I closely read the whole post and considered it carefully. Iâm struggling to sum up my reaction to this 15,000-word piece in way thatâs 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 donât 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 âlynchingâ (also offensive) and âwitch-burningâ.
Conflation between being depressed and being delusional.
Glib dismissal of other peopleâs feelings and experiences.
The ridiculous use of âphotographic evidenceâ, which feels manipulative and/âor delusional to me.
Seeming to have generally benighted views on trauma, abuse, power dynamics, boundaries, mental health, âvictimhoodâ, resilience, narcissism, DARVO, what status means for accusations of bad behaviour, culture wars, sexism/âmisogyny, 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/âvillains or angels/âdemons 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 âthe worldâs problemsâ.
Arguing that Benâs 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 peopleâs concern about Nonlinear as an overreaction to FTX/âAlameda 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 [have some serious skepticism about the bookâs thesis]. Itâs not that he doesnât have a point⊠But, anyway, thatâs a topic for another post. (Note: on July 26, 2025 at 01:16 UTC, I edited the part of this footnote in [square brackets] because I regretted how harsh my original wording was. I strive to be kind to people even when I disagree, and I think in this case I fell short of that goal. I apologize for my original wording and I also apologize for taking so long to finally change it.)
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, thereâs 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 wouldâve greatly appreciated if someone reached out to me via PM and said âyo, are you doing OK?â But it has never occurred to me to do this when observing someone else getting dogpiledâI just think to myself âhm, seems like a pretty clear case of unfair dogpilingâ and close the tab.
In any case, Iâve found getting dogpiled myself to be surprisingly stressful, relative to the experience of observing itâand 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.)
Itâs very easy say in the abstract: âIf I was getting dogpiled, I would just focus on the facts. I would be very self-aware and sensitive, I wouldnât dismiss anyone, I wouldnât say anything bad about my accusers (even if I had serious negative information about them), I wouldnât remind people about scout mindset or anything like that.â 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. Itâs not something most of us have practice with. And I hesitate to draw strong inferences about someoneâs character from their behavior in this situation.
[Note: Iâm using the term âdogpiledâ because unlike terms like âcancelledâ, âcalled outâ, âscapegoatedâ, âbrought to justiceâ, âmobbedâ, âharassedâ, etc. it doesnât have any valence WRT whether the person/âgroup is guilty or innocent, and my point is orthogonal to that.]
I agree with the points made in this comment. Itâs 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 âcancelledâ as being worse than her experience of being kidnapped.
That said, I donât know how well they address the original comment theyâre replying to. The post weâre 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 itâs possible to overcome oneâs 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 haveâfor 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 Katâs 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 âloss of equanimityâ.
To add on to this vibe of âgetting dogpiled is an unusually stressful experience that is probably hard to imagine accuratelyâ, I feel a bit strange to be reading so many âreasonedâ comments about how specific improvements in replies/âwordings could have been decisively accurate/âevident, as though anything less seems like a negative sign.
I relate to that logically as an observer, but at the same time I donât 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/âenergy, let alone the fact that weâre human beings and itâs more than okay to produce incomplete/âflawed 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? Itâs insanely hard to communicate all the right information in one go, and thatâs why we have conversations. Though this broader discussion of âwhatâs the real storyâ isnât one that I consider myself entitled to, nor do I think we should all be entitled to it just because weâre 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 canât just dogpile them. Itâs 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, isnât 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 canât 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 arenât 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/âEmerson seems to be on display here. (* Edit: I mean, Kat couldâve done worse, but it wouldnât help her/âNonlinear.)
I also feel like Kat is misrepresenting Benâs article? For example, Kat says
Chloe claimed: they tricked me by refusing to write down my compensation agreement
I just read that article and donât remember any statement to that affect, and searching for individual words in this sentence didnât lead me to a similar sentence in Benâs article on in Chloeâs followup. I think the closest thing is this part:
Chloeâs salary was verbally agreed to come out to around $75k/âyear. However, she was only paid $1k/âmonth, 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. (Iâve done some spot-checks of the costs of their AirBnbs and travel, and Alice/âChloeâs 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 shouldnât treat it dollar-for-dollar like normal compensation.
More importantly I feel like thereâs misdirection. Chloeâs claim was that a verbal agreement existed and wasnât fully upheld; Kat rewrites this into a different claim, then labels it âFalse.â
No, you donât get to do this. When your reputation is on the line and youâre being scrutinized, I expect you to be on your best behavior.
Benâs article draws a sharp distinction between the reputations of Alice and Chloe, but Katâs article lumps them together as âAlice/âChloeâ 27 times (tbf, Ben also groups them about 19 times, but Katâs lumping seems less appropriate to me, on average)
Kat says there were 21 Nonlinear employees but Ben refers to âtheir two in-person employeesâ 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, Katâs implication that they both lied or (in Chloeâs case) gave misleading accounts would be surprising if true.
Kat, if youâre reading thisâI 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/âAlice/âChloe in order to make them sound less reasonable. (Edit: or rather, to make their positions easier to refute. And letâs keep in mind that Ben did a âsearch for negative informationâ and did not build a âbalanced caseâ.)
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 Benâs judgement and âmanyâ anonymous sources. Plus, I agree with Ben that the policy âI donât say bad things about you, you donât say bad things about meâ is not a good policy; âI speak charitably of you, you speak charitably of meâ 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 youâre so convinced of your own innocence that you canât see that the red flags that were discussed were actually red....
Kat reworded every claim made by Alice/âChloe/âBen, so I checked a few more:
Kat says âAlice/âChloe claimed Nonlinear failed to pay them. Later, they denied ever claiming this.â Now Iâm really confused, like, did Ben publish more than one article? The one I read didnât make it sound like that. It did indicate that Alice may have communicated poorly or deceptively (âcatastrophic miscommunicationsâ, Kat reportedly said), but I canât find any claim from Chloe about not being paid.
Kat said âChloe claimed: they told me not to spend time with my romantic partnerâ. It does seem a bit odd that Benâs article doesnât mention Chloeâs romantic partner being there for two months, since it does say âAlice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with âlow value peopleâ, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/âvisitors that Nonlinear invited.â But since this part is a combination of what Alice and Chloe said, itâs not strictly accurate to say âChloe claimed she was advised not to spend time with her romantic partnerâ, or to say âtoldâ (which sounds like an order) rather than âadvisedâ.
Kat said that Chloe said âI felt like they didnât value me or my timeâ. I canât find any statement to that effect in Benâs article or Chloeâs big comment, but it did remind me of something: âAlice 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.â Katâs response was basically that Nonlinear was generous and that âKat showed so much gratitude that Chloe actually asked her to stop expressing gratitudeâ. But after what Alice said, I feel like Kat may have missed the point of whatever the paraphrase âthey didnât value meâ was intended to refer to.
Kat said that Alice said that âKat threatened my career for telling the truthâ. There is a similar clause in Benâs article, but it comes across differently: âKat Woodsâ texts that read to me [Ben] as a veiled threat to destroy someoneâs career for sharing negative information about her.â
Kat refers to âBenâs hypothesis â 2 EAs are Secretly Evilâ. I donât think thatâs accurate (edit: but Kat likely does see it this way.)
My read on this is that a lot of the things in Benâs 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 Katâs post seems to show. Like⊠I donât really think any of the financial points made in the first one hold up, and without those, whatâs 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 âhold upâ I meant in the emotional takeaway of âNL was abusive,â to be clear, not on the factual âthese bank account numbers changed in these ways.â 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 itâs just a shitty job offer despite the apparent perks? Maybe it is for many people. That doesnât mean adults shouldnât be trusted to understand what theyâre getting into and use their agency to pull the plug. Regrets after the fact are not the same as manipulation or deception on NLâs part.
And this would still be fine if Benâs post just said âThere are EA orgs making job offers that I think put their employees in vulnerable positions, so people should be more careful about accepting them.â 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 theyâve reconsidered after the experiences they had).
But what it said was âThese people are predators who chew up and spit out bright eyed altruists.â 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 wasnât claimed directly in Benâs post to be the result of deception. Because if itâs 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 Benâs 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 Benâs shoulders; even if Benâs 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 âmanipulated,â 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 Benâs hypothesis that â2 EAs are Secretly Evilâ is a pretty good summation of his postâs takeaways, given the assertions he made at the end.
I feel like this response ignores my central points â my sense that Kat misrepresented/âstrawmanned the positions of Chloe/âAlice/âBen and overall didnât 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 âclash of personalitiesâ rather than âabuseâ. 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 âpart of the familyâ. But to judge properly, I think Iâd have to hear what other remote/âformer employees think about NL.
what it said was âThese people are predators who chew up and spit out bright eyed altruists.â
I think there should be a norm against treating paraphrases as quotes. What it said was âI 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 doesnât have reliable defenses against such predators.â
I feel like this response ignores my central points â my sense that Kat misrepresented/âstrawmanned the positions of Chloe/âAlice/âBen and overall didnât 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 theyâre asserting is not supported by whatever evidence they can actually present.
For goodness sake, one of your points is in the distinction between âtoldâ and âadvised.â What, exactly, do you expect NL to say to clarify that distinction thatâs more important than the rebuttal of pointing out they invited the boyfriend to travel with them for 2 months? âNo, we didnât say that, nor did we advise it?â Thereâs no evidence they did say it or âadviseâ 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 âtechnically true but ultimately misleadingâ things, along with some strictly false accusations by Alice/âChloe. Iâm 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 thereâs some meaningful nuance my quote missed, Iâd ask you to explain why.
What, exactly, do you expect NL to say to clarify that distinction
I expect them to say âadvisedâ. This isnât Twitter, and even on Twitter I myself use direct quotes as much as possible despite the increased length, for accuracyâs sake. Much of this situation was â(s)he said /â she saidâ 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 involvedâbut in the beginning Kat and Ben had good reputations while (after Benâs 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 2â3 of my total grade and had 10 questions. 9 were about material that wasnât 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 couldnât just fail everyone, so they graded people based on that one question and a few quizzes.
Thatâs kind of like this. When much of the story is invisible to us, we judge based on whatâs visible. How can we do otherwise? So Kat couldâve 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 couldâve conveyed a strong sense of kindness. The fact that she didnât do these things reads as her ârealâ personality showing. âA leopard canât change its spots.â
but boy am I confused by your issue with my summarizing that paragraph with that quote
Sorry, itâs just that in the past Iâve talked to lots of climate dismissives and Iâve 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 âretaliatory and unkind,â my main takeaway from the post was something like âpassive-aggressive benefit of the doubtâ 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 Benâs 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 itâs like to be in the position NL has been put in. Iâm not saying itâs a perfect post, but the degree of tone policing in the face of claims like âthey starved meâ is kind of bizarre to me.
Sorry, itâs just that in the past Iâve talked to lots of climate dismissives and Iâve 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 thereâs no way for them to refute by simple âno we didnât.â
While I agree that these are both helpful, I would have been most excited to see a clear separation between careful direct refutations (âhere are several clear examples where Benâs post contained demonstrably false claimsâ) and fuzzier context (âhere is an explanation why this specific claim from Benâs post, while arguably literally true, is pretty misleadingâ).
Which is very different from the situation Katâs post seems to show. Like⊠I donât really think any of the financial points made in the first one hold up, and without those, whatâs 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 Benâs 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 âŹ1000 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 âŹ700 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 ~âŹ2900 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 wouldnât 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/âreimbursements 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 donât 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 âsalaryâ or âreimbursementâ 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 Aliceâs 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 thereâs disagreement about whether this was in the range of $600/âmonth (your estimate) or $3k/âmonth (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 donât 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 shouldnât be included in claims against NL.
Another debunked financial claim: Benâs original post has:
Chloeâs salary was verbally agreed to come out to around $75k/âyear. However, she was only paid $1k/âmonth, and otherwise had many basic things compensated i.e. rent, groceries, travel.
An employment agreement stating $1k/âmonth + expenses
NL texting Chloe before she started that the stipend was $1k/âmonth and Chloe confirming
A transcript of the employment interview where NL told Chloe it was a $1k/âmonth stipend + expenses, which they thought was about as valuable as a $70k/âyear salary.
I think in as much as the reimbursement claim is true, I agree with you that presenting it as âsalaryâ 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 Katâs 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 didnât include mention of Aliceâs 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 didnât 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. Thereâs also a clear motive. When sheâs talking to you, sheâs trying to seem maximally like a helpless victim, because otherwise she wouldnât 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.
Thereâs also a clear motive. When sheâs talking to you, sheâs trying to seem maximally like a helpless victim, because otherwise she wouldnât 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 itâs quite plausible she exaggerated how much money her business was making. I think thatâs bad, but also isnât something particularly terrible (Iâve seen many people do it over the years, and I think itâs pretty bad, but sadly also not uncommon). I also think itâs 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 donât 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 Iâm misremembering, thereâs 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 doesnât look great for Alice here, by my lights.
By âhold upâ I meant in the emotional takeaway of âNL was abusive,â to be clear, not on the factual âthese bank account numbers changed in these ways.â 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 âBen seems like he was led to believe a particular narrative by selective information and the usual emotional spin of only hearing one side.â Not âBen got specific facts wrong.â
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. Thereâs 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/âAI safety. Also, if I am not mistaken, Emerson funds a lot of Nonlinear himself.
I donât 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, thereâs no point downvoting the truth.
If anyone can provide evidence that this hot tub money was used for good purposes Iâd love to see it. Otherwise donât be dishonest and donât downvote.
I down voted because it isnât 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 donât think restarting that argument here is productive.
I closely read the whole post and considered it carefully. Iâm struggling to sum up my reaction to this 15,000-word piece in way thatâs 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 donât 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 âlynchingâ (also offensive) and âwitch-burningâ.
Conflation between being depressed and being delusional.
Glib dismissal of other peopleâs feelings and experiences.
The ridiculous use of âphotographic evidenceâ, which feels manipulative and/âor delusional to me.
Seeming to have generally benighted views on trauma, abuse, power dynamics, boundaries, mental health, âvictimhoodâ, resilience, narcissism, DARVO, what status means for accusations of bad behaviour, culture wars, sexism/âmisogyny, 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/âvillains or angels/âdemons 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 âthe worldâs problemsâ.
Arguing that Benâs 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 peopleâs concern about Nonlinear as an overreaction to FTX/âAlameda 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 [have some serious skepticism about the bookâs thesis]. Itâs not that he doesnât have a point⊠But, anyway, thatâs a topic for another post. (Note: on July 26, 2025 at 01:16 UTC, I edited the part of this footnote in [square brackets] because I regretted how harsh my original wording was. I strive to be kind to people even when I disagree, and I think in this case I fell short of that goal. I apologize for my original wording and I also apologize for taking so long to finally change it.)
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, thereâs 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 wouldâve greatly appreciated if someone reached out to me via PM and said âyo, are you doing OK?â But it has never occurred to me to do this when observing someone else getting dogpiledâI just think to myself âhm, seems like a pretty clear case of unfair dogpilingâ and close the tab.
In any case, Iâve found getting dogpiled myself to be surprisingly stressful, relative to the experience of observing itâand 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.)
Itâs very easy say in the abstract: âIf I was getting dogpiled, I would just focus on the facts. I would be very self-aware and sensitive, I wouldnât dismiss anyone, I wouldnât say anything bad about my accusers (even if I had serious negative information about them), I wouldnât remind people about scout mindset or anything like that.â 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. Itâs not something most of us have practice with. And I hesitate to draw strong inferences about someoneâs character from their behavior in this situation.
[Note: Iâm using the term âdogpiledâ because unlike terms like âcancelledâ, âcalled outâ, âscapegoatedâ, âbrought to justiceâ, âmobbedâ, âharassedâ, etc. it doesnât have any valence WRT whether the person/âgroup is guilty or innocent, and my point is orthogonal to that.]
I agree with the points made in this comment. Itâs 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 âcancelledâ as being worse than her experience of being kidnapped.
That said, I donât know how well they address the original comment theyâre replying to. The post weâre 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 itâs possible to overcome oneâs 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 haveâfor 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 Katâs 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 âloss of equanimityâ.
To add on to this vibe of âgetting dogpiled is an unusually stressful experience that is probably hard to imagine accuratelyâ, I feel a bit strange to be reading so many âreasonedâ comments about how specific improvements in replies/âwordings could have been decisively accurate/âevident, as though anything less seems like a negative sign.
I relate to that logically as an observer, but at the same time I donât 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/âenergy, let alone the fact that weâre human beings and itâs more than okay to produce incomplete/âflawed 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? Itâs insanely hard to communicate all the right information in one go, and thatâs why we have conversations. Though this broader discussion of âwhatâs the real storyâ isnât one that I consider myself entitled to, nor do I think we should all be entitled to it just because weâre 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 canât just dogpile them. Itâs 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, isnât 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 canât 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 arenât 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/âEmerson seems to be on display here. (* Edit: I mean, Kat couldâve done worse, but it wouldnât help her/âNonlinear.)
I also feel like Kat is misrepresenting Benâs article? For example, Kat says
I just read that article and donât remember any statement to that affect, and searching for individual words in this sentence didnât lead me to a similar sentence in Benâs article on in Chloeâs 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 shouldnât treat it dollar-for-dollar like normal compensation.
More importantly I feel like thereâs misdirection. Chloeâs claim was that a verbal agreement existed and wasnât fully upheld; Kat rewrites this into a different claim, then labels it âFalse.â
No, you donât get to do this. When your reputation is on the line and youâre being scrutinized, I expect you to be on your best behavior.
Benâs article draws a sharp distinction between the reputations of Alice and Chloe, but Katâs article lumps them together as âAlice/âChloeâ 27 times (tbf, Ben also groups them about 19 times, but Katâs lumping seems less appropriate to me, on average)
Kat says there were 21 Nonlinear employees but Ben refers to âtheir two in-person employeesâ 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, Katâs implication that they both lied or (in Chloeâs case) gave misleading accounts would be surprising if true.
Kat, if youâre reading thisâI 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/âAlice/âChloe in order to make them sound less reasonable. (Edit: or rather, to make their positions easier to refute. And letâs keep in mind that Ben did a âsearch for negative informationâ and did not build a âbalanced caseâ.)
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 Benâs judgement and âmanyâ anonymous sources. Plus, I agree with Ben that the policy âI donât say bad things about you, you donât say bad things about meâ is not a good policy; âI speak charitably of you, you speak charitably of meâ 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 youâre so convinced of your own innocence that you canât see that the red flags that were discussed were actually red....
Kat reworded every claim made by Alice/âChloe/âBen, so I checked a few more:
Kat says âAlice/âChloe claimed Nonlinear failed to pay them. Later, they denied ever claiming this.â Now Iâm really confused, like, did Ben publish more than one article? The one I read didnât make it sound like that. It did indicate that Alice may have communicated poorly or deceptively (âcatastrophic miscommunicationsâ, Kat reportedly said), but I canât find any claim from Chloe about not being paid.
Kat said âChloe claimed: they told me not to spend time with my romantic partnerâ. It does seem a bit odd that Benâs article doesnât mention Chloeâs romantic partner being there for two months, since it does say âAlice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with âlow value peopleâ, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/âvisitors that Nonlinear invited.â But since this part is a combination of what Alice and Chloe said, itâs not strictly accurate to say âChloe claimed she was advised not to spend time with her romantic partnerâ, or to say âtoldâ (which sounds like an order) rather than âadvisedâ.
Kat said that Chloe said âI felt like they didnât value me or my timeâ. I canât find any statement to that effect in Benâs article or Chloeâs big comment, but it did remind me of something: âAlice 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.â Katâs response was basically that Nonlinear was generous and that âKat showed so much gratitude that Chloe actually asked her to stop expressing gratitudeâ. But after what Alice said, I feel like Kat may have missed the point of whatever the paraphrase âthey didnât value meâ was intended to refer to.
Kat said that Alice said that âKat threatened my career for telling the truthâ. There is a similar clause in Benâs article, but it comes across differently: âKat Woodsâ texts that read to me [Ben] as a veiled threat to destroy someoneâs career for sharing negative information about her.â
Kat refers to âBenâs hypothesis â 2 EAs are Secretly Evilâ. I donât think thatâs accurate (edit: but Kat likely does see it this way.)
My read on this is that a lot of the things in Benâs 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 Katâs post seems to show. Like⊠I donât really think any of the financial points made in the first one hold up, and without those, whatâs 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 âhold upâ I meant in the emotional takeaway of âNL was abusive,â to be clear, not on the factual âthese bank account numbers changed in these ways.â 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 itâs just a shitty job offer despite the apparent perks? Maybe it is for many people. That doesnât mean adults shouldnât be trusted to understand what theyâre getting into and use their agency to pull the plug. Regrets after the fact are not the same as manipulation or deception on NLâs part.
And this would still be fine if Benâs post just said âThere are EA orgs making job offers that I think put their employees in vulnerable positions, so people should be more careful about accepting them.â 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 theyâve reconsidered after the experiences they had).
But what it said was âThese people are predators who chew up and spit out bright eyed altruists.â 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 wasnât claimed directly in Benâs post to be the result of deception. Because if itâs 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 Benâs 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 Benâs shoulders; even if Benâs 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 âmanipulated,â 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 Benâs hypothesis that â2 EAs are Secretly Evilâ is a pretty good summation of his postâs takeaways, given the assertions he made at the end.
I feel like this response ignores my central points â my sense that Kat misrepresented/âstrawmanned the positions of Chloe/âAlice/âBen and overall didnât 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 âclash of personalitiesâ rather than âabuseâ. 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 âpart of the familyâ. But to judge properly, I think Iâd have to hear what other remote/âformer employees think about NL.
I think there should be a norm against treating paraphrases as quotes. What it said was âI 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 doesnât have reliable defenses against such predators.â
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 theyâre asserting is not supported by whatever evidence they can actually present.
For goodness sake, one of your points is in the distinction between âtoldâ and âadvised.â What, exactly, do you expect NL to say to clarify that distinction thatâs more important than the rebuttal of pointing out they invited the boyfriend to travel with them for 2 months? âNo, we didnât say that, nor did we advise it?â Thereâs no evidence they did say it or âadviseâ 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 âtechnically true but ultimately misleadingâ things, along with some strictly false accusations by Alice/âChloe. Iâm 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 thereâs some meaningful nuance my quote missed, Iâd ask you to explain why.
I expect them to say âadvisedâ. This isnât Twitter, and even on Twitter I myself use direct quotes as much as possible despite the increased length, for accuracyâs sake. Much of this situation was â(s)he said /â she saidâ 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 involvedâbut in the beginning Kat and Ben had good reputations while (after Benâs 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 2â3 of my total grade and had 10 questions. 9 were about material that wasnât 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 couldnât just fail everyone, so they graded people based on that one question and a few quizzes.
Thatâs kind of like this. When much of the story is invisible to us, we judge based on whatâs visible. How can we do otherwise? So Kat couldâve 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 couldâve conveyed a strong sense of kindness. The fact that she didnât do these things reads as her ârealâ personality showing. âA leopard canât change its spots.â
Sorry, itâs just that in the past Iâve talked to lots of climate dismissives and Iâve 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 âretaliatory and unkind,â my main takeaway from the post was something like âpassive-aggressive benefit of the doubtâ 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 Benâs 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 itâs like to be in the position NL has been put in. Iâm not saying itâs a perfect post, but the degree of tone policing in the face of claims like âthey starved meâ 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 (âhere are several clear examples where Benâs post contained demonstrably false claimsâ) and fuzzier context (âhere is an explanation why this specific claim from Benâs post, while arguably literally true, is pretty misleadingâ).
(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 Benâs 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/âreimbursements 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 donât 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 âsalaryâ or âreimbursementâ 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 Aliceâs 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 thereâs disagreement about whether this was in the range of $600/âmonth (your estimate) or $3k/âmonth (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 donât 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 shouldnât be included in claims against NL.
Another debunked financial claim: Benâs original post has:
Nonlinear provided screenshots of:
An employment agreement stating $1k/âmonth + expenses
NL texting Chloe before she started that the stipend was $1k/âmonth and Chloe confirming
A transcript of the employment interview where NL told Chloe it was a $1k/âmonth stipend + expenses, which they thought was about as valuable as a $70k/âyear salary.
Thank you!
I think in as much as the reimbursement claim is true, I agree with you that presenting it as âsalaryâ 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 Katâs 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 didnât include mention of Aliceâs 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 didnât 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. Thereâs also a clear motive. When sheâs talking to you, sheâs trying to seem maximally like a helpless victim, because otherwise she wouldnât 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 itâs quite plausible she exaggerated how much money her business was making. I think thatâs bad, but also isnât something particularly terrible (Iâve seen many people do it over the years, and I think itâs pretty bad, but sadly also not uncommon). I also think itâs 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 donât 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 Iâm misremembering, thereâs 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 doesnât look great for Alice here, by my lights.
Edited above comment to clarify:
By âhold upâ I meant in the emotional takeaway of âNL was abusive,â to be clear, not on the factual âthese bank account numbers changed in these ways.â 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 âBen seems like he was led to believe a particular narrative by selective information and the usual emotional spin of only hearing one side.â Not âBen got specific facts wrong.â
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. Thereâs 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/âAI safety. Also, if I am not mistaken, Emerson funds a lot of Nonlinear himself.
I donât 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, thereâs no point downvoting the truth.
If anyone can provide evidence that this hot tub money was used for good purposes Iâd love to see it. Otherwise donât be dishonest and donât downvote.
I down voted because it isnât 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 donât think restarting that argument here is productive.
Thanks for providing context here, similar to Vaipan, I wasnât sure why people were disagree/âdownvoting me.