I absolutely do not admit that Ben’s post substantially got the number of Nonlinear employees during the relevant period wrong. As far as I can tell it is still accurate.
His precise sentence was this:
My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe).
He did not say “At the time Alice and Chloe were working there, they’d had...”. He used the present tense! It is simple revisionism to act as if the sentence says anything else. Anyone reading that sentence would and should come to the conclusion that he was speaking about the company as a whole, providing background context for who they are, not anchoring it to some unspecified point in the past.
He did not say “At the time Alice and Chloe were working there, they’d had...”. He used the present tense!
Presumably you meant to say “he used the past tense”.
You used the present tense in this discussion, so I was responding to claims about the present tense. You said “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.”, which to me reads as clearly talking about how many employees a company has simultaneously.
I agree that in the quoted section Ben’s post talks in the past tense in a way that implies it is talking about all historical employees (by the end of the period Ben’s investigation covers, Nonlinear was not properly incorporated, so there is not even really a sense of legal employment, so how to handle past data points, and what the ground truth is, is messier than it would usually be). The veracity of that statement seems still right to me, though not one I really want to litigate here, or am really that confident about.
In other places he also talks about the number of concurrent employees. I just wanted to make sure no falsehoods about concurrent employees get propagated.
I meant nothing of the sort. “They’ve had” is present perfect tense, and it’s in a section where he is referring to Nonlinear in the present tense as of 7 September 2023 as he outlines the basics of their structure and history.
EDIT:
which to me reads as clearly talking about how many employees a company has simultaneously.
This reading would make sense in isolation; as we have all been talking about the same fact pattern for a week, I admit it makes rather less sense to me. Either you read my statement as a general hypothetical to demonstrate what an unambiguous falsehood looks like, in which case there’s no issue, or you read it as referring to the Nonlinear situation, in which common sense dictates it should be read as sloppy shorthand for the “has had 21 employees” fact pattern that’s been under discussion.
I meant nothing of the sort. “They’ve had” is present perfect tense, and it’s in a section where he is referring to Nonlinear in the present tense as of 7 September 2023 as he outlines the basics of their structure and history.
Ah, sorry, that’s not how I would have used “present tense”, but I am also not a native english speaker.
This reading would make sense in isolation; as we have all been talking about the same fact pattern for a week, I admit it makes rather less sense to me.
I agree it would have been better to ask for clarification instead of immediately objecting. As I say in a comment above, I do really care about misrepresentations of Ben’s post being corrected, because there is a very large amount of that in Nonlinear’s reply.
I did just straightforwardly update from the language you used here that in the OP you had interpreted Ben as talking about the number of maximum concurrent employees during the relevant period (which I agree is not the most natural interpretation of the language Ben used, but seemed implied to me by the language you used). We’ve now clarified, and I apologize for jumping to hasty conclusions about your epistemic state.
His precise sentence was this:
He did not say “At the time Alice and Chloe were working there, they’d had...”. He used the present tense! It is simple revisionism to act as if the sentence says anything else. Anyone reading that sentence would and should come to the conclusion that he was speaking about the company as a whole, providing background context for who they are, not anchoring it to some unspecified point in the past.
This is a strange claim to litigate in this way.
Presumably you meant to say “he used the past tense”.
You used the present tense in this discussion, so I was responding to claims about the present tense. You said “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.”, which to me reads as clearly talking about how many employees a company has simultaneously.
I agree that in the quoted section Ben’s post talks in the past tense in a way that implies it is talking about all historical employees (by the end of the period Ben’s investigation covers, Nonlinear was not properly incorporated, so there is not even really a sense of legal employment, so how to handle past data points, and what the ground truth is, is messier than it would usually be). The veracity of that statement seems still right to me, though not one I really want to litigate here, or am really that confident about.
In other places he also talks about the number of concurrent employees. I just wanted to make sure no falsehoods about concurrent employees get propagated.
I meant nothing of the sort. “They’ve had” is present perfect tense, and it’s in a section where he is referring to Nonlinear in the present tense as of 7 September 2023 as he outlines the basics of their structure and history.
EDIT:
This reading would make sense in isolation; as we have all been talking about the same fact pattern for a week, I admit it makes rather less sense to me. Either you read my statement as a general hypothetical to demonstrate what an unambiguous falsehood looks like, in which case there’s no issue, or you read it as referring to the Nonlinear situation, in which common sense dictates it should be read as sloppy shorthand for the “has had 21 employees” fact pattern that’s been under discussion.
Ah, sorry, that’s not how I would have used “present tense”, but I am also not a native english speaker.
I agree it would have been better to ask for clarification instead of immediately objecting. As I say in a comment above, I do really care about misrepresentations of Ben’s post being corrected, because there is a very large amount of that in Nonlinear’s reply.
I did just straightforwardly update from the language you used here that in the OP you had interpreted Ben as talking about the number of maximum concurrent employees during the relevant period (which I agree is not the most natural interpretation of the language Ben used, but seemed implied to me by the language you used). We’ve now clarified, and I apologize for jumping to hasty conclusions about your epistemic state.