I think this comment will be frustrating for you and is not high quality. Feel free to disagree, I’m including it because I think it’s possible many people (or at least some?) will feel wary of this post early on and it might not be clear why. In my opinion, including a photo section was surprising and came across as near completely misunderstanding the nature of Ben’s post. It is going to make it a bit hard to read any further with even consideration (edit: for me personally, but I’ll just take a break and come back or something). Basically, without any claim on what happened, I don’t think anyone suspects “isolated or poor environment” to mean, “absence of group photos in which [claimed] isolated person is at a really pretty pool or beach doing pool yoga.” And if someone is psychologically distressed, whether you believe this to be a misunderstanding or maliciously exaggerated, it feels like a really icky move to start posting pictures that add no substance, even with faces blurred, with the caption “s’mores”, etc.
In my opinion, including a photo section was surprising and came across as near completely misunderstanding the nature of Ben’s post. It is going to make it a bit hard to read any further with even consideration
In addition to the overall tone of this post being generally unprofessional.
Yeah, I don’t necessarily mind an informal tone. But the reality is, I read [edit: a bit of] the appendix doc and I’m thinking, “I would really not want to be managed by this team and would be very stressed if my friends were being managed by them. For an organisation, this is really dysfunctional.” And not in an, “understandably risky experiment gone wrong” kind of way, which some people are thinking about this as, but in a, “systematically questionable judgement as a manager” way. Although there may be good spin-off convos around, “how risky orgs should be” and stuff. And maybe the point of this post isn’t to say, “nonlinear did a reasonably sufficient job managing employees and can expect to do so in the future” but rather, “I feel slandered and lied about and I want to share my perspective.”
I can see where you’re coming from. The photos on their own certainly don’t prove they weren’t isolated. However, it does provide evidence on top of the extensive other evidence (e.g. living/working apart from us 50% of the time, Chloe’s 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/Chloe’s 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 don’t believe the claim was that the environment was materially poor (please tell me if I’m 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 couldn’t have possibly murdered her, or showing flirty texts between a man and woman to argue that he couldn’t have raped her, etc. This is a bad rhetorical strategy when prosecutors use it—and it’s a bad rhetorical strategy here—because 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 Ben’s 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 strategy—the photos, the assertion that this was a “dream job”—strikes me as eerily similar to the job ad linked in Ben’s original post (https://web.archive.org/web/20211022160447/https://www.nonlinear.org/operations.html). Probably this did seem like a dream job, which is presumably why Chloe and Alice accepted it. And what’s at issue now is their claim that it wasn’t, 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. It’s less strong evidence that they weren’t 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.
I’d like to reiterate that 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 they don’t 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 accuser’s credibility. In short, this isn’t an issue of “disliking your tone or pictures,” 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 I’m 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 don’t really know what to say to that. I am confused by how this is in any way NL’s fault, and why it should imply that less evidence overall would be better.
I think that if we were all completely rational, you’d be right. But we’re not, and I think the photos were included in an attempt to exploit that fact.
If the post just argued “there were s’mores and iguanas; Chloe and Alice must be lying about how bad their experience was!” my brain would go “that argument sucks; obviously people can be unhappy in a land of iguanas.” But the photos hijack my reasoning by conjuring a vivid image of a tropical paradise (brain: “hm, this looks pretty nice! It’s cold here and I wish I was there right now! Maybe this was an awesome job.”)
The reason this is bad is because the photos don’t tell us anything relevant that we didn’t already know; we knew they were hanging out in tropical places and the presence of s’mores has zero bearing on the veracity of Chloe and Alice’s claims. No one ever disputed whether there were s’mores and there having been s’mores 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 “our” irrationality, I could be persuaded that the photos are harmful toward some people’s, maybe even most people’s, 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 “disputed” 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 people’s reactions to Ben’s post)
Those specific things are absolutely not exclusive with “this was a nightmare job with abusive people.” I agree that’s a separate thing that can totally co-exist with the job being in other ways a “dream job that many people would enjoy for the experiences it provides.”
If the photos undermines some people’s ability to recognize that it might have also been a nightmare in addition to that reality… again, I’m open to that being an outcome most people will experience, but I don’t think the answer is for NL to provide less evidence overall.
It’s certainly not how I want to be treated when I’m 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 would’ve been more useful and persuasive (and generated better discourse) if it had been 1/5th as long. Throwing evidence—even high-quality evidence—at people does not always make them reason better, and often makes them reason worse. (I also don’t think it works here to say “just have better epistemics!” because (a) one important sense in which we’re 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 faith—who wants you to reach the right conclusions—should account for this in how they present information.)
Critically, as previously stated, I think the photos constitute particularly poor evidence—they have a very low “provides useful information:how likely are they to sway people in ways that are irrational” ratio. This is why my comment wasn’t just “shorten your post so people can understand it better,” but rather “I think these photos will lead to vibes-based reasoning.” (This is also why prosecutors etc etc use this kind of evidence; it’s meant to make the jury think “aw they look so happy together! He couldn’t have possibly done that,” 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 you’re 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 “was this job the kind of job that it’s reasonable to sell as ~$75k in compensation.”
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 “Jobs like this are just fundamentally bad and wrong and predatory etc, and we shouldn’t trust adults to be agentic enough to agree to them and not quit if they dislike them, etc”...
Or when people have takeaways from Alice and Chloe’s 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, they’re fighting a number of narrative battles here, many of them vibes based.
I get that you’re saying this particular move backfired on that level for you, and I’m open to the idea that it was a “strategic” 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 think this comment will be frustrating for you and is not high quality. Feel free to disagree, I’m including it because I think it’s possible many people (or at least some?) will feel wary of this post early on and it might not be clear why. In my opinion, including a photo section was surprising and came across as near completely misunderstanding the nature of Ben’s post. It is going to make it a bit hard to read any further with even consideration (edit: for me personally, but I’ll just take a break and come back or something). Basically, without any claim on what happened, I don’t think anyone suspects “isolated or poor environment” to mean, “absence of group photos in which [claimed] isolated person is at a really pretty pool or beach doing pool yoga.” And if someone is psychologically distressed, whether you believe this to be a misunderstanding or maliciously exaggerated, it feels like a really icky move to start posting pictures that add no substance, even with faces blurred, with the caption “s’mores”, etc.
In addition to the overall tone of this post being generally unprofessional.
Yeah, I don’t necessarily mind an informal tone. But the reality is, I read [edit: a bit of] the appendix doc and I’m thinking, “I would really not want to be managed by this team and would be very stressed if my friends were being managed by them. For an organisation, this is really dysfunctional.” And not in an, “understandably risky experiment gone wrong” kind of way, which some people are thinking about this as, but in a, “systematically questionable judgement as a manager” way. Although there may be good spin-off convos around, “how risky orgs should be” and stuff. And maybe the point of this post isn’t to say, “nonlinear did a reasonably sufficient job managing employees and can expect to do so in the future” but rather, “I feel slandered and lied about and I want to share my perspective.”
I’ll commit to not commenting more now unless I’ve gotten something really wrong or it’s really necessary or something :’)
I can see where you’re coming from. The photos on their own certainly don’t prove they weren’t isolated. However, it does provide evidence on top of the extensive other evidence (e.g. living/working apart from us 50% of the time, Chloe’s 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/Chloe’s 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 don’t believe the claim was that the environment was materially poor (please tell me if I’m 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 couldn’t have possibly murdered her, or showing flirty texts between a man and woman to argue that he couldn’t have raped her, etc. This is a bad rhetorical strategy when prosecutors use it—and it’s a bad rhetorical strategy here—because 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 Ben’s 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 strategy—the photos, the assertion that this was a “dream job”—strikes me as eerily similar to the job ad linked in Ben’s original post (https://web.archive.org/web/20211022160447/https://www.nonlinear.org/operations.html). Probably this did seem like a dream job, which is presumably why Chloe and Alice accepted it. And what’s at issue now is their claim that it wasn’t, 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. It’s less strong evidence that they weren’t 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.
I’d like to reiterate that 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 they don’t 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 accuser’s credibility. In short, this isn’t an issue of “disliking your tone or pictures,” 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 I’m 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 don’t really know what to say to that. I am confused by how this is in any way NL’s fault, and why it should imply that less evidence overall would be better.
I think that if we were all completely rational, you’d be right. But we’re not, and I think the photos were included in an attempt to exploit that fact.
If the post just argued “there were s’mores and iguanas; Chloe and Alice must be lying about how bad their experience was!” my brain would go “that argument sucks; obviously people can be unhappy in a land of iguanas.” But the photos hijack my reasoning by conjuring a vivid image of a tropical paradise (brain: “hm, this looks pretty nice! It’s cold here and I wish I was there right now! Maybe this was an awesome job.”)
The reason this is bad is because the photos don’t tell us anything relevant that we didn’t already know; we knew they were hanging out in tropical places and the presence of s’mores has zero bearing on the veracity of Chloe and Alice’s claims. No one ever disputed whether there were s’mores and there having been s’mores 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 “our” irrationality, I could be persuaded that the photos are harmful toward some people’s, maybe even most people’s, 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 “disputed” 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 people’s reactions to Ben’s post)
Those specific things are absolutely not exclusive with “this was a nightmare job with abusive people.” I agree that’s a separate thing that can totally co-exist with the job being in other ways a “dream job that many people would enjoy for the experiences it provides.”
If the photos undermines some people’s ability to recognize that it might have also been a nightmare in addition to that reality… again, I’m open to that being an outcome most people will experience, but I don’t think the answer is for NL to provide less evidence overall.
It’s certainly not how I want to be treated when I’m 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 would’ve been more useful and persuasive (and generated better discourse) if it had been 1/5th as long. Throwing evidence—even high-quality evidence—at people does not always make them reason better, and often makes them reason worse. (I also don’t think it works here to say “just have better epistemics!” because (a) one important sense in which we’re 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 faith—who wants you to reach the right conclusions—should account for this in how they present information.)
Critically, as previously stated, I think the photos constitute particularly poor evidence—they have a very low “provides useful information:how likely are they to sway people in ways that are irrational” ratio. This is why my comment wasn’t just “shorten your post so people can understand it better,” but rather “I think these photos will lead to vibes-based reasoning.” (This is also why prosecutors etc etc use this kind of evidence; it’s meant to make the jury think “aw they look so happy together! He couldn’t have possibly done that,” 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 you’re 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 “was this job the kind of job that it’s reasonable to sell as ~$75k in compensation.”
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 “Jobs like this are just fundamentally bad and wrong and predatory etc, and we shouldn’t trust adults to be agentic enough to agree to them and not quit if they dislike them, etc”...
Or when people have takeaways from Alice and Chloe’s 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, they’re fighting a number of narrative battles here, many of them vibes based.
I get that you’re saying this particular move backfired on that level for you, and I’m open to the idea that it was a “strategic” 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.