I find it interesting and revealing to look at how Nonlinear re-stated Chloe’s initial account of an incident into a shorter version.
First, here’s their shortened version (by Nonlinear):
One of Chloe’s jobs was to organize fun day trips (which she’d join us on). In fact, one of her unofficial titles was Fun Lord of Nonlinear, First of Her Name. One day, spontaneously, we decided to go on a trip to St. Barths. Emerson asked her to do her usual job, and she said “It’s a weekend” and he said, “But you like organizing fun trips!”—she had said so many times—and she said sure.
She continued doing her job (arranging ATV rentals for the group—herself getting to ride as well of course). Then, when she complained, Emerson said “OK” and then just… went and did her job for her. And that was that.
(This is another example of Chloe coming in with the implicit frame that doing her job is abusive. “Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer.” We can empathize with her wishing she could join us before finishing her job, but this was her job. Being an assistant is not abuse.)
The day after she talks to me about it, how she wants to not have work spontaneously sprung on her on a break day. I agree with her. I think break days should be sacred. I talk to Emerson about it and tell him that he can’t do that, and that we cannot spring work on her on break days unless they’re an actual emergency. He disagrees because he thinks it’s totally normal for startup employees to ocassionally work on weekends, but I insist, and that’s that.
We proceed to only ask her to do her job on work days. She must just not remember that we set up this policy. But we did.
There was a time during our stay at St Martin when I was overwhelmed from living and seeing only the same people every single day and needed a day off. Sometimes I’d become so overwhelmed I became really bad at formulating sentences and being in social contexts so I’d take a day off and go somewhere on the island where I could be on my own, away from the whole team—I’ve never before and after experienced an actual lack of being able to formulate sentences just from being around the same people for too long. This was one of these times. We had guests over and the team with the guests had decided in the morning that it’s a good vacation day for going to St Barths. I laid low because I thought since I’m also on a weekend day, it would not be mine to organize (me and Kat would take off Tuesdays and Saturdays, these were sometimes called weekend or vacation days).
Emerson approaches me to ask if I can set up the trip. I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself. He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”. I don’t know how to respond nor how to get out of it, I don’t feel like I have the energy to negotiate with him so I start work, hoping that if I get it done quickly, I can have the rest of the day for myself.
I didn’t have time to eat, had just woken up, and the actual task itself required to rally up 7 people and figure out their passport situation as well as if they want to join. St Barths means entering a different country, which meant that I needed to check in with the passport as well as covid requirements and whether all 7 people can actually join. I needed to quickly book some ferry tickets there and back for the day, rally the people to the cars and get to the ferry—all of this within less than an hour. We were late and annoyed the ferry employees—but this is one of the things generally ignored by the Nonlinear team, us being late but getting our way is a sign of our agency and how we aren’t NPCs that just follow the prescribed ferry times—they’re negotiable after all, if we can get away with getting to St Barths anyway.
I thought my work was done. We got to the island, my plan was to make the most of it and go on my own somewhere but Emerson says he wants an ATV to travel around with and without an ATV it’s a bit pointless. Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer. All ATVs have been rented out—it’s tourist season. I check back in, Emerson says I need to call all the places on the island and keep trying. I call all the places I can find, this is about 10 places (small island). No luck. Eventually Emerson agrees that using a moped will be okay, and that’s when I get relieved from my work tasks.
I did describe this to Kat in my next meeting with her that it’s not okay for me to have to do work tasks while I’m on my weekends, and she agreed but we struggled to figure out a solution that would make sense. It remained more of a “let’s see how this plays out”.
It’s probably best for readers to think first about whether they feel like the summary omits important things. I think it’s fine to omit some things and mostly describe the incident from Kat and Emerson’s perspective. But I think not mentioning the following three things, at least, is pretty bad form and misleading:
There’s a huge difference between “I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself” versus “Emerson asked her to do her usual job, and she said “It’s a weekend” This difference above really changes the context for ”He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”.” Basically, for the version where Chloe only said “It’s a weekend,” it’s defensible to interpret Emerson’s reply as a friendly negotiation attempt. By contrast, in the version where Chloe says “I really need the vacation day for myself,” the comment that most readily comes to my hyperbole-prone mind for “But organizing stuff is fun for you!” is “psychopathic.” (To be fair, it could be that Chloe failed at expressing just how much she needed that day off – I think that’s a common pattern with many people to struggle with voicing their needs and limits. Even so, I think it’s bad form by Nonlinear to not acknowledge this discrepancy of accounts and instead impose their own framing on Chloe’s account. It feels like trying to alter the frame covertly rather than discussing what happened in the open.) (Not to mention that “she said so many times” (about liking to organize trips) is totally beside the point, and pretending otherwise is bizarre. Like, if they can’t even get this right here on the forum after three months of thinking about it, things don’t look good.)
I think it’s not okay to omit relevant context when they summarized the following passage: ”(This is another example of Chloe coming in with the implicit frame that doing her job is abusive. “Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer.” We can empathize with her wishing she could join us before finishing her job, but this was her job. Being an assistant is not abuse.)” They make it seem like Chloe was complaining about normal work on a normal work day. However, in this story, Chloe had agreed here to work on a weekend and she only expected that she had to organize the trip (St Martin and back) and nothing else. Getting the ATV rentals while everyone else was having coffee was yet another unexpected task on her off day. It’s a very different thing to feel bad about unexpected new tasks coming up on your off day after you already felt like you got talked into doing more than you wanted, than it is to feel bad about normal work while your bosses are resting. It feels unfair not to acknowledge the true source of Chloe’s discontent in this specific story about the cafe.
Chloe doesn’t seem to agree with the following description: “Then, when she complained, Emerson said “OK” and then just… went and did her job for her.” Here, what Nonlinear omitted was this contradicting passage in Chloe’s account: ”All ATVs have been rented out—it’s tourist season. I check back in, Emerson says I need to call all the places on the island and keep trying. I call all the places I can find, this is about 10 places (small island). No luck. Eventually Emerson agrees that using a moped will be okay, and that’s when I get relieved from my work tasks.” It’s strange to omit this. It sounds like Emerson insisted that she made ten phone calls before dropping the idea. To me, it feels quite demanding to ask your assistant to go to such great lengths on what was initially an off day for them (or at all, tbh), especially if you can probably infer based on their mood and behavior that they’re not in the happiest and most energetic of states.
In any case, this is the sort of thing that makes me feel like “Nonlinear are being unfair and somewhat sneaky in their presentation.”
To be clear, I’m not necessarily accusing them of deliberately misrepresenting what Chloe said. They might reasonably reply, “We know Chloe said different things; after all, we linked to her long comment and we think forum readers can read for themselves. We decided to showcase our side of the story, how we remember it.” However, even if that’s how they reply, I think it’s not okay to do things underhandedly like that, especially when they then go on and make strong negative statements about Chloe’s entitlement and bad attitude based on their version of events, without flagging that Chloe disagrees about so much of the context. Doing things underhandedly is manipulative because it hides possible points of disagreement, making it seem like their version of the story is more obviously accurate/objective than it actually is.
This comment sounds very reasonable, but I think it really isn’t. Not because anything you said is false; I agree that the summary left out relevant sections, but because the standard is unreasonably high. This is a 134 page document. I expect that you could spend hours poking one legitimate hole after another into how they were arguing or paraphrasing.
Since I expect that you can do this, I don’t it makes sense to update based on you demonstrating it.
I feel the same way about what happened itself. It seems like Chloe really wanted to have a free day, but Emerson coerced her into working because it was convenient for him, that he probably wouldn’t have insisted if she had argued the point, but that she didn’t have the social courage to do so (which is super understandable, I don’t think I’d have argued in that sitaution). If so, that’s very much not cool from Emerson. It also is completely normal. I would expect that you can find anecdotes like this one from people who are more considerate than average. Not if you meet them for a day, but if you’re with them for several months.
Now if Chloe complained about this and the same thing kept happening, then we’re talking. I think that puts it into the territory of “so bad that it warrants sharing information about it publicly”. And who knows, maybe it did. I mean, here’s it’s just Kat’s word against Chloe’s. But then the problem isn’t quoting inaccurately, it’s that information contained in the doc isn’t true. If I take the doc at face value, I really don’t think the anecdote looks bad for Nonlinear, even with the full context from the quote.
This is also kind of how I feel about much of the comment section. A lot of it seems to apply the standard “did Nonlinear do something seriously wrong”. Yes, of course they did things seriously wrong. When regular people live together, everyone does things seriously wrong all the time. I think the standard we should apply instead is “did they do anything unusually wrong”, meaning unusual given that we’re picking from a several month window. And I’d say the same for this document. You shouldn’t ask “can I find serious errors with this document?” because the answer is bound to be yes, it should be “can I find really egregious errors?” This one doesn’t seem like an egregious error; it seems like one that most people would make many of in a document of this length. (I think that’s true even if they work on it for several months.)
Note that I didn’t go through all the pages of the appendix looking for something particularly worthy of critique. Instead, I remembered that Chloe’s comments in her own words seemed quite compelling to me three months ago, so I wanted to re-read it and compare it to what Nonlinear wrote about this incident. When I did so, I thought “wow this is worse than I thought; this warrants its own comment.” Note that this is one of the only times I went back to source material and compared it directly to Nonlinear’s appendix.
I feel the same way about what happened itself. [...] It also is completely normal. I would expect that you can find anecdotes like this one from people who are more considerate than average. Not if you meet them for a day, but if you’re with them for several months.
I doubt you can find anecdotes like this from people who are more considerate than average. (But also, I think this would be too high of a standard.)
In any case, I think the gist of your point is reasonable and I might interpret this evidence the same way you do if I had more favorable priors from other places of the discussion.
I just think “Why would you have more favorable priors from other places of the discussion, given that what I pointed out is probably more typical than outlier-y.”
And I’d say the same for this document. You shouldn’t ask “can I find serious errors with this document?” because the answer is bound to be yes, it should be “can I find really egregious errors?”
The following isn’t an “egregious error” exactly, but I think the whole document is outlier-y across the dimension of “how forcefully do they try to push a black-and-white narrative?” They tell us strong things about how to interpret Chloe’s motivations when it doesn’t even pass the test of representing her points accurately. I’m concerned about this and it’s one thing that goes into me having less favorable priors than you do when I then go on to evaluate individual anecdotes and their weight.
I do understand where people are coming from defending Nonlinear. Even if, like me, someone thinks there’s a lot about them that didn’t go well or that doesn’t look good in terms of their processing and reflection skills, it’s still important that the “flagship accusations” [edit: this was a poor choice of words, I should have said “smoking-gun, most outrageous-sounding examples of the accusations.” The original post by Ben – search for “summary of my epistemic state” here – listed four bullet points as the main concerns, and I think 3⁄4 of those still seem obviously strong to me, while the 3rd point is something I’m now more unsure of.] in the original post were mostly wrong, so I’m like, “Did they deserve to go through this public trial?,” maybe not! At the same time, it wouldn’t feel ideal either to pretend like I don’t now have significant concerns about them. And then, what creates additional pressure to keep arguing the point, is that it seems like they’ve succeeded at convincing quite a few people that Chloe might be a malefactor (lending some credibility to initial fears of retaliation), when my best guess is that this isn’t the case at all. To be fair, Chloe is currently protected by anonymity, so you could argue this is the smaller issue. However, some people contemplated de-anonymizing both Chloe and Alice, and I’m truly shocked by the suggestion to de-anonymize Chloe, especially since the message this would be sending is something like, “public judgment that the community considers her a bad actor.” For these reasons, I felt compelled to press the point that I think Nonlinear look bad to me in many ways both regarding initial events under discussion and related to how they now speak about Chloe, even though I’m also sympathetic to the viewpoint of “maybe let it be, they’ve gone through enough.”
I find it interesting and revealing to look at how Nonlinear re-stated Chloe’s initial account of an incident into a shorter version.
First, here’s their shortened version (by Nonlinear):
For comparison, here’s Chloe’s original:
It’s probably best for readers to think first about whether they feel like the summary omits important things. I think it’s fine to omit some things and mostly describe the incident from Kat and Emerson’s perspective. But I think not mentioning the following three things, at least, is pretty bad form and misleading:
There’s a huge difference between
“I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself”
versus
“Emerson asked her to do her usual job, and she said “It’s a weekend”
This difference above really changes the context for
”He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”.”
Basically, for the version where Chloe only said “It’s a weekend,” it’s defensible to interpret Emerson’s reply as a friendly negotiation attempt. By contrast, in the version where Chloe says “I really need the vacation day for myself,” the comment that most readily comes to my hyperbole-prone mind for “But organizing stuff is fun for you!” is “psychopathic.”
(To be fair, it could be that Chloe failed at expressing just how much she needed that day off – I think that’s a common pattern with many people to struggle with voicing their needs and limits. Even so, I think it’s bad form by Nonlinear to not acknowledge this discrepancy of accounts and instead impose their own framing on Chloe’s account. It feels like trying to alter the frame covertly rather than discussing what happened in the open.) (Not to mention that “she said so many times” (about liking to organize trips) is totally beside the point, and pretending otherwise is bizarre. Like, if they can’t even get this right here on the forum after three months of thinking about it, things don’t look good.)
I think it’s not okay to omit relevant context when they summarized the following passage:
”(This is another example of Chloe coming in with the implicit frame that doing her job is abusive. “Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer.” We can empathize with her wishing she could join us before finishing her job, but this was her job. Being an assistant is not abuse.)”
They make it seem like Chloe was complaining about normal work on a normal work day. However, in this story, Chloe had agreed here to work on a weekend and she only expected that she had to organize the trip (St Martin and back) and nothing else. Getting the ATV rentals while everyone else was having coffee was yet another unexpected task on her off day. It’s a very different thing to feel bad about unexpected new tasks coming up on your off day after you already felt like you got talked into doing more than you wanted, than it is to feel bad about normal work while your bosses are resting. It feels unfair not to acknowledge the true source of Chloe’s discontent in this specific story about the cafe.
Chloe doesn’t seem to agree with the following description:
“Then, when she complained, Emerson said “OK” and then just… went and did her job for her.”
Here, what Nonlinear omitted was this contradicting passage in Chloe’s account:
”All ATVs have been rented out—it’s tourist season. I check back in, Emerson says I need to call all the places on the island and keep trying. I call all the places I can find, this is about 10 places (small island). No luck. Eventually Emerson agrees that using a moped will be okay, and that’s when I get relieved from my work tasks.”
It’s strange to omit this. It sounds like Emerson insisted that she made ten phone calls before dropping the idea. To me, it feels quite demanding to ask your assistant to go to such great lengths on what was initially an off day for them (or at all, tbh), especially if you can probably infer based on their mood and behavior that they’re not in the happiest and most energetic of states.
In any case, this is the sort of thing that makes me feel like “Nonlinear are being unfair and somewhat sneaky in their presentation.”
To be clear, I’m not necessarily accusing them of deliberately misrepresenting what Chloe said. They might reasonably reply, “We know Chloe said different things; after all, we linked to her long comment and we think forum readers can read for themselves. We decided to showcase our side of the story, how we remember it.” However, even if that’s how they reply, I think it’s not okay to do things underhandedly like that, especially when they then go on and make strong negative statements about Chloe’s entitlement and bad attitude based on their version of events, without flagging that Chloe disagrees about so much of the context. Doing things underhandedly is manipulative because it hides possible points of disagreement, making it seem like their version of the story is more obviously accurate/objective than it actually is.
This comment sounds very reasonable, but I think it really isn’t. Not because anything you said is false; I agree that the summary left out relevant sections, but because the standard is unreasonably high. This is a 134 page document. I expect that you could spend hours poking one legitimate hole after another into how they were arguing or paraphrasing.
Since I expect that you can do this, I don’t it makes sense to update based on you demonstrating it.
I feel the same way about what happened itself. It seems like Chloe really wanted to have a free day, but Emerson coerced her into working because it was convenient for him, that he probably wouldn’t have insisted if she had argued the point, but that she didn’t have the social courage to do so (which is super understandable, I don’t think I’d have argued in that sitaution). If so, that’s very much not cool from Emerson. It also is completely normal. I would expect that you can find anecdotes like this one from people who are more considerate than average. Not if you meet them for a day, but if you’re with them for several months.
Now if Chloe complained about this and the same thing kept happening, then we’re talking. I think that puts it into the territory of “so bad that it warrants sharing information about it publicly”. And who knows, maybe it did. I mean, here’s it’s just Kat’s word against Chloe’s. But then the problem isn’t quoting inaccurately, it’s that information contained in the doc isn’t true. If I take the doc at face value, I really don’t think the anecdote looks bad for Nonlinear, even with the full context from the quote.
This is also kind of how I feel about much of the comment section. A lot of it seems to apply the standard “did Nonlinear do something seriously wrong”. Yes, of course they did things seriously wrong. When regular people live together, everyone does things seriously wrong all the time. I think the standard we should apply instead is “did they do anything unusually wrong”, meaning unusual given that we’re picking from a several month window. And I’d say the same for this document. You shouldn’t ask “can I find serious errors with this document?” because the answer is bound to be yes, it should be “can I find really egregious errors?” This one doesn’t seem like an egregious error; it seems like one that most people would make many of in a document of this length. (I think that’s true even if they work on it for several months.)
Note that I didn’t go through all the pages of the appendix looking for something particularly worthy of critique. Instead, I remembered that Chloe’s comments in her own words seemed quite compelling to me three months ago, so I wanted to re-read it and compare it to what Nonlinear wrote about this incident. When I did so, I thought “wow this is worse than I thought; this warrants its own comment.” Note that this is one of the only times I went back to source material and compared it directly to Nonlinear’s appendix.
I doubt you can find anecdotes like this from people who are more considerate than average. (But also, I think this would be too high of a standard.)
In any case, I think the gist of your point is reasonable and I might interpret this evidence the same way you do if I had more favorable priors from other places of the discussion.
I just think “Why would you have more favorable priors from other places of the discussion, given that what I pointed out is probably more typical than outlier-y.”
The following isn’t an “egregious error” exactly, but I think the whole document is outlier-y across the dimension of “how forcefully do they try to push a black-and-white narrative?” They tell us strong things about how to interpret Chloe’s motivations when it doesn’t even pass the test of representing her points accurately. I’m concerned about this and it’s one thing that goes into me having less favorable priors than you do when I then go on to evaluate individual anecdotes and their weight.
Good reply. I’m back to feeling a lot of uncertainty about what to think.
I do understand where people are coming from defending Nonlinear. Even if, like me, someone thinks there’s a lot about them that didn’t go well or that doesn’t look good in terms of their processing and reflection skills, it’s still important that the “flagship accusations” [edit: this was a poor choice of words, I should have said “smoking-gun, most outrageous-sounding examples of the accusations.” The original post by Ben – search for “summary of my epistemic state” here – listed four bullet points as the main concerns, and I think 3⁄4 of those still seem obviously strong to me, while the 3rd point is something I’m now more unsure of.] in the original post were mostly wrong, so I’m like, “Did they deserve to go through this public trial?,” maybe not! At the same time, it wouldn’t feel ideal either to pretend like I don’t now have significant concerns about them. And then, what creates additional pressure to keep arguing the point, is that it seems like they’ve succeeded at convincing quite a few people that Chloe might be a malefactor (lending some credibility to initial fears of retaliation), when my best guess is that this isn’t the case at all. To be fair, Chloe is currently protected by anonymity, so you could argue this is the smaller issue. However, some people contemplated de-anonymizing both Chloe and Alice, and I’m truly shocked by the suggestion to de-anonymize Chloe, especially since the message this would be sending is something like, “public judgment that the community considers her a bad actor.” For these reasons, I felt compelled to press the point that I think Nonlinear look bad to me in many ways both regarding initial events under discussion and related to how they now speak about Chloe, even though I’m also sympathetic to the viewpoint of “maybe let it be, they’ve gone through enough.”