I can see where youâre coming from. The photos on their own certainly donât prove they werenât isolated. However, it does provide evidence on top of the extensive other evidence (e.g. living/âworking apart from us 50% of the time, Chloeâs exit interview saying how much she loved meeting so many people, us being in EA hubs a large fraction of the time, screenshots of them hanging out with others in different countries, etc etc).
As for showcasing how they were not poor, the main part of their compensation was room and board and travel, and I think the photos provide some evidence that they were not poor. Of course, we also share a lot of other information proving this.
But you see how they provide approximately no additional evidence, right? Because photos provide no account for how long someone was away or not away, etc. Basically, in both Alice/âChloeâs world and your world, these photos can exist. One of them is just Alice sitting on a beach chair? And to the second point, I donât believe the claim was that the environment was materially poor (please tell me if Iâm wrong).
The first set of photos is to provide some (but certainly not conclusive) evidence that they were not poor or isolated.
The second set of photos is in the section as some evidence that this job would have been a dream job for many people. And I think working on a tropical beach with a dog would be the dream for many.
This rhetorical strategy is analogous to a prosecutor showing smiling photos of a couple on vacation to argue that he couldnât have possibly murdered her, or showing flirty texts between a man and woman to argue that he couldnât have raped her, etc. This is a bad rhetorical strategy when prosecutors use itâand itâs a bad rhetorical strategy hereâbecause it perpetuates misinformation about what abusive relationships look like; namely, that they are uniformly bad, with no happy moments or mitigating qualities.
As anyone who has been in an abusive relationship will tell you, this is rarely what abuse looks like. And you insinuating that Chloe and Alice are lying because there were happy-appearing moments is exactly the kind of thing that makes many victims afraid to come forward.
To be clear: I do not think these photos provide any evidence against the allegations in Benâs post because no one is contesting that the group hung out in tropical locations. Additionally, having hung out in tropical locations is entirely compatible with the allegations made in the initial post. Ironically, this rhetorical strategyâthe photos, the assertion that this was a âdream jobââstrikes me as eerily similar to the job ad linked in Benâs original post (https://ââweb.archive.org/ââweb/ââ20211022160447/ââhttps://ââwww.nonlinear.org/ââoperations.html). Probably this did seem like a dream job, which is presumably why Chloe and Alice accepted it. And whatâs at issue now is their claim that it wasnât, a point that these photos do nothing to refute.
We are not using the photos to disprove all allegations made against us. We shared them to provide some (but not all) evidence that they were a) not poor and b) not isolated.
They provide some evidence that they were not poor. The bulk of their compensation was room and board, and we show photos of them living in luxurious conditions. Itâs less strong evidence that they werenât isolated, but it is some evidence.
We also proceed to provide hundreds of pages of evidence showing that this was not a one-off thing, but the default.
Iâd like to reiterate that I am disappointed that weâve provided hundreds of pages of evidence that they lied to you and misled you and have shown no remorse or attempts to improve their behavior, but people are focusing on how they donât like our tone or our pictures.
I think you cannot and should not expect people to read hundreds of pages about this, as you acknowledge. And I am not going to. The reason I reacted to the photos is just that this is not the kind of evidence an actor acting in good faith typically invokes because: 1) their arguments should speak for themselves, such that this kind of vibes-based attack is rendered unnecessary and 2) this kind of evidence is typically used to wrongly and unfairly undermine an accuserâs credibility. In short, this isnât an issue of âdisliking your tone or pictures,â because the pictures (irrelevant, wrongly biasing) and tone (retaliatory, unapologetic) provide important information about the kind of organization nonlinear is, and what it was like to work there, which is a central part of what is at issue.
I think Iâm confused by the claim that the written evidence without the picture evidence would be better than the written + pictures.
To me the photos are only manipulative if they are on their own.
If someone chooses not to read the evidence and only focus on the pictures, then feels manipulated by that...
I donât really know what to say to that. I am confused by how this is in any way NLâs fault, and why it should imply that less evidence overall would be better.
I think that if we were all completely rational, youâd be right. But weâre not, and I think the photos were included in an attempt to exploit that fact.
If the post just argued âthere were sâmores and iguanas; Chloe and Alice must be lying about how bad their experience was!â my brain would go âthat argument sucks; obviously people can be unhappy in a land of iguanas.â But the photos hijack my reasoning by conjuring a vivid image of a tropical paradise (brain: âhm, this looks pretty nice! Itâs cold here and I wish I was there right now! Maybe this was an awesome job.â)
The reason this is bad is because the photos donât tell us anything relevant that we didnât already know; we knew they were hanging out in tropical places and the presence of sâmores has zero bearing on the veracity of Chloe and Aliceâs claims. No one ever disputed whether there were sâmores and there having been sâmores is entirely compatible with this job having been a nightmare. The pictures just undermine my ability to immediately recognize that fact.
While I disagree that the photos are hijacking âourâ irrationality, I could be persuaded that the photos are harmful toward some peopleâs, maybe even most peopleâs, general epistemics around issues like this. But the solution to that seems to me to be people working on improving how their epistemics work, not asking for less evidence to avoid becoming confused?
To me the photos are evidence of a particular, specific set of things. Whether anyone âdisputedâ those things is irrelevant to me; I have more information than I did without them, and also the photos prevent people from disputing those specific things going forward, or just insinuating or implying otherwise.
(Which, for the record, I think are somewhat entangled in the overall accusations being made and the emotional vibe I picked up from peopleâs reactions to Benâs post)
Those specific things are absolutely not exclusive with âthis was a nightmare job with abusive people.â I agree thatâs a separate thing that can totally co-exist with the job being in other ways a âdream job that many people would enjoy for the experiences it provides.â
If the photos undermines some peopleâs ability to recognize that it might have also been a nightmare in addition to that reality⊠again, Iâm open to that being an outcome most people will experience, but I donât think the answer is for NL to provide less evidence overall.
Itâs certainly not how I want to be treated when Iâm trying to get a clearer picture of a complex situation.
This is just a weird way to think about evidence, imo. I think the original post wouldâve been more useful and persuasive (and generated better discourse) if it had been 1/â5th as long. Throwing evidenceâeven high-quality evidenceâat people does not always make them reason better, and often makes them reason worse. (I also donât think it works here to say âjust have better epistemics!â because (a) one important sense in which weâre all boundedly rational is that our ability to process information well decreases as the volume of information increases and (b) a writer acting in good faithâwho wants you to reach the right conclusionsâshould account for this in how they present information.)
Critically, as previously stated, I think the photos constitute particularly poor evidenceâthey have a very low âprovides useful information:how likely are they to sway people in ways that are irrationalâ ratio. This is why my comment wasnât just âshorten your post so people can understand it better,â but rather âI think these photos will lead to vibes-based reasoning.â (This is also why prosecutors etc etc use this kind of evidence; itâs meant to make the jury think âaw they look so happy together! He couldnât have possibly done that,â when in reality, the photo of the smiling couple on vacation has ~0 bearing on whether he murdered her.)
I agree in principle with the things youâre saying here. I disagree with these particulars because I disagree that the photos are poor evidence of anything relevant. The only issue at play here is NOT whether NL was abusive, or else I would agree with you.
To be more specific, the photos provide evidence of a unique kind for things like âwas this job the kind of job that itâs reasonable to sell as ~$75k in compensation.â
Again, this can be true in addition to it ending up being an abusive environment. But when the discourse around this topic also includes things like âJobs like this are just fundamentally bad and wrong and predatory etc, and we shouldnât trust adults to be agentic enough to agree to them and not quit if they dislike them, etcâ...
Or when people have takeaways from Alice and Chloeâs assertions that they were were treated basically like Cinderella while the NL leadership got to enjoy the tropical paradise themselves...
I think more evidence is better, yeah. NL is not just trying to counter some claims in some platonic ideal realm of simple facts, theyâre fighting a number of narrative battles here, many of them vibes based.
I get that youâre saying this particular move backfired on that level for you, and Iâm open to the idea that it was a âstrategicâ mistake.
But my take is that we are all imperfect reasoners whose epistemics have flaws in them and also that we can improve them, and I have yet to be in a situation where I feel like less information would have been better for me than more so long as that information is relevant, which may in fact be our main crux of disagreement here.
I can see where youâre coming from. The photos on their own certainly donât prove they werenât isolated. However, it does provide evidence on top of the extensive other evidence (e.g. living/âworking apart from us 50% of the time, Chloeâs exit interview saying how much she loved meeting so many people, us being in EA hubs a large fraction of the time, screenshots of them hanging out with others in different countries, etc etc).
As for showcasing how they were not poor, the main part of their compensation was room and board and travel, and I think the photos provide some evidence that they were not poor. Of course, we also share a lot of other information proving this.
But you see how they provide approximately no additional evidence, right? Because photos provide no account for how long someone was away or not away, etc. Basically, in both Alice/âChloeâs world and your world, these photos can exist. One of them is just Alice sitting on a beach chair? And to the second point, I donât believe the claim was that the environment was materially poor (please tell me if Iâm wrong).
The first set of photos is to provide some (but certainly not conclusive) evidence that they were not poor or isolated.
The second set of photos is in the section as some evidence that this job would have been a dream job for many people. And I think working on a tropical beach with a dog would be the dream for many.
Since Frances is not commenting more:
This rhetorical strategy is analogous to a prosecutor showing smiling photos of a couple on vacation to argue that he couldnât have possibly murdered her, or showing flirty texts between a man and woman to argue that he couldnât have raped her, etc. This is a bad rhetorical strategy when prosecutors use itâand itâs a bad rhetorical strategy hereâbecause it perpetuates misinformation about what abusive relationships look like; namely, that they are uniformly bad, with no happy moments or mitigating qualities.
As anyone who has been in an abusive relationship will tell you, this is rarely what abuse looks like. And you insinuating that Chloe and Alice are lying because there were happy-appearing moments is exactly the kind of thing that makes many victims afraid to come forward.
To be clear: I do not think these photos provide any evidence against the allegations in Benâs post because no one is contesting that the group hung out in tropical locations. Additionally, having hung out in tropical locations is entirely compatible with the allegations made in the initial post. Ironically, this rhetorical strategyâthe photos, the assertion that this was a âdream jobââstrikes me as eerily similar to the job ad linked in Benâs original post (https://ââweb.archive.org/ââweb/ââ20211022160447/ââhttps://ââwww.nonlinear.org/ââoperations.html). Probably this did seem like a dream job, which is presumably why Chloe and Alice accepted it. And whatâs at issue now is their claim that it wasnât, a point that these photos do nothing to refute.
I think you meant a defense attorney, not a prosecutor.
We are not using the photos to disprove all allegations made against us. We shared them to provide some (but not all) evidence that they were a) not poor and b) not isolated.
They provide some evidence that they were not poor. The bulk of their compensation was room and board, and we show photos of them living in luxurious conditions. Itâs less strong evidence that they werenât isolated, but it is some evidence.
We also proceed to provide hundreds of pages of evidence showing that this was not a one-off thing, but the default.
Iâd like to reiterate that I am disappointed that weâve provided hundreds of pages of evidence that they lied to you and misled you and have shown no remorse or attempts to improve their behavior, but people are focusing on how they donât like our tone or our pictures.
I think you cannot and should not expect people to read hundreds of pages about this, as you acknowledge. And I am not going to. The reason I reacted to the photos is just that this is not the kind of evidence an actor acting in good faith typically invokes because: 1) their arguments should speak for themselves, such that this kind of vibes-based attack is rendered unnecessary and 2) this kind of evidence is typically used to wrongly and unfairly undermine an accuserâs credibility. In short, this isnât an issue of âdisliking your tone or pictures,â because the pictures (irrelevant, wrongly biasing) and tone (retaliatory, unapologetic) provide important information about the kind of organization nonlinear is, and what it was like to work there, which is a central part of what is at issue.
I think Iâm confused by the claim that the written evidence without the picture evidence would be better than the written + pictures.
To me the photos are only manipulative if they are on their own.
If someone chooses not to read the evidence and only focus on the pictures, then feels manipulated by that...
I donât really know what to say to that. I am confused by how this is in any way NLâs fault, and why it should imply that less evidence overall would be better.
I think that if we were all completely rational, youâd be right. But weâre not, and I think the photos were included in an attempt to exploit that fact.
If the post just argued âthere were sâmores and iguanas; Chloe and Alice must be lying about how bad their experience was!â my brain would go âthat argument sucks; obviously people can be unhappy in a land of iguanas.â But the photos hijack my reasoning by conjuring a vivid image of a tropical paradise (brain: âhm, this looks pretty nice! Itâs cold here and I wish I was there right now! Maybe this was an awesome job.â)
The reason this is bad is because the photos donât tell us anything relevant that we didnât already know; we knew they were hanging out in tropical places and the presence of sâmores has zero bearing on the veracity of Chloe and Aliceâs claims. No one ever disputed whether there were sâmores and there having been sâmores is entirely compatible with this job having been a nightmare. The pictures just undermine my ability to immediately recognize that fact.
While I disagree that the photos are hijacking âourâ irrationality, I could be persuaded that the photos are harmful toward some peopleâs, maybe even most peopleâs, general epistemics around issues like this. But the solution to that seems to me to be people working on improving how their epistemics work, not asking for less evidence to avoid becoming confused?
To me the photos are evidence of a particular, specific set of things. Whether anyone âdisputedâ those things is irrelevant to me; I have more information than I did without them, and also the photos prevent people from disputing those specific things going forward, or just insinuating or implying otherwise.
(Which, for the record, I think are somewhat entangled in the overall accusations being made and the emotional vibe I picked up from peopleâs reactions to Benâs post)
Those specific things are absolutely not exclusive with âthis was a nightmare job with abusive people.â I agree thatâs a separate thing that can totally co-exist with the job being in other ways a âdream job that many people would enjoy for the experiences it provides.â
If the photos undermines some peopleâs ability to recognize that it might have also been a nightmare in addition to that reality⊠again, Iâm open to that being an outcome most people will experience, but I donât think the answer is for NL to provide less evidence overall.
Itâs certainly not how I want to be treated when Iâm trying to get a clearer picture of a complex situation.
This is just a weird way to think about evidence, imo. I think the original post wouldâve been more useful and persuasive (and generated better discourse) if it had been 1/â5th as long. Throwing evidenceâeven high-quality evidenceâat people does not always make them reason better, and often makes them reason worse. (I also donât think it works here to say âjust have better epistemics!â because (a) one important sense in which weâre all boundedly rational is that our ability to process information well decreases as the volume of information increases and (b) a writer acting in good faithâwho wants you to reach the right conclusionsâshould account for this in how they present information.)
Critically, as previously stated, I think the photos constitute particularly poor evidenceâthey have a very low âprovides useful information:how likely are they to sway people in ways that are irrationalâ ratio. This is why my comment wasnât just âshorten your post so people can understand it better,â but rather âI think these photos will lead to vibes-based reasoning.â (This is also why prosecutors etc etc use this kind of evidence; itâs meant to make the jury think âaw they look so happy together! He couldnât have possibly done that,â when in reality, the photo of the smiling couple on vacation has ~0 bearing on whether he murdered her.)
I agree in principle with the things youâre saying here. I disagree with these particulars because I disagree that the photos are poor evidence of anything relevant. The only issue at play here is NOT whether NL was abusive, or else I would agree with you.
To be more specific, the photos provide evidence of a unique kind for things like âwas this job the kind of job that itâs reasonable to sell as ~$75k in compensation.â
Again, this can be true in addition to it ending up being an abusive environment. But when the discourse around this topic also includes things like âJobs like this are just fundamentally bad and wrong and predatory etc, and we shouldnât trust adults to be agentic enough to agree to them and not quit if they dislike them, etcâ...
Or when people have takeaways from Alice and Chloeâs assertions that they were were treated basically like Cinderella while the NL leadership got to enjoy the tropical paradise themselves...
I think more evidence is better, yeah. NL is not just trying to counter some claims in some platonic ideal realm of simple facts, theyâre fighting a number of narrative battles here, many of them vibes based.
I get that youâre saying this particular move backfired on that level for you, and Iâm open to the idea that it was a âstrategicâ mistake.
But my take is that we are all imperfect reasoners whose epistemics have flaws in them and also that we can improve them, and I have yet to be in a situation where I feel like less information would have been better for me than more so long as that information is relevant, which may in fact be our main crux of disagreement here.