If a company has 21 employees and someone says it has 7, I’m not going to call the situation ambiguous just because someone disagrees with me
Just for the record, it is definitely false that at any point during the period Ben’s investigation covered, Nonlinear would be accurately described as “having 21 employees”. I am also pretty confident that at no point Nonlinear could have been described as “having 21 employees”, unless there was maybe some very temporary internship program, but the average number of employees was verifiably very far from 21.
(Edit: Removed an unnecessary aside about evidentiary standards. I just want to make sure nobody walks away with a wrong impression about concurrent employees. I don’t really want to get into more indirect stuff)
Ben’s original phrasing (“My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe).”) seems clearly to be referring to their total number of employees, not the concurrent number.
I sympathize with how you’re feeling here, and I agree that taking Nonlinear’s word for it without evidence would not have constituted fact-checking, but I think you may be falling into an arguments-as-soldiers mindset. If it’s not overstepping to suggest (and I apologize if it is!), I think it might be helpful to take a step back from this discussion and do something less stressful for a while, so as to hopefully return with less of a sense of urgency.
Yeah, sorry. To be clear I was responding specifically to TracingWoodgrain’s claim which is written in a way that implies concurrent employees. However, the thing I should have done was to be less nitpicky and be like “just to clarify, you probably meant to say ‘if a company has had 21 employees, and someone says it had 7...’”, and then maybe make some response.
Based on TracingWoodgrain’s phrasing, the above does really seem to be talking about concurrent employees, and I care a lot about people not ending up with the wrong impression of that number. Ben’s post does talk about the number of concurrent employees multiple times, so this seemed like a relevant claim.
I do agree that I should have done less of a “gotcha” thing, and instead just tried to clarify the conversation. Conversation gets worse when every sentence gets interpreted in the most adversarial and narrow fashion, and I contributed to that in the above.
I appreciate the suggestion to take a step back. I do care a lot about preventing false narratives from what was written in Ben’s post from taking hold, and which things are substantiated by evidence, because Nonlinear’s post contains such a huge number of inaccurate claims about what Ben, Alice or Chloe said.
Based on the language that TracingWoodgrains used, I did genuinely come to believe that he thought Nonlinear had 21 concurrent employees during the relevant period, and have a draft DM to him where I ask him for clarification on this, because if so, that does seem like a major misunderstanding. Now Tracing has clarified, and I think we can let this discussion rest.
By “has” I meant “has had a total of”, in line with their consistent claim of past count. I think that should have been clear given context and am unsure why you’re acting as if I would be claiming something different to that.
It was simple to fact-check. Trivial, really:
They wanted to tell you. They were ready to answer questions and had the information immediately on hand. They knew exactly how many employees they’d had. You could have asked; they would have told you. If you wanted more specifics to ensure you had an accurate count, I suspect that a week would be plenty of time for them to pull up records.
You wouldn’t need to take their word for it; most companies keep records of past employees and have some form of evidence to back their claims. You would have needed to go to a source that had the info available, and such a source was there and begging to speak with you.
(Edit: This comment was responding to a version of Tracing’s comment before an edit. The comment became moot when Tracing edited his comment to clarify, so am removing it to not get dragged into discussions that seem unnecessary)
I’m baffled. What do you mean “during the relevant period”? The relevant period as explicitly written into Ben’s post is the company’s entire history.
Chloe and Alice were in no position to know the company’s historical employee count as of September 7, 2023, which is the only thing that matters at all in determining whether Ben’s claim was accurate.
If you go and check the primary sources, and they definitely confirm that during the relevant period [presumably you mean: while Chloe/Alice were employed there] Nonlinear did not have 21 employees (and had much closer to the number of employees that Ben listed), it will update me further towards the conclusion that you are straining at gnats to defend obvious inaccuracies.
Just for the record, it is definitely false that at any point during the period Ben’s investigation covered, Nonlinear would be accurately described as “having 21 employees”. I am also pretty confident that at no point Nonlinear could have been described as “having 21 employees”, unless there was maybe some very temporary internship program, but the average number of employees was verifiably very far from 21.
(Edit: Removed an unnecessary aside about evidentiary standards. I just want to make sure nobody walks away with a wrong impression about concurrent employees. I don’t really want to get into more indirect stuff)
Ben’s original phrasing (“My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe).”) seems clearly to be referring to their total number of employees, not the concurrent number.
I sympathize with how you’re feeling here, and I agree that taking Nonlinear’s word for it without evidence would not have constituted fact-checking, but I think you may be falling into an arguments-as-soldiers mindset. If it’s not overstepping to suggest (and I apologize if it is!), I think it might be helpful to take a step back from this discussion and do something less stressful for a while, so as to hopefully return with less of a sense of urgency.
Yeah, sorry. To be clear I was responding specifically to TracingWoodgrain’s claim which is written in a way that implies concurrent employees. However, the thing I should have done was to be less nitpicky and be like “just to clarify, you probably meant to say ‘if a company has had 21 employees, and someone says it had 7...’”, and then maybe make some response.
Based on TracingWoodgrain’s phrasing, the above does really seem to be talking about concurrent employees, and I care a lot about people not ending up with the wrong impression of that number. Ben’s post does talk about the number of concurrent employees multiple times, so this seemed like a relevant claim.
I do agree that I should have done less of a “gotcha” thing, and instead just tried to clarify the conversation. Conversation gets worse when every sentence gets interpreted in the most adversarial and narrow fashion, and I contributed to that in the above.
I appreciate the suggestion to take a step back. I do care a lot about preventing false narratives from what was written in Ben’s post from taking hold, and which things are substantiated by evidence, because Nonlinear’s post contains such a huge number of inaccurate claims about what Ben, Alice or Chloe said.
Based on the language that TracingWoodgrains used, I did genuinely come to believe that he thought Nonlinear had 21 concurrent employees during the relevant period, and have a draft DM to him where I ask him for clarification on this, because if so, that does seem like a major misunderstanding. Now Tracing has clarified, and I think we can let this discussion rest.
By “has” I meant “has had a total of”, in line with their consistent claim of past count. I think that should have been clear given context and am unsure why you’re acting as if I would be claiming something different to that.
It was simple to fact-check. Trivial, really:
They wanted to tell you. They were ready to answer questions and had the information immediately on hand. They knew exactly how many employees they’d had. You could have asked; they would have told you. If you wanted more specifics to ensure you had an accurate count, I suspect that a week would be plenty of time for them to pull up records.
You wouldn’t need to take their word for it; most companies keep records of past employees and have some form of evidence to back their claims. You would have needed to go to a source that had the info available, and such a source was there and begging to speak with you.
(Edit: This comment was responding to a version of Tracing’s comment before an edit. The comment became moot when Tracing edited his comment to clarify, so am removing it to not get dragged into discussions that seem unnecessary)
I’m baffled. What do you mean “during the relevant period”? The relevant period as explicitly written into Ben’s post is the company’s entire history.
Chloe and Alice were in no position to know the company’s historical employee count as of September 7, 2023, which is the only thing that matters at all in determining whether Ben’s claim was accurate.
If you go and check the primary sources, and they definitely confirm that during the relevant period [presumably you mean: while Chloe/Alice were employed there] Nonlinear did not have 21 employees (and had much closer to the number of employees that Ben listed), it will update me further towards the conclusion that you are straining at gnats to defend obvious inaccuracies.