I’m disappointed that much of this document involves attacking the people who’ve accused you of harmful actions, in place of a focus on disputing the evidence they provided (I appreciate that you also do the latter). I also really bounce off the distraction tactics at play here, where you encourage the reader to turn their attention back to the world’s problems. It doesn’t seem like you’ve reflected carefully and calmly about this situation; I don’t see many places where you admit to making mistakes and it doesn’t seem like you’re willing to take ownership of this situation at all.
I don’t have time to engage with all the evidence here, but even if I came away convinced that all of the original claims provided by Ben weren’t backed up, I still feel really uneasy about Nonlinear; uneasy about your work culture, uneasy about how you communicate and argue, and alarmed at how forcefully you attack people who criticise you.
I’m disappointed that much of this document involves attacking the people who’ve accused you of harmful actions, in place of a focus on disputing the evidence they provided
The vast majority of what they gave is disputing the evidence. There is a whole 135 pages of basically nothing but that. You then even refer to it saying:
I don’t have time to engage with all the evidence here
How can both these be true at once? Either it’s a lot so you don’t have time to go through it all or they haven’t done much in which case you should be able to spend some time looking at it?
I don’t think I, as a reader, am obliged to review all the evidence here and adjudicate with full information. You certainly shouldn’t read my comment as me implying I’ve done that.
This post struck me as unpleasant and off the mark in the ways I describe it, and I think it’s okay for me to just say that.
I want to push back on this framing, and I think it shows a lack of empathy with the position Nonlinear have been put in. (Though I do agree with your dislike of many of the stylistic choices made in this post)
This post is 15K words, and does a mix of attacking the credibility of Ben, Alice and Chloe and disputing the claims with evidence. The linked doc is 58K words, and seems predominantly about collecting an exhaustive array of evidence. Nonlinear have clearly put in a *lot* of work to the linked doc, and try hard to dispute the evidence. So it seems to me that your complaint is really about what aspects Nonlinear chose to make prominent in this post, which in my opinion is a strategic question about how to write a good post, plus some emotional baggage from Nonlinear feeling aggrieved about this whole thing.
From Nonlinear’s perspective (not necessarily mine, to be clear), they have two disgruntled ex-employees who had a bad time, told a bunch of lies about them, and got an incredibly popular and widely read EA Forum post about it. This has destroyed their reputation in EA, and been catastrophic to the org, in a way that they consider ill-deserved. They want to write a post to clear their name. They were very emotionally hurt by this, and extremely reasonably! “Alice, Ben, and Chloe hurt me (Kat) so much I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and I cried more than any other time in my life. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t type responses to comments.”
Zooming out a bit, it seems like we could live in three worlds: A) Nonlinear did terrible things and were abusive towards Alice and Chloe. Ben’s post was basically true B) Nonlinear fucked up a fair bit, Ben’s post was sketchy in various ways, no parties look great C) Nonlinear acted pretty reasonably/understandably throughout, Ben’s post was full of false accusations
If we live in world C then Ben’s post was a gish gallop of many terrible sounding and hard to refute allegations, which gives super bad vibes, and even if they can address 90% of them, people will still care about the final 10%, *and* likely still have the bad vibes of first reading Ben’s post and initially making up their mind’s against Nonlinear. Plus, idk, most people won’t read exhaustive evidence (I expect few readers of this post are reading the long attached doc!) Attacking the credibility of your attackers seems one of the few ways of getting out of that. I further think that, if the list of false allegations Nonlinear gives are truly false, Alice and Chloe really aren’t that credible, made some extremely serious and false allegations, and their overall credibility is a really important part of evaluating this story! And justifies a pretty forceful attack on them.
If we live in world C then “I don’t see many places where you admit to making mistakes and it doesn’t seem like you’re willing to take ownership of this situation at all.” doesn’t really make sense.
Of course, if we live in world A, then Nonlinear are getting rightfully criticised and are fighting dirty against whistleblowers. And their 58K word doc is a gish gallop of their own. It’s a complex situation! But I can totally see where they’re coming from.
(CoI: Kat is a friend of mine, and I received money in the past from Nonlinear’s productivity fund, but no one asked me to write this. I made an alt for this because, given the level of NonLinear hate going around, I feel vaguely uncomfortable about being seen publicly defending them)
We only tried to remind people about the bigger problems after we’d established that they’d told dozens of falsehoods and misleading claims about us.
I am disappointed that we’ve 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 we need to apologize for things we didn’t do and improve on things we didn’t do wrong.
I can see where Ollie’s coming from, frankly. You keep referring to these hundreds of pages of evidence, but it seems very likely you would have been better off just posting a few screenshots of the text messages that contradict some of the most egregious claims months ago. The hypothesising about “what went wrong”, the photos, the retaliation section, the guilt-tripping about focusing on this, etc. - these all undermine the discussion about the actual facts by (1) diluting the relevant evidence and (2) making this entire post bizarre and unsettling.
I have a section called “a story with no villains” and I explain again and again that I don’t think Alice or Chloe are bad people. I think it’s most likely that they are mentally unwell and deserving of compassion. Ben literally calls me a predator out to get the youth.
Yeah and you called him a predator/abuser in response no? And this was, depending on which part of the post/comments you read, confirmed by multiple people/unfair/definitely true/very bad/not bad
I’m disappointed that much of this document involves attacking the people who’ve accused you of harmful actions, in place of a focus on disputing the evidence they provided (I appreciate that you also do the latter). I also really bounce off the distraction tactics at play here, where you encourage the reader to turn their attention back to the world’s problems. It doesn’t seem like you’ve reflected carefully and calmly about this situation; I don’t see many places where you admit to making mistakes and it doesn’t seem like you’re willing to take ownership of this situation at all.
I don’t have time to engage with all the evidence here, but even if I came away convinced that all of the original claims provided by Ben weren’t backed up, I still feel really uneasy about Nonlinear; uneasy about your work culture, uneasy about how you communicate and argue, and alarmed at how forcefully you attack people who criticise you.
The vast majority of what they gave is disputing the evidence. There is a whole 135 pages of basically nothing but that. You then even refer to it saying:
How can both these be true at once? Either it’s a lot so you don’t have time to go through it all or they haven’t done much in which case you should be able to spend some time looking at it?
I think it’s not actually accurate to say that
as it’s constantly interspersed with stuff like how great it is to work in a hot tub.
I don’t think I, as a reader, am obliged to review all the evidence here and adjudicate with full information. You certainly shouldn’t read my comment as me implying I’ve done that.
This post struck me as unpleasant and off the mark in the ways I describe it, and I think it’s okay for me to just say that.
I want to push back on this framing, and I think it shows a lack of empathy with the position Nonlinear have been put in. (Though I do agree with your dislike of many of the stylistic choices made in this post)
This post is 15K words, and does a mix of attacking the credibility of Ben, Alice and Chloe and disputing the claims with evidence. The linked doc is 58K words, and seems predominantly about collecting an exhaustive array of evidence. Nonlinear have clearly put in a *lot* of work to the linked doc, and try hard to dispute the evidence. So it seems to me that your complaint is really about what aspects Nonlinear chose to make prominent in this post, which in my opinion is a strategic question about how to write a good post, plus some emotional baggage from Nonlinear feeling aggrieved about this whole thing.
From Nonlinear’s perspective (not necessarily mine, to be clear), they have two disgruntled ex-employees who had a bad time, told a bunch of lies about them, and got an incredibly popular and widely read EA Forum post about it. This has destroyed their reputation in EA, and been catastrophic to the org, in a way that they consider ill-deserved. They want to write a post to clear their name. They were very emotionally hurt by this, and extremely reasonably! “Alice, Ben, and Chloe hurt me (Kat) so much I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and I cried more than any other time in my life. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t type responses to comments.”
Zooming out a bit, it seems like we could live in three worlds:
A) Nonlinear did terrible things and were abusive towards Alice and Chloe. Ben’s post was basically true
B) Nonlinear fucked up a fair bit, Ben’s post was sketchy in various ways, no parties look great
C) Nonlinear acted pretty reasonably/understandably throughout, Ben’s post was full of false accusations
Nonlinear seem to be arguing we’re in a mix of B and C, and mostly C (their reflections section seems to be buried [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P4iLZPrQt-dxl9njvz1EvnB8qOBt11DVmtn8PHwFyPw/edit#heading=h.orqsey1n2itd)). I think that if we live in world C (and to a lesser degree B) then attacking the credibility of your critics is pretty reasonable?
If we live in world C then Ben’s post was a gish gallop of many terrible sounding and hard to refute allegations, which gives super bad vibes, and even if they can address 90% of them, people will still care about the final 10%, *and* likely still have the bad vibes of first reading Ben’s post and initially making up their mind’s against Nonlinear. Plus, idk, most people won’t read exhaustive evidence (I expect few readers of this post are reading the long attached doc!) Attacking the credibility of your attackers seems one of the few ways of getting out of that. I further think that, if the list of false allegations Nonlinear gives are truly false, Alice and Chloe really aren’t that credible, made some extremely serious and false allegations, and their overall credibility is a really important part of evaluating this story! And justifies a pretty forceful attack on them.
If we live in world C then “I don’t see many places where you admit to making mistakes and it doesn’t seem like you’re willing to take ownership of this situation at all.” doesn’t really make sense.
Of course, if we live in world A, then Nonlinear are getting rightfully criticised and are fighting dirty against whistleblowers. And their 58K word doc is a gish gallop of their own. It’s a complex situation! But I can totally see where they’re coming from.
(CoI: Kat is a friend of mine, and I received money in the past from Nonlinear’s productivity fund, but no one asked me to write this. I made an alt for this because, given the level of NonLinear hate going around, I feel vaguely uncomfortable about being seen publicly defending them)
We tried to keep it to explaining how their claims were false or misleading, plus including an alternative hypothesis to explain what’s going on. We have a section where we explain the things we’re doing differently in the future.
We only tried to remind people about the bigger problems after we’d established that they’d told dozens of falsehoods and misleading claims about us.
I am disappointed that we’ve 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 we need to apologize for things we didn’t do and improve on things we didn’t do wrong.
I can see where Ollie’s coming from, frankly. You keep referring to these hundreds of pages of evidence, but it seems very likely you would have been better off just posting a few screenshots of the text messages that contradict some of the most egregious claims months ago. The hypothesising about “what went wrong”, the photos, the retaliation section, the guilt-tripping about focusing on this, etc. - these all undermine the discussion about the actual facts by (1) diluting the relevant evidence and (2) making this entire post bizarre and unsettling.
I think you forgot to mention that you also accused the person criticising you of being personally abusive in the post
I have a section called “a story with no villains” and I explain again and again that I don’t think Alice or Chloe are bad people. I think it’s most likely that they are mentally unwell and deserving of compassion. Ben literally calls me a predator out to get the youth.
Yeah and you called him a predator/abuser in response no? And this was, depending on which part of the post/comments you read, confirmed by multiple people/unfair/definitely true/very bad/not bad