Out of curiosity, if, after reviewing the available evidence, it appears that Alice and Chloe indeed fabricated a number of accusations against Nonlinear and exhibited a pattern of behavior of doing similar things elsewhere, would you reverse the request to keep them anonymous?
If what Nonlinear is saying is true, then Alice and Chloe have the potential to be very destructive to others in the community.
I would strongly caution against doing so. Even if it turns out to be seemingly justified in this instance (and I offer no view either way whether it is or not), I cannot think of a more effective way of discouraging victims/whistleblowers from coming forward (in other cases in this community) in future situations.
I think norms should strongly push against taking seriously any public accusation made anonymously in most circumstances. I feel like we have taken a norm that was appropriate to a very limited set of circumstances and tried to make a grand moral principle out of it, and it doesn’t work. Giving some anonymity to victims of sexual assault/harassment, in some circumstances, makes sense because it’s a uniquely embarrassing thing to be a victim of due to our cultural taboos around sex. Anonymity might be appropriate for people revealing problems at their current employer. Or it might be appropriate in industries that are generally more amoral, for conduct I would expect most employers to want to commit—e.g. I would want people to be able to anonymously disclose that a doctor is biased in favor of prescribing drugs pushed by the pharma sales rep who buys him the fanciest lunches, because I think most doctors want to supplement their incomes by taking pharma bribes. But if people have legitimate fears about retaliation by unrelated employers within the EA ecosystem then we have lost the plot so thoroughly that we should probably burn the whole thing down.
If someone is going to make false accusations, the rest of us have a right to know that about their character and avoid dealing with them. A person making false accusations is in fact a predator; describing themself as a victim doesn’t change that. Mental illness doesn’t change that. I have a family member with mental health issues similar to what Kat has described of Alice. In my experience this person is a genuinely bad person, despite many professions of good intent. This person leaves a trail of wreckage in their wake wherever they go. I don’t introduce friends or significant others to them without a warning. It would be unfair to my friends/SOs to do otherwise. If I were in a position to warn their prospective employers, I would consider myself duty-bound to warn them as well.
If the accusations are true I don’t see how it possibly hurts their reputation to have their identities attached to them, except that it makes similarly abusive employers less likely to hire them. Which I wouldn’t exactly consider a negative if I were in their shoes.
I don’t know who Chloe is in real life (nor Alice for that matter), but based on what I’ve read, it seems really really off to me to say that she has the potential to be destructive to others in the community. [Edit: I guess you’re not outright saying that, but I’m reading your comment as “if all that Nonlinear are saying about Chloe is true, then...,” and my take on that is that apart from their statements of the sort of “Chloe is so mentally unhealthy that she makes things up” (paraphrased), none of the concrete claims are obviously red flags to me. It’s certainly not great to say things in misleading ways, but it can happen in the heat of battle. Also, I want to flag that we haven’t heard Chloe’s reply to Nonlinear’s presentation, so I don’t consider it established that she’s less reliable than, e.g., the typical person, or Nonlinear themselves. On the compensation dispute for instance, I can see interpretations where it made sense for Chloe to feel misled – see also the fact check exercise someone has done.]
I think something has gone wrong for someone to even bring up this point. (I can see where you’re coming from regarding Alice, if claims about her are correct.) I feel like we wouldn’t be entertaining that possibility if Nonlinear hadn’t lumped Chloe and Alice together and written their post in a unfairly-narrativizing style.
Update: 1h after posting this comment (and long after the edit I made above), this post currently sits at −5 karma and 9 voters. Will be interesting to see where it ends up. I continue to think that something has gone wrong.
Let’s assume Nonlinear are completely right about how they describe Chloe and Alice. I’d summarize their perspective as follows:
Alice-as-described-by-Nonlinear is likely to be destructive in other contexts as well because that is a strong pattern with her generally. :(
By contrast,
Chloe-as-described-by-Nonlinear is significantly less likely to be destructive in other contexts. While Nonlinear claim that Chloe is entitled, it’s still the case that her beef with them is largely around the tensions of living together (primes her to expect equal-ness and friendship) combined with her having to do tasks for them that make her feel like her time isn’t being valued. (Plus things around the vagueness of her role and her being repeatedly negatively surprised by things they expect of her or ways they treat her.)
Even if you take Nonlinear’s account at face value, it seems like you’d have a lot of uncertainty about the claim “Chloe is likely to be destructive in other contexts.”
Lastly, I again want to flag that I don’t consider it established that Chloe is entitled or unreliable. ((To some degree, the same caveats may also apply to claims about Alice, but I haven’t focused on that much because it seems like Nonlinear have a lot of anonymized evidence?, and it’s hard to argue with that..., plus even Ben acknowledged that Alice feels like less reliable a source than Chloe.)) I don’t think someone has to be entitled to feel devalued doing assistant-type tasks for others. It really depends on how you’re treated. It’s a bit suspicious that an assistant feeling unvalued is framed as “the assistant didn’t like being an assistant.” Sure, this could be true. But it could also be true that the assistant simply didn’t like aspects of how they were treated, and these things can be subtle and not easy to explain, but we all know that there are “horrible bosses” and “entitled bosses,” so it’s not like this is a complaint with a very low base rate. For these reasons, I’m still quite skeptical of many of the claims against Chloe, even though I’d say the Nonlinear document has updated me in their direction somewhat.
Edit to add: In case some people lack some of the relevant context, this is Chloe in her own words. I think she comes across well and in a purely vibes-based way, I trust her narration more than I trust the Nonlinear texts. (Not to mention that Nonlinear in their document simply cut out or selectively quoted/re-stated/paraphrased passages in her stories/accounts to make it seem less compelling. Like, a lot of her specific complaints there feel like they aren’t addressed well or at all by Nonlinear. Update: see my comment here for examples.)
I think if we deanonymise now, there’s a strong chance that the next whistleblower will remember what happened as “they got deanonymised” and will be reluctant to believe it won’t happen to them. It kind of doesn’t matter if there’s reasons why it’s OK in this case, as long as they require digging through this post and all the comments to understand them. People won’t do that, so they won’t feel safe from getting the same treatment.
Out of curiosity, if, after reviewing the available evidence, it appears that Alice and Chloe indeed fabricated a number of accusations against Nonlinear and exhibited a pattern of behavior of doing similar things elsewhere, would you reverse the request to keep them anonymous?
If what Nonlinear is saying is true, then Alice and Chloe have the potential to be very destructive to others in the community.
I would strongly caution against doing so. Even if it turns out to be seemingly justified in this instance (and I offer no view either way whether it is or not), I cannot think of a more effective way of discouraging victims/whistleblowers from coming forward (in other cases in this community) in future situations.
I think norms should strongly push against taking seriously any public accusation made anonymously in most circumstances. I feel like we have taken a norm that was appropriate to a very limited set of circumstances and tried to make a grand moral principle out of it, and it doesn’t work. Giving some anonymity to victims of sexual assault/harassment, in some circumstances, makes sense because it’s a uniquely embarrassing thing to be a victim of due to our cultural taboos around sex. Anonymity might be appropriate for people revealing problems at their current employer. Or it might be appropriate in industries that are generally more amoral, for conduct I would expect most employers to want to commit—e.g. I would want people to be able to anonymously disclose that a doctor is biased in favor of prescribing drugs pushed by the pharma sales rep who buys him the fanciest lunches, because I think most doctors want to supplement their incomes by taking pharma bribes. But if people have legitimate fears about retaliation by unrelated employers within the EA ecosystem then we have lost the plot so thoroughly that we should probably burn the whole thing down.
If someone is going to make false accusations, the rest of us have a right to know that about their character and avoid dealing with them. A person making false accusations is in fact a predator; describing themself as a victim doesn’t change that. Mental illness doesn’t change that. I have a family member with mental health issues similar to what Kat has described of Alice. In my experience this person is a genuinely bad person, despite many professions of good intent. This person leaves a trail of wreckage in their wake wherever they go. I don’t introduce friends or significant others to them without a warning. It would be unfair to my friends/SOs to do otherwise. If I were in a position to warn their prospective employers, I would consider myself duty-bound to warn them as well.
If the accusations are true I don’t see how it possibly hurts their reputation to have their identities attached to them, except that it makes similarly abusive employers less likely to hire them. Which I wouldn’t exactly consider a negative if I were in their shoes.
I don’t know who Chloe is in real life (nor Alice for that matter), but based on what I’ve read, it seems really really off to me to say that she has the potential to be destructive to others in the community. [Edit: I guess you’re not outright saying that, but I’m reading your comment as “if all that Nonlinear are saying about Chloe is true, then...,” and my take on that is that apart from their statements of the sort of “Chloe is so mentally unhealthy that she makes things up” (paraphrased), none of the concrete claims are obviously red flags to me. It’s certainly not great to say things in misleading ways, but it can happen in the heat of battle. Also, I want to flag that we haven’t heard Chloe’s reply to Nonlinear’s presentation, so I don’t consider it established that she’s less reliable than, e.g., the typical person, or Nonlinear themselves. On the compensation dispute for instance, I can see interpretations where it made sense for Chloe to feel misled – see also the fact check exercise someone has done.]
I think something has gone wrong for someone to even bring up this point. (I can see where you’re coming from regarding Alice, if claims about her are correct.) I feel like we wouldn’t be entertaining that possibility if Nonlinear hadn’t lumped Chloe and Alice together and written their post in a unfairly-narrativizing style.
Update: 1h after posting this comment (and long after the edit I made above), this post currently sits at −5 karma and 9 voters. Will be interesting to see where it ends up. I continue to think that something has gone wrong.
It’s a fair point that we should treat Alice and Chloe separately and that deanonymizing one need not imply that we should deanonymize the other.
Yeah.
Let’s assume Nonlinear are completely right about how they describe Chloe and Alice. I’d summarize their perspective as follows:
Alice-as-described-by-Nonlinear is likely to be destructive in other contexts as well because that is a strong pattern with her generally. :(
By contrast,
Chloe-as-described-by-Nonlinear is significantly less likely to be destructive in other contexts. While Nonlinear claim that Chloe is entitled, it’s still the case that her beef with them is largely around the tensions of living together (primes her to expect equal-ness and friendship) combined with her having to do tasks for them that make her feel like her time isn’t being valued. (Plus things around the vagueness of her role and her being repeatedly negatively surprised by things they expect of her or ways they treat her.)
Even if you take Nonlinear’s account at face value, it seems like you’d have a lot of uncertainty about the claim “Chloe is likely to be destructive in other contexts.”
Lastly, I again want to flag that I don’t consider it established that Chloe is entitled or unreliable. ((To some degree, the same caveats may also apply to claims about Alice, but I haven’t focused on that much because it seems like Nonlinear have a lot of anonymized evidence?, and it’s hard to argue with that..., plus even Ben acknowledged that Alice feels like less reliable a source than Chloe.)) I don’t think someone has to be entitled to feel devalued doing assistant-type tasks for others. It really depends on how you’re treated. It’s a bit suspicious that an assistant feeling unvalued is framed as “the assistant didn’t like being an assistant.” Sure, this could be true. But it could also be true that the assistant simply didn’t like aspects of how they were treated, and these things can be subtle and not easy to explain, but we all know that there are “horrible bosses” and “entitled bosses,” so it’s not like this is a complaint with a very low base rate. For these reasons, I’m still quite skeptical of many of the claims against Chloe, even though I’d say the Nonlinear document has updated me in their direction somewhat.
Edit to add: In case some people lack some of the relevant context, this is Chloe in her own words. I think she comes across well and in a purely vibes-based way, I trust her narration more than I trust the Nonlinear texts. (Not to mention that Nonlinear in their document simply cut out or selectively quoted/re-stated/paraphrased passages in her stories/accounts to make it seem less compelling. Like, a lot of her specific complaints there feel like they aren’t addressed well or at all by Nonlinear. Update: see my comment here for examples.)
I think if we deanonymise now, there’s a strong chance that the next whistleblower will remember what happened as “they got deanonymised” and will be reluctant to believe it won’t happen to them. It kind of doesn’t matter if there’s reasons why it’s OK in this case, as long as they require digging through this post and all the comments to understand them. People won’t do that, so they won’t feel safe from getting the same treatment.