I still find Chloe’s broad perspective credible and concerning [...] it’s begging the question to self-describe your group with “Your group has a really optimistic and warm vibe. [...]” some of the short-summary replies to Chloe seemed uncharitable to the point of being mean. [...] I thought it’s simply implausible that the most Nonlinear leadership could come up with in terms of “things we could’ve done differently” is stuff like “Emerson shouldn’t have snapped at Chloe during that one stressful day” [...] Even though many the things in my elaboration of “(2)” are negative about Nonlinear, I want to emphasize again that this post made me update positively about them [...]
I just noticed that Kat posted the following on Facebook Dec 13 @11:34 PST (after older thoughtful messages such as this one, and the ones from Yarrow, David Mathers, OllieBase, etc). It seems like Kat disregarded the community’s concerns and doubled down on her original PR strategy (including painting Alice and Chloe with the same brush):
Two mentally unwell ex-employees told dozens of falsehoods about us, but even in the darkest times, I told myself to trust that EAs/rationalists would update when they saw the evidence, and now I feel justified in that trust.
Turns out that 200+ pages of evidence showing that their accusations were false or misleading is enough for most people
It was very painful being #27 and #28 people that Alice has accused of persecuting/oppressing her, but today’s been a relief. 75% was our best case scenario, because we believed that ~30% of EAs would never update, since they follow “believe all people-claiming-to-be-victims” epistemics.
Our remaining critics have been largely silent on the evidence and mostly just criticize our ‘tone’ or stylistic choices, which is usually how you know you’ve won an argument.
I neither upvoted nor downvoted, so I’m a bit miffed at “75%” as a metric of support. Edit: I see some aren’t shy about downvoting though. Looks like Kat unfriended me on Facebook around the same time as this downvote. I think this is unfortunate, because I still think Kat is an EA at heart and that she could improve as a person by handling this situation differently.
Yeah, at least several comments have much more severe issues than tone or stylistic choices, like rewording ~every claim by Ben, Chloe and Alice, and then assuming that the transformed claims had the same truth value as the original claim.
I’m in a position very similar to Yarrow here: While I think Kat Woods has mostly convinced me that the most incendiary claims are likely false, and I’m sympathetic to the case for suing Ben and Habryka, there was dangerous red flags in the responses, so much so that I’d stop funding Nonlinear entirely, and I think it’s quite bad that Kat Woods responded the way they did.
I just noticed that Kat posted the following on Facebook Dec 13 @11:34 PST (after older thoughtful messages such as this one, and the ones from Yarrow, David Mathers, OllieBase, etc). It seems like Kat disregarded the community’s concerns and doubled down on her original PR strategy (including painting Alice and Chloe with the same brush):
I neither upvoted nor downvoted, so I’m a bit miffed at “75%” as a metric of support. Edit: I see some aren’t shy about downvoting though. Looks like Kat unfriended me on Facebook around the same time as this downvote. I think this is unfortunate, because I still think Kat is an EA at heart and that she could improve as a person by handling this situation differently.
Yeah, at least several comments have much more severe issues than tone or stylistic choices, like rewording ~every claim by Ben, Chloe and Alice, and then assuming that the transformed claims had the same truth value as the original claim.
I’m in a position very similar to Yarrow here: While I think Kat Woods has mostly convinced me that the most incendiary claims are likely false, and I’m sympathetic to the case for suing Ben and Habryka, there was dangerous red flags in the responses, so much so that I’d stop funding Nonlinear entirely, and I think it’s quite bad that Kat Woods responded the way they did.