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. Itās less strong evidence that they werenāt 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.
Iād like to reiterate that I am disappointed that weāve 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 donāt 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 accuserās credibility. In short, this isnāt an issue of ādisliking your tone or pictures,ā 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 Iām 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 donāt really know what to say to that. I am confused by how this is in any way NLās fault, and why it should imply that less evidence overall would be better.
I think that if we were all completely rational, youād be right. But weāre not, and I think the photos were included in an attempt to exploit that fact.
If the post just argued āthere were sāmores and iguanas; Chloe and Alice must be lying about how bad their experience was!ā my brain would go āthat argument sucks; obviously people can be unhappy in a land of iguanas.ā But the photos hijack my reasoning by conjuring a vivid image of a tropical paradise (brain: āhm, this looks pretty nice! Itās cold here and I wish I was there right now! Maybe this was an awesome job.ā)
The reason this is bad is because the photos donāt tell us anything relevant that we didnāt already know; we knew they were hanging out in tropical places and the presence of sāmores has zero bearing on the veracity of Chloe and Aliceās claims. No one ever disputed whether there were sāmores and there having been sāmores 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 āourā irrationality, I could be persuaded that the photos are harmful toward some peopleās, maybe even most peopleās, 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 ādisputedā 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 peopleās reactions to Benās post)
Those specific things are absolutely not exclusive with āthis was a nightmare job with abusive people.ā I agree thatās a separate thing that can totally co-exist with the job being in other ways a ādream job that many people would enjoy for the experiences it provides.ā
If the photos undermines some peopleās ability to recognize that it might have also been a nightmare in addition to that realityā¦ again, Iām open to that being an outcome most people will experience, but I donāt think the answer is for NL to provide less evidence overall.
Itās certainly not how I want to be treated when Iām 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 wouldāve been more useful and persuasive (and generated better discourse) if it had been 1/ā5th as long. Throwing evidenceāeven high-quality evidenceāat people does not always make them reason better, and often makes them reason worse. (I also donāt think it works here to say ājust have better epistemics!ā because (a) one important sense in which weāre 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 faithāwho wants you to reach the right conclusionsāshould account for this in how they present information.)
Critically, as previously stated, I think the photos constitute particularly poor evidenceāthey have a very low āprovides useful information:how likely are they to sway people in ways that are irrationalā ratio. This is why my comment wasnāt just āshorten your post so people can understand it better,ā but rather āI think these photos will lead to vibes-based reasoning.ā (This is also why prosecutors etc etc use this kind of evidence; itās meant to make the jury think āaw they look so happy together! He couldnāt have possibly done that,ā 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 youāre 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 āwas this job the kind of job that itās reasonable to sell as ~$75k in compensation.ā
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 āJobs like this are just fundamentally bad and wrong and predatory etc, and we shouldnāt trust adults to be agentic enough to agree to them and not quit if they dislike them, etcā...
Or when people have takeaways from Alice and Chloeās 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, theyāre fighting a number of narrative battles here, many of them vibes based.
I get that youāre saying this particular move backfired on that level for you, and Iām open to the idea that it was a āstrategicā 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.
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. Itās less strong evidence that they werenāt 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.
Iād like to reiterate that I am disappointed that weāve 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 donāt 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 accuserās credibility. In short, this isnāt an issue of ādisliking your tone or pictures,ā 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 Iām 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 donāt really know what to say to that. I am confused by how this is in any way NLās fault, and why it should imply that less evidence overall would be better.
I think that if we were all completely rational, youād be right. But weāre not, and I think the photos were included in an attempt to exploit that fact.
If the post just argued āthere were sāmores and iguanas; Chloe and Alice must be lying about how bad their experience was!ā my brain would go āthat argument sucks; obviously people can be unhappy in a land of iguanas.ā But the photos hijack my reasoning by conjuring a vivid image of a tropical paradise (brain: āhm, this looks pretty nice! Itās cold here and I wish I was there right now! Maybe this was an awesome job.ā)
The reason this is bad is because the photos donāt tell us anything relevant that we didnāt already know; we knew they were hanging out in tropical places and the presence of sāmores has zero bearing on the veracity of Chloe and Aliceās claims. No one ever disputed whether there were sāmores and there having been sāmores 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 āourā irrationality, I could be persuaded that the photos are harmful toward some peopleās, maybe even most peopleās, 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 ādisputedā 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 peopleās reactions to Benās post)
Those specific things are absolutely not exclusive with āthis was a nightmare job with abusive people.ā I agree thatās a separate thing that can totally co-exist with the job being in other ways a ādream job that many people would enjoy for the experiences it provides.ā
If the photos undermines some peopleās ability to recognize that it might have also been a nightmare in addition to that realityā¦ again, Iām open to that being an outcome most people will experience, but I donāt think the answer is for NL to provide less evidence overall.
Itās certainly not how I want to be treated when Iām 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 wouldāve been more useful and persuasive (and generated better discourse) if it had been 1/ā5th as long. Throwing evidenceāeven high-quality evidenceāat people does not always make them reason better, and often makes them reason worse. (I also donāt think it works here to say ājust have better epistemics!ā because (a) one important sense in which weāre 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 faithāwho wants you to reach the right conclusionsāshould account for this in how they present information.)
Critically, as previously stated, I think the photos constitute particularly poor evidenceāthey have a very low āprovides useful information:how likely are they to sway people in ways that are irrationalā ratio. This is why my comment wasnāt just āshorten your post so people can understand it better,ā but rather āI think these photos will lead to vibes-based reasoning.ā (This is also why prosecutors etc etc use this kind of evidence; itās meant to make the jury think āaw they look so happy together! He couldnāt have possibly done that,ā 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 youāre 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 āwas this job the kind of job that itās reasonable to sell as ~$75k in compensation.ā
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 āJobs like this are just fundamentally bad and wrong and predatory etc, and we shouldnāt trust adults to be agentic enough to agree to them and not quit if they dislike them, etcā...
Or when people have takeaways from Alice and Chloeās 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, theyāre fighting a number of narrative battles here, many of them vibes based.
I get that youāre saying this particular move backfired on that level for you, and Iām open to the idea that it was a āstrategicā 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.