Agreed that would have been better!
Daystar Eld
Karma: 1,692
It sounds like what you would be more convinced by is a short, precise refutation of the exact things said by the original post.
But I feel the opposite. That to me would have felt corporate, and also is likely impossible given the way the original allegations are such a blend of verified factual assertions, combined with some things that are technically true but misleading, may be true but are hearsay, and some things that do seem directly false.
Rather than “retaliatory and unkind,” my main takeaway from the post was something like “passive-aggressive benefit of the doubt” at worst, while still overall giving me the impression that Kat believed Ben was well intentioned but reckless. There are some parts that border on or are bad faith, like presuming that Ben’s reactions to evidence against his conclusions must be X or Y thing to justify posting anyway...
But even given that, I think the readers insisting this post should have just stuck to sterile fact-disputing can be both correct on some level, while still lacking in empathy of what it’s like to be in the position NL has been put in. I’m not saying it’s a perfect post, but the degree of tone policing in the face of claims like “they starved me” is kind of bizarre to me.
Sorry, it’s just that in the past I’ve talked to lots of climate dismissives and I’ve become sensitive to their many tactics even in unrelated situations. One of them is misquoting.
No worries, very understandable!
I agree, and find the ratio of agree/disagreement on your comment really disheartening in terms of what lesson this community has learned from all this.
I get that people find it too “retaliatory” and bad-faith. Maybe it would have been cleaner if it wasn’t about Ben, though I don’t think a hypothetical person would have made the lesson as clear, and if Ben wasn’t fair game for having written that article, I don’t know who would be. Unless people believe Kat is just making up accusations entirely, they must believe those accusations deserve just as much to be aired in public as Alice and Chloe’s, or else acknowledge that in both cases there are problems with one-sided grievance sharing.
To me the presumption of motive just doesn’t matter: the point Kat makes with that section is absolutely true, and it doesn’t become less true even if it was motivated by retaliation.
To emphasize that section’s point, again: basically any organization or individual can be made to look like a monster if presented a certain way. This is doubly true of EA organizations in particular, given how generally weird we are.
Personally, I like Ben. What Ben did no doubt took a lot of work and time and effort, and I trust Ben to have been well intentioned throughout it, even if I disagree with decisions he made. I would be pretty sad to learn that he has skeletons in his closet.
But I am not updating on Kat’s section in any meaningful way because I know ~everyone has things in their closets that would look like a skeleton in bad light, and until I get better light I’m not going to live my life jumping at shadows.
It’s clear to me, however, that many people in the community do not have the same attitude or instincts against knee-jerk or vibes-based updates on people from hearsay. Which is fair enough, since I developed mine in part from years of working as a family therapist and mediator. But it’s still a problem for the community if this sort of thing happens again.
I totally sympathize with wanting to just ignore all this and go back to doing meaningful work, and encourage anyone who can do that to do that. But for people who also care about the community’s health, we need a better system than what we’ve got so far for dealing with situations like this.
I feel like I’m confused by what you would find more convincing here given that there was no evidence in the first place that they did say something like that?
Like would them saying “No we didn’t” actually be more persuasive than showing an example of how they did the opposite?
Or like… if we take for granted that words that someone might interpret that way left their mouth, at what point do we stop default trusting the person who clearly feels aggrieved by them and seems willing to exaggerate or lie when they then share those words to others?
There are plenty of context in which the thing alleged is not at all abusive, and plenty of contexts where it is. Without reason to believe they were actually keeping them isolated, I’m not sure how much weight to put on it.
It at least allows people who now trust them again to choose to work with them and have things to point to as to why.
FWIW I think I don’t care how much money she actually made. I care how much money she said she made to NL, and how much she told Ben that she told NL she was making.
If she insinuated high to NL to get the job and then did not own up to that when talking to Ben, that is very hard for me to forgive. Even setting aside the idea that NL might not have hired her in the first place if she accurately represented both her skills and her financial dependence, thus avoiding this whole mess in the first place… it basically treated Ben as an arrow to be fired at people who she felt wronged by, and once again led in an additional way to this whole more recent mess.
And unless I’m misremembering, there’s at least a bit of evidence that Emerson believed she was making ~36k a year and said as much to her, which presumably was not corrected by her after, but even if it was… yeah, it doesn’t look great for Alice here, by my lights.
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.
While I agree that this would largely have been an effective rebuttal that prevented many people from having the vibes-based reactions they’re having, I think it itself excludes a thing I find rather valuable from this post… namely, that the thing that happened here is one that the community (and indeed most if not all communities) did not handle well and I think are overall unprepared for handling in future circumstances.
Open to hearing ways that point could have been made in a different way, but your post still treats this all as “someone said untrue things about us, here’s the evidence they were untrue and our mistakes,” and I think more mistakes were made beyond just NL or Alice/Chloe.
I feel like this response ignores my central points ― my sense that Kat misrepresented/strawmanned the positions of Chloe/Alice/Ben and overall didn’t respond appropriately.
And I disagree, and used one example to point out why the response is not (to me) a misrepresentation or strawman of their positions, but rather treating them as mostly a collection of vague insinuations peppered with specific accusations that NL can only really respond to by presenting all the ways they possibly can how the relationship they’re asserting is not supported by whatever evidence they can actually present.
For goodness sake, one of your points is in the distinction between “told” and “advised.” What, exactly, do you expect NL to say to clarify that distinction that’s more important than the rebuttal of pointing out they invited the boyfriend to travel with them for 2 months? “No, we didn’t say that, nor did we advise it?” There’s no evidence they did say it or “advise” it in the first place! How does a simple denial better rebut either the claim itself or the underlying implications?
These points would still be relevant even in a hypothetical disagreement where there was no financial relationship between the parties.
I think it would be absurdly unfair to take for granted that the non-financial aspects are represented in a non-misleading way if the financial aspects are misrepresented, which is part of why I highlighted that particular point.
What Ben was told by Alice and Chloe seems to me at this point basically entirely a set of “technically true but ultimately misleading” things, along with some strictly false accusations by Alice/Chloe. I’m confused by the insistence that these rebuttals are strawmanning their positions when their positions are themselves dependent on an overarching relationship and vibe and emotional experience, and not a specific set of claims backed by evidence of wrongdoing.
It would be a different story if they had provided their own proof and then NL ignored that proof to instead disprove a different set of things.
I think there should be a norm against treating paraphrases as quotes.
I generally agree, but boy am I confused by your issue with my summarizing that paragraph with that quote. He directly calls them predators. He directly asserts they chewed up and spat out young altruists. If you disagree with either of those, or think there’s some meaningful nuance my quote missed, I’d ask you to explain why.
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.
“My own suspicion is that everyone, even Nonlinear, would have been better off if Nonlinear had just let this lie and instead gone about earning trust by doing good work with normal working relationships.”
I think I’m not sure this is actually possible without having addressed the original claims. The overriding take I felt from the community after Ben’s post was that they were in exile limbo until their side of the story was shared.
I know this is probably a frustrating thing for others to read, but seems worth saying anyway… since making the above comment I’ve had private information shared with me that makes me more confident NL didn’t act in an abusive way regarding this particular issue.
Edited above comment to clarify:
By “hold up” I meant in the emotional takeaway of “NL was abusive,” to be clear, not on the factual “these bank account numbers changed in these ways.” To me hiring someone who turns out to be financially dependent into a position like this is unwise, not abusive. If someone ends up in the financial red in a situation where they are having their living costs covered and being paid a $1k monthly stipend… I am not rushing to pass judgement on them, I am just noting that this seems like a bad fit for this sort of position, which I think NL has more than acknowledged, and if they misled NL about their financial security, that further alleviates NL of some responsibility.
Sorry for not making that more clear. To be extra clear, my takeaway here is “Ben seems like he was led to believe a particular narrative by selective information and the usual emotional spin of only hearing one side.” Not “Ben got specific facts wrong.”
I agree that asking employees to commit illegal acts they wouldn’t normally commit is bad. I qualify it like that be because I’ve known many people who casually break the law in many ways on “victimless crimes” like smoking pot (particularly before it became largely legalized) or getting prescription medicine from others, and I think rationalists/EAs are not unique compared to base rates in skirting laws like this.
Unless the accusers are the sorts of people who don’t, like me, then it would make sense to me if they were asked to do something that seemed in line with their normal behavior. But this is speculation on my part, and I agree that pressuring them in any case would be wrong.
Agree that my epistemic state on this point is also something close to this.
Summarized would be “something like asking her to bring the drugs probably happened, and if so was a mistake that I’d hope was learned from, but the major issue would be if she was pressured to do it, and I’m unsure if I trust the person reporting enough to decide either way without evidence.”
[Edit: I know this is probably a frustrating thing for others to read, but seems worth saying anyway… since making the above comment I’ve had private information shared with me that makes me more confident NL didn’t act in an abusive way regarding this particular 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 agree that this would be a good thing to get clarity on as well, though I think it’s a very dangerous thing to ask people to verify in a public setting? We could take for granted that it’s true if they don’t explicitly deny it, but the issue might matter more or less to different people if it was simply an ask vs if there was pressure to do it.
Personally my take is something like “It would be bad to pressure people to do this if they don’t want to. It would be the kind of mistake I hope someone would learn from if they made it. It affects some level of how hostile and unpleasant the job would feel for people being pressured to do that, but doesn’t affect the other claims of abuse, so while it would be good to know on the basis of how much of the accusers’ experience matched reality vs not, it doesn’t feel cruxy to me on the other issues.”
My read on this is that a lot of the things in Ben’s post are very between-the-lines rather than outright stated. For example, the financial issues all basically only matter if we take for granted that the employees were tricked or manipulated into accepting lower compensation than they wanted, or were put in financial hardship.
Which is very different from the situation Kat’s post seems to show. Like… I don’t really think any of the financial points made in the first one hold up, and without those, what’s left? A She-Said-She-Said about what they were asked to do and whether they were starved and so on, which NL has receipts for.
[Edit after response below: By “hold up” I meant in the emotional takeaway of “NL was abusive,” to be clear, not on the factual “these bank account numbers changed in these ways.” To me hiring someone who turns out to be financially dependent into a position like this is unwise, not abusive. If someone ends up in the financial red in a situation where they are having their living costs covered and being paid a $1k monthly stipend… I am not rushing to pass judgement on them, I am just noting that this seems like a bad fit for this sort of position, which I think NL has more than acknowledged, and if they misled NL about their financial security, that further alleviates NL of some responsibility]Ok, so maybe it’s just a shitty job offer despite the apparent perks? Maybe it is for many people. That doesn’t mean adults shouldn’t be trusted to understand what they’re getting into and use their agency to pull the plug. Regrets after the fact are not the same as manipulation or deception on NL’s part.
And this would still be fine if Ben’s post just said “There are EA orgs making job offers that I think put their employees in vulnerable positions, so people should be more careful about accepting them.” I would even agree to that kind of post, especially if it came after talking to NL about its job offers (which they already apparently said at the time that they’ve reconsidered after the experiences they had).
But what it said was “These people are predators who chew up and spit out bright eyed altruists.” And that feels like a very strong judgement to make, and makes me glad that Kat posted the details about the financial stuff even if it wasn’t claimed directly in Ben’s post to be the result of deception. Because if it’s not… why was it brought up at all? Dislike of the job offers feel like a clash of vibes and difference of opinion on best practice, not predatory action.But what people are left with from Ben’s post is an impression that there was a pattern of abuse and predatory action, and the financial aspect is really important for that. That impression is not solely on Ben’s shoulders; even if Ben’s article is written largely from the perspective of what he believed from what he saw. I think if NL is even half-correct in these rebuttals, Ben was clearly influenced to some degree to reach that conclusion by Chloe and Alice… not even necessarily intentionally, which is why I hesitate to use the word “manipulated,” but just by the nature of how people who feel victimized will naturally selectively tell their side of the story.
This generally applies to the rest of your bullet points, so yeah, I think Ben’s hypothesis that “2 EAs are Secretly Evil” is a pretty good summation of his post’s takeaways, given the assertions he made at the end.
It feels really cruxy to me whether you or Ben received any actual evidence of whether Alice or Chloe had lied or misrepresented anything in that 1 week.
Because to me the actual thing I felt from reading the original post’s “Response from Nonlinear” was largely them engaging in some kind of justification or alternative narrative for the overall practices of Nonlinear… but I didn’t care about that, and honestly it felt like it kind of did worse for them because it almost seemed like they were deflecting from the actual claims of abuse.
To me, if you received 0 evidence that there were any inaccuracies in the accusations against Nonlinear in that 1 week, then I think they really dropped the ball in not prioritizing at least something to show that you shouldn’t trust the original sources. Maybe they just thought they had enough time to talk it out, and maybe it really was just like, woah, we need to dig through records from years ago, this is going to take longer than we expected.
But if you did receive some evidence that maybe Alice and Chloe had lied or exaggerated at all… to me that would absolutely justify waiting another week for more evidence, and being much more cautious about everything else you had heard. And if you didn’t, that’s where I personally would be like “You need to show me something that makes me doubt these reports ASAP.”
I get that worries about retaliation can be scary, particularly if the person in question is being described as effectively a ruthless sociopath who will do anything to crush opposition, including hiring stalkers(?!) and such. But in that situation, my take is not “if this happens at least our public post will be out,” it’s “if this happens it’s time to publish and call the police.”
What feels weird to me is the middle-ground area of “These people are dangerous and might retaliate” and “But as long as we post this soon we’re all safe.” It feels like something people facing the mafia might think, like people would break into homes and wipe hard drives or kidnap people before they could publish.
And if that’s the level of Evil that Alice and Chloe described them as… well, at the very least I’m sympathetic to being “manipulated” if that turns out not to be true. But as a “figuring out how to deal with these situations going forward as a community,” I think it makes sense to treat that as “we were emotionally manipulated” and not “we did due diligence,” unless again Nonlinear did nothing to prove any falsehoods in that first week.
Woops, fixed now, thanks!