I’m well aware of the difficulties of balancing competing stakeholders giving you feedback late on posts and trying to hit publication timing targets. I think you had several valid options:
Never make commitments about publication date and time in the first place.
Make commitments, but be clear they are provisional. When you receive this information, email your sources saying “hey guys, really sorry but we just received some last-minute info that we need to update on. We’ll circle back to coordinate a new launch date that works for you.”
Give Spencer a reasonable deadline to respond, committing to take into account feedback received before this deadline.
Delete that section and publish on the original schedule.
Edit the section and publish on the original schedule.
Edit the section and publish on the original schedule.
I mean, to be clear, we did this the first time Nonlinear disputed the relevant section.
Alice quit being vegan while working there. She was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days. Alice eventually gave in and ate non-vegan food in the house. She also said that the Nonlinear cofounders marked her quitting veganism as a ‘win’, as they thad been arguing that she should not be vegan.
(Nonlinear disputes this, and says that they did go out and buy her some vegan burgers food and had some vegan food in the house. They agree that she quit being vegan at this time, and say it was because being vegan was unusually hard due to being in Puerto Rico. Alice disputes that she received any vegan burgers.)
I think this section is really quite clear. We have one report from Alice saying that she quit being vegan. We directly include, in the next paragraph, the fact that Nonlinear disputes this. I really don’t think we misled anyone. The screenshots sent did not actually materially change anything in the paragraphs above, indeed both of the paragraphs are still fully accurate (and in as much as Alice claimed that she did not get food while indeed getting food, that is IMO an important part of the story that seems important for other people to be able to cross-check).
I think the choice of “you have some sources, you cite the sources while being really quite clear that you don’t fully trust your sources, and when a thing gets directly disputed by another source you say that directly” is a reasonable thing to do. Again, as I’ve said an enormous number of times, we never had an intention of fully litigating all of these claims before publication, which would have been completely infeasible time-wise.
The alternative to Ben’s post would have probably been a series of fully anonymous posts with extremely vague high-level accusations that would have been extremely hard to respond to. We tried to make the claims concrete and provide an interface to aggregate information at all.
Like, what kind of edit would you have preferred us to do instead of the above?
I think this section is really quite clear. We have one report from Alice saying that she quit being vegan. We directly include, in the next paragraph, the fact that Nonlinear disputes this. I really don’t think we misled anyone.
I strongly disagree. Alice’s and Nonlinear’s perspectives are portrayed with very different implicit levels of confidence in those paragraphs. Alice’s perspective is stated as a fact—“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food,” not “Alice says nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food.” In contrast, Nonlinear’s perspective is shared as “[Nonlinear] says [x].”
I think most readers who trust Ben to be truthful would assume, from the way those paragraphs were worded, that Alice had much better evidence to support her claims, and that Nonlinear was doing some slightly deceitful reputational management by countering them. But that isn’t what turned out to be the case:
Nonlinear has evidence that on December 15, they had oatmeal, peanuts, almonds, prunes, tomatoes, cereal, an orange, mixed nuts, and quinoa (which Kat offered to cook) in the house.
At some point, Emerson went out and tried to purchase Alice more food despite his knee injury, but he couldn’t find the very specific items she requested.
Then, on December 18, it looks like Alice’s first non-vegan meal was a vegetarian pizza she ordered (rather than non-vegan food already in the house). It looks like she ordered it right after Kat reminded her that they already had vegan noodles in the fridge.
On top of all of this, apparently everybody in the house was either sick or injured, but Ben’s post only mentions that Alice was sick.
It seems that Alice/Ben have no evidence to counter any of the points above.
So the original claim that was stated as fact (“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food”) seems very wrong. Which is sad, because it’s a very serious accusation that most people would assume was not made lightly.
Yeah, sorry, I think I was too strong in my language above, though my sense is you are also interpreting my answer to be about a somewhat different question than the one I perceived Larks as asking. To clarify where I think we are on the same page: I am pretty unhappy about that section, and wouldn’t ask Ben to write something different given what I believe today.
The thing I was responding to was whether we misrepresented the evidence that we did have at the time.
On that topic, I do think it was a mistake to omit as many of the “Alice/Chloe claims that X” in the post as we did, and fall back into a neutral third-party way of summarizing the claims, and given that we did, I think it makes sense to hold Ben and Lightcone more responsible for the veracity of statements that did not include an explicit “Alice/Chloe alleges X”.
I also think that there is a pretty reasonable case to be made that we should have waited longer on getting more evidence from Nonlinear. I felt conflicted on this topic then, and feel conflicted now. I really hate that the situation we were in made it quite hard for us to wait longer for Nonlinear to respond to us. I am still not fully sure whether I would wait if I was in this situation again, since the considerations against waiting were also quite strong, though overall I am leaning slightly that waiting would have been the better option (I do not think this forgives or excuses Nonlinear’s attempts at intimidation and threats of retaliation).
However, overall on the question of “did we accurately summarize the evidence available to us”, I think Ben’s post and this section is doing pretty well.
I agree that we frame Alice and Chloe’s evidence as more trustworthy, and in-aggregate, across the whole post, I stand behind that framing, in that I think Alice and Chloe are substantially more reliable sources of evidence than Kat and Emerson. I agree that in this situation I think this went the wrong way around and it looks to me like the vegan food situation seems like it was represented to us in a substantially misleading way, and I am still hoping for me or Ben to follow up with Alice on this topic and figure out whether I am missing something. However, I think on-average the framing of the post was not misleading about the balance of evidence that we had received to that point (including accounting for expected future evidence Nonlinear that we expected Nonlinear might provide).
Some smaller nitpicks on your comment:
In contrast, Nonlinear’s perspective is shared as “[Nonlinear] says [x].”
It’s true that we don’t share Nonlinear’s perspective with the same authority as Alice and Chloe’s. We did also include a summary directly written from their perspective, which I do think helps:
This seems also straightforwardly inaccurate, we brought her potatoes, vegan burgers, and had vegan food in the house. We had been advising her to 80⁄20 being a vegan and this probably also weighed on her decision.
Another quick comment:
It seems that Alice/Ben have no evidence to counter any of the points above.
I would give people some time before concluding that. While Ben (and I) are trying really hard to not be dragged into a full-on follow-up investigation of this, I do expect there will be some kind of response to this which includes procuring more evidence. I personally do feel pretty convinced on this point, but I am not updating on Alice or Ben not providing more evidence in coming to that conclusion, since they haven’t responded to anything so far, and I do know that many of the claims in the OP and associated appendix are inaccurate, and those also haven’t been responded to yet (it includes many claims about what Ben believes or what the process of writing Ben’s original post was like, which I am very confident are inaccurate).
I am substantially less confident in that claim, though yeah, I would still overall say I believe it (it’s not super well-operationalized so not super clear what a probability would mean, but like, I guess I am at ~80% that if I knew all the facts and had arbitrary insight into Alice’s, Kat’s and Emersons’ life that I would overall expect Alice to be reporting more accurately than Kat and Emerson)
I’m not sure if Spencer sent you all the screenshots or just some of them, but something along the lines of:
Alice quit being vegan while working there. She was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, who she alleges refused to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days. Alice eventually gave in and ate non-vegan food in the house. She also said that the Nonlinear cofounders marked her quitting veganism as a ‘win’, as they thad been arguing that she should not be vegan.
(Nonlinear disputes this, and sent dated screenshots suggesting and says that they did go out and buy her some vegan burgers food and had some vegan food in the house that they cooked for her. They agree that she quit being vegan at this time, and say it was because being vegan was unusually hard due to being in Puerto Rico. Alice disputes that she received any vegan burgers; we did not ask her to comment on the screenshots.)
Importantly the screenshot only covered events on December 15th.
Here is the relevant screenshot:
Kelsey Piper in the thread summarizes these screenshots (together with some other screenshots that Kat shared) as follows:
On December 15, Alice states that she’d had very little to eat all day, that she’d repeatedly tried and failed to find a way to order takeout to their location, and tries to ask that people go to Burger King and get her an Impossible Burger which in the linked screenshots they decline to do because they don’t want to get fast food. She asks again about Burger King and is told it’s inconvenient to get there. Instead, they go to a different restaurant and offer to get her something from the restaurant they went to. Alice looks at the menu online and sees that there are no vegan options. Drew confirms that ‘they have some salads’ but nothing else for her. She assures him that it’s fine to not get her anything.
It seems completely reasonable that Alice remembers this as ‘she was barely eating, and no one in the house was willing to go out and get her nonvegan foods’ - after all, the end result of all of those message exchanges was no food being obtained for Alice and her requests for Burger King being repeatedly deflected with ‘we are down to get anything that isn’t fast food’ and ‘we are down to go anywhere within a 12 min drive’ and ‘our only criteria is decent vibe + not fast food’, after which she fails to find a restaurant meeting those (I note, kind of restrictive if not in a highly dense area) criteria and they go somewhere without vegan options and don’t get her anything to eat.
It also seems totally reasonable that no one at Nonlinear understood there was a problem. Alice’s language throughout emphasizes how she’ll be fine, it’s no big deal, she’s so grateful that they tried (even though they failed and she didn’t get any food out of the 12⁄15 trip, if I understand correctly). I do not think that these exchanges depict the people at Nonlinear as being cruel, insane, or unusual as people. But it doesn’t seem to me that Alice is lying to have experienced this as ‘she had covid, was barely eating, told people she was barely eating, and they declined to pick up Burger King for her because they didn’t want to go to a fast food restaurant, and instead gave her very limiting criteria and went somewhere that didn’t have any options she could eat’.
My guess is this aligned with Ben’s interpretation at the time. The screenshots were relevant evidence, but they did not directly disprove anything in the original article.
Kat then shared further screenshots in the comments, which importantly were not shared with Ben beforehand(unless Spencer failed to forward them to me in my DM with him yesterday), that demonstrated that on the next day Kat did successfully bring her food.
However, the story, in the above screenshot, on December 15th, is that indeed Alice did not get food, despite her requesting it. The screenshots that Spencer sent us appear to fail to include the most relevant part of the conversation, which is that they did indeed fail to get her vegan food that day during that trip.
(Edit: Kat disputes this below, sharing some additional screenshots that seem to show that Kat did get food for Alice later that day, which seems important to get right. Though I don’t think Spencer’s screenshot demonstrated this).
Here are the edits I currently agree would have been better, though I think they are minor enough that I don’t currently see it as a major error to not have included them:
Nonlinear disputes this, and sent dated screenshotsthat document part of the relevant conversation. In those screenshots we can see that on December 15th Alice did indeed request vegan food from multiple restaurants, but her and Drew ran into difficulties finding vegan food that was available in the area, and it seems like Nonlinear ultimate did indeed decline to stop by a different restaurant for Alice to get her vegan food, though the details are not fully clear. They agree that she quit being vegan at this time, and say it was because being vegan was unusually hard due to being in Puerto Rico. Alice disputes that she received any vegan burgers; we did not ask her to comment on the screenshots.)
I really encourage you to look at the screenshots, Kelsey’s summary, and Kat’s original comment on the Nonlinear post and explain to me how these screenshots falsify part of the post. As we later received more screenshots, it seems like we actually received confirmation that the conversation on that date did indeed not result in Alice getting food.
(Edit: Kat shares some additional screenshots below that do seem to show Alice got food on the 15th, though not from the restaurant trip that was talked about in the screenshot Spencer sent us)
I’m a little bit confused about Kelsey’s summary—it contains a line about rejecting burgers because they were ‘fast food’ that doesn’t seem to be in the original. So I don’t think it can reflect Ben’s state of mind in that way.
If you only had the one screenshot (9:53 to 10:28 timestamps), I agree that you can’t infer that Kat cooked for ‘Alice’, nor is there proof that the discussed burger trip actually took place, though I think they strongly imply it will—certainly Alice seems to think it has been agreed and will occur. However, I find your comment about 15th vs 16th unconvincing because ‘Alice’ explicitly claims a 2 day duration, so food the next day would also contradict this (assuming the 15th is the first day).
Here is another possible version that reflects just the one screenshot:
Alice quit being vegan while working there. She was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, who she alleges refused to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days. Alice eventually gave in and ate non-vegan food in the house. She also said that the Nonlinear cofounders marked her quitting veganism as a ‘win’, as they thad been arguing that she should not be vegan.
(Nonlinear disputes this, and sent dated screenshots showing a conversation Kat had with ‘Alice’ about two different restaurants they could go to, as well as the vegan food they had in the house, which seems to end with an agreement to go to get (vegan) burgers. They further claim (though the screenshots do not prove this) and says that they did go out and buy her some vegan burgers food and had some vegan food in the house. They agree that she quit being vegan at this time, and say it was because being vegan was unusually hard due to being in Puerto Rico. Alice disputes that she received any vegan burgers; we did not ask her to comment on the screenshots.)
I think my key objections to the original version is asserts as fact that Nonlinear refused to get her food, vs this being an unverified claim, and that it does not reflect that NonLinear didn’t merely dispute it, they offered evidence.
If you only had the one screenshot (9:53 to 10:28 timestamps), I agree that you can’t infer that Kat cooked for ‘Alice’, nor is there proof that the discussed burger trip actually took place, though I think they strongly imply it will
Just to be clear, that burger trip did indeed not happen that day, if I understand it correctly. What instead happened is that Kat went out a few hours later and got Alice mashed potatoes at a store (which is not really hinted at at all in the screenshots).
Yeah, I think this version is reasonable and I would have preferred to post this version (and somewhat think that we should have updated it ASAP, even after publication).
on December 15th, is that indeed Alice did not get food,
This is false. Alice got food on December 15th. She got food 2.5 hours after she asked. Actually, she never asked me, I just offered when it seemed like she was struggling.
It says December 16 at 12:14am because I was in Europe at the time, so it’s showing the European time zone. It was Dec 15 at 7:13pm in the local time when this occurred.
She brought up being hungry at 4:53pm. I immediately offered to cook her the food in the house. When she didn’t want any of the food in the house or food from any non-fast food restaurant within a 12 minute drive of home, I went out, while sick myself, and got and cooked her food. The only vegan food that fit her criteria in the store.
The only complaint she can legitimately say is that we did not get her Panda Express as fast as she would have liked (we got it for her the next day). She waited 2.5 hours for food. And she could have had it sooner if she’d wanted any of the food in the house, which she usually ate nearly daily and enjoyed. She just didn’t want that food. She wanted fast food and didn’t get it as fast as she preferred.
Thank you! This definitely seems like highly relevant evidence.
Can you clarify whether Kelsey’s summary of the December 15th conversation is accurate or inaccurate? It’s totally possible that I am misreading the screenshots, though my best interpretation was indeed the interpretation that Kelsey made in the screenshots.
I would be happy to correct the statement above if I am wrong here.
I do think this issue seems somewhat separate from the question of “did the screenshots that were shared with us materially affect the things Ben wrote?”.
To be clear, this is relevant in as much as the original screenshot was evidence of there being more things you could share here, though I currently maintain that I don’t think the screenshots that were shared with us showed any material error (given that Kelsey also walked away with the same impression of them being consistent).
I also totally care about just setting the record straight and getting the object-level issue right here, and in as much as there isn’t anything very weird going on with the screenshots you sent, I think you provided pretty decent proof here and am changing my mind on the December 15th issue (and think if you had shared those screenshots with us instead, I think it’s pretty likely Ben would have somehow made sure that they made it into the post).
Kelsey’s summary was wrong in a number of important ways.
She missed the fact that we did indeed succeed in getting her vegan food (I found at the nearby store, despite being sick myself). 2.5 hours after we first offered. And it would have been faster if she’d wanted any of the food in the house, or chosen a restaurant that had vegan options for Emerson and Drew to go to.
It doesn’t mention the vegan food that was in the house already that I offered to cook (Alice ate oatmeal almost every day and she loved quinoa. Later when I cooked some up for her, she loved it, like usual, cause quinoa is the Queen of All Foods).
It doesn’t mention that Drew said he would go to any restaurant within a 12 minute drive from our place and she just… didn’t choose a restaurant. She only wanted fast food. So they ended up choosing a restaurant that didn’t happen to have vegan options aside from the usual fries.
A quick look at Google Maps shows that there was over 20 restaurants that fit that criteria in the area. It wasn’t restrictive at all.
She frames it as they didn’t get her the food she wanted “because they [didn’t] want to get fast food.” It’s important to note that Emerson and Drew also are people whose preferences matter. Just because Alice is sick doesn’t mean everybody has to drop their own needs and preferences to get her the very particular food she wants.
She frames it as Emerson and Drew being somehow inconsiderate and shallow, when you could just as easily frame it as Alice not considering the needs or preferences of anybody but herself, expecting everybody to drop everything and go out of their way so she can get the very specific fast food she wants. Then, when she doesn’t get exactly what she wants as fast as she wants, she goes around telling lies about what happened to destroy a charity (e.g. nobody willing to get her food)
As for what Ben knew before publishing, if you look at that screenshot, you can see that:
Drew has offered to pick her up food (“Drew suggested he could otherwise pick up stuff”)
Me and Emerson offered to pick her up food (“Me and Emerson can do it if he can’t”)
I offered to cook her the food in the house (“Could make you some quinoa”)
Ben said in his post that “nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food”. This is absolutely false. Ben had seen this screenshot clearly showing that we were willing to go out and get her food.
Note that she didn’t even ask for food. I just offered because I could see she was in need (“want me to order food?”)
It also said “so she barely ate for 2 days”. It shows in the messages that there was vegan food in the house. So that was clearly not the reason she didn’t eat for days.
She had plenty of options but she wanted fast food in particular.
We got her her first choice of fast food the very next day (remember, she only started asking for food in the evening the previous day. It was also hard to get stuff for her. This was our first experience with covid and we were trying to figure out how to manage it, try to have it not spread, etc etc. It was quite a stressful and overwhelming time.).
Because she didn’t get a very particular fast food as fast as she wanted, she interpreted this as us being heartless people who wouldn’t take care of a sick person in need. She told Ben a false and misleading story about us not being willing to go out and get food for her.
As we later received more screenshots, it seems like we actually received definitive confirmation that the conversation on that date did indeed not result in Alice getting food.
I’m waiting for Ben, or someone else, to make a table of claims, counter claims, and what the evidence shows. Because nonlinear providing evidence that doesn’t support their claims seems to be a common occurance.
Just to give a new example, Kat screenshots herselfreplying “mediating! Appreciate people not talking to loud on the way back [...] ” here, to provide evidence supporting that there was not a substantial discussion that occurred. However, I can only interpret the use of “mediating!” to indicate that there was in-fact a substantial amount of discussion at play.
Edit: Retracted as correctly pointed out by @Sean_o_h , I read meditation as mediation.
I’m well aware of the difficulties of balancing competing stakeholders giving you feedback late on posts and trying to hit publication timing targets. I think you had several valid options:
Never make commitments about publication date and time in the first place.
Make commitments, but be clear they are provisional. When you receive this information, email your sources saying “hey guys, really sorry but we just received some last-minute info that we need to update on. We’ll circle back to coordinate a new launch date that works for you.”
Give Spencer a reasonable deadline to respond, committing to take into account feedback received before this deadline.
Delete that section and publish on the original schedule.
Edit the section and publish on the original schedule.
I mean, to be clear, we did this the first time Nonlinear disputed the relevant section.
I think this section is really quite clear. We have one report from Alice saying that she quit being vegan. We directly include, in the next paragraph, the fact that Nonlinear disputes this. I really don’t think we misled anyone. The screenshots sent did not actually materially change anything in the paragraphs above, indeed both of the paragraphs are still fully accurate (and in as much as Alice claimed that she did not get food while indeed getting food, that is IMO an important part of the story that seems important for other people to be able to cross-check).
I think the choice of “you have some sources, you cite the sources while being really quite clear that you don’t fully trust your sources, and when a thing gets directly disputed by another source you say that directly” is a reasonable thing to do. Again, as I’ve said an enormous number of times, we never had an intention of fully litigating all of these claims before publication, which would have been completely infeasible time-wise.
The alternative to Ben’s post would have probably been a series of fully anonymous posts with extremely vague high-level accusations that would have been extremely hard to respond to. We tried to make the claims concrete and provide an interface to aggregate information at all.
Like, what kind of edit would you have preferred us to do instead of the above?
I strongly disagree. Alice’s and Nonlinear’s perspectives are portrayed with very different implicit levels of confidence in those paragraphs. Alice’s perspective is stated as a fact—“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food,” not “Alice says nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food.” In contrast, Nonlinear’s perspective is shared as “[Nonlinear] says [x].”
I think most readers who trust Ben to be truthful would assume, from the way those paragraphs were worded, that Alice had much better evidence to support her claims, and that Nonlinear was doing some slightly deceitful reputational management by countering them. But that isn’t what turned out to be the case:
Nonlinear has evidence that on December 15, they had oatmeal, peanuts, almonds, prunes, tomatoes, cereal, an orange, mixed nuts, and quinoa (which Kat offered to cook) in the house.
On the same day, Kat had successfully purchased mashed potatoes for Alice.
On the next day, they apparently went out and purchased both Panda Express vegan noodles and vegan burgers for Alice.
At some point, Emerson went out and tried to purchase Alice more food despite his knee injury, but he couldn’t find the very specific items she requested.
Then, on December 18, it looks like Alice’s first non-vegan meal was a vegetarian pizza she ordered (rather than non-vegan food already in the house). It looks like she ordered it right after Kat reminded her that they already had vegan noodles in the fridge.
On top of all of this, apparently everybody in the house was either sick or injured, but Ben’s post only mentions that Alice was sick.
It seems that Alice/Ben have no evidence to counter any of the points above.
So the original claim that was stated as fact (“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food”) seems very wrong. Which is sad, because it’s a very serious accusation that most people would assume was not made lightly.
Yeah, sorry, I think I was too strong in my language above, though my sense is you are also interpreting my answer to be about a somewhat different question than the one I perceived Larks as asking. To clarify where I think we are on the same page: I am pretty unhappy about that section, and wouldn’t ask Ben to write something different given what I believe today.
The thing I was responding to was whether we misrepresented the evidence that we did have at the time.
On that topic, I do think it was a mistake to omit as many of the “Alice/Chloe claims that X” in the post as we did, and fall back into a neutral third-party way of summarizing the claims, and given that we did, I think it makes sense to hold Ben and Lightcone more responsible for the veracity of statements that did not include an explicit “Alice/Chloe alleges X”.
I also think that there is a pretty reasonable case to be made that we should have waited longer on getting more evidence from Nonlinear. I felt conflicted on this topic then, and feel conflicted now. I really hate that the situation we were in made it quite hard for us to wait longer for Nonlinear to respond to us. I am still not fully sure whether I would wait if I was in this situation again, since the considerations against waiting were also quite strong, though overall I am leaning slightly that waiting would have been the better option (I do not think this forgives or excuses Nonlinear’s attempts at intimidation and threats of retaliation).
However, overall on the question of “did we accurately summarize the evidence available to us”, I think Ben’s post and this section is doing pretty well.
I agree that we frame Alice and Chloe’s evidence as more trustworthy, and in-aggregate, across the whole post, I stand behind that framing, in that I think Alice and Chloe are substantially more reliable sources of evidence than Kat and Emerson. I agree that in this situation I think this went the wrong way around and it looks to me like the vegan food situation seems like it was represented to us in a substantially misleading way, and I am still hoping for me or Ben to follow up with Alice on this topic and figure out whether I am missing something. However, I think on-average the framing of the post was not misleading about the balance of evidence that we had received to that point (including accounting for expected future evidence Nonlinear that we expected Nonlinear might provide).
Some smaller nitpicks on your comment:
It’s true that we don’t share Nonlinear’s perspective with the same authority as Alice and Chloe’s. We did also include a summary directly written from their perspective, which I do think helps:
Another quick comment:
I would give people some time before concluding that. While Ben (and I) are trying really hard to not be dragged into a full-on follow-up investigation of this, I do expect there will be some kind of response to this which includes procuring more evidence. I personally do feel pretty convinced on this point, but I am not updating on Alice or Ben not providing more evidence in coming to that conclusion, since they haven’t responded to anything so far, and I do know that many of the claims in the OP and associated appendix are inaccurate, and those also haven’t been responded to yet (it includes many claims about what Ben believes or what the process of writing Ben’s original post was like, which I am very confident are inaccurate).
Given Chloe is not involved in this claim, do you also stand behind the framing that Alice is more reliable than Kat/Emerson?
I am substantially less confident in that claim, though yeah, I would still overall say I believe it (it’s not super well-operationalized so not super clear what a probability would mean, but like, I guess I am at ~80% that if I knew all the facts and had arbitrary insight into Alice’s, Kat’s and Emersons’ life that I would overall expect Alice to be reporting more accurately than Kat and Emerson)
I’m not sure if Spencer sent you all the screenshots or just some of them, but something along the lines of:
The screenshot Ben received at the time is one of the ones that Kat linked in this comment:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/32LMQsjEMm6NK2GTH/sharing-information-about-nonlinear?commentId=Ejbe8ukX6FhrfRv5C
Importantly the screenshot only covered events on December 15th.
Here is the relevant screenshot:
Kelsey Piper in the thread summarizes these screenshots (together with some other screenshots that Kat shared) as follows:
My guess is this aligned with Ben’s interpretation at the time. The screenshots were relevant evidence, but they did not directly disprove anything in the original article.
Kat then shared further screenshots in the comments, which importantly were not shared with Ben beforehand (unless Spencer failed to forward them to me in my DM with him yesterday), that demonstrated that on the next day Kat did successfully bring her food.
However, the story, in the above screenshot, on December 15th, is that indeed Alice did not get food, despite her requesting it. The screenshots that Spencer sent us appear to fail to include the most relevant part of the conversation, which is that they did indeed fail to get her vegan food
that dayduring that trip.(Edit: Kat disputes this below, sharing some additional screenshots that seem to show that Kat did get food for Alice later that day, which seems important to get right. Though I don’t think Spencer’s screenshot demonstrated this).
Here are the edits I currently agree would have been better, though I think they are minor enough that I don’t currently see it as a major error to not have included them:
I really encourage you to look at the screenshots, Kelsey’s summary, and Kat’s original comment on the Nonlinear post and explain to me how these screenshots falsify part of the post. As we later received more screenshots, it seems like we actually received confirmation that the conversation on that date did indeed not result in Alice getting food.
(Edit: Kat shares some additional screenshots below that do seem to show Alice got food on the 15th, though not from the restaurant trip that was talked about in the screenshot Spencer sent us)
I’m a little bit confused about Kelsey’s summary—it contains a line about rejecting burgers because they were ‘fast food’ that doesn’t seem to be in the original. So I don’t think it can reflect Ben’s state of mind in that way.
If you only had the one screenshot (9:53 to 10:28 timestamps), I agree that you can’t infer that Kat cooked for ‘Alice’, nor is there proof that the discussed burger trip actually took place, though I think they strongly imply it will—certainly Alice seems to think it has been agreed and will occur. However, I find your comment about 15th vs 16th unconvincing because ‘Alice’ explicitly claims a 2 day duration, so food the next day would also contradict this (assuming the 15th is the first day).
Here is another possible version that reflects just the one screenshot:
I think my key objections to the original version is asserts as fact that Nonlinear refused to get her food, vs this being an unverified claim, and that it does not reflect that NonLinear didn’t merely dispute it, they offered evidence.
Just to be clear, that burger trip did indeed not happen that day, if I understand it correctly. What instead happened is that Kat went out a few hours later and got Alice mashed potatoes at a store (which is not really hinted at at all in the screenshots).
Yeah, I think this version is reasonable and I would have preferred to post this version (and somewhat think that we should have updated it ASAP, even after publication).
This is false. Alice got food on December 15th. She got food 2.5 hours after she asked. Actually, she never asked me, I just offered when it seemed like she was struggling.
It says December 16 at 12:14am because I was in Europe at the time, so it’s showing the European time zone. It was Dec 15 at 7:13pm in the local time when this occurred.
She brought up being hungry at 4:53pm. I immediately offered to cook her the food in the house. When she didn’t want any of the food in the house or food from any non-fast food restaurant within a 12 minute drive of home, I went out, while sick myself, and got and cooked her food. The only vegan food that fit her criteria in the store.
The only complaint she can legitimately say is that we did not get her Panda Express as fast as she would have liked (we got it for her the next day). She waited 2.5 hours for food. And she could have had it sooner if she’d wanted any of the food in the house, which she usually ate nearly daily and enjoyed. She just didn’t want that food. She wanted fast food and didn’t get it as fast as she preferred.
I’m currently back on the same time zone, so here’s the same screenshot, but showing the right time zone dates and times
Thank you! This definitely seems like highly relevant evidence.
Can you clarify whether Kelsey’s summary of the December 15th conversation is accurate or inaccurate? It’s totally possible that I am misreading the screenshots, though my best interpretation was indeed the interpretation that Kelsey made in the screenshots.
I would be happy to correct the statement above if I am wrong here.
I do think this issue seems somewhat separate from the question of “did the screenshots that were shared with us materially affect the things Ben wrote?”.
To be clear, this is relevant in as much as the original screenshot was evidence of there being more things you could share here, though I currently maintain that I don’t think the screenshots that were shared with us showed any material error (given that Kelsey also walked away with the same impression of them being consistent).
I also totally care about just setting the record straight and getting the object-level issue right here, and in as much as there isn’t anything very weird going on with the screenshots you sent, I think you provided pretty decent proof here and am changing my mind on the December 15th issue (and think if you had shared those screenshots with us instead, I think it’s pretty likely Ben would have somehow made sure that they made it into the post).
Kelsey’s summary was wrong in a number of important ways.
She missed the fact that we did indeed succeed in getting her vegan food (I found at the nearby store, despite being sick myself). 2.5 hours after we first offered. And it would have been faster if she’d wanted any of the food in the house, or chosen a restaurant that had vegan options for Emerson and Drew to go to.
It doesn’t mention the vegan food that was in the house already that I offered to cook (Alice ate oatmeal almost every day and she loved quinoa. Later when I cooked some up for her, she loved it, like usual, cause quinoa is the Queen of All Foods).
It doesn’t mention that Drew said he would go to any restaurant within a 12 minute drive from our place and she just… didn’t choose a restaurant. She only wanted fast food. So they ended up choosing a restaurant that didn’t happen to have vegan options aside from the usual fries.
A quick look at Google Maps shows that there was over 20 restaurants that fit that criteria in the area. It wasn’t restrictive at all.
She frames it as they didn’t get her the food she wanted “because they [didn’t] want to get fast food.” It’s important to note that Emerson and Drew also are people whose preferences matter. Just because Alice is sick doesn’t mean everybody has to drop their own needs and preferences to get her the very particular food she wants.
She frames it as Emerson and Drew being somehow inconsiderate and shallow, when you could just as easily frame it as Alice not considering the needs or preferences of anybody but herself, expecting everybody to drop everything and go out of their way so she can get the very specific fast food she wants. Then, when she doesn’t get exactly what she wants as fast as she wants, she goes around telling lies about what happened to destroy a charity (e.g. nobody willing to get her food)
As for what Ben knew before publishing, if you look at that screenshot, you can see that:
Drew has offered to pick her up food (“Drew suggested he could otherwise pick up stuff”)
Me and Emerson offered to pick her up food (“Me and Emerson can do it if he can’t”)
I offered to cook her the food in the house (“Could make you some quinoa”)
Ben said in his post that “nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food”. This is absolutely false. Ben had seen this screenshot clearly showing that we were willing to go out and get her food.
Note that she didn’t even ask for food. I just offered because I could see she was in need (“want me to order food?”)
It also said “so she barely ate for 2 days”. It shows in the messages that there was vegan food in the house. So that was clearly not the reason she didn’t eat for days.
She had plenty of options but she wanted fast food in particular.
We got her her first choice of fast food the very next day (remember, she only started asking for food in the evening the previous day. It was also hard to get stuff for her. This was our first experience with covid and we were trying to figure out how to manage it, try to have it not spread, etc etc. It was quite a stressful and overwhelming time.).
Because she didn’t get a very particular fast food as fast as she wanted, she interpreted this as us being heartless people who wouldn’t take care of a sick person in need. She told Ben a false and misleading story about us not being willing to go out and get food for her.
I’m waiting for Ben, or someone else, to make a table of claims, counter claims, and what the evidence shows. Because nonlinear providing evidence that doesn’t support their claims seems to be a common occurance.
Just to give a new example,Kat screenshots herselfreplying “mediating! Appreciate people not talking to loud on the way back[...] ” here, to provide evidence supporting that there was not a substantial discussion that occurred. However, I can only interpret the use of “mediating!” to indicate that there was in-fact a substantial amount of discussion at play.Edit: Retracted as correctly pointed out by @Sean_o_h , I read meditation as mediation.
Uh, the word in that screenshot is “meditating”. She was asking people to not talk too loudly while she was meditating.
That is correct.
Oh thanks for flagging, I will retract it now