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
Chloe claimed: they tricked me by refusing to write down my compensation agreement
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:
Chloe’s salary was verbally agreed to come out to around $75k/year. However, she was only paid $1k/month, and otherwise had many basic things compensated i.e. rent, groceries, travel. This was supposed to make traveling together easier, and supposed to come out to the same salary level. While Emerson did compensate Alice and Chloe with food and board and travel, Chloe does not believe that she was compensated to an amount equivalent to the salary discussed, and I believe no accounting was done for either Alice or Chloe to ensure that any salary matched up. (I’ve done some spot-checks of the costs of their AirBnbs and travel, and Alice/Chloe’s epistemic state seems pretty reasonable to me.)
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.
what it said was “These people are predators who chew up and spit out bright eyed altruists.”
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.”
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.
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?
These points would still be relevant even in a hypothetical disagreement where there was no financial relationship between the parties.
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 think there should be a norm against treating paraphrases as quotes.
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.
What, exactly, do you expect NL to say to clarify that distinction
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.”
but boy am I confused by your issue with my summarizing that paragraph with that quote
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.
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.
I care about the strict facts and I want to know how to contextualize the things that there’s no way for them to refute by simple “no we didn’t.”
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”).
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.
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:
The financial situation is complicated and messy. This is in large-part due to them doing very little accounting. 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. Though to be clear she was paid back ~€2900 of her outstanding salary by Nonlinear within a week, in part due to her strongly requesting it. (The relevant thing here is the extremely high level of financial dependence and wealth disparity, but Alice does not claim that Nonlinear failed to pay them.)
One of the central reasons Alice says that she stayed on this long was because she was expecting financial independence with the launch of her incubated project that had $100k allocated to it (fundraised from FTX). In her final month there Kat informed her that while she would work quite independently, they would keep the money in the Nonlinear bank account and she would ask for it, meaning she wouldn’t have the financial independence from them that she had been expecting, and learning this was what caused Alice to quit.
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.
Which financial claims seem to you like they have been debunked?
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:
Chloe’s salary was verbally agreed to come out to around $75k/year. However, she was only paid $1k/month, and otherwise had many basic things compensated i.e. rent, groceries, travel.
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.
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.
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
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.
Everybody already agrees that she gives unreliable testimony.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.