for the accuracy of every single thing their sources say, they are responsible for accurately citing reporting what their sources say. If you have another source disputing your first source, you accurately summarize that contradicting source too. Sometimes people say wrong things. Sometimes the fact that they say wrong things is even materially relevant to the story.
It clearly must be possible to write an article that includes the sentence “this source says X” even if X is wrong, or if you think there is only a 50% chance that X is true.
“Meaningful” covers cases like the ones you mentioned. I stand by my words.
Journalists are responsible, to the best of my understanding, for the accuracy of every single thing they say, which includes the things their sources say. If a source says something a journalist knows to be false and the journalist reports that claim, knowing it to be false, they are not fulfilling their duty. As far as I can observe, this aligns with the legal standard (as I discuss here) as well as the ethical standard.
When you amplify someone’s claims, you take responsibility for those claims. When you amplify false claims where contradictory evidence is available to you and you decline to investigate that contradictory evidence, you take responsibility for that.
If someone had evidence of fraud at FTX, they should have published specifically the limited set of evidence they were confident in and could independently verify. If they lacked the time to build a more cohesive, complete story, they should have found someone who had that time.
People live and die on their reputations, and spreading falsehoods that damage someone’s reputation is and should be seen as more than just a minor faux pas. I understand the environment that makes EAs want to overcorrect on this right now, but due diligence is not optional when whistleblowing.
I don’t think a norm that if you quote someone or try to comment on something someone said, you have to take full responsibility for the accuracy of their statements is a recipe for good public communication.
When I write on LessWrong, or the EA Forum, or when I talk to my friends in Slack and large chat rooms, I would absolutely not hold people responsible for the content of things they are commenting on. Indeed, I think it would be impossible for me to have almost any of the conversations I routinely have, if I did try that.
This kind of relationship to publication seems to me to have enormous chilling effects on information propagation and communication, and I don’t really see its merits.
Yes, of course I will sometimes cite and refer sources that I can’t fully verify as reliable. In those cases I will state that I don’t think they are fully reliable. This seems so much better than being unable to express my epistemic state at all.
If I believe something, I try to give a detailed account of what evidence has convinced me of that belief. This of course will often include sources that aren’t fully reliable (as practically no source is). And the end state of my belief is often one of uncertainty, and it seems crucial to be able to express this uncertainty.
I am planning to continue going around and share many concerns I have about people, even if I can’t definitely prove them beyond the shadow of a doubt. I think it’s OK for other people to operate on a different philosophy, but I really don’t feel very beholden or resonate much with the standard you outline here.
It’s a category error, in my estimation, to lump casual commentary in with published articles. You and Ben published a thorough, detailed article that mixed hundreds of hours of investigative reporting and opinion with a very specific goal: Destroy the reputation of a group within your community. It is currently the sixth-most popular post of the year
, which I believe is a significant decline from its peak,and had massive impacts on your community and subculture.That is something altogether different from an offhand comment deep in a thread. It is a massive undertaking with potentially massive ramifications in the lives of other people and as such entails a massive duty to those people. What are the merits of this kind of relationship to publication—a kind, I want to emphasize, that every journalistic institution in the United States claims? Very simple: if you have that kind of relationship to publication, you do not cause damage to others via propagation of false rumors about them.
Journalists don’t have a very good reputation right now, and not without reason, but a responsibility for accuracy is core to the first, second, and third principles in their code of ethics. “They were simply too loyal to truth, and too cautious about publishing things that later turned out to be false” is not a criticism I have ever heard leveled at a journalistic institution.
The standard is not “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” but a minimum standard is absolutely “wait to review immediately forthcoming contradictory evidence before publishing falsehood.”
I admire the first-principles thinking of rationalists and effective altruists. In many ways, it resonates with me. But the standards of common law and of broader ethics are written in blood, and outright dismissing those standards due to confidence that your own first-principles thinking is superior not only leaves you open to liability any time your actions clash with those standards, it leaves you in a position to cause much of the same damage those standards were written to prevent.
Just for the record, this is inaccurate in a bunch of different ways.
Our goal was not to destroy the reputation of that group within our community. Our primary goal was to investigate some bad things we heard about, with honestly my primary motivation being to figure out ways to somehow allow the very extensive rumors and warnings from many dozens of people that I’ve heard about in the case of FTX, to translate into further investigation and scrutiny.
In the case of FTX, there were similarly an enormous number of rumors and flags that people had raised, but nobody felt comfortable publishing those, which played a major role in the damage that FTX was able to cause. At least my primary goal in allocating resources to this was to try very concretely to apply those lessons to the Nonlinear case and see whether it’s possible to somehow get information from the rumor level into a more fact-checkable and verifiable level.
I think this is also false. The post lost about 20 karma in the last few days, not really changing its relative ranking at all.
At the time of publication, I struggle to differentiate between “destroy the reputation” and “allow the very extensive rumors and warnings from many dozens of people … to translate into further investigation and scrutiny [comparable to the case of FTX, the biggest scandal in your community]”. I respect that you perceive a difference but the one seems like an expansion of the other. Raising serious red flags about an organization has straightforward and predictable reputational effects.
I’ll strikethrough the other claim—I must have misinterpreted some of what I remembered reading about it.
Hmm, I feel like what I am trying to say here is not that weird. My current model is that if you want to be able to catch things like FTX early, before they explode as badly as they did and cause enormous harms, you need some better ways of propagating information than we had at the time. Information about sketchiness and wrongdoing was present, but definitive proof of fraud was not present.
Of course most of the time when the community notices flags like this it will not turn out to be as big as we found out FTX was after it exploded. If I had definitive knowledge that FTX was defrauding billions of customer deposits I would have taken very different actions. But there must be some way to propagate my concerns about FTX pre-collapse which maybe could have reduced the size of the fallout, or sparked an investigation that uncovered the full extend of the fraud. If you have better ways for doing that than the kind of investigation we tried to do here, I would be very interested in hearing them.
It’s not weird, it’s just that there might be a disconnect in tone. “Destroy reputation” has negative connotations; “raise red flags” has responsible connotations. It can be correct to damage someone’s reputation if they do things incompatible with that reputation, and raising red flags has a way of doing that.
I think I’ve been clear and consistent in terms of “better ways.” When people raise concerns, they should be investigated. When you’re looking to publish those concerns, you should make reasonable efforts to verify their specifics, which matter a great deal and cannot be handwaved away. If you are reporting secondhand and not from direct experience, you should either receive primary source documents that let you see evidence directly or check to see whether the accused can provide contrary evidence on every claim in dispute.
In this case, every claim that was important enough to be included in the document was important enough to verify with either direct primary evidence or against Nonlinear’s word and evidence. There are multiple unambiguous instances in the article where you relayed false information that was contradicted by evidence Nonlinear was volunteering to make available to you. You excuse those by claiming that pressure meant you had a duty to release. It did not. Pressure is the correct response to imminent publication of falsehoods and is only inappropriate against truth. The greater the pressure, the more it matters whether you wind up presenting the truth on every particular in your report.
In numbered format:
If Alice or Chloe had wanted to share their direct personal experience, they could have done so without using you as an intermediary, taking personal responsibility for the truth or falsehood of their claims.
Once you elected to be intermediary, you should have relied on primary source documents and gathered as much of it as possible to support or contradict various claims. You should not have turned down a request to send you detailed primary source documents, nor should you have neglected to update your story on receiving new ones even two hours before publication.
In the absence of primary source documents for or against a given claim, you would be free to share it as a claim from an involved party reliant on their word.
The only appropriate time to publish is when the report is complete—when every claim you want to publish has been vetted and is good to go. External and internal pressure, even threats of lawsuits, matter massively less than whether you have given a complete and accurate accounting of what you were aiming to investigate.
I think you’ve both raised good points. Way upthread @Habryka said “I don’t see a super principled argument for giving two weeks instead of one week”, but if I were unfairly accused I’d certainly want a full two weeks! So Kat’s request for a full week to gather evidence seems reasonable [ed: under the principle of due process], and I don’t see what sort of opportunities would’ve existed for retribution from K&E in the two-week case that didn’t exist in the one-week case.
However, when I read Ben’s post (like TW, I did this “fresh” about two days ago; I didn’t see Ben’s post until Kat’s post was up) it sounds like there was more evidence behind it than he specifically detailed (e.g. “I talked to many people who interacted with Emerson and Kat who had many active ethical concerns about them and strongly negative opinions”). Given this, plus concerning aspects of Kat’s response, I think Ben’s post is probably broadly accurate―perhaps overbiased against NL based on the evidence I’ve seen, but perhaps that’s compensated by evidence I haven’t seen, that was only alluded to.
(Edit: but it also seems like the wording of Ben’s piece would’ve softened if they’d waited a bit longer, so… basically I lean more toward TW’s position. But also, I don’t expect the wording to have softened that much. This is all so damn nuanced! Also, I actually think even a partial softening of Ben’s post would’ve been important and might have materially changed Kat’s response and increased community cohesion. K&E likely have personality flaws, but are also likely EAs and rationalists at heart. I respect that, and I respect the apparently substantial funds they put into trying to do good, and so it seems like it would’ve been worth spending more time to get Ben’s initial post right. I’m sad about this situation, I guess because I feel that both Ben and Kat’s posts were worded in somewhat unfair ways, and I’m unconvinced that quite so much acrimony was necessary.)
I am not an effective altruist, but I am broadly adjacent and I work on stories about sensitive and complex situations with competing information from various parties regularly. I am coming to this fresh, not having heard of Nonlinear or Lightcone prior to yesterday.
Of all responses in this saga, I confess this is the one I’m least sympathetic to. Lawsuit threats are distinctly unfriendly. Here’s another thing that’s distinctly unfriendly: publishing libelous information likely to do irreparable damage to an organization without giving them the opportunity to proactively correct falsehoods. The legal system is a way of systematizing responses to that sort of unfriendliness; it is not kind, it is not pleasant, but it is a legitimate response to a calculated decision to inflict enormous reputational harm.
So you would have lost 40 hours of productive time? Respectfully: so what? You have sources actively claiming you are about to publish directly false information about them and asking for time to provide evidence that information is directly false. A lot of time, when people do that, they provide a different gloss on the same substantive information, and your original story can go ahead without serious issue. But it’s vital to at least see what they’re talking about!
As of right now, I am persuaded that at least some of the claims in the original article—claims, again, used to inflict serious reputational harm—were substantively false in a way that could and should have been corrected by checking the evidence provided by the accused parties. I am persuaded that you published those claims without due diligence, that those claims materially contributed to damaging the reputation of an organization in the community where its reputation mattered most, and that you received warning in advance that there was evidence available to indicate the falsehood of those claims.
I’m an outsider to this situation proceeding on the limited information in these two posts and comment sections, but given that information, I think the decision to publish potentially materially false information without waiting for available hard evidence to counter it was a poor one to which “threats of retaliation” (libel suits) were a proportionate response, not an unreasonable escalation.
Also, I think it is worth Oli/Ben estimating how many productive hours were lost to the decision to not delay; it would not surprise me if much of the benefit here was illusory.
I think it’s a bit messy, but my guess is indeed the additional time cost of this has been greater. Though to be clear, I never argued anywhere that this was the primary reason for making this decision, and wouldn’t want someone to walk away with that impression (and don’t think anyone is claiming that here, but not sure).
One of the big disputes here is over whether Alice was running her own incubated organization (which she could reasonably expect to spin out) or just another project under Nonlinear. Since Kat cites this as significant evidence for Alice’s unreliability, I wanted to do a spot-check.
(Because many of the claims in this response are loosely paraphrased from Ben’s original post, I’ve included a lot of quotes and screenshots to be clear about exactly who said what. Sorry for the length in advance.)
Let’s start with claims in Ben’s original post:
and
These are the only mentions I can find of Alice running an incubated project. An important point: Ben never says that Alice thought she was running a separate organization. He represents Alice as claiming that her organization was fiscally sponsored by Nonlinear and shared a bank account and operational resources, but operated independently and planned to spin out in the future.
Now let’s look at Kat’s counterclaims, starting from page 91 of the appendix:
This is supported by a screenshot which shows minutes from a meeting on April 14, 2022, listing Kat as “Supreme Commander” and a redacted name (presumably Alice) as “PM.”
Kat also includes a screenshot of a Whatsapp conversation with Alice about her organization/project, the Productivity Fund. The texts show that 1) money for the Productivity Fund was raised from FTX, and 2) Alice could spend money “as [she] saw fit” as long as it’s within scope for the original application. If she wanted to do something out of scope for the Productivity Fund, she wouldn’t be able to use their allocated budget.
Finally, Kat says Alice wasn’t running her own organization, because she was still “Attending Nonlinear weekly meetings, Getting expenses reimbursed by Nonlinear, Using a Nonlinear email address, Having Chloe, our operations manager, handle her operations”
In summary: Kat says that Alice’s project was not an incubated organization at all, but only a project under Nonlinear. But the evidence she cites isn’t conclusive either way.
I think this is due to some confusion about how incubation/fiscal sponsorship works. As an example, I run an organization (Asterisk Magazine) which is fiscally sponsored by another organization (Effective Ventures Foundation U.S.). This means that I report to the CEO of EVF, my organization’s allocated funding is housed in EVF’s bank account, and many of my ops tasks, like accounting and finance, are handled by EVF’s staff. However, I have full control over the project I run, and I’m currently in the process of spinning out into a separate organization – at which point the funds I’ve raised would follow me. In this case, EVF is acting as an incubator to help me get Asterisk off the ground while I build up operational capacity.
Everything Kat shows here is consistent with Alice running her own incubated organization. It’s normal for the head of an incubated organization to report to the CEO of their fiscal sponsor, use their fiscal sponsor’s operational resources, and be reimbursed by their fiscal sponsor for expenses. I think that the Whatsapp messages support this interpretation – Kat is telling Alice that she can use the money raised from an outside funder for her organization however she wants, but can’t use those funds for other projects (just like I can’t use funds allocated for another EVF project to support Asterisk).
Kat keeps talking about Alice being confused and thinking she was running a “separate org” – e.g. “This is where Alice, again, thinks that it’s a separate organization and that I’ve given her $240,000. Her only evidence for this strange idea is her memory of the conversation” and “Alice misunderstood this as it being a separate org again. Maybe it’s because she kept getting confused about the possibility of spinning out in the future?” But it’s really unclear to me if Alice ever believed this, or if she thought she was running a fiscally sponsored organization which would one day be independent and whose budget she controlled. This is what Ben’s original post says, and nothing here disproves that interpretation.
On the other hand, there is a fair amount of evidence suggesting that at the time, Nonlinear and Alice both understood Alice to be incubating her own organization.
Here’s Alice’s job description from Nonlinear’s website at the time she worked there:
(Note: This screenshot comes from an archived version of Nonlinear’s about page. I’m not providing a link because this would reveal Alice’s identity, and I strongly urge everyone reading this not to use this information to dox her. I realize posting this at all caries some doxxing risk, and if mods want me to take it down of course I’ll do so.)
Here, Alice is clearly referred to as a incubatee building up her own project, though the project listed here (Idea Market) is different from the project Kat discusses (Productivity Fund). This listing also seems to use incubatee and project manager interchangeably, which could contribute to the confusion over how much independence Alice was supposed to have.
There’s also an EA forum comment from Kat talking about incubating a “promising woman” to run an unspecified charity. Based on the dates, I think this has to be referring to Alice.
[EDIT: a friend points out that Kat refers to Alice as an independent founder in the appendix, too. “Some of Alice’s stories suddenly make no sense when you know she only worked for us for 4 months, and the plan was she’d soon leave to start her own charity—the opposite of controlling” (page 22), “Even though she was there as a friend, Emerson was not charging her rent and was covering groceries while she, a founder, figured out what x-risk charity to start next” (page 22), “We thought [Alice] might spin [the Productivity Fund] out, depending on how it goes, in like, 6 months to 1.5 years maybe” (page 96). All of this seems to suggest an environment where it was generally assumed that Alice was running her own project that she was planning to spin out! I can see why the situation might seem unclear to her.]
At this point, I’m pretty confused. Alice’s bio refers to the “Idea Market” and clearly lists this as her incubated organization. Ben’s post also refers to Alice’s incubated organization, and says that it had a budget of $100k. But Kat’s post refers to the “Productivity Fund,” which has a budget of $240k. It’s unclear to me if these are separate projects with their own budgets, or if the scope and nature of Alice’s project changed while she worked at nonlinear.
In either case, it seems disingenuous of Kat to express total befuddlement at Alice’s belief that she was running her own incubated org. It might be that Kat is using a nonstandard definition of “incubate” that includes projects that remain within Nonlinear and never become independent, but this seems inconsistent with Nonlinear’s description of their incubation program on their current home page, which does explicitly talk about launching new charities:
It seems very likely to me that both Alice and Kat were confused about what being an incubated organization entailed, and had trouble communicating their expectations with each other.
On the other hand, looking at the public descriptions of Alice’s project and Alice’s role, I’m troubled by how Nonlinear characterizes it in this rebuttal. The rebuttal makes it sound like Alice would have to be delusional or dishonest to understand the project as “her incubated project”, and also claims that the only record of this is Alice’s (presumed suspect) memory, when there’s in fact documentation that Alice was supposed to be incubating a project. I find this especially concerning because it’s part of a larger pattern of Nonlinear mischaracterizing statements by Ben, Alice, or Chloe, which has been pointed out in other spot-checks and leaves me with very serious doubts about their integrity.
It doesn’t. It lists her as the “Project Manager of the Idea Market”.
We list her as an incubatee as well because the plan was always that she’d use the Idea Market (a product that prioritizes charity ideas) to figure out what charity to start. While she was building it, she’d gain valuable experience and mentorship while building something high impact in expectation.
There was never any expectation that it was hers or that she’d spin out with the Idea Market.
I’m confused. Why do you believe this?
“[Alice] gave Nonlinear (on their request) full ownership of the organization”
This sentence clearly indicates Alice thought she “owned” the organization, not that it was a project under Nonlinear with the possibility of being spun out later.
She also falsely stated that we requested it. It was ours the entire time. When she requested if she could have it and the $240,000, we said no. Then she started telling false and misleading claims about us to the community.
“from the funds allocated for her incubated organization”
This sentence also shows that she believes it was an incubated organization, not a project under Nonlinear with the possibility of being spun out later.
I think maybe part of your reasoning is that she might think she’s a fiscally sponsored organization? You say “He represents Alice as claiming that her organization was fiscally sponsored by Nonlinear and shared a bank account and operational resources, but operated independently and planned to spin out in the future”
I haven’t seen evidence for that in any of Ben’s writing and it would certainly be the first I heard of it. Where does he say that it’s a fiscally sponsored org?
Seems like something you could consider, but in terms of hypotheses, very unlikely unless they’re actually claiming that that’s the case and can provide evidence for that.
As it is, we have meeting minutes describing Alice as the project manager of the Productivity Fund. This on its own should be more than enough, since the only evidence she has is her anonymous word. If it was just she-said-she-said, then it might be ambiguous. But we have it in writing and she simply has her word.
If you are comparing the evidence impartially without isolated demands for rigor, then it’s clear she was a project manager of the Productivity Fund.
And we don’t just have it in writing what her role was. You can read the section to get all of the other smaller pieces of evidence, which all add up to quite a lot.
I also don’t know where the $100k number came from. Would be happy if Ben or Alice clarified.
Side note: the 240k was not raised by Alice for Alice. It was raised by me for Nonlinear.
Okay, I think it would be helpful to clarify some definitions.
I read your use of “separate organization” to mean a fully independent organization not operating under the legal entity of Nonlinear at all. That’s because you talk about Alice using Nonlinear’s bank account, ops support, etc. as evidence that she does not have a separate org, while these things would all be perfectly normal for an incubated or fiscally sponsored org. Ben never claims, and never claims that Alice claimed, that she had a fully independent entity of this type. When he says she “gave Nonlinear ownership” of the organization, I did not read that as him saying that she transferred legal control of an indendent entity, but ceded practical control of the project she was incubating inside Nonlinear. I think this is more consistent with the other quotes from Ben’s document, where he says that the organization was indeed using Nonlinear’s bank account and being incubated by Nonlinear.
I was using fiscally sponsorsed and incubated interchangeably, and apologize for any confusion that may have caused. In my parlance, these would be equivalent – an incubated org is understood to be under the control of the incubatee while being fiscally sponsored by the incubator, but it seems that you (and maybe the rest of Nonlinear?) are working with a different definition of one or both terms. Certainly I would naturally assume that project with the intent to spin out is an incubated organization, since the whole point of incubating an org is that it would one day spin out and become independent!
I don’t find the fact that Alice is described as a “Project Manager” very compelling either way, since I can’t tell how you’re using that term, and elsewhere you seem to use it to refer to the heads of incubated organizations.
I have read all the evidence you’ve provided, and as I explain in my earlier post, I don’t think any of it clearly establishes that Alice was not the head of a project under Nonlinear as opposed to an incubated org. Everything you describe would be perfectly normal for the head of an incubated org.
I don’t have a strong opinion about what was actually going on, because the situation seems incredibly confusing. I mostly object to your characterization that Alice must have been delusional to think she was running her own incubated org. I am reasonably familiar with nonprofit law and the spin-out process, and I’m confused about whether Alice was running an incubated org. Your statements here have not made it easier to understand whether or not Alice was running an incubated org, or indeed what Nonlinear management understands an incubated org to be.
In any case, if Alice was not running an incubated org, that means that she was brought on with the expectation that she would be incubating her own project, and instead ended up responsible for a different project over which she had significantly less control and leadership, and (it sounds like) never had this change in responsibility fully clarified. After looking over the evidence that exists in writing, I’m pretty convinced that at the very least there was a very significant failure of communication and expectation-setting here.
This post spends a lot of time touting the travel involved in Alice’s and Chloe’s jobs, which seems a bit off to me. I guess some people deeply value living in beautiful and warm locations and doing touristy things year-round, but my impression is that this is not very common. “Tropical paradises” often lack much of the convenience people take for granted in high-income countries, such as quick and easy access to some products and services that make life more pleasant. I also think most people quickly get bored of doing touristy things when it goes beyond a few weeks per year, and value being close to their family, friends, and the rest of their local community. Constantly packing and traveling can also be tiring and stressful, especially when you’re doing it for others.
Putting those things together, it’s plausible that Alice and Chloe eventually started seeing the constant travel as a drawback of the job, rather than as a benefit.
Can confirm. In the family assistant type professional sphere, travel is generally considered a drawback that needs to be highly compensated in order to do.
I strongly agree with the end of your post:
I want you to know that I don’t think you’re a villain, and that your pain makes me sad. I wrote some comments that were critical of your responses … and still I stand by those comments. I dislike and disapprove the approach you took. But I also know that you’re hurting, and that makes me sad.
So… I’d like you to dwell on that for a minute.
I wrote something in an edited paragraph deep within a subthread, and thought I should raise the point more directly. My sense is that you and Emerson have some characteristics or habits that I would call flawed or bad, and that it was justified to publicly write something about that.
But I also have a sense that Ben’s post contains errors.
I think you are EAs and rationalists at heart. I respect that. And I respect the (unknown to me but probably large) funds you’ve put into trying to do good. Because of that, I think Ben & co should’ve spent more time to get Ben’s initial post right.
And I guess I’m sad about this situation because I feel that both Ben’s post and your post were worded in somewhat unfair ways, and I’m unconvinced that quite so much acrimony was necessary. I like to imagine a softer version of Ben’s post, and a softer version of your response, in which Ben basically says “I’ve spoken to a bunch of people who disapprove of the way Kat & Emerson handle A, B, C, and D, and two people I’m calling Alice and Chloe were hurt by factors A, B, C and E”.… and you end up saying “after a lot of soul-searching we’ve decided to apologize about A and B and handle those differently in the future, but we still contend that E was an inaccurate characterization, and we stand by C and D because reasons, and we accept that some people won’t like that.”
Do you think an alternate timeline like that was possible?
Thank you for the empathy. Means a lot to me. This has been incredibly rough, and being expected to exhibit no strong negative emotions in the face of all of this has been very challenging.
And, yes, I do think an alternative timeline like that was possible. I really wish that had happened, and if the multiverse hypothesis is true, then it did happen somewhere, so that’s nice to think about.
Thanks for sharing all this information Kat. It seems like this situation has been very difficult for everyone involved. Members of the community health team will look through the post, comments and appendix and work out what our next steps (if any) will be.
Thanks, community health team. I’m wondering if it’d be helpful for the CHT +/- forum mods to develop guidelines regarding standards of evidence for sensitive forum posts, e.g.: under what circumstances (if any) should mods censor a post/parts of a post for making insufficiently substantiated and potentially harmful allegations? Perhaps the answer is “under no circumstances,” but even this would be worth clarifying, I think, so readers know never to expect this and understand the rationale for never doing so.
The forum does have guidance on infohazards, and I assume a post that contained serious infohazards would be censored. Given there are presumably limitations on harmful true things people might say, it seems prima facie plausible that there should be limitations on harmful potentially false things people might say, but I’m not sure when/whether/how that’s right, and it seems worth devoting some serious thought to this. (Sorry if this guidance does exist somewhere, or if this would be outside the purview of what the CHT does, but thanks for considering it.)
Writing in a personal capacity.
“An update to our policies on revealing personal information on the Forum” covers some of what you’re asking about, I think, although the framing there is more about revealing private vs public info than about “How substantiated is substantiated enough?” The most relevant part:
(I recognize that the above isn’t really granular enough to help with answering the questions in front of us right now, for instance, “Was it okay for Ben to include Alice’s allegations?” Or, “Is Kat’s ‘Sharing Information on Ben Pace’ section acceptable?” Thanks for raising this point for the moderators, it will be discussed. (My immediate take: I can see a couple of reasons for why it might be hard to operationalize, and to enforce, a set of policies here. But, as you say, this does seem important enough to warrant some thought.))
Thank you for taking the time to write up all of this evidence, and I can only imagine how time-consuming and challenging this must have been.
Apologies if I missed this, but I didn’t see a response to Chloe’s statement here that one of her tasks was to buy weed for Kat in countries where weed is illegal. This statement wasn’t in Ben’s original post, so I can see how you might have missed it in your response. But I would appreciate clarification on whether it is true that one of Chloe’s tasks was to buy weed in countries where weed is illegal.
I agree that this would be a good thing to get clarity on as well, though I think it’s a very dangerous thing to ask people to verify in a public setting? We could take for granted that it’s true if they don’t explicitly deny it, but the issue might matter more or less to different people if it was simply an ask vs if there was pressure to do it.
Personally my take is something like “It would be bad to pressure people to do this if they don’t want to. It would be the kind of mistake I hope someone would learn from if they made it. It affects some level of how hostile and unpleasant the job would feel for people being pressured to do that, but doesn’t affect the other claims of abuse, so while it would be good to know on the basis of how much of the accusers’ experience matched reality vs not, it doesn’t feel cruxy to me on the other issues.”
You make a fair point about the risk of admitting to such activities in a public setting. Although, if the statement is not true, there would be no risk in denying it, right? I’m hesitant to assume something is true in the absence of a denial, but I wanted to at least give Nonlinear an opportunity to deny it.
This will vary between readers, but I personally find this more cruxy than perhaps you do. In my opinion: asking an employee to commit illegal acts, even with minimal social pressure, especially in a foreign country, especially if it happened multiple times, is a very serious concern. I can imagine extreme instances where it could be justified, but it doesn’t seem like that applies to this situation.
I am also hoping that the accuracy of the weed allegation is much less ambiguous than some of the harder-to-pin down abuse claims (even if those might be worse in sum total if they were all true).
I agree that asking employees to commit illegal acts they wouldn’t normally commit is bad. I qualify it like that be because I’ve known many people who casually break the law in many ways on “victimless crimes” like smoking pot (particularly before it became largely legalized) or getting prescription medicine from others, and I think rationalists/EAs are not unique compared to base rates in skirting laws like this.
Unless the accusers are the sorts of people who don’t, like me, then it would make sense to me if they were asked to do something that seemed in line with their normal behavior. But this is speculation on my part, and I agree that pressuring them in any case would be wrong.
Yeah I see your point. I think I personally have a stronger aversion to illegal requests from employers as a matter of a principle, even if the employee does that sort of thing anyway. But I can see how other people might view that differently.
That said, in this particular case, it doesn’t seem like Chloe would otherwise be illegally buying weed?
I know this is probably a frustrating thing for others to read, but seems worth saying anyway… since making the above comment I’ve had private information shared with me that makes me more confident NL didn’t act in an abusive way regarding this particular issue.
This is a bit tangential/meta, but looking at the comment counter makes me want to express gratitude to the Community Health Team at CEA.
I think here we see a ‘practical demonstration’ of the counterfactuals of their work:
- insane amount of attention sucked by this
- the court of public opinions on fora seems basically strictly worse at all relevant dimensions like fairness, respect of privacy or compassion to people involved
As ‘something like this’ would be quite often the counterfactual to CH to trying to deal with stuff …it makes it clear how much value they are creating by dealing with these problems, even if their process is imperfect
While I agree that the discussion here is bad at all those metrics, I’m not sure how you infer that the CH team does better at e.g. fairness or compassion.
Based on public criticisms of their work and also reading some documents about a case where we were deciding whether to admit someone to some event (and they forwarded their communication with CH). It’s a limited evidence, but still some evidence.
Came here via the FB post by Kat Woods: https://www.facebook.com/katxiowoods/posts/pfbid02mbupEfdsrmkcJwmDWS3E1qmpJQBycapzeFcijhBpi7rQMVx9iHjksA9koGC9b3WCl
which starts out with “𝗔𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟳𝟓% 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲!
and follows up with “Two mentally unwell ex-employees told dozens of falsehoods about us, but even in the darkest times, I told myself to trust that EAs/rationalists would update when they saw the evidence, and now I feel justified in that trust.
Turns out that 200+ pages of evidence showing that their accusations were false or misleading is enough for most people
Since I am much more of a frequent flyer on FB than on the EA Forum I wonder: Where does the 75% measure come from?
EDIT: Asking this despite the post ending with “Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio.” since this doesn’t help much with deriving said 75%.
As best as I can tell, it’s made up.
(Edit: The FB post now says “*Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio.”. I don’t really see how you get that number based on vote count and karma.)
Somewhere within those wide error bars resides the truth.
Why on earth would somebody do an intro with an obviously partisan estimate like this to their own article given they are talking to the EA community and not some imbeciles?
Since I don’t presume Nonlinear to be plain old stupid I can’t wrap my head around this.
In the same comment at the bottom:
”Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio.”
Actually it was “*Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio” with an Asterisk.
There was however no Asterisk attached to the leading claim, instead there was a party hat emoticon. Either way I didn’t feel very much informed on how the 75% claim came to be. It certainly struck me as dubious and more like a commercial and a priming which I consider especially strange when it directs to a matter like this.
Update: I changed the wording of the post to now state: 𝗔𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟳𝟓% 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘂𝗽𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻*
And the * at the bottom says: Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio. And of course this is not proof that everybody changed their mind. There’s a lot of reasons to upvote the post or down vote it. However, I do think it’s a good indicator.
This was a quick thing I dashed off, expecting to share this with my friends on Facebook, where I don’t spend as much time thinking about how to be completely precise. I was not expecting a stranger to post it on the Forum. When I post on the Forum, I spend more time trying to be precise and accurate. Sorry for this being communicated on the Forum in a way that I never would have posted had I consented.
I’ve turned the Facebook post to sharing only with friends (my default is sharing with everybody) because I now realize it is not safe to assume that people will not share it in settings where it’s not appropriate.
The math I did was I assumed the average voter strength was 3 (educated guess). I then took the karma and vote count, and figured out the percentage. This was for the LessWrong post as of a few hours ago. It was around 70% on the EA Forum using the same method.
I did say in the post that I “Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio.”
Another way to come to that number: if the post was exactly 50⁄50 up vs downvoting, I would have zero karma. As of now, we’re at 164, so it has to be well above 50% upvote rate.
If I’m understanding this right, you assume that if someone upvoted the post, it’s because they changed their mind?
Yes. It’s not completely precise, but I do think it’s unlikely that somebody upvoted the post if they didn’t either largely update or already think that Alice and Chloe had told falsehoods and misleading claims about us.
It’s Facebook though, for my friends, not for the EA Forum. I would try to post more precise numbers here. I’m not going to do a whole mathematical model for Facebook though. This was posted here without my permission and I also said in the post that this was a napkin math guesstimate.
I think many people (including myself and people at Lightcone) upvoted this post for signal-boosting reasons, and because it seems important to share contradicting evidence whether you agree with it or not. I really don’t think upvote to downvote ratio is a reasonable estimate of “having changed their mind” in this case.
I disagree, I think it’s entirely possible to upvote things you disagree with, or to upvote the post, read it and update negatively, which is presumably not what you meant here by “people changed their minds”.
I think this is a very poor way to make this estimate for most reasonable interpretations of “people changed their minds
One uncharitable interpretation is that this is a way of implying a consensus where it doesn’t exist, and conflating “good epistemics” with “people who agree with me”. (“75% of people agree with us! I’m so grateful that EA epistemics are trustworthy”). Doing this may create some social pressure to conform both to the majority and to people who apparently have “good epistemics”, especially given this claim came alongside the link to the EA Forum post on your FB post, and your call for action at the bottom including voting behavior. This is subtle and not necessarily what you intended, but I thought worth pointing out because the effects may exist regardless of your intentions.
On the uncharitable case:
I think there are other examples in the post that seem reasonable at first glance but can be interpreted or misinterpreted as similar cases of creating some kind of social pressure to take the Nonlinear position. Some of these are are raised in Yarrow’s comment.
Others include:
“However, if Ben pulled a Geoffrey Hinton and was able to update based on new information despite massive psychological pressure against that, that would be an act of impressive epistemic virtue. As a community, we want to make it so that people are rewarded for doing the right but hard thing, and this is one of those times.”
“EA’s high trust culture, part of what makes it great, is crumbling, and “sharing only negative information about X person/charity” posts will destroy it.
“EA since FTX has trauma. We’re infected by a cancer of distrust, suspicion, and paranoia. Frequent witch burnings. Seeing ill-intent everywhere. Forbidden questions (in EA!) Forbidden thoughts (in EA!)
We’re attacking each other instead of attacking the world’s problems.”
Most of the rest of the section titled “So how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?”)
“This doesn’t mean EA is rife with abuse, it just means that EA is rife with humans. Humans with strong moral emotions and poor social skills on average. We should expect a lot of conflict. We need to find a better way to deal with this. Our community has been turning on itself with increasing ferocity, and we need to find a better way to recover from FTX. Let’s do what EA does best: optimize dispassionately, embody scout mindset, and interpret people charitably.”
On the charitable case:
I think it’s fairly obvious that using post upvotes is a poor way of indicating support for the Nonlinear position, because there are a lot of reasons for upvotes (or downvotes) that are unrelated to whether voters agree or disagree with the post itself.
Skimming some comments quickly (moved to footnote for ease of reading).[1]
There are obviously problems with aggregating votes which make these hard to interpret, but even if you take a looser definition, like “75% of readers now have a better net impression of Nonlinear than after Ben Pace’s post”, this still feels very unclear to me without cherry picking comments. I’m not expecting NL to have attempted to modelling consensus with agreevotes, but I think it’s clear even on skimming that opinions here are mixed (this doesn’t discount the possibility of multiple NL staff agree/disagreevoting many of these posts or comments), and ceteris paribus make it more surprising that the 75% claim was made.
Yarrow’s comment
“Even if most of what Kat says is factually true, this post still gives me really bad vibes and makes me think poorly of Nonlinear.”
has 68 agreevotes and 24 disagreevotes.
Lukas’ comment:
“I updated significantly in the direction of “Nonlinear leadership has a better case for themselves than I initially thought”,
“it seems likely to me that the initial post indeed was somewhat careless with fact-checking.”,
“I’m still confused about some of the fact-checking claims”, “I still find Chloe’s broad perspective credible and concerning (in a “this is difficult work environment with definite potential for toxicity” rather than “this is outright abusive on all reasonable definitions of the word”). The replies by Nonlinear leadership didn’t change my initial opinion here by too much”
has 34 agree-votes and 4 disagreevotes.
Ollie’s comment:
I don’t have time to engage with all the evidence here, but even if I came away convinced that all of the original claims provided by Ben weren’t backed up, I still feel really uneasy about Nonlinear; uneasy about your work culture, uneasy about how you communicate and argue, and alarmed at how forcefully you attack people who criticise you.
has 78 agreevotes and 31 disagreevotes
Muireall’s comment/spot check:
From my perspective, this is between “not responsive to the complaint” and “evidence for the spirit of the complaint”. It seems an overreach to call “They told me not to spend time with my boyfriend...” a “sad, unbelievable lie” “discrediting [Chloe] as a reliable source of truth” when it is not something anyone has cited Chloe as saying. It seems incorrect to describe “advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’” as in “direct contradiction” with any of this, which instead seems to affirm that traveling with Nonlinear was conditioned on “high potential” or being among the “highest quality people”. Finally, having initially considered inviting Chloe’s boyfriend to travel with them would still be entirely consistent with later deciding not to; encouraging a visit in May would still be consistent with an overall expectation that Chloe not spend too much time with her boyfriend in general for reasons related to his perceived “quality”.
has 20 agreevotes and 3 disagreevotes
Geoffrey’s comment:
Whatever people think about this particular reply by Nonlinear, I hope it’s clear to most EAs that Ben Pace could have done a much better job fact-checking his allegations against Nonlinear, and in getting their side of the story.
has 53 agreevotes and 11 disagreevotes
Vipulnaik’s comment:
“For the most part, an initial reading of this post and the linked documents did have the intended effect on me of making me view many of the original claims as likely false or significantly exaggerated. But my own take is that the post would have been stronger had these changes been made prior to publishing. Curious to hear if others agree or disagree.”
has 24 agreevotes and 2 disagreevotes
Peter’s comment:
“Personally, I have updated back to being relatively unconcerned about bad behaviour at Nonlinear”
has 9 agreevotes and 15 disagreevotes
Kerry’s comment:
“to the main charges raised by Ben, this seems about as close to exonerating as one can reasonably expect to get in such cases”
has 30 agreevotes and 26 disagreevotes
Marcus’ comment:
“Overall, I think Nonlinear looks pretty good here. I definitely think they made some mistakes, especially adding members to their work+travel arrangements, but on the whole, I think they acted pretty reasonably and were unjustly vilified.”
has 14 agreevotes and 13 disagreevotes
John’s comment:
I think the preliminary takeaway is that non-linear are largely innocent, but really bad at appearing that way. They derailed their own exoneration via a series of bizarre editorials, which do nothing but distract, borne out of (seemingly) righteous indignation
has 12 agreevotes and 13 disagreevotes
Or “agreed with Nonlinear before this post and still agrees now”. Kat’s math assumes that literally everyone agreed with Ben’s post until now.
“This was posted here without my permission”
It was a public post an hour ago.
The repurposing of a holocaust poem seems insensitive to me
FWIW I’ve seen that poem used ironically multiple times before, and I don’t recall it being flagged as offensive or insensitive in past incidences.
Eg here’s the query on Twitter, <10% of hits are about the Holocaust, and 0% of the replies I spot checked talked about the implied comparison being offensive or insensitive.
Do you read the “First they came for one EA leader” poem as ironic? When I read it, I saw it as an argument against “EA leader lynching”, and as a request for people to speak up to protect EA leaders.
I think in general it is fine to use this poem in a joking manner, see the comment by Guy Raveh below, and I don’t expect John G. Halstead to be against all repurposing of the holocaust poem.
I haven’t checked your sources on twitter, because your link doesnt work for people without an account. But I don’t consider random tweets to be a reliable source of whats considered insensitive anyways.
Mostly I find it ironic, given that Ben says his original post was motivated by a sense that there was a pervasive silencing effect, where people felt unwilling to share their negative experiences with Nonlinear for fear of reprisal.
Can you point out where the poem is in the very long post?
First they came for the… But I said nothing.
This is extremely distasteful. We have sufficient evidence now about nonlinear I think, and fortunately it is all in public view
I was initially going to comment on how we in Israel actually repurpose this poem quite a lot in a joking manner—but then I Ctrl+F’d the actual part of the post and I mostly agree with you on this point.
Most of this seems focused on Alice’s experience and allegations. As I understand it, most parties involved—including Kat—believe Chloe to be basically reliable, or at least much more reliable.
Given all that, I’m surprised that this piece does not do more to engage with what Chloe herself wrote about her experience in the original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/32LMQsjEMm6NK2GTH/sharing-information-about-nonlinear?commentId=gvjKdRaRaggRrxFjH
Chloe has been unreliable. She lied about not having a work contract, she lied about the compensation structure, she lied about how many incubatees we had, she lied about being able to live/work apart, doing the accounting, etc etc. Almost all of the falsehoods and misleading claims we cover are also told by her because she signed off on Ben’s post and didn’t correct the dozens of falsehoods and misleading claims in it.
We originally thought she was more reliable because we hadn’t heard from reliable sources what she was saying. Now that it’s in writing, we have firm evidence that she has told dozens of falsehoods and misleading claims.
I said at the time that I felt that Ben made a mistake in not waiting a week, though I wasn’t completely confident about this. Having skimmed parts of the document, I’m now much more confident that not waiting was indeed a mistake.
Disclaimer: I remotely interned at Nonlinear.
I’ve been talking to Nonlinear and Lightcone trying to understand how much time LC gave NL for ‘adversarial’ fact checking on the final claims. Here’s what I’ve ended up with for the timeline; dates are ET since that’s where I am:
September 2nd (~5d before), LC reached out to NL to set up a meeting. (source)
September 4th (~3d before), LC shares a high level summary of the claims, an overview of which is public.
Later on September 4th (~2.5d before), the call happens. NL asks for a week to pull together evidence counter to claims in the draft. (source)
September 5th (~2d before), LC says they intend to write a draft that week, and will send it to NL for feedback before publishing. Their wording is ambiguous on whether that’s the timeline for publishing or drafting (“I intend to write a public update this week”).
Later on September 5th (~1.5d before), NL repeats their request for more time.
September 6th (21hr before), LC shares a draft of their post with NL. This includes additional accusations. (source) Note that NL and LC disagree on how much this added: NL claims this introduced many new accusations (source), while LC claims they’d already shared all the important ones (source). LC also shares a draft with Spencer Greenberg, who points out some errors and LC corrects. (source, source)
Later on September 6th (12hr before), NL repeats their request to wait, asking for 9d this time (“end of next week”), and includes that the draft includes “libelous” claims.
Later on September 6th (~2.5hr before), Spencer sends screenshots that arguably conflict with the post’s assertion that when Alice was sick “nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days”. (source, source)
September 7th (30min before), NL writes to LC requesting a week to give evidence that falsifies statements in the post, and saying that if they are not given this time they’ll sue for libel. (source)
Slightly later on September 7th, LC publishes the post.
(The specific times come from screenshots NL shared with me)
Kat, I’m pretty confused about the tax situation. (Disclaimer: not a tax attorney, unfamiliar with PR + tax codes for other countries you worked from)
Alice/Chloe are referred to as “employees” and you provide a work contract titled “Employment Agreement”, so it seems like you think they were employees (instead of independent contractors, which would have different tax liabilities associated with their work.)
Your org was based out of Puerto Rico, so presumably subject to things like PR minimum wage and tax reporting requirements. I know PR differs from US states in some federal income tax regulations, but IIUC PR income is still subject to Social Security, Medicare, and local taxes.
This post suggests the value of the housing should be counted as part of the “compensation” which is valued at ~$70k per year. Housing provided as a fringe benefit is taxable and subject to withholding, just like regular income tax.
Maybe it’s inaccurate to consider the AirBnB’s “housing” (it’s ambiguous given the temporary nature of the housing during travel, but also does seem to be the employees’ primary residences during their employment.) Suppose it’s not “housing”, it’s just a travel stipend—this wouldn’t be a taxable benefit.
But in that case, were you compliant with PR minimum wage requirements? If the living expenses aren’t treated as taxable income, then my understanding is they also don ’t count towards meeting minimum wage requirements.
Unless I’m missing something, it seems like there’s a double-bind: did you treat the benefits as taxable, file a W2 and withhold taxes, or did you deem them not taxable and not meet minimum wage requirements?
Piggybacking on your comment to say I am also curious about the visa situation. My impression is that countries typically severely restrict work by foreigners within their borders, even if it’s temporary, and even if you’re doing remote work. Maybe some Caribbean countries have different rules, but I’m worried that if they took Alice or Chloe to e.g. the US or UK on a tourist visa and made them work in those places, that would be illegal, and could make immigrating to those countries in the future much more complicated.
They could be US citizens?
My impression is that they were working in many different countries, not only in the US
It looks like Alice described events that took place in Puerto Rico as being in a “foreign country,” indicating she is not a US citizen.
Once again, where is the board?
Two of the biggest questions for me are whether or not Nonlinear had a board of directors when Alice and Chloe worked for them and, if they did, whether an employee would know the identities and contact information of the board members and could feel reasonably safe approaching board members to express concerns and seek intervention. I can’t find evidence they had a board at the time of the complaints or do now a year and a half after Alice and Chloe stopped working with them. The only reference to a board of directors I see in the Google Doc is Lightcone’s board, which seems telling on a few levels.
Nonprofit boards are tasked with ensuring legal compliance, including compliance with relevant employment law considerations, and including above board practices in unconventional and riskier structures like Nonlinear chose to operate through. This situation looks very different if a legitimate board is in place than if employees don’t have that safeguard.
Though I’m sad about the hurt experienced by many people across the Nonlinear situation, I’m personally less concerned with the minutiae of this particular organization and more about what structures, norms, and safeguards can be established across the EA ecosystem as a whole to reduce risk and protect EA community members going forward. Boards and institutional oversight are a recurring theme, from FTX to Nonlinear (to maybe OpenAI?) and I’m personally more skeptical of any organization that does not make its board information readily apparent.
Yes, I’ve been wondering who’s on Nonlinear’s board for the better part of a year!
It seems that at least during the relevant period, Nonlinear was at least partially fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity. Rethink Charity’s board is, I think, based on this blog post from 2019:
I don’t know what fraction of Nonlinear’s operations were fiscally sponsored by Rethink, and I feel kind of embarrassed for just noticing this now (I found out by looking at the grants made in the 2022-H1 Survival and Flourishing Funds grant round). I think talking to the Rethink Board would have been a great thing to do in this whole situation, I just totally missed this.
Update: Pinging Ozzie on that list, it seems Rethink Charity ceased operations in the U.S. and its board is therefore no longer active. It was however active during the central period our investigation covered. I might see whether I can get takes from the old board members, but it seems like there is no longer an active board.
Leaving trace of previous comment: Oh, huh, I didn’t realize this, but I think a good chunk of Nonlinear’s activities might be fiscally sponsored by Rethink Priorities, which would make the following people Nonlinear’s board:Hi,
(writing as the COO of Rethink Priorities).
Nonlinear is not, and has never been fiscally sponsored by Rethink Priorities. RP has never had a legal or financial connection to Nonlinear.
In the grant round you cite, it looks like the receiving charity is listed as Rethink Charity. RP was fiscally sponsored by RC until 2020, but is no longer legally connected to RC. RC is a separate legal entity with a separate board. RP and RC do not have a legal connection anymore, and have not since 2020.
Oops, sorry! I did indeed think that you were still part of the same legal structure!
Correcting myself, then I guess the following is Nonlinear’s board (the board of Rethink Charity)?
Will also update my other comment to correct for this.
@abrahamrowe, I’m curious if you have insights on the larger point about good governance across the EA ecosystem. As evidenced by EV’s planned disbanding, sponsorship arrangements have a higher potential to become fraught. The opacity of the relationship between Rethink Charity and Nonlinear might be another example. (I.e. This is further indication Nonlinear employees wouldn’t have had the same protection and recourse mechanisms as employees of more conventionally governed 501c3s, especially those of established 501c3s sizeable enough to hire 21 staff members.) Given RP is growing into one of the larger fiscal sponsors through your Special Projects Team, it might be worth further commentary from the RP team on how you’re navigating risk and responsibility in sponsorship arrangements. Given RP’s track record of proactive risk mitigation, I imagine you all have given this ample thought and it might serve as a template for others.
I do think that’s a reasonable question, but given that Rethink Priorities has indeed never sponsored Nonlinear (and it was just Rethink Charity), I do think that can happen in a different thread, or feels a bit off-topic for this discussion.
Edited to remove my comment since it is off topic. I’m happy to talk about this though if people want to in other contexts! I definitely think this is a pretty important question, and looking into how fiscal sponsorship arrangements are working in reality is important, as I imagine there is high variance in how effective oversight mechanisms are (though I think RP has done this well).
Hey just some notes on how nonprofit fiscal sponsorship stuff works (I have worked in ops for charities for a while now) --
Not sure if the grant acceptance was your only evidence, but the fact that RC was the receiving charity for a grant in 2022 doesn’t necessarily mean they are fiscally sponsoring Nonlinear (or were at the time). I can think of a few reasons related to bank set up times, international transactions, etc. that a charity might ask another charity to receive the grant for them, although it is a bit weird.
If RC is the fiscal sponsor, it looks like most of RC’s fiscal sponsorship projects are Model C. There are a bunch of different fiscal sponsorship models with different implications for the relationship. Model C means they are basically just a pass-through for funds, so Nonlinear would have had to have its own governance board, if one exists.
Depending on what exactly Nonlinear is, from a legal perspective, it may not have a board. As far as I can tell, they have no information about their corporate structure on their website; they list several “advisors” but that doesn’t seem to be a governance board. If Nonlinear doesn’t have a board, that reflects somewhat poorly on the due diligence of RC’s regranting, but explains why the employees might not have had anyone to complain to.
A google searchreveals that Spartz Philanthropies had it’s nonprofit status revoked by the IRS for failing to file their tax documents for 3 consecutive years. So it seems unlikely that they’re doing formal fiscal sponsorship through that group either.
Hi there,
SoonKhen, the former Executive Director of Rethink Charity USA here.
I can confirm that Nonlinear was previously fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity under a Model C sponsorship. A Model C fiscal sponsorship functions more like a grantor-grantee relationship; more information about it can be found here. In Model C sponsorships, the projects fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity were not projects of Rethink Charity itself, but rather belonged to the fiscal sponsees. Our responsibilities included accepting grants and, according to the agreement and project budget, disbursing grants to sponsees, as well as monitoring their progress through reports they submitted. The board of Rethink Charity was not the board of Nonlinear.
(There appears to be a link missing)
Sorry Habryka! Can’t believe I missed it. I’ve added the link above.
As I mentioned, I did ping Ozzie. He did confirm that RC provided fiscal sponsorship (and more recently since I posted my comment also brought up the model C sponsorship). I was also involved in that SFF round and so could confirm that Nonlinear was using RC as a fiscal sponsor and not just a passthrough entity.
Appreciate the other info.
Ok, what is the crazy downvoting going on here?
Sorry for confusing Rethink Priorities and Rethink Charity before I edited it, but it still seems really relevant and a direct answer to the question at hand that Nonlinear was indeed fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity, and people seem to keep downvoting it, which makes no sense IMO.
I think it’s bad to repeatedly accuse people of things they didn’t do, or having responsibilities they didn’t have, and then write “Oops, sorry!”, and we should do less of this.
You could have easily checked in with them, as with Macaskill last time, so that RP didn’t have to rush in immediately with a correction, since otherwise way fewer people will see the correction than the original claim/accusation (if any). It lowers this forum’s epistemics, wastes people’s time, and stains accused people’s reputation for no reason.
The tradeoff between writing a claim instantly or spending some time to confirm its correctness usually favours the latter. If I were on the board of RP, having my name on this thread could be damaging, and I would feel lucky that it got corrected immediately. I downvoted because I want to see fewer comments like that.
Just for context, I posted this comment after I messaged a Rethink board member who told me:
“So the Rethink Board delegates authority to govern non-linear to a specific sub-board. I’ll find out who is on that sub-board.”
I really feel like given that response, I sure felt justified in my epistemic state that Rethink Priorities was indeed the appropriate organization. It turned out to be a miscommunication, which is unfortunate, but I did actually try to confirm this before posting.
You messaged a ‘Rethink’ board member as in a Rethink Priorities board member or a Rethink Charity board member? They seem to have fully disjoint boards.
(That these are both “Rethink” while independent is not great branding, and I think they should expect continued confusion until one of them renames.)
EDIT: I see below you say you talked to Niel of RP, so it sounds like he was just wrong in his response to you?
Yeah, Rethink Priorities, and yeah he was just wrong, which confused me. To be clear, I don’t think this was his fault, I asked the question in a kind of leading way, and he responded very quickly, and so I model this more as an unfortunate miscommunication.
I just got very excited and posted immediately because I thought that maybe there would be some way out of this that doesn’t primarily route through the court of public opinion which my guess was everyone would appreciate.
Confirming that I was wrong about this in my communication with Oli. Also agreeing with Oli here on the context in which those comments were made.
I have made a note in my reflective journal entry on this event to be more careful with my comms in circumstances such as this one.
That’s rough! It sounds like you did the right thing (checking with an RP board member before saying NL was under RP) and then the harsh response was because others couldn’t tell you’d done the right thing.
My guess is if you had posted a second comment with the true information people would have downvoted the first incorrect one, upvoted the second, and the net would be negative (because people are very averse to false information being shared).
I feel like I shared very relevant information in either case, and IMO it feels like a reasonable mistake to make to think that Rethink Charity is the same as Rethink Priorities, given that they were indeed the same organization in the past.
I also messaged Niel from the Rethink board who himself said to me things that sounded like it confirmed that Nonlinear was fiscally sponsored (happy to share the text in DMs), so I feel like my epistemic state was really quite reasonable.
Re: Checking that claims are true
Adding on as former Nonlinear intern who was aware of a “falling out” between Alice and Nonlinear for almost a year now:
To my knowledge, Nonlinear was given very few/practically no opportunities to respond to the many claims made in “Sharing Information About Nonlinear” before they were posted, despite repeatedly communicating for several months that this counter-evidence was available to Ben and some CEA employees.
I understand that the power asymmetry, high-trust environment and ethical standards within EA makes this complicated to resolve. However, my issue is that the vast majority of the claims made were easily verifiable/falsifiable. Things like payment/lack of payment, delivery orders, messages, receipts, who stayed where etc. all have paper trails. If it’s so trivially easy to verify, there is a responsibility to verify!
I’m not against Ben and Alice choosing to post this. I believe we should normalise people exercising their option to speak out publicly. The alternative is being silenced by massive power asymmetry.
What I am against, is the way these allegations were made, which did not prioritise verifying allegations/claims when repeatedly presented with significant, factual counter-evidence.
Why was Nonlinear not given some chance to present counterevidence? It’s clear the initial investigation took months to gather; only a few days (two days, I think) before posting were Kat and Emerson presented with this, after reaching out to Ben several times! Even granting Nonlinear a day to submit an official refutation of the top 5-10 claims for review would have made a difference.[1] And that’s before factoring in the asymmetry required to refute these allegations with evidence vs making the initial allegations.
I think the handling of this community issue was not healthy for EA/longtermism. Fewer people will read this post than the initial allegations, and Nonlinear’s reputation has definitely been harmed. At best, future whistleblowers are less likely to be believed. I don’t see this as a win for anyone.
Personal Story: How unverified allegations cause harm to real people
Throughout this discussion, there was this undertone that over-weighting Alice’s claims justified the increased reputational risk to Nonlinear, because Kat and Emerson are “better-off” than Alice, so harming them is a more “acceptable” risk because Kat and Emerson will still do fine, whereas Alice is new and less established in EA.
I’d like to say that these allegations don’t just affect Emerson and Kat. It affects the many independent AI Safety researchers Nonlinear helps fund.[2] It also affects Nonlinear’s other employees. It has personally affected me. I am from Southeast Asia, where it’s much harder to find work in EA/longtermism than in EA hubs. Nonlinear was the first (and currently only) EA org I’ve interned at.
Nonlinear had formally stopped hiring interns when I applied, due to the incidents mentioned above. I contributed to the Superlinear bounty platform as a remote volunteer, without knowing it was owned by Nonlinear, or what Nonlinear was. I had spent so much time trying to contribute to EA part-time, that I wanted to make the experience easier for others.
When I was hired as an intern, I texted my friend “What’s Nonlinear? Are they … like, a big deal?”. My friend explained that having Nonlinear as a reference would help me gain admission to EA conferences, and be taken seriously for EA job applications.
Now that Nonlinear’s reputation within EA has been seriously harmed, I’ve been very concerned about how this affects my ability to contribute within EA. Should I add Nonlinear/Kat as references and risk very negative associations, or omit them and risk being overlooked in favour of other applicants who do have references from prominent EAs? It means a lot to me because, as a non-US/EU/UK citizen, I know I’m always applying at a significant disadvantage.[3] I will always have fewer opportunities than an EA born in London who goes to a prestigious UK college with an active EA chapter and many EA internship options, who doesn’t have additional Visa requirements. And if I get rejected for a role, I often don’t get to know why.
I didn’t mention this before, because I cared about whether Alice was actually abused. I had a hunch they were making false claims, but I didn’t want to invalidate victims who might be telling the truth. As of now, this seems … less likely.
These allegations do cause harm: to me, to other Nonlinear employees trying to contribute to EA and the people Nonlinear helps through our work.
In the future, please verify these more seriously. Thank you.
The first time I asked Nonlinear about the allegations, it took me maybe 5-10 minutes to figure out there were multiple misleading statements, since I was shown message logs.
In fundraising, reputation matters. Serious, public allegations of abuse means funders are (rightfully) hesitant, and less funding goes to researchers.
If you are reading this and trying to get into AI Safety/longtermism from a non EA hub, do reach out and I’ll try to reply when I can! We gotta support each other >:)
I wrote this in response to Ben’s post
I have now read the above post, some of the comments, and very little of the appendix.
Nonlinear seems to have more evidence on their side than I had expected. I had the impression that the whole situation was very informal, with practically nothing written down. Now it looks like Nonlinear actually have documentations on their side. Although I have not actually looked at them. I might do this at some point, but mostly I’m hoping that other impartial observers will do this work for me, and I can just read their summaries in a couple of weeks or so.
This is to say, I’m still keeping my mind open. But given that this superficially looks better than expected, I am updating in favour on Nonliner’s version. I.e, I went from expecting Nonlinear to be in the wrong to being much more unsure.
Some thoughts:
I expect that if I ever get a clear view of what happened here, it will look like one side was mostly telling the truth and one side where either delusional or straight up lying. But I don’t yet know who is telling the truth and who isn’t. The reason I think this is that this don’t look like just escalating misunderstandings. From what I can see [at least one side is delusional or lying], but also [only one side being delusional or lying] is enough to explain the evidence. I still have enough faith in EA that I think most EAs are mostly sane an honest, which means that [only one side being delusional or lying] is more likely on priors.
I think the important thing now is to find the truth. Any discussions of what lessons to learn should wait.
I expect all of these public accusations to be very painful for everyone involved. I want to express sympathy for everyone involved. Someone is falsely accused of terrible things. I think I can imagine how much this hurts.
I still think it probably good that this issue get public scrutiny. Who ever is right, some of these allegations are serious enough that I don’t think it should be over looked, and our community don’t have some type of more closed doors court to appeal too. If this was not brough out, who ever is in the wrong, would probably continue to hurt more people. But I also have a lot of uncertainty on this point.
Even though I expect it to be mostly one sided (which I could be wrong about by the way). I also expect anyone involved in this, who is trying to be honest, will make mistakes, and will sometimes express things in a somewhat hyperbolic way. That’s what happens when you are hurt.
While there are several stylistic things one might disagree with in the post, to the main charges raised by Ben, this seems about as close to exonerating as one can reasonably expect to get in such cases.
Thanks for writing such an exhaustive post; it can’t have been easy.
Sometimes, it is not enough to make a point theoretically, it has to be made in practice. Otherwise, the full depth of the point may not be appreciated. In this case, I believe the point is that, as a community, we should have consistent (high-quality) standards for investigations or character assessments.
This is why I think it is reasonable to have the section “Sharing Information on Ben Pace”. It is also why I don’t see it as retaliatory.
The response to that section is negative by some even though Kat specifically pointed out all the flaws in it, said that people shouldn’t update about it, and that Ben shouldn’t have to respond to such things. Why? I believe she is illustrating the exact problem with saying such things, even if one tries to weaken them. The emotional and intellectual displeasure you feel is correct. And it should apply to anyone being assessed in such a way.
I fear there are those who don’t see the parallel between Ben’s original one-sided (by his own statements) post and Kat’s one-sided example (also by her own statements), that is clearly for educational purposes only.
Although apparently problematic to some, I hope the section has been useful to highlight the larger point: assessments of character should be more comprehensive, more evidence-based, and (broadly) more just (eg allowing those discussed time to respond).
I agree, and find the ratio of agree/disagreement on your comment really disheartening in terms of what lesson this community has learned from all this.
I get that people find it too “retaliatory” and bad-faith. Maybe it would have been cleaner if it wasn’t about Ben, though I don’t think a hypothetical person would have made the lesson as clear, and if Ben wasn’t fair game for having written that article, I don’t know who would be. Unless people believe Kat is just making up accusations entirely, they must believe those accusations deserve just as much to be aired in public as Alice and Chloe’s, or else acknowledge that in both cases there are problems with one-sided grievance sharing.
To me the presumption of motive just doesn’t matter: the point Kat makes with that section is absolutely true, and it doesn’t become less true even if it was motivated by retaliation.
To emphasize that section’s point, again: basically any organization or individual can be made to look like a monster if presented a certain way. This is doubly true of EA organizations in particular, given how generally weird we are.
Personally, I like Ben. What Ben did no doubt took a lot of work and time and effort, and I trust Ben to have been well intentioned throughout it, even if I disagree with decisions he made. I would be pretty sad to learn that he has skeletons in his closet.
But I am not updating on Kat’s section in any meaningful way because I know ~everyone has things in their closets that would look like a skeleton in bad light, and until I get better light I’m not going to live my life jumping at shadows.
It’s clear to me, however, that many people in the community do not have the same attitude or instincts against knee-jerk or vibes-based updates on people from hearsay. Which is fair enough, since I developed mine in part from years of working as a family therapist and mediator. But it’s still a problem for the community if this sort of thing happens again.
I totally sympathize with wanting to just ignore all this and go back to doing meaningful work, and encourage anyone who can do that to do that. But for people who also care about the community’s health, we need a better system than what we’ve got so far for dealing with situations like this.
Thanks! This line in particular changed my mind about whether it was retributive, I genuinely can’t think of anyone else it would be appropriate to do this for
The obvious thing to do is finding a friend or other ally who’s willing to consent to do this. Rather than spring it on someone else out of the blue.
Normally you could also volunteer yourself, but of course it’s not exactly viable in this case.
EDIT: I’m happy to volunteer myself for these 1-3 hypothetical experiments going forwards. But please warn me first! And I only want to run this experiment 1-3 times to start with.
Overall, I think Nonlinear looks pretty good here. I definitely think they made some mistakes, especially adding members to their work+travel arrangements, but on the whole, I think they acted pretty reasonably and were unjustly vilified.
A lot of people seem very concerned with the tone of the post, whether the “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” section was in bad taste/too retaliatory, whether there were too many pictures depicting the lifestyle, how exactly to compute their employees’ salaries, and so on. The primary thing that matters is the veracity and accuracy of the claims made in Ben’s original post, whether Nonlinear successfully refuted (enough of) the claims made, how good their evidence is and finally how open should the EA community be in continuing to work with Nonlinear in the future.
On the whole, I think Nonlinear fairly successfully refuted the vast majority of the concerning claims in Ben’s post, their evidence is pretty good and I’d be happy for the EA community to work with Nonlinear folks in the future.
From Ben: “After this, there were further reports of claims of Kat professing her romantic love for Alice, and also precisely opposite reports of Alice professing her romantic love for Kat. I am pretty confused about what happened.”
Could you comment?
I think the preliminary takeaway is that non-linear are largely innocent, but really bad at appearing that way. They derailed their own exoneration via a series of bizarre editorials, which do nothing but distract, borne out of (seemingly) righteous indignation
I think the best thing for readers to do is to await Ben Pace’s response, which he aims to have done in week or two.
This whole fiasco has wasted enough EA time as it is. Whether it continues to is in the hands of each reader. Let’s put down the popcorn / pitchforks and get back to work.
“she said it was finally time to be strong and speak up now, as long as she was fully anonymized … She’s still lying awake each night, replaying, over and over, the nightmare of what Ben did to her.”
And then you publish it for the first time telling everyone not to believe her???
If what you describe is actually what she told you, how dare you use it for your own gain here? What a cruel and bizarre thing to do
Isn’t the implication that the (EDIT: alleged) victim gave consent for Kat to share anonymously?
EDIT: This was confusingly phrased, see what I actually meant expressed more clearly below.
I think Kirsten point was maybe “don’t publish it as plausibly a false allegation” not “don’t publish it without the accusers permission”.
I see. In that case, it’s not a false allegation. I have information that makes me very confident it happened
Why on earth are you reporting it here, given that it is completely irrelevant to the truth of the allegations against nonlinear?
I took
to imply something like “if the alleged victim shared private and very personal information, you should not publish it.” This still makes most sense to me as a literal reading.
(I would agree that “don’t publish plausibly false allegation [that you don’t see reason to litigate]” feels like a stronger position.)
If that’s the case, then yeah, she gave permission and was happy for me to share it, as long as it was anonymized. She signed off on this post.
Can you just confirm that it’s something someone else told you, and not referring to yourself in third person?
Sorry that bad phrasing on my part I meant: Kirsten might have been saying “don’t speculate that it’s false when doing so will badly harm the accuser if it’s actually true”. I didn’t mean Kirsten might have been saying “don’t spread possibly false accusations.”
Yes, that’s what I mean. If a friend of mine confided in me about something really bad that had happened to her, I wouldn’t want to publish it 2⁄3 of the way down a post about my own drama, even if she said it was okay—and especially wouldn’t then tell people not to believe her. But obviously I wasn’t sitting in on the conversation and there might be important context I’m missing. It just seems really wrong to me.
Does it matter that she wanted me to share this? Are you going to say that she shouldn’t be allowed to do it because you wouldn’t want to do it?
Ah, gotcha. In that case, I disagree. I think if somebody is accused of something, it is OK and good to debate whether a) the thing happened and b) whether the thing is bad.
This seems crucial for ethics and epistemics. Imagine the alternative. If somebody accuses somebody of something, people are not allowed to debate whether it happened or if it’s bad. This would lead to all accusations being treated as true by default and there would be no way to determine whether it was true or bad. False accusations would be a win-button for anybody.
And I think the main point I was making was that you shouldn’t believe or not believe the accusation based on what I wrote because the methods I used were bad (e.g. one sided, loaded phrasing, no disconfirming evidence, etc) which I stand by. If she had just told me that information in that way, I wouldn’t update a lot. I would ask Ben for his perspective and get more evidence before I came down too harshly on him.
I have just had too many times where somebody told me this terrible thing happened to them, but when I heard the other side, it almost always turns out to be more nuanced than that. If you only hear one side of a fight, you have very little information about what actually happened.
Just to clarify do you think the person sharing the allegation is a fantasist or not? I’ve lost track
I think the allegations are true and that in that particular case, what Ben did was unethical. I think that ~50% of EAs would disagree with me and the woman though. I also think that the woman is happy (for the most part) with the actions being taken to correct the behavior.
Ah! Thank you. That makes most sense to me both as a literal reading and as a position. Sorry Kirsten if I misread.
Yes, I meant some combination of this + this was not a good place to publish that allegation, which again imo harms the accuser if it’s true. No worries at all Joel!
While it’s generally poor form to attempt to de-anonymize stories, since it’s at issue here it seems potentially worth it. It seems like this could be Kat’s description of Kat’s experience of Ben, which she (clearly) consents to sharing.
Hmm, there are a bunch of rhetorical components like “she told me not to talk to Ben about it” that I think almost any reader would interpret as disconfirmation of this being the case.
I think if this is a summary of Kat’s experiences with Ben, then I think that section would IMO be pretty misleading (and that is relevant and not just pre-empted by it trying to be a reductio-ad-absurdum, since the level of misleadingness is trying to be parallel to the original Nonlinear post).
“she told me not to talk to Ben about it” still can be true (but misleading) under this hypothesis. In a section written as true but misleading, this does not seem to me like evidence against “she” referring to Kat in that sentence.
I don’t think the section is written to be misleading in a generic sense. The section is written to be misleading in a very specific way by drawing an analogy to how information in Ben’s post was presented. I don’t see any candidate analogy for this kind of misleadingness in Ben’s post.
Is it actually the case that Kat and Ben used to date? If so this seems like the sort of information that should have been disclosed, probably in both posts.
We never dated. We only interacted briefly once before this whole thing happened
Thanks!
They definitely did not date. But also, where are you getting the implication of dating from? The relevant section doesn’t seem to make a reference to dating.
I think I got confused by the adjacent sections where the subsequent one is about bad breakups and disgruntled exes.
She asked me to share this and is grateful I did.
I think you might have misunderstood what I was trying to convey. I wasn’t telling people not to believe her. I was telling people that if they heard the full story, there would be debate about whether what happened to her was bad/as bad as she made it out to be.
I for one think that what happened to her was very bad. But I predict ~50% of EAs would disagree.
You found your own comment helpful?
Sorry that was an error! I didn’t know how else to see who had found it helpful on mobile, but I meant to untap it after I had checked
[Third edit to add my current position on 22/12/23]
I said below that I would read the arguments from both sides and then make a final decision. I haven’t done that because I didn’t have time, and it didn’t feel like high value. Especially in light of later posts and comments by people who are better qualified. I feel that it is still better (or at least closer to keeping my prior commitment) to state my current position for future readers than to not say anything further. With that in mind, this (copied from elsewhere) is where I ended up:
Before BP post: NL are a sort of atypical, low structure EA group, doing entrepreneurial and coordination focused work that I think is probably positive impact.
After BP post: NL are actually pretty exploitative and probably net negative overall. I’ll wait to hear their response, but I doubt it will change my mind very much.
After NL post: NL are probably not exploitative. They made some big mistakes (and had bad luck) with some risks they took in hiring and working unconventionally. I think they are probably still likely to have a positive impact on expectation. I think that they have been treated harshly.
After this post: I update to be feeling more confident that this wasn’t a fair way to judge NL and that these sorts of posts/investigations shouldn’t be a community norm.
I am still pretty uncertain overall. I definitely think that NL should be more careful and conventional in their hiring and work practices in the future.
I added this as an edit because I didn’t think it warranted a new comment, and a new comment would provoke more engagement and distract more people, etc.
[Second edit to say that I am not sure if I fully endorse this comment anymore. I briefly re-read some of the previous post by Ben and saw various claims that I didn’t recall and that I am not sure are refuted. I will try to find time to review everything in more detail tomorrow.]
[First edit: To split the comment into two parts because I want to know which part people are disagreeing/agreeing with. The removed content is in my first reply below]
I sympathise with everyone involved in this (and everyone like me who planned to do something productive and then stumbled across this or the original post).
It is very unfortunate that this saga does not seem to have resulted in a clear conclusion for the majority of readers. I doubt it ever will.
Personally, I have updated back to being relatively unconcerned about bad behaviour at Nonlinear (and feeling weakly positive about them in general, but very uncertain). It seems that some things were probably not done well but not to some exceptionally bad degree and I assume ignorance/fallibility, not malice.
I personally feel bad for not reaching out to Kat or others at nonlinear to offer support, commenting something on the original post expressing that I would withhold judgement until they responded, or managing to withhold judgement at the time.
[I probably won’t reply to any responses to this comment due to a lack of time].
One lesson I see in this saga that we, as a community, and hopefully as a society, should be more aware of the fact that accusations are sometimes false and a little slower to pass judgement or react to them.
I think that EAs are particularly vulnerable to a sort of ‘moral hazard’ of being especially receptive to perceived victims; many of us are empathetic people who feel strong moral obligations to help others. In this case, I can imagine Ben feeling a strong need or even obligation to do something and acting according. If so, what he did was actually very admirable, even if it turns out to have been misguided in hindsight.
I’ll also just quickly say that I am still somewhat conflicted about how to interpret the threat of legal action made by NL. On one hand, that seems extreme and a very bad signal for an EA organisation.
On the other hand, as we see here, someone publishing a lot of (in your view) false information about your organisation is extremely harmful and time-consuming to those who are invested in that organisation. It does irreparable damage to reputations and trust.
So this does seem like an exceptional circumstance where you might consider exceptional actions/threats—especially if you have a background in business and entrepreneurship, areas where threatening and taking legal action is normal and necessary.
Having written that, I am realising that I feel NL acted reasonably, knowing what I now know.
Yeah, I think that is my current position.
Kat, I appreciate you responding in detail to Ben’s post. I haven’t had time yet to look at all the evidence but will hopefully do that in more detail later. One thing that stood out to me from the appendix:
This sounds a bit like you haven’t really reflected on whether the setup of living with your employees is a good idea in general, regardless of the climate in EA. In your comment below, you say:
I liked Holly’s comment on Ben’s original post saying that if we encourage lots of experimentation as a community, it is unfair to blame people if the experimentation goes wrong. However, I think this is conditional on the people in question acknowledging that something went wrong and being willing to learn from it.
I wish there was more reflection and apologising in your post. Just blaming the EA community for assuming ill-intent too often and spending all your energy on debunking as many claims as possible gives the impression that you’re not really taking responsibility for the situation. It seems pretty clear to me that working and living together (especially when going to lots of new places where you don’t have an existing support system) does create a lot of dependence and makes it more likely for your employees to feel stripped of their agency. I think a lot of the things that I find icky from Ben’s post and that still feel icky to me have to do with this dynamic of completely blurred professional and personal boundaries. In the same vein, I agree with Frances’s comment, that including all these photos seems to be missing the point. Yes, you traveled to really cool places together and everyone looks really happy in these pictures, but it is a highly unusual situation to have this kind of relationship with your employers and I don’t find it that surprising that people left feeling really bad about some of the dynamics that played out.
I know it must have been tough to respond to the original post and I understand why you focused on debunking as many claims as possible. However, to rebuild trust in the community I think it would be really helpful to hear more about what your reflections are and how you’re planning to prevent anything like this from happening again.
Hi Luzia. We did acknowledge that we’re no longer living with employees for exactly the reasons you expressed. You can see our “lessons learned” section here. And it’s not going to show up as much in the post, but I have probably spent a full month of full-time work analyzing what happened and what I can do better in the future.
I think we had reason to believe that living and working together would be fine. I’ve done it with many employees in the past and me and Emerson had been doing it for years. However, I do think it’s risky and it’s not worth the cost. I hope other EA orgs learn from what happened to us.
However, I do think that overall, this was small relative to the amount of things they lied or experienced delusions about. We’ve presented hundreds of pages of evidence showing that they told serious falsehoods that were extremely damaging to us.
I think that focusing on our tone or what we did wrong when they’ve demonstrably lied about dozens of claims is missing the point.
Maybe it was unwise of us to live with employees, but they told dozens of falsehoods and misled people in a way that will cause damage to us until the singularity.
Everybody should reflect on what they could do better in the future, and we have. But Alice, Ben, and Chloe have shown zero such reflection, have shown zero regret, and have legitimately caused massive damage that they could have prevented, whereas we lived with employees and hired somebody who’d never been an assistant before and didn’t like it.
Kat, thank you for this post. I appreciate the very helpful/understanding manner in which it is written. I’m really sorry that you needed to invest so much into this, although I think you made the right decision in doing so.
I’ll read more fully, probably sit with this for some time, and respond properly after that. (Keeping in mind my conditional pre-commitments to signal boost and seriously engage.)
Just to be clear, was this work contract was signed by both parties? If one has made a verbal contract to do X, but before any work is done, a different written contract to do Y is drafted and signed, the written contract will take precedence over the verbal contract (Y>X). I.e. it wouldn’t matter what was promised in interviews, as long as you have a written contract agreeing the compensation package. [1]
GPT 4 Tells me this is often referred to as the “parol evidence rule” , and identifies some exceptions to this rule https://chat.openai.com/share/9139370f-9004-4717-85a6-f83a6a3cb07d
I won’t comment on who is right and who is wrong. That’s not what is relevant here in my opinion anyway. Rather the carelessness with which the money is used and the attitude behind, which gives ground to EA critics, and how could they be not wrong? If we trust the picture given by these people—luxurious salaries, luxurious retreats, carelessness about the money and romantic involvement with each other that leads to drama--, I’m ashamed to be an EA. The fact that no one comments on this worries me tremendously.
This situation disappoints me deeply, and it prompts reflection on what is EA in such circles, and what should be EA. It’s disheartening to witness the allocation of funds in a manner that seemingly deviates from the core values of this movement.
My concern extends beyond individual actions; what truly troubles me is the apparent lack of stewardship over financial resources. The discretion given to Chloé regarding her compensation, supposedly from funds “raised,” raises questions about accountability. Additionally, extravagant expenditures, like Ben’s $5000 for evaluating job applicants, appear starkly incongruent with the principles of effectiveness and impact that EA advocates.
This isn’t about adopting a holier-than-thou stance, but rather about upholding the fundamental tenets of EA. It’s disconcerting to see substantial financial resources being directed towards luxurious AI retreats, seemingly deviating from the ethos I initially embraced within EA.
Many within EA seek to make a meaningful difference through diligent, often challenging work—researching, striving for jobs aligned with their values, living modestly to contribute more to causes. EA, while predominantly associated with a specific demographic of rich white men in STEM (statistically that is what EA is, as the movement is around 90% white and 69% male) should not dismiss the struggles of those outside this stereotype.
The recent focus on Nonlinear feels like a departure from the altruistic essence of EA. It stands in stark contrast to the ethos set forth by McAskill’s example of allocating the majority of his income to charitable causes.
My concerns regarding Nonlinear’s operations in the Bahamas were met with a response emphasizing increased productivity without substantiated evidence. This lack of quantitative validation adds to the disillusionment surrounding the situation.
Something needs to be done. Many valuable people are exiting the movement because of shady allocations of funds—isn’t that funny to read these posts about which charity is the best, penny-close wise, while la crème de la crème does luxurious AI safety retreats? This isn’t a ‘one-time type of thing’, this is well-known. And yet nothing is done. I will sound Cromwellian, but we need morals and reality-check for people in power. Nothing surprising, but it needs to be repeated, again.
Oh, and I feel that this should be my signature: if you dislike my comment, why is that? So far I’ve received one comment nitpicking about how one AI safety retreat they know of is not luxury; aside from that, does anyone has anything to say about how poorly this reflects on EA? How a whole movement pays the PR price of the luxury lifestyle of a few? How this is plainly in contradiction with principles of effective altruism and nobody says anything because I assume the funder and the causes are hyped? I have a lot of respect for someone who funds something like Charity Entrepreneurship, it’s definitely one of the best things EA did. However the rest doesn’t speak in their favor and doesn’t justify this debauchery.
Tell me more about these “luxurious AI safety retreats”? I haven’t been to an AI safety workshop in several years, and wonder if something has changed. From searching the web, I found this:
and this:
And not much visible evidence of luxury.
That’s one example, it is only one though; many other fellowships are very well-paid, up to 3000 euros per month, I’m thinking SERI/CHERI/CERI
Can I suggest you make this a new top-level post and link to it here? It sounds like you’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think continued discussion would probably be better in its own post rather than here (although your original comment makes sense here for sure!)
Thanks for saying this. Sadly there is a lot of deference when it comes to AI safety and its questionable researchers, and while EA claims it loves criticism, I didn’t meet much love when raising my concerns.
In a group that is composed at 80% by rich white males who have a STEM background where AI safety allows them to get the recognition of their technical skills AND a huge pay, raising such concerns never goes well.
I’m actually preparing a series of post on the lack of diversity within AI and cultural biases will be part of it—how your critical thinking shuts down when it comes to doing work you love, and how evidence that existential risks should be prioritized falls apart under hard criticism (see David Thorsad’s criticism of Bostrom’s famous number 10^16). I expect much pushback and blind denial, as I can see with the comments under my own post that are pretty much just saying ‘AI researchers deserve to be paid well because ML is hard’. I have news: it’s far from unique to AI safety, sadly.
Which of the comments under your post do you read that way?
I understand the standard argument to be more like “AI researchers have commercial options that will pay them very highly, so it’s hard to get good AI researchers to work on altruistic projects if you offer too far below what they could be making elsewhere”.
Fellowships where you seek people with excellent machine learning skills should be well-paid to attract talent, especially given how much such people can make doing capacity research.
3000 per month for beginners in an AI fellowship is way, way too much.
We need to stop considering machine learning engineers as la crème de la crème and justify these exorbitant salaries based on that assumption. The tractability and impact measuring of the work of these people is highly questionable (the causality series written by RP rates existential risk research at 2 on a scale from 1 to 5, tractability-wise).
$3,000 a month in San Francisco is literally under minimum wage. Entry level salaries in data science in the US, for people fresh out of college or a boot camp program, is like $8,000 a month.
I should have specified: the fellowships I’m talking about are in London/Switzerland. Still expensive but nothing that justifies paying people with barely a bachelor degree and no work experience
I don’t think that helps much? If it was in, say, Geneva then $3k/month is under minimum wage.
(I agree $3k/month is above minimum wage in London)
Is your actual objection to hiring new grads to at all?
sounds like it’s also below Zurich minimum wage (not totally sure if that minimum wage is currently in effect or not) and similar to the London “living wage” (which isn’t a required thing)
How much should a technical researcher be paid during an AI safety fellowship in your opinion? 3000 Euro per month does not sound like a lot to me.
(Actually, I think that many AI safety researchers are being paid a lot more than just 3000 Euro. My guess is that some at Anthropic might earn 6 times as much).
We’re talking fellows, so people with very little experience and no certainty of impact at all. You’re comparing this with fully-fledged Anthropic researchers, which doesn’t make sense at all.
And I could talk how these researchers at Anthropic are probably paid way too much for the tractability of their work, but I guess this asks for another post.
This seems unlikely—these numbers on Glassdoor are way lower than I’d expect for most of these job titles. Can anyone from OP corroborate?
The Glassdoor numbers are outdated. We share salary information in our job postings; you can see examples here ($84K/year plus a $12k 401k contribution for an Operations Assistant) and here (a variety of roles, almost all of which start at $100k or more per year — search “compensation:” to see details).
I am confident many of these salaries are inaccurate. I don’t know the operation-jobs pay-scales, since I’ve interfaced more with the grantmakers and research associates, but I would be very surprised if these are the current numbers.
Yeah, for what it’s worth, I suspect pay is higher there now.
The point still stands and it would still be accurate for Open Phil at X point in time. And I assure you, Open Phil has a much larger budget than we do and wasn’t considered at that point to pay their team scandalously low pay.
I really like the “no villains” conclusion. It might be naive and definitely would be difficult, but I would love to see us all have that attitude of goodwill and forgiveness towards one another.
I read the author’s intention, when she makes the case for ‘forgiveness as a virtue’, as a bid to (1) seem more virtuous herself, and (2) make others more likely to forgive her (since she was so generous to her accusers—at least in that section—and we want to reciprocate generosity). I think this is an effective persuasive writing technique, but is not relevant to the questions at issue (who did what).
Another related ‘persuasive writing’ technique I spotted was that, in general, Kat is keen to phrase the hypothesis where Nonlinear did bad things in an extreme way—effectively challenging skeptics “so, you saying we’re completely evil moustache-twirling vagabonds from out of a children’s fairytale?”. That’s a straw person, because what’s at issue is the overall character of Nonlinear staff, not whether they’re cartoon villains. The word ‘witch’ is used 7 times in this post, and ‘evil’ half a dozen times too. Quote:
> 2 EAs are Secretly Evil Hypothesis: 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees felt bad because while Kat/Emerson seem like kind, uplifting charity workers publicly, behind closed doors they are ill-intentioned ne’er do wells.
I’m confused. You say “what’s at issue is the overall character of Nonlinear staff”, but that Kat displaying virtues like forgiveness is “is not relevant to the questions at issue (who did what)”. (I think both people’s character and “who did what” are relevant, and a lot of the post addresses “who did what”).
Incidentally, your interpretation of Kat as being manipulative happens to be an example of the lack of goodwill that my original comment was referring to. Whether or not goodwill is in general desirable, I think viewing things through such an overly negative lens puts you at risk of confirmation bias.
When I said ‘overall character’ I was trying to draw a contrast between, on the one hand, categorising people into ‘evil’ vs ‘normal’ in a binary way, and, on the other hand, a kind of evaluation that allows for gradations of being a bad actor. My lazy phrasing implied that I was interested in the good behaviour of Nonlinear staff as well as the bad, but I actually think it’s more worth paying one’s limited attention to the bad side in particular, in the same way that it makes more sense to launch an investigation when someone has potentially done something bad, than when someone has potentially done something good.
If what’s at issue was the ‘overall character of Nonlinear staff’, then is it fair to assume you fully disagreed with Ben’s one-sided approach?
David probably meant “overall character of Nonlinear management” there. And in that case you might not interview the managers themselves, although you’d probably want to interview other employees to see if they were treated like Alice and Chloe.
I phrased that poorly, please see my reply to Vlad’s reply for an explanation.
I weakly think Ben’s decision to search for bad information rather than good was a good policy, but that the investigation was lacking in some other aspects.
Looking at this from a systemic perspective, I wonder how we can prevent this situation from happening again. To clarify, the situation I refer to is intense criticism presented without consideration of the facts that requires significant resources to be directed towards defense in order to maintain credibility.
Writing and responding to discrediting posts consumes a lot of resources that counterfactually could have been used for more impactful purposes.
Additionally, it creates a lot of fear—I can only imagine the distress this situation caused Kat and NL. It takes a lot of personal strength and conviction to stand up to such negativity, and I fear that this kind of whistleblowing is more likely to push people away from doing the hard job of being a nonprofit entrepreneur.
I’d love to hear any suggestions about how to prevent this from happening again.
Contradicting myself to write comments that it wouldn’t be helpful for me to sit with...
Posting a price at which you’re willing to do investigative work does not imply that this price is your current average wage.
The lost productivity claim somewhat rubs me the wrong way. It feels like this could be used as motivated reasoning to underinvest in community norm/safety enforcement.
That said, I totally agree that if someone does have cheap ways to spare the (very real) productivity costs, they should do so.
I think the crux might be whether or not Ben did have a cheap option. My memory (maybe misremembered) is that he and Habryka felt that engaging further with Nonlinear could come with a large delay. I’m not sure if you think Ben was right to think this but disagree about whether the large delay was cheap, or if you think that Ben was wrong to think this.
I even think that this reasoning can hold true in cases where you are 100% sure that the bad thing was bad. (If the badness is sufficiently low/productivity costs sufficiently high.)
Yeah, this was quick napkin math to illustrate the point. It was intended to be an intuition pump about how expensive it can be to spend this much time on something. I won’t stand by that particular math.
In terms of the delay, we only asked for a week and Ben had already been working on it for 6 months, so it felt like it wasn’t that much of an ask. He sent us the draft in the morning and said he was going to publish it that day. On a day he knew we were traveling and wouldn’t have the capacity to respond. He also knew that one of us was sick so couldn’t respond. It was the worst day of my life.
Also, I think the main point was that if he’d asked for our side and evidence sooner, he could have saved even more time. He spent over 6 months working on this and spent virtually none of the time talking to us or looking for disconfirming evidence. And according to his second post, he’d already written almost the entire post before he spoke to us and had already promised Alice and Chloe $10,000.
Totally agree that people should be willing to look into claims about somebody. I think the main thing I’d like to see different in the future is truth-seeking and trying to look for disconfirming evidence. Waiting to see the evidence of the other side before dropping a bomb on them that will cause permanent damage to them seems like basic ethics and epistemics.
Apologies for the repeat, I asked these questions on LessWrong but didn’t get an answer so I’m trying here.
When did Chloe sign her contract? The document says she was sent it 6 days after starting, but not when she signed it.
What was the agreement on medical care? At points you describe Emerson’s covering Alice’s expenses as generous and voluntary, but elsewhere say medical expenses were a part of compensation.
I am pretty confused by some of the comments here. I think “Sharing information on Ben Pace” is supposed to be about Kat’s experiences and that Kat is expecting/wanting that to be obvious.
Re-reading that section, it was surprisingly consistent with that interpretation, but this line seems to make no sense if it’s about Kat’s experience—if the trauma is publishing the previous post then “probably really hurt her career if she came forward with her information” does not make sense because the trauma was a public event
I am also confused by this. I think it would be good for Kat to quickly clarify if it was or wasn’t her. Since the section is for rhetorical affect, I don’t think this should matter, and it seems like an easy misunderstanding to clear up.
FWIW, that was not obvious to me on first reading, until the comments pointed it out to me.
A slightly different possibility is that “Sharing information on Ben Pace” is supposed to be about Kat’s experiences, and Kat did not want it to be obvious, because it makes Ben look bad and untrustworthy. But that would be a really dishonest and manipulative thing to do, and would undermine her post, which is supposed to establish that other people are telling lies about her. Kat should clarify that she didn’t intend it this way and the section is about someone else.
In Ben’s post, he paraphrased Nonlinear as saying (N.B.: these are Ben’s words, written from Nonlinear’s perspective, not Nonlinear’s words):
Regarding Ben’s summary of his call with Nonlinear, of which the above is part, Ben claimed in his post:
In this Nonlinear post responding to Ben’s post, they write:
And:
And:
So, Ben’s post claims that Nonlinear admitted to asking a “semi-employee” to bring “recreational drugs” over a border. In this post, Nonlinear now seems to emphatically deny this claim.
We have an apparent contradiction.
My questions for Nonlinear:
1) Was Ben’s paraphrase (quoted above) inaccurate?
2) Was Ben’s claim that Emerson said the summary of his call with Nonlinear (of which Ben’s paraphrase was a part) “good summary” false?
3) What were the so-called “recreational drugs”, if there were any? Were they legal drugs, obtained with a prescription, but used recreationally?
Thanks for the questions!
Yes. We wouldn’t ask somebody to travel across borders with illegal drugs. We thought they were legal where she was going, and that’s the only reason we asked her. We actually recommended she not travel across borders with illegal recreational drugs, which she was in the habit of doing.
Yes, it was false. We told him that. We sent him multiple emails saying that the article was riddled with falsehoods and misleading claims. The rest of that sentence was “Good summary. Some points still require clarification”. I think this was very intellectually dishonest of Ben to publish just one part of the sentence.
We didn’t ask for any recreational drugs across borders. We asked for one pack of producitivity medicine which we thought were legal where she was going. When we found out it required a prescription, we said never mind.
It’s with a heavy heart that I find myself (a) spotting this post (b) starting to read it. Rightly or wrongly, I’m not enjoying the community drama.
I feel like I just want to forget that I’d ever seen any of these posts, and just continue being kind and friendly to anyone I know who’s involved in this.
This solution sounds like a crude cludge (shouldn’t I be more truth-seeking that that? can’t I be more thoughtful?) But I just don’t think I have the energy to do better than that.
Would that everybody would do this.
Minimally, this is an account of an organisation riddled with mismanagement and confusion; that Nonlinear was responsible for allocating non-trivial sums of money, career coaching, or whatever else is a symptom of the degradation of “Effective” Altruism in recent years.
There’s a human cognitive bias that may be relevant to this whole discussion, but that may not be widely appreciated in EA yet: gender bias in ‘moral typecasting’.
In a 2020 paper, my UNM colleague Tania Reynolds and coauthors found a systematic bias for women to be more easily categorized as victims and men as perpetrators, in situations where harm seems to have been done. The ran six studies in four countries (total N=3,317).
(Ever since a seminal paper by Gray & Wegner (2009), there’s been a fast-growing literature on moral typecasting. Beyond this Nonlinear dispute, it’s something that EAs might find useful in thinking about human moral psychology.)
If this dispute over Nonlinear is framed as male Emerson Spartz (at Nonlinear) vs. the females ‘Alice’ and ‘Chloe’, people may tend to see Nonlinear as the harm perpetrator. If it’s framed as male Ben Pace (at LessWrong) vs. female Kat Woods (at Nonlinear), people may tend to see Ben as the harm-perpetrator.
This is just one of the many human cognitive biases that’s worth bearing in mind when trying to evaluate conflicting evidence in complex situations.
Maybe it’s relevant here, maybe it’s not. But the psychological evidence suggests it may be relevant more often than we realize.
I don’t think it’s productive to name just one or two of the very many biases one could bring up. I would need some reason to think this bias is more worth mentioning than other biases (such as Ben’s payment to Alice and Chloe, or commenters’ friendships, etc.).
David—I mention the gender bias in moral typecasting in this context because (1) moral typecasting seems especially relevant in these kinds of organizational disputes, (2) I’ve noticed some moral typecasting in this specific discussion on EA Forum, and (3) many EAs are already familiar with the classical cognitive biases, many of which have been studied since the early 1970s, but may not be familiar with this newly researched bias.
Where is the evidence people are seeing this as primarily E vs A&C rather than K vs A&C? The post is written by Kat, and the comments on this and other recent posts are from Kat…
TL;DR: In this comment I share my experience being coached by Kat.
I care about the world and about making sure that we develop and implement effective solutions to the many global challenges we face. To accomplish this, we need more people actively working on these issues. I think that Kat plays an important role in facilitating this.
Since I have not followed or analyzed all the recent developments surrounding Nonlinear in detail, I cannot and will not provide my opinion on these developments.
However, I think it’s still useful to share my experience with Kat, because I believe that if more people had the opportunity to speak with her about their projects and challenges, it would be highly valuable, provided they go as I experienced them. I had three calls with Kat, two of which occurred in July and August 2023.
So, what was my experience being coached by Kat? It was very positive. During our conversations, I felt listened to, and she directly addressed the challenges I communicated. What particularly stood out was Kat’s energy and enthusiasm which are infectious. Starting a new organization is challenging, and I remember a call where I felt somewhat discouraged about a development at my project. After the call, I felt re-energized and gained new perspectives on tackling the issues we discussed. She encouraged me to reach out again if I needed further discussion which made me feel supported.
Having someone to bounce ideas off, especially someone who has co-founded multiple organizations is incredibly helpful. Kat’s directness was both amusing and beneficial in ensuring clear communication. This frank approach is refreshing compared to the often indirect and confusing hints others may give.
A significant aspect of coaching is understanding the coachee’s needs in depth to provide tailored solutions. Different coaching styles work for different people. In my case, while I felt listened to, the coaching could have been even more effective if Kat had spent more time initially asking questions. This would have allowed for a more nuanced understanding before she passionately began offering resources and solutions to my problems. However, this point didn’t detract from the overall value of the calls. I always felt that I made significant progress and found the calls highly beneficial.
Another aspect of my interaction with Kat that I greatly appreciated was her warm and bubbly nature. This demeanor added a sense of comfort and positivity to our discussions. Working on reducing existential risks can often be a daunting and emotionally taxing endeavor. It’s rare to find someone who can blend professional insight with a genuinely uplifting attitude, and Kat does this exceptionally well. Her ability to lighten the mood without undermining the seriousness of the topics we discussed was a skill that significantly enhanced the coaching experience.
Overall, I would rate her 9 out of 10, considering these points. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to receive guidance and coaching from Kat and hope that she can assist many more individuals in their efforts to do good better.
@Kat Woods
I’m trying to piece together a timeline of events.
You say in the evidence doc that
Can you tell me what month this was? Does this mean just after she quit her previous job or just after she started traveling with you?
Late February to late March.
She’d quit her previous job a while back.
Great. Thank you!
[NOTE: This comment is specifically about things that Nonlinear could have done better after the employees in question had left the organization. This is not intended to connote that others were faultless; I’m just focusing on things from Nonlinear’s perspective for the purpose of this comment. Also, I am assuming the essential truth of the information Nonlinear has shared, again for the sake of argument.]
One thing I would have suggested Nonlinear do differently in the past few months, after getting clear information that Alice/Chloe were spreading information about Nonlinear that was at odds with Nonlinear’s own understanding of what had happened: start privately putting together a document (like this one) as a defensive measure, even before the allegations became widespread. Obviously the document could not be super-specific without knowledge of exactly what allegations would be made or exactly how they would be worded, but going by what Kat suggests in the post, the approximate list of concerns that the former employees were raising was already known to Nonlinear. (In fact, I’d go further and say they should have focus-grouped or otherwise gotten feedback on their responses so as to understand how others might perceive things). Having a document like this prepared before there was a PR crisis would have helped in several ways:
Nonlinear staff (Kat and others) could have gotten over some of the emotional edge that one has when first confronting accusations, or putting one’s response to accusations on paper, which may have improved the quality of their communication, reducing the risk of them appearing defensive or otherwise sending out signals of poor epistemic virtue.
Nonlinear could have proactively provided the proofs to Ben without requesting him to wait a week for them to collect proofs, because the proofs would have been ready.
Even if Ben had not been willing or able to review all of these, Nonlinear could have published its response relatively more quickly after Ben’s post was published. The 3-month-plus delay likely cost a lot to Nonlinear’s reputation.
Having a substantive response may also have reduced the chances that Nonlinear would resort to approaches such as legal threats, that (in my view) did not succeed, and rather ended up backfiring for Nonlinear in the court of public opinion.
My suggestion would have been to purely prepare the document defensively, only to be published if the accusations gained wider credence, but potentially the document could also be shared with funders, grantees, potential employees, or other stakeholders who had already heard the accusations and were concerned about associating with Nonlinear due to the accusations.
I think many of the same factors that led to a lot of the problems in the first place likely also constrained Nonlinear’s ability to preemptively respond to the problems, namely: not a lot of manpower, not a lot of internal organization, always being on the move, etc. I think it could still be a valuable lesson for other individuals or organizations to consider when they come to learn that there is negative information about them that’s floating around.
Preemptively responding to a threat that may never materialize may mean wasted effort. But then again, a lot of the whole existential risk / catastrophic risk / AI safety community is focused on preemptively responding to things that may not materialize. So I don’t think that’s much of an objection in principle. It comes down partly to how high the probability is, but it’s worth keeping in mind the other angle: once the threat has materialized, it’s much harder to respond in a level-headed manner.
Your description of Chloe’s driving seems consistent with hers- she didn’t want to drive without a license, but there were no ubers available and getting her boss to drive her was too hard.
There were taxis available.
She said she wanted to drive without a license. We gave her alternatives (us paying for taxis/ubers for the once a week or two grocery shop she had to do). She could have done that until she went home and got her license, but she wanted to drive.
Did you see the section where it shows how difficult it was for her to get a ride? She just asked and Emerson said yes. It wasn’t very difficult.
to be clear: you offered to pay for taxis when she was running errands for you, as part of her job?
Yes, she had to use the car once every week or two for groceries. We offered to pay for taxis for her to go and pick that up. We also offered to pay for taxis for any other things she wanted to do. It was all expenses paid.
One of the falsehoods she told was that she had to drive daily. This was not the case.
Here is where I find myself:
Maybe you did everything right here, and it would have been good enough for a reasonable person. Maybe using the phone was prohibitive (although sounds like she did use it as part of her job?). In which case, Chloe is being unfair at best, malicious and deceptive at worst.
But I can see a lot of ways your report could be misleading while being technically true[1]. The ideal thing would be for Chloe to respond with more details, but if things are half as bad as she said, it’s very reasonable for her not to do that. But that’s also the most likely response if she made it up.
Non-exhaustive list of possible reasons taxis might have been a bad solution:
* the taxi companies don’t actually show up quickly and reliably (which wouldn’t be surprising, since even Uber isn’t reliable in places as remote as Alameda, which is a 5 minute drive from downtown Oakland).
* she didn’t speak Spanish, the drivers don’t reliably speak English, and she finds the language barrier stressful.
* she got sexually harassed by a driver her first week there and is scared of a repeat
* she fears the expense will be used against her later.
Deleting this comment after some fair criticism.
Why are you saying “these orgs”? I feel like even though it’s common in EAs to use money to buy time and productivity, combining world travels and living in luxury locations with impactful work is something that was unique to Nonlinear as far as I’m aware.
Also, why are you assuming it’s “donated money” that was used for this, rather than them having earmarked funding for specific projects while they use Emerson’s savings (seems rich or has rich parents) for the luxury expenses? I mean, sure, earmarking is a fuzzy concept, but are you saying that people with independent wealth are prohibited to also fundraise for charitable work they’re doing unless they cut down on the lifestyle they could already independently afford?
I feel like, the important question here is “Do you have a reason to believe that specific Nonlinear donors were misled about the use of funds?” If not, then there’s nothing to complain about.
To be clear, I’m not ruling out that donors were misled here. I just think there’s not necessarily a ton of reason to believe this at this stage, so we should be cautions with the outrage buttons. And only going by pictures with not much about the specifics of this org or the broader context isn’t helpful. (For instance, regarding the broader context, I feel like Nonlinear probably overstates how connected they are to AI safety, so this thing should probably be at most a small update about how AI safety is done and funded more generally within EA.)
Yeah these criticisms are fair, my comment was made hastily and in poor taste. I’ve deleted it.
As far as I know they weren’t funded by donated money, they received a grant from the S&F Fund and a smaller one from Open Phil (I don’t think either org take donations). The rest was self funded, more details in the original post.
Thanks for the clarification! I probably should’ve read in more depth before commenting, I was just viscerally shocked by seeing all of these social-media style pictures so prominent in the beginning of the post.
Executive summary: A response was provided to allegations from former employees published on forums, with documentation to support different perspectives on the disputed claims. Issues related to investigation practices and community norms were raised.
Key points:
Claims were made regarding compensation, work environment, and other topics. Counter-evidence regarding these claims was provided.
Alternative explanations for the differing perspectives were proposed.
Concerns were raised about investigation practices used prior to publication of the original allegations.
Potential broader impacts on community culture and trust were discussed.
Despite harms highlighted, good intentions were acknowledged all around.
Suggestions were made for improving community norms to handle similar situations better in the future.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
Perhaps inevitable given the nature of the post, but I thought this was a pretty poor summary; it is too far abstracted from the concrete issues. And “good intentions were acknowledged all around” seems false, as a key part of the post’s argument is that Alice is a serial liar.
I asked ChatGPT for a summary and thought it did somewhat better. It was a little less abstract and also shorter, though still more abstract than I would have liked.
While I have been interested in EA since the beginning, I feel like a cultural outsider. One thing that struck me was what seems to be a clear mistake you haven’t acknowledged, which many might see as your most significant error: continuing to work with and trust someone who, according to your account, is a serious and long-term drug user.
I weakly agree that the EA social scene is too drug-y. (By which I mean: people doing psychedelics even though they have mental health issues that psychedelics might exacerbate, one person talking about having once done cocaine in casual conversation, plus I just suspect that psychedelics are bad for your epistemics and make you more likely to believe what I’d class as “new age-y bullshit”.)
But I still think talking about drug use on this way is a bit melodramatic. A large % of the population in Western countries are fairly to very regular users of alcohol. A significant minority of those people semi-regularly drink to excess. And alcohol is I think regarded by most public health people as having a worse risk profile than many illegal drugs, including weed and pretty much any psychedelic. But whilst “don’t hire a (non-recovered) alcoholic” is a common-sense rule, no one says “don’t hire long-term frequent alcohol users”.
The illegal drug trade inflicts an enormous amount of harm on the world and this should be taken into account when considering the social harm of drug use. Plus, it is a very bad look for charities to openly tolerate employees using illegal drugs.
Kathy Forth was proven right though: EA/rationalism does have a sexual assault problem. A few weeks after her suicide note was made public it was revealed that in fact CFAR personnel had in fact known about the accusations against Brent Dill and had refused to make them public.
I find Scott Alexander’s conduct in this affair extremely questionable. Despite the fact that Brent had revealed his manipulative nature on SSC , Scott effectively introduced Brent to the Bay Area community, and AFAIK he has not made a blog post publicly calling out Brent Dill as he did with Kathy Forth.
I have documented a timeline of relevant events below:
April 18, 2014 Brent Dill comments “I suppose ‘reactionary’ is just the closest affiliation I can latch onto; my actual worldview is a weird sort of nihilistic, depersonalized, ultra-authoritarian fascism straight out of 1984, so it’s kinda hard to find people to flag tribal affiliation towards. 🙁” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/18/confounder-of-the-day-how-sexy-your-parents-were/
June 3, 2014 Scott Alexander suggests to Brent Dill that he should move to the Bay Area. Elsewhere in the thread, Brent Dill says “Well, I have a LOT of medical debt, but I am also a pretty good computer programmer. On the gripping hand, I’m not conventionally hirable due to mental instability. 🙁” and “I left Phoenix Arizona for here after burning out all of the Phoenix community’s goodwill with my mental health drama.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/03/southeast-michigan-meetup-68/
August 10, 2014 Brent Dill says “manipulation is my only natural skill, and the one that I’ve honed the most. (Remember, narcissistic upbringing; probably a lot of unpleasantly narcissistic tendencies in myself as well.)”, “I completely get and agree with Neoreaction, my only objection is about scale. In the world I want to live in, I am a Sovereign King of my own household, where the only options are Obedience and Exit.”, ” I lived with a harem of attractive, submissive women who called me their ‘Master’ and pretty much voluntarily structured their lives around making me happy.” in SSC comments section https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/09/friendship-is-still-countersignaling/
September 19, 2014 Scott Alexander makes a blog post, asking for people to help Brent Dill move to the Bay Area https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/19/open-thread-5-my-best-friends-threadding/
Date unknown, 2014 Brent Dill joins a Berkeley rationalist group house https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent
November 11, 2017 “An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential” posted by Kathy Forth https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gFpaHk2aKq2jGijnd/an-exploration-of-sexual-violence-reduction-for-effective
November 17, 2017 “Sexual Violence Risk Reduction—Let’s Do Tracking!” posted by Kathy Forth https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/suiTJeeEMnv7aPu8p/sexual-violence-risk-reduction-let-s-do-tracking
January, 2018 (precise date unknown) ACDC receives report of Brent Dill’s abuse from a former partner of his https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent
March 14, 2018 “EA Survey: Sexual Harassment Questions—Feedback Requested” posted by Kathy Forth https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3oukNayDZXWLzte7c/ea-survey-sexual-harassment-questions-feedback-requested
March 17, 2018 Kathy Forth commits suicide
April 15, 2018 announcement of Kathy Forth’s death https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s93F5JmhCxKDxWukD/remembering-the-passing-of-kathy-forth#
April 2018 (precise date unknown) ACDC recommends not banning Brent Dill from CFAR events, CFAR leadership follows this recommendation https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent
June 18, 2018 Kathy Forth suicide letter published https://medium.com/@itai.ilyich/if-i-cant-have-me-no-one-can-kathleen-rebecca-forth-born-april-11-1980-31c49ed15121
June 22, 2018 9:05 PM Scott Alexander publishes a response to Kathy Forth suicide letter, accusing Kathy of false accusations of sexual assault https://web.archive.org/web/20221111065956/https://www.tumblr.com/slatestarscratchpad/175157697076/content-warning-sexual-harassment-suicide-i
September 17, 2018 mittenscautious publishes “Brent, a warning” https://medium.com/@mittenscautious/brent-a-warning-38e447c55ab0
September 19, 2018 mittenscautious publishes “Warning 2”, <real name redacted>’s account of Brent https://medium.com/@mittenscautious/warning-2-153ed9f5f1f3
September 19, 2018 mittenscautious publishes “Warning 3”, <real name redacted>’s account of Brent https://medium.com/@mittenscautious/warning-3-8097bb6747b1
September 21, 2018 8:22 AM CFAR internal memo regarding Brent Dill is leaked https://pastebin.com/fzwYfDNq
September 21, 2018 CFAR temporarily bans Brent Dill, publishes apology https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2018/acdc
September 21, 2018 r/slatestarcodex mods remove all references to Brent Dill, including external links to medium posts https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9ghlh1/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_17/e6e9sbn/?context=999
November 23, 2018 CFAR publishes further update regarding Brent Dill, specifying that he is permanently banned from CFAR events https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2018/further-updates
February 17, 2019 Bay Area REACH declines to make investigation of Brent Dill public, ostensibly to avoid legal liability https://archive.is/6kyIM
Kathy Forth was NOT right. How can you say that when she falsely accused someone of sexual assault, and tried to smear their character in her own way when proven wrong? She was demonstrably wrong. Please just let the dead rest. No one will like it, including Kathy’s family and friends, if this gets brought up again. Honestly it is not appropriate that you posted her suicide letter which has falsehoods within, and we know how drama hungry the EA community is. I personally witnessed the pain and chaos her delusions prompted her to cause and it does not need to be repeated. Many people witnessed that pain but mostly we don’t talk about it out of respect for the dead, because it is so evident she was unwell not malicious. It’s very sad. If you don’t see her claims constantly being refuted out in the open that’s why. Most correction about Kathy happens over DM so as to not publicly embarrass her memory. But it’s been 5 years and people on the EA Forum need to stop giving her falsehoods platform in your comments. So now I am writing this public response.
BTW you start off saying “EA/rationalism does have a sexual assault problem”. Actually, this still remains to be proven that EA has issues with sexual misconduct (let alone assault) worse than other, say, millenial-coded, social communities. Yes there was a big blowup with Brent Dill and Vassar 5 years ago. Appalling stuff. But I fail to see how this necessarily translates to the average EA’s experiences. As someone who has spent time in many social scenes (rave, burning man, nerd, gamer, poly, startup, animal liberation, spiritual/woo, and university social scenes to name a few) blowups happen everywhere thanks to the worst men. Women also have bad experiences everywhere. Unfortunately it is part of being a woman in a coed space. EA’s social scene is very respectful/boundary-respecting toward women in my experience, and their reporting processes are good (even Kathy praised the reporting systems of EA/CEA). Is there room for improvement? Almost definitely, like anywhere else. I hope to see more improvement. But in my opinion EA does not have a noteworthy sexual misconduct problem in 2023. Let alone an assault problem.
Just my opinion based on my own experience. But it is just as valid a data point as anyone else’s. If you are going to share stories, you could share the stories of women who have not experienced harassment too. Pushing back on this salacious narrative does not mean dismissing women’s reports btw. We EAs should take reports extremely seriously. And I expect most reports will be true or mostly true. But we should also refrain from labelling the whole diverse community as being plagued with a “sexual assault problem” because some women have had problems. Men do troubling things in every community. Reports are extremely important so we can attend to those specific people and situations, but they tell us almost nothing about frequency/endemicness of harassment within the broader community. Hopefully we get broader data soon.
Brent Dill was not the only case. There were also accusations of statutory rape against Eliezer Yudkowsky (and others):
https://archive.ph/Kvfus
Here’s an open letter to Vitalik Buterin discussing miricult.com, the donations from Jeffrey Epstein, and other things (if the facebook discussion mentioned in the link is real, it’s pretty damning):
https://fredwynne.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-vitalik-buterin-ce4681a7dbe
I really can’t overstate how important it is for there to be answer about what happened with miricult.com, but all I really know is that no one seems to be willing to talk about it.
Anyways, there’s more:
https://twitter.com/RuffleJax/status/1009140252085243906
https://twitter.com/RuffleJax/status/1009630452322316289
Time Magazine article
https://time.com/6252617/effective-altruism-sexual-harassment/
I have read all that before. I really have to wonder if you actually read the Facebook threads, because that isn’t damning at all. Especially not against Yudkowsky.. it’s actually overtly vindicating of him. And it is intellectually dishonest that you even link the archived miricult website when even the medium piece and the Facebook posts malign it as essentially a highly inaccurate hit-piece. So, your second link contradicts the first. (The first is so nutty it’s not believable anyway it’s very pizzagate-ish).
And tbh, the facebook threads themselves discredit much of the second link where they are ironically posted within as proof of the claims it tries to make.
Also it is funny that if you read those Facebook threads, Michael Vassar is named as a primary source for some of those claims they discuss whether or not they could they be true. And Vassar is actually one of the few people that is agreed to be a sexual harasser/assaulter and serious agent of chaos. He is one of the men RuffleJax names in your 3rd and 4th links. So, your third and fourth links which implicate Vassar as a bad actor, in so doing also discredit the 1st and 2nd about MIRI involvement in statutory rape/blackmail/etc.
As for the RuffleJax tweet allegations, yes serious stuff. I can’t comment on the Rettek stuff because I am not in the rationality community to the extent to know, but Vassar has been discussed on here before and has been banned from EA and SlateStarCodex events for quite a while. Please read that link. Plus RuffleJax admits that the only reason she included EA in her tweets, not only rationality, was out of respect for Kathy naming EA. RuffleJax only had issues in rationality, but it is proven that Kathy was wrong about EAs so there was never any reason for RuffleJax to mention EA and doing so was a mistake on her part tbh. Relatedly, I wish you too would not speak of EA and rationality as though they are interchangeable.
That same Vassar discussion also is a good enough rebuttal to the Time piece, though there is a lot more to be concerned about with the veracity and relevance if you dig for anything that doesn’t already confirm your ideas that EA has an abnormally high rate of sexual assaulters:
Questions like, were any women with recent experiences who spoke to journalists actually interacting with EAs, or were they interacting with startup and coliving people in the bay and assigning the responsibility to EAs? As 2023 has progressed, people have become a lot more aware that EA does not necessarily include E/acc and other random bay area armchair-philosophizer, polyamorous, and AI-obsessed types. But tbh most people could be forgiven for being mistaken about this when the TIME journalist was doing interviews. More questions you might care about could be: Had the EA community health team handled those complaints already to the victim’s satisfaction? Are perpetrators cast out and what are the banning procedures? Should it matter for EA’s reputation that the EA community had not been given the chance to handle some of those complaints? (Some women spoke to TIME without ever having told anyone of the behavior they experienced and I think this matters, because men do sexual misconduct everywhere behind closed doors. So I think it is more how a community handles misconduct when reported that should matter for that community’s reputation. How else would other EAs not experiencing harassment know about it? Reports are so essential). And is this quantity of complaints one can dig up unusually large for a community of this size and diversity, especially if you allow yourself to go back 5 or more years in collecting reports? (In my experience no this is not an unusual quantity of complaints going back 5 years)
It feels like you are just throwing everything you can think of to prove your preconceptions, but the intellectually honest thing would be to pick the things you think are valid only. Your links either contradict each other (as with the first 4) or are redundant and outdated (as Vassar is implicated strongly in both RuffleJax’s tweets and the Time piece and has been dealt with) and actually paint a picture of a hit-piece not a serious critique or expose at all.
I don’t want to comment much on what did or didn’t happen. What I will comment on myself is this: Those instances where we can actually identify the alleged bad actors were a long time ago:
The miricult stuff was alleged to have happened 10 years ago (and I’m not sure this relates to EA anyway tbh). Personally I don’t find them believable allegations anyway. But I’ll leave it at 10 years.
The RuffleJax/Vassar/Rettek stuff was alleged 5 years ago and has been dealt with, and has nothing to do with EA by her own admission.
The one thing in the Time piece that was definitely attached to EA and not Vassar or startup/AI culture (the OCB stuff) was also 5 years ago and has been dealt with. In fact the woman had told CEA that she was satisfied with CEA’s handling prior to the TIME piece being written. The dynamics were also quite a lot more socially complicated than it was made out to be in the Time piece.
If your claim is still that EA and/or rationality has a sexual harassment or assault problem today, I’m sorry but your data just does not prove that in the slightest. If you disagree with this still then I really don’t know what to say. Maybe, “encourage women to make more reports that include date and names?” Because right now it is impossible to say what has been going on in recent years. It’s always going to be harder to prove a negative (that sexual misconduct doesn’t happen much in EA or rationality), but at least if reporting were the norm, lacking recent reports would be a good signal. Right now it’s hard to say if it means that misconduct instances or low, or just that women were avoiding reporting and wanted to exit the community asap.
It’s funny because back in 2018 I was extremely hard on the rats about the Brent Dill stuff. Now 5 years later I’m the one who is reminding everyone that time has passed and it’s possible things changed. I witnessed the rat community wake up to abuses and people really started paying a lot more attention to twisted dynamics. I am actually really hopeful that not only have things gotten better, but that EA (and maybe even rationality!!) is a more respectful place for women than other counterfactual communities. Again, it looks like we will have better data soon. But your links are not good data at all that there is a current issue. I don’t understand the rush to condemn an entire diverse community, almost every one of whom cares deeply about sexual misconduct as much as anyone else who, say, read that TIME piece. You should withhold judgement just a bit longer.
Read the facebook thread again and don’t equivocate. Vassar was the primary source only for the claim that MIRI gave into blackmail. Vassar was not the source for the claims of statutory rape.
The comment that says “I am confident that some of the things on the Miri cult website have nonzero truth to them” was not from Vassar. The discussions about whether the statue of limitations still applies did not involve Vassar either.
Yudkowsky, for his part, went on the record saying that “pedophilia is not the same as ephebophilia.” around the same time. Do you think that is an acceptable opinion?
The very same Eliezer Yudkowsky came on this forum telling EAs that they should keep money they received from FTX—money that was known to be stolen from FTX customers in SBF’s criminal fraud.
So yeah, I think the question of whether Yudkowsky is a pedophile (or “ephebophile”, to use Yudkowsky’s preferred term) does relate to EA, because his opinion seems to hold a lot of weight in this community.
I’d say Vassar was a primary source for the salaciousness of the wording of the whole situation. Which is what matters if you are going to say it is damning. Because, surely you don’t think a 17yo who consented and is still in the community 10 years later who has shown no apparent problem looking back on it, is that big of a deal?
Did you know that in every European country and 38⁄50 US states the legal age of sexual consent is 17 or below?
Don’t you think this makes 18 more of a legal quirk than a boundary on which to park your moral disgust reactor? Now I personally like the age of consent being high because it makes taking legal action extremely easy in case people behave badly. It means people should behave carefully. And I think it is dumb and often emotionally risky to have sex with a 17 yo. But dumb is not the same as unethical, and often emotionally risky is not the same as always emotionally risky. From what I have heard elsewhere, that person was one month from turning 18, and they weren’t like, plucked off the street for having a sexy body or something. It seems everyone knew each other and had been friends/friendly for months. I’m not seeing proof of abuse of power or objectification going on.
FWIW you can literally ask people for details as I have done before now. These are real people who had the experiences you are gossiping about. 10 years ago. I have never understood this desire to gossip rather than actually do something meaningful to root out and address problems. I think if you wouldn’t have the guts to approach the now-27yo or someone else you think might have been involved, that is probably your conscience telling you “ah tbh you are overstepping and you know it isn’t really a real issue” in which case you shouldn’t have the guts to spread their private info on internet forums. It really reads to me as pretending something was a big deal that you really know was not. If you really think someone was abused there (and especially if you think that risk remains today!) please reach out to some relevant parties. I would applaud you for putting your effort where your mouth is.
So anyway I still think it is not damning. And even if it were damning, you have no idea who it was. You have no idea if that person whoever it was still even works at MIRI. It almost def wasn’t Yudkowsky according to that thread. So why are you using that to support to your thesis that EA has problems today? Very strange. I’m all in support of rooting out bad behavior toward women or minors. But your chain of reasoning does not hold to support such a grand conclusion about a community of tens of thousands of people across dozens of cities. It does not even hold to support the claim that MIRI has an issue. It’s been 10 years. In case it isn’t obvious, I’m not dying on the hill that nothing bad happened. I have only even responded to you again and again because I am under the impression you are trying to prove that EA has a problem with sexual misconduct today.
As for the rest of your comment… It’s super weird you are tracking this all down about Yud. It has absolutely nothing to do with your original thesis and it is moving the goalposts, for a new goal which I’m not even sure what it might be. If you don’t like Yudkowsky, just say that. You are free to say that. You can say you think Yudkowsky is a dick, or a jerk, or is wrong about things.* What you are not allowed to do is take your feelings about someone, feelings based of of cherrypicked pieces from an extremely prolific writer, and use those feelings for motivated reasoning to share those cherrypicked bits as suggestion that that person has abused children or teens, and then even further, use that as proof that the community he is a part of has a drastic sexual assault or harassment problem. TO MAKE THOSE CLAIMS IS SO WILDLY INAPPROPRIATE AND FAR-FETCHED IT IS ESSENTIALLY SLANDEROUS. And if you aren’t making those claims, I have no idea what you are trying to say tbh.
If I were you I would really ask yourself what you are trying to do here. Is it help women? If so, how is what you are doing helping? What could you do that is more helpful for women, that doesn’t just leave a bunch of chaos and misinformation in your wake about people (EAs, including EA women who try to address sexual misconduct) who don’t deserve it?
I will not be responding to further comments. I only expect more gish gallop from you. I warn everyone reading this to significantly downgrade their trust in what you write next in this thread. To the extent a reader can agree I have refuted your first-choice arguments, and your second-choice, and then your third-choice, I highly doubt your 4th and 5th choice set of gish gallops will suddenly be intellectually honest and prove your original thesis. Which again, is all I’m here for. Not dying on the hill that nothing bad ever happened, obviously. I actually view that claim as an impossibility, because I think crappy men occasionally do bad things to women in every coed community.
*FWIW Yud is right though that pedophilia is different than ephebophilia. [[Edit 1: IDK why he wrote that and neither do you. For all we know, he could have been saying “Inb4 any edgelords reply that pedophilia isn’t inherently harm-causing. If you believe that, you must be thinking of ephebophilia and regardless of what I think, I refuse to have this conversation today. Reminder that I’m talking about pedophilia, not ephebophilia.” And we don’t even know if he meant ephebophilia in the sense of “an insatiable fetish” or “the possibility to feel some attraction for some teens.”
But no matter why he wrote it, or in what sense he meant that term, I agree with his statement. E and P are NOT the same.]] It’s disgusting to speak as though attraction to or sex with a 17yo is the same as attraction to or sex with a 12yo, 8yo, or 4yo. Ephebophilia even includes 18 and 19 year-olds so you aren’t even necessary venturing into illegal territory. If you equivocate E with P, then I claim you are nothing more than a moral relativist robot who bases morality on the letter of whatever local law you happen to exist under, and doesn’t understand what is truly twisted about sex with children. I’m actually angry that you’d try to corner me in this discussion as being the one with the unacceptable opinion if I agree with Yud’s obviously correct opinion there. Everyone agrees with that around the world. Which is why 17 and even 16 years old are very, very common legal ages of consent. Much more so than age 18, which is a relatively uncommon legal age of consent. About 25% of countries/states have a legal age of sexual consent that is 18 or older. And the remaining 75% have 17 or under. I think there are valid reasons to have the law at 18 or higher, but they are not that potential sex with, let alone attraction to, a 17yo is objectively wrong. They are more to add strength to a potential victim’s toolkit. I don’t think it makes sense for someone else (you) to yell statutory rape regarding a consenting 17 year old. Only the victim themselves doing so makes sense to me, if they are that old at time of consent. If someone thinks they were taken advantage of at 17yo, when reflecting years later, let them take it to court or their community under statutory rape. And let everyone in our culture be aware this is a thing that can happen. I want everyone to be careful and screw them if they were careless enough to cause a problem for someone down the line. Support people if they come forward, but if not, mind your business I’d say, and don’t go imagining coercive cultures that you’ve got no proof of. I realize it might sound salacious in a PC culture, but please get yourself together and realize that once in a while a 17 year old will strongly desire to have sex and be able to meaningfully consent to sex. Most other countries, states, and people understand that.
[[Edit 2: I just want to make it very clear that if someone came forward unhappy with their 17yo experiences at the hands of older people, I would support them in taking retributive action. Problems can obviously occur in those types of arrangements. But I still don’t expect a case from 10 years ago to be proof of broader problems today. I have seen and experienced way too much sexual misconduct by men to believe that episodes ten years ago (and prior to the Me Too Movement too, when I witnessed a lot of men “wake up” about this stuff and become better at policing their communities) should prompt us to typecast and trash an org, community, or subculture today. I’d have to throw the whole world out, and I promise I’m not overdramatizing when I say that.]]
I don’t know these people, so I can’t speak to the veracity of any incident, but I’m a little worried about the passage here:
I think we need to be careful with statements like this. It can take many years, or even entire lifetimes, for bad actors to be outed. You can think of famous examples like Bill cosby or jimmy saville here, who ran free for decades before their actions were exposed.
“we haven’t heard about an incident for ten years” does not necessarily mean that a group doesn’t still have a problem. They could have just gotten better at hiding it.
I do think that groups and even individuals that were previously sketchy can get better. I was in a group that I believe successfully eliminated it’s sexual misconduct problem. But we did so proactively, by kicking people out and instituting preventative measures. I think some parts of EA have done this and are following best practices, but I am concerned about others, in particular the Bay Area rationalists, who it seems (purely from a biased outside perspective) have been far too dismissive of allegations like the time article. I would be happy to be proven wrong about this!
You and I don’t disagree. Which is why I ended my prior two comments with calls for patience and links to a survey so we can get better data. I feel like I touched on that throughout but my point wasn’t to make an active claim about the community, it was to get someone else to stop making active claims backed up with tripe.
Honestly, I am frustrated by this comment. It reveals to me that I’m not sure what I can say to keep from being misunderstood. I added in that edit you quote as a way of trying to say something very similar to what you have just said. I was acknowledging that there still could have been a problem, despite all my talk about 17yo consent. And I was acknowledging that things can take years to come out, that is how these things can happen, so even though it has been a decade, I would support if something came out. I added in that edit out of raw fear that people would misunderstand me and I would get cancelled. But somehow you have taken that edit as proof of something very different, almost the opposite, the opinion that “if we haven’t heard about an incident for ten years, that means that a group doesn’t still have a problem.” That is an opinion that I don’t hold, and yeah which I could be unduly cancelled for, so I guess my edit got me into hotter water. Sigh.
Again, I don’t think it’s impossible that something bad occurred. But if you read the FB thread, the one now-27 yo (then 25 I think) remarks on it in a very unperturbed fashion and also claims they were the only minor. That was the more important thing that made it “not damning”. And less so the time gap, although the two bits look strong put together I guess. IMO at this point it is violating privacy to assume bad things happen and go spreading such links.
And again, I don’t think it’s impossible there is a current problem worse than other communities.[1] Or that the group doesn’t “still” have a problem.[2] I agree, there could be “a [bigger than average] problem”. I just think there is very, very poor proof of this. And I think you and I would agree that a problem ten years ago, if it was a problem, when you don’t even know who it was or if they still at work at the same org or in the movement, is generally very bad proof that there is a noteworthy problem today. You might say “sure but it would be weak proof if it was reported as a problem retroactively!” Would it? Because I promise you I can walk into any longrunnning large social community and ask them if they had a problem with any man doing messed up things to women in the past ten years, and the answer will be yes. Especially if that community is tens of thousands of people, and especially if you go back to the founding most-casual years of that community before systems inevitably get put in place. Honestly, I’m having a hard time imagining that even, say, Rotary Club, has been exempt in the past decade. They just don’t have a culture of airing grievances publicly, which is EA’s bread and butter.
So nothing I have seen, in the density of complaints I have seen over time, including even if that consensual statutory incident was actually problematic, proves or disproves the idea that EA could have a big problem. Thomas was making a positive claim of a big problem, which is why my focus on trying to bring back neutrality could perhaps be misconstrued as arguing for the opposite claim. People are used to seeing two opposite claims duking it out, not just someone trying to return neutrality. So, to make my position abundantly clear, I am not arguing for any particular claim except sharing my own experience as a data point, and I am trying to get other people to stop using bad evidence to back up claims. And using bad evidence naturally means that the claim won’t hold up well when you look close, if that poor evidence is all or most of what you have. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to prove the opposite of the claim, it means they set up their argument that badly.
Does EA have a big problem? It’s hard to prove one way or another, and it has not been proven. But we will have more data soon. Until then, I would like to remind critics of what definitely matters if they are going to make claims about our community today as though their claims are the unobjectifiable truth: women’s safety today. That is essentially the only evidence that definitely matters if the claim is not “EA or rationality used to have a problem”. We should use 5 years past, 10 years past, suspicion of problems to do more digging into whether EA has a current major problem and if so, how our recent systems that focus on sexual misconduct have been inadequate. Which is indeed what is being done.
Please keep in mind, it is extremely stressful to write the types of comments I wrote above. I do it to try to protect real people and our very real movement from unwarranted hasty kneejerk cancellation, which derails lives, waylays futures, and causes emotional health crises for those effected. Unfortunately, I am well aware that while doing so, I risk such cancellation myself, which is very scary and necessitates (IMO) me writing a cringe novel so people can fully understand the context of my words and not come after me/ruin my future. But the more words I write, the more sentences I create which also demand perfection or risk being nitpicked And people interpret things in different ways, or forget points I make if I haven’t revisited it in the last few paragraphs. It would be a lot nicer if people on this forum would afford some grace to those of us who take on this reputational risk for the good of others in the community (and under our real names, so it actually means something). If I saw someone share a letter that was proven to falsely accuse Titotal, I would step in for you too. And wouldn’t it annoy you, perhaps even greatly concern you, if, after a defense of you had been mounted, saying validly “we don’t know there was a problem here”, then someone comes in and says “but there still might be a problem tho”? Like, yes, but I just want it to sink in with an audience that attacking others, posting proven falsehoods, and making grand unsupported claims about these things is not okay, and let that stand on it’s own. I really think EAs should stick up for ourselves and each other here.
A note to forum readers in general: Instead of trying to pick everything apart on the defensive side, where I/people like me are simply trying to add neutrality back in and police interpersonal decency so as to prevent slander and privacy-violations, you could pick apart the other side. The side that initially tries to make active (not neutral) claims which they “prove” with blatant falsehoods, outlandishly farfetched speculation, and uncalled-for judgements on people/the movement who are multiple steps removed from theoretical or actual bad situations. I wait a good bit of time usually from when I see an unacceptable comment, but hardly anyone ever steps in. If anyone thinks they can do it better, please do. But right now I have to wonder if I’m one of the few who notices and cares that journalists and people with pitchforks sometimes hang out here, and based on noticing that risk, does time-urgent comms in response to potentially-damaging comments.[3] We should not expect downvotes and disagreevotes to stop journalists or people with pitchforks—they can just DM the person who got downvoted or copypaste anyway. They can easily use that as proof that EAs just don’t want to hear “valid” critiques. The truth was that the critiques were not valid, but people will never know unless EA Forum users like you and me respond. Journalists can share the truth if they want, but I can’t be the only one who no longer expects journalists to figure out what is true let alone what true things are relevant to a grand thesis. In that case, someone needs to do the factchecking and, frankly, critical thinking for such comments/posts on the spot before gish gallops and the like snowball. This is why I responded to the Kathy Forth stuff and so on and so on to whatever might have slanderous aspects or I see as unfair to others. You can do this too. Please.
I am sorry for going off here Titotal, but I really don’t need the feedback that “we need to be more careful with statements like this” or “X does not mean Y”. I was very careful. And I know that X does not mean Y. It is already nightmare fuel for me that I had that conversation with Thomas all through the weekend, and I tried very hard for many hours, and I only did so for the good of others. Maybe focus on the other side to be careful with their statements. If you want to add or highlight another point, it would be nicer if you check for what I think in the thread, or ask a question of what I really meant, or frame it as a heads up to the audience, rather than (apparently) try to correct me on the one thing in thousands of words you think I might not have gotten.
Okay I admit I do have strong expectation that EA does not have more assault than other communities, which was the original claim I was pushing back against, but that is still just my belief and I’m still trying to focus on data and wait for more to come out
Although I will say that if we have a Bill Cosby in our community, someone who would be doing ongoing bad things for many years and still today, it was probably Brent Dill or Michael Vassar. People are looking for these types now.
I’m sure some people notice and care but don’t have the time. I’m more puzzled that lots of people do seem to have the time to comment on community drama, but don’t seem to notice or care enough to comment when blatantly unreasonably negative claims about others (and our movement) get made that could very easily end up as another hit piece or viral twitter thread that meaningfully makes lives worse, both our lives (EA’s) and the lives of the people/animals we try to help via our movement, while being unwarranted. We could find out claims are unwarranted, but it would be too late to take it back after people’s reputations are trashed
For the public record: I was not trying to “call you out”, I don’t think you are harmful, and I recognize how emotionally exhausting it is to discuss these subjects. I think Thomas was trying to throw out as much negative things as possible in a way that was fairly counterproductive, and I dont blame you for trying to rebut that.
I felt the need to write the comment because I think it is still incredibly important to get this right, and not let reactions to attacks let you go too far in the other direction. If you find out someone did something sketchy ten years ago, it is evidence that they are sketchy now. Not complete and total “cancellable” evidence that overwrites the rules of charity and society, but evidence nonetheless.
By pure statistical chance, even if it was the the best community in the world re harrassment. there are probably still some people being abused. They need to know that they can come out, and that their claims will be treated fairly and not minimised for bad reasons. That is more important than anything I can write here. And for the record, I don’t think you would do that, but unfortunately others might, and I have seen that before here.
I don’t see the connection between this comment and the post.
EDIT: Somewhat in mitigation, having checked one of the threads Scott Alexander did tell Brent “you are creeping me out, tone it down” the first time he started talking about being a fascist who loves domination and torture. Not that mitigating in my view.
It’s kind of the fault of the original post bringing up an unrelated case in the first place.
Also, frankly, I think it is always worth people being made to face the discomfort of the fact that someone widely regarded as a beloved community leader was prepared to ask people to help someone out after they boasted on his blog about their fascism and misogyny and manipulativeness. Worth being only dubiously on topic for that.
I do object to the idea that someone who made accusations against multiple specific individuals is vindicated just because one of those individuals was guilty or the community they were part of has a bad record on abuse. Either they made at least some false accusations or they didn’t. If they did (something I have no knowledge of or opinion about either way), they aren’t somehow really correct anyway, no matter what else is true.
My comment was meant to address the part of the original post that says “Alice has similarities to Kathy Forth”
Does someone have a 100 word summary of the whole affair?
My impression is that two nonlinear employees were upset that they weren’t getting paid enough and had hurt feelings about some minor incidents like not getting a veggieburger, so they wrote some mean blog posts about the Nonlinear leadership, and the Nonlinear leadership responded that actually they were getting paid enough (seems to amount to something like $100k/yr all in) and that they’d mostly made it up.
Is that accurate?
I don’t think anybody said any numbers like that; I think the highest anybody has claimed so far was $75k/year, assuming that you count travel, meals, lodging at expensive places etc to be worth 1:1 in compensation to the employee (which I think is dubious as ~nobody earning $75k/year will want to spend >80% of their income as travel).
You’re right that it’s ~$75k total comp.
Alice was paid $72k cash annualized once she asked to be paid in a cash salary rather than a compensation package like she signed up for originally.
The $100k you’re thinking of is the $72k cash annualized + the ~$36k per year she claimed her independent business was making. So if what she said about her business was true she was making over $100k, but we were not paying her over $100k. “Just” $72k.
Where are you getting that number from? It was a mix of rent, food, medical, productivity tools, etc. Some quick math I did shows that only 6% of the money we spent on her was for travel.
Math from this doc
Flights:800+190=990
Total spent on her when she was compensated with room, board, travel, and medical + stipend: 17,174
990/17174 = 6%
(I didn’t include the flight from the Bahamas to London because that was when she was picking her own cash salary, rather than the all expenses paid + stipend. We’d just already booked it before she’d switched to cash.
If you want to include that, it’s hard, because then should we include the cash comp or not?)
It’s also important to emphasize that even though compensation is not the same as purely cash pay, she signed up for the compensation package that she got. When she asked to get compensated purely in cash, we said yes.
So it’s not like she was forced to spend money in a certain way. It’s like if you signed up for a fellowship that covered room and board and a stipend. Later, you decide that you want to spend the money differently, so you talk to the person in charge and they say it’s fine for you to be purely compensated with cash. There’s no forcing you at any point in that process to spend your money in a particular way.
Hi Kat, sorry if my short comment came across as aggressive or inaccurate. I’m just trying to be precise here.
And thanks for the speedy and detailed reply.[1]
I will count lodging away from home as travel expenses. Board is debatable[2].
I’m not sure what counts as productivity tools here. But for most immediately salient examples, I will not count productivity tools as compensation in the usual sense of the term at all. At most it’s a perk. In most American companies your employer will not count, say, office space or hardware or productivity software as part of your compensation package (and my understanding is that the IRS lets self-employed people deduct productivity tools from their taxes).
I’m confused about the medical expenses. Looking online, I think medical benefits are generally considered a benefit, and it is reasonable and commonplace to include that in a “total compensation” package[3]. However, my understanding is also that talking about “total compensation” in that sense isn’t very commonplace, and if you’re including medical benefits in your compensation package and comparing it to a $72k salary, you’re not comparing like-for-like (most companies that offer $72k/year will also separately pay for medical insurance!)
I’m not sure why this is important to emphasize. If the claim is that she was forced into the work unwillingly, then the fact that a willing noncoerced adult willingly signed an employment agreement is strong evidence that there was consent involved. But AFAICT my comment did not say anything about consent; it was only a technical point about the number under dispute.
Historically, I’ve willingly decided to volunteer to do EA org work sometimes (in some cases they’ve offered and I’ve refused payment). But my consent for $0/hour doesn’t mean that my “compensation package” is $X/hour. (Even if they offered $X/h, this doesn’t mean my actual compensation package is $X/h).
I agree that this is some Bayesian evidence that she would’ve in fact been one of the strange people who would in fact spend >80%(or >60%) of their income on travel, especially if it later turns out that after being purely compensated in cash, they ended up spending that money similarly with only tiny differences.
I still don’t on balance buy it though. I would strongly guess that most people in Alice or Chloe’s shoes would’ve preferred to be paid the equivalent cash amount, and I’m at <50% that Alice and Chloe are sufficiently different from the general population.
Though I’m slightly confused that nobody else corrected Roko’s far more egregious errors in 4 days, while my “errors” were corrected within an hour of posting.
My intuitive answer is to count it as the counterfactual cost of how much I’d be willing to pay for the same food at home, but maybe other people have better ideas + there is already precedent for this type of calculation elsewhere.
In tech, when people say “total compensation” they usually just mean monetary pay + stock, or occasionally monetary pay + stock + 401k matching. But I can imagine tech is an outlier here.
Thanks! And I’m also sorry if I come across that way. I’m trying to be as unemotional as possible, but as I’m sure you can imagine, it’s been challenging, and I certainly haven’t succeeded as much as I would like.
Alice did, and then when she asked she got it. Chloe never requested this.
It’s really important that they signed up for this. If we had promised them $75,000 cash salary and then instead gave them this compensation package, I think that is indeed unethical and unfair. However if they knew what they were signing up for and it was clearly communicated and they said yes, then that is totally fine and an informed choice they made.
I don’t see an alternative. I can’t read minds. I couldn’t change their comp package if I didn’t know they wanted to. And when I did know, I said yes.
If they chose this compensation package when they could have applied for other jobs with a more standard package or could have asked for a standard package, then they did indeed choose this compensation package.
Additionally, we need to be able to distinguish between “this was what they chose” and “this was what they would have preferred if they could have had anything in the world right away without having to ask”.
Like, imagine I applied the same standards to funders. “I asked for $50,000 and they gave me $50,000, but I would have preferred $75,000. Yes, I didn’t ask for $75,000, but most people in my shoes would prefer $75,000 over $50,000.” (Or replace with whatever numbers make most sense to you)
This follows the same structure of the argument “Alice and Chloe signed up for a all-expenses-paid + stipend compensation package and they got that, but they would have preferred a cash salary of a similar value to the comp package. Yes, they didn’t ask for that, but most people in their shoes would prefer a cash salary over the other comp package.”
Or maybe a better analogy is a charity applying for funding and the grantmaker donates but with earmarked funds. All orgs would prefer unearmarked funds (flexible funds are more useful than earmarked ones), but that doesn’t mean it’s unethical for a donor to earmark their donations.
Is rent a travel expense?
Counting rent while traveling if this was a part-time travel experience seems reasonable. For example, if they usually live in the Bay area and they’re expected to travel to London for EAG, the cost of the Airbnb in London is clearly a travel expense.
However, if they are always traveling and they do not have a permanent place anywhere, that does not seem like a travel expense but rather just regular rent. Neither of them had a permanent place. Alice had been nomadic before she even met us. Counting that as a travel expense in this context doesn’t make sense and will lead to people getting the wrong idea.
Think about it. Otherwise then, for the last 4 years I have paid zero rent? Clearly, if you are a full-time nomad then airbnbs are just rent, not travel.
How to calculate total compensation
I quickly googled “when people describe a compensation package do they usually include medical” and the first result said:
“Health Insurance Benefits are a huge piece of your overall compensation package. This can include Medical, Dental, Vision, as well as HSA/FSA accounts. When calculating how much your benefits are worth, think about what percentage your employer is going to be covering. Is your employer covering 100% of the cost? 80%? Does that change if you were to include a spouse or dependents in the coverage? These are all important questions to ask when evaluating an offer package and figuring out how much your health benefits are worth.”
“A total compensation package goes beyond your new hires’ base pay rate. It also includes items like health insurance, bonuses, and paid time off”
When I Google “how to calculate the value of your compensation package” these are the first results:
“To calculate total compensation for an employee, take the sum of their base salary and the dollar value of all additional benefits. Additional benefits include insurance benefits, commissions and bonuses, time-off benefits, and perks.”
“Total compensation is the combined value of your salary, bonuses, a 401(k) match, free office coffee, and more. All those freebies or conveniences that feel like work perks—including your PTO—are actually parts of your total compensation package, and they can have just as much value as your salary.”
Since Google knows my history, I thought maybe it’s giving me a biased result. So I tried searching in incognito mode so it wasn’t taking into account my recent posting, and it gave the same results.
Now, I do think that a compensation package is clearly different from cash salary. We say that right away at the almost the very beginning of our post. But we did not describe it to them or to anybody as a $75,000 salary cash. We described it as a compensation package that we estimated to be worth around $70,000.
Once, off hand, in a recorded interview. Every single other communication was just saying all expenses paid plus stipend.
They were informed about this beforehand and they signed up for it. If they had wanted something different, all they had to do was ask. Or they could have applied to a different job. When Alice did, she got it.
If people come away from reading this thinking that we said that we paid them both a cash salary of $75,000 or that it’s the same as a $75,000 cash salary, then they made the same mistake that Chloe seems to have made. Chloe kept on saying that we offered to pay her something equivalent to a $75,000 cash salary. We were saying that this was worth around $70,000. I think her interpreting it this way led to a lot of suffering. We tried to explain it to her a bunch of times that that was not what we were saying but she did not seem to be able to update. I do think people seem to struggle with this a lot.
I think the main thing though, and the way I think about it at least, is as a consequentialist. I don’t think in terms of how much money is it worth etc. I tend to think of it as are you getting your needs met? What about your preferences? And I think the key is that she was living an exceptionally comfortable lifestyle. She was living the almost exactly the same lifestyle as myself.
She also had plenty of freedom and options. She publicly says she had savings and we covered everything so well that, as far as we can tell, all of her stipend went into savings as well. She got her dream job 2 and 1⁄2 months after she quit. And she could have gotten a regular dev job far faster if she wanted.
I don’t know how she would have spent the money otherwise, But that seems irrelevant. It seems like if somebody got a scholarship that included room and board, and then they get upset, because they would have spent it on a different house. If they accept the scholarship, then that is how they would spend it. They would spend it on that house and that food, because that is what they chose. They could have just tried to get a different scholarship or a job. In fact, if you accept that scholarship, and then speak to the people who gave you it and say that you would prefer cash instead and they say yes, that is exceptionally generous and way outside the norm of what is expected.
If a scholarship/fellowship/job offered you room and board and you accepted and then later asked for cash instead I suspect that 98% of them would say no.
She is trying to make it sound like a hardship and us being unreasonable when it is incredibly unreasonable to ask for your compensation package to be changed so quickly after you accepted it.
Most people do not ask for changes in compensation until they’ve been working for at least a year.
Most people if they’re offered room and board + stipend never get the option of switching to cash only.
Most people don’t accept a compensation package and then later say they would have preferred a different compensation package and therefore they were financially controlled.
Most people don’t go to the EA Hotel and say that they’re being financially controlled because they got room and board and a stipend and couldn’t choose to spend the money on something else.
Most people don’t say that a scholarship offering to pay for room and board is somehow bad because the student could have used that money to spend less on a room or paid for a different room.
Sure, everybody would prefer that. But they are not entitled to that.
Sure, some people might misinterpret a compensation package being estimated to be worth $X as being the same as a cash salary of $X. But as long as you clearly communicate what they’re signing up for and they have other options and they choose the compensation package, then nothing wrong was done. If they later change their mind and want something different, they have to ask or quit and find a job that meets their criteria. They can’t make a choice, later want to make a different choice, then try to pillory an person for not reading their mind and giving them everything they ask for right away.
People can’t say “They told me I’d get paid $X and I got paid $X but I think $Y would be better, therefore we have to warn the community about the ‘predator’ in our midst, ‘chewing up and spitting out’ the youth of the community.”
They can say “They offered me $X and I got paid $X, and I would have preferred $Y, and when I asked for $Y, I got $Y.”
They can say “They offered me $X and I got paid $X. I would have preferred $Y, but I never asked for $Y and that made me sad. I guess I should learn from this and get better at asking people for things instead of expecting mind-reading and getting everything that I want immediately without asking.”
First of all, sympathies again. Having hundreds of comments piled on (twice) must be an exceedingly unpleasant experience, and I hope you find some time to practice self-care and enjoy the holidays.
I want to be respectful of your time and the very difficult emotional spot you’re going through, but it seems like your comment is rather afield of the original point I was making. Recall that Roko summarized the situation as:
Since nobody else tried to correct Roko in 4 days, I tried to explain that he was off on two fronts with that line: a) Nobody said $100k/yr, the highest claimed number was ~$75k/year and b) saying someone is “getting paid” $75k/year will predictably give a misleading impression when said payment includes flights and lodging with your employer at expensive places.
That was it. I did not say anything about consent or agreement until you brought it up (and then only to deny that I took the contrary position). I didn’t say anything about whether the deal was net good or bad. Note also that my original comment was exactly one sentence.
I’m not sure how to say this politely, but you write rather long paragraphs arguing against a position I do not hold, and I clearly never did. I don’t appreciate you reframing my language imprecisely[1] and strongly implying things I didn’t say.
To be honest, your comments triggered “someone is wrong on the internet” feelings from me, and I have to actively resist my natural instincts to fight back line-by-line. Like dude if you want to win a fight by writing overly long and nitpicky EA forum comments you sure picked the wrong person to mess with.
I understand that you’re in an emotionally tough spot right now, and I want to be respectful of your time, so I’ll refrain from commenting further in this thread.
I never at any point said that they didn’t choose this.
(speaking for myself) No, I think it’s more like if I did active grantmaking, saw Alex who might be a good independent researcher, but was worried that they were doing too much theory and not enough computational work, and also think they’d benefit more from working in Berkeley, and also that they’d be more productive if they exercised more (no offense to them of course). So I arranged for them to be paid $10k in stipend, $15k in housing subsidies for Berkeley, and bought $25k in compute credits for them, and arranged $15k worth of office space in Berkeley, and bought an expensive gym membership from FAR for $10k/year.
And then afterwards I go around telling people that Alex was paid $75k/year. People might reasonably object on whether (e.g.) just because I somehow managed to be deluded enough to pay $10k/year in overpriced gym memberships to a third party on behalf of a grantee who doesn’t exercise, that it’s actually equivalent to paying the grantee $10k/year.
The whole point is that it wasn’t the same value. Cost does not equal value! Also I note that you are putting quote marks around things I didn’t say. Instead of block quotes, would you prefer if instead (mis)quoted you as saying “I think approving a grant should have the exact same responsibilities and norms as employing someone under your direct care and instruction. Also I hate Taylor Swift and I like pineapple on pizza[2]”?
In this comment chain, I never said anything about whether an action is ethical or not.
As the saying goes “anything is possible if you lie.”
ok. So the total comp really is 75k.
But it includes accommodation within that?
Yep.
Yes it appears to include the 1k stipend, flights, recreational activities, meals, lodging, productivity expenses, laptop, medical expenses, and rental car.
(No, that is very inaccurate)
In what way, specifically?
Apparently 77 people chose to downvote this without offering an alternative 100 word summary. .
If you think writing an 100 word summary of all of this content is as easy as downvoting, you’re probably significantly overrating the value of your original comment.
Apparently nobody else can do any better. Anyway, the community seems somewhat insane about this, like it’s a sacred subject that we dare not do a quick summary of.
If only you were some future AI with the ability to retrocausally coerce people into doing the substantial task of even trying to summarize this mess into a 100 word summary. Apparently your fame was not enough. ;-)