Software engineer in Boston, parent, musician. Switched from earning to give to direct work in pandemic mitigation. Married to Julia Wise. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.
Full list of EA posts: jefftk.com/news/ea
Software engineer in Boston, parent, musician. Switched from earning to give to direct work in pandemic mitigation. Married to Julia Wise. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.
Full list of EA posts: jefftk.com/news/ea
Thanks for writing this! I’d been putting something together, but this is much more thorough.
Here are the parts of my draft that I think still add something:
I’m interested in two overlapping questions:
Should Ben have delayed to evaluate NL’s evidence?
Was Nonlinear wrong to threaten to sue?
While I’ve previously advocated giving friendly organizations a chance to review criticism and prepare a response in advance, primarily as a question of politeness, that’s not the issue here. As I commented on the original post, the norm I’ve been pushing is only intended for cases where you have a neutral or better relationship with the organization, and not situations like this one where there are allegations of mistreatment or you don’t trust them to behave cooperatively. The question here instead is, how do you ensure the accusations you’re signal-boosting are true?
Here’s my understanding of the timeline of ‘adversarial’ fact checking before publication: timeline. Three key bits:
LC first shared the overview of claims 3d before posting.
LC first shared the draft 21hr before posting, which included additional accusations
NL responded to both by asking for a week to gather evidence that they claimed would change LC’s mind, and only threatened to sue when LC insisted on going ahead without hearing their side of the story.
Overall, it does look to me like Ben should have waited. That he was still learning his post had additional false accusations right up to publication, including one so close to publication that he didn’t have time to address it, meant he should have expected that if he didn’t delay it would go to publication containing additional false claims. And Ben seems to have understood this, and told NL two days before that “I do expect you’ll be able to show a bunch of the things you said” and “I did update from things you shared that Alice’s reports are less reliable than I had thought”. Additionally, three days (some of which NL was traveling for) is not long to rebut such a long list of accusations, and some of the accusations were shared with NL less than a day in advance of publishing.
Given that I think it’s clear Ben should have given NL some time to assemble conflicting evidence, do I also need to conclude that it was ok for NL to threaten to sue if he didn’t? That is something I really don’t want to do: I’m not a fan of how strict defamation law is, and I think it’s really valuable that it’s almost never used in our community. If we instead had a culture where everyone is being super careful never to say anything that they would lose a suit over I think we’d see a tremendous chilling effect where many true and important things would never come out. This is especially important around allegations of abusive behavior, where proving the truth of anything can be quite difficult and abusers have often taken advantage of this.
On the other hand, defamation law at its best deters people from saying false things, including fact checking before republishing others’ claims, especially in cases where false statements are likely to have strong personal and professional impacts. NL threatening a suit here seems to me like the law used correctly even given the tighter scope I’d like to see for defamation law, and while it’s still not something I would do and I’d be sad if it became common in our community, I don’t think NL was actually wrong to do it.
Note that I’m not making an overall “Nonlinear: yes or no” judgement here; please don’t interpret this post as a view on whether NL mistreated their employees or on how trustworthy their former employees are. I’ve only been looking at the two questions above: should Ben have waited for additional evidence, and was it an unreasonable escalation for NL to threaten to sue.
A few thoughts about how future posts like LC’s could go better:
Be clear about voice. Ben’s post often clarifies that he’s relaying information (“Alice reported that”) but at other times reports Alice or Chloe’s perspective as his own (“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days”). The latter would be warranted if Ben had validated the claims he’s relaying, but my understanding is this was instead just a bit sloppy.
If you have your facts straight you don’t have to give the people you’re writing about a chance to look over a draft and point out errors, and in cases where, for example, people are telling the story of abuse that happened to them that’s often a reasonable decision. On the other hand, especially if you’re reporting on a situation you weren’t a part of, I think you’re really very likely to have some mistakes. Sharing your post’s claims section (you don’t have to share parts of the post that don’t make new claims) for review is really hard to beat as a way of avoiding publishing false claims.
How much time to give for assembling evidence depends on how many claims there are, and I think you can do some prioritization. You can ask if they can provide evidence for some of the places they think you’re most clearly wrong, and if they can’t do a good job with this given a few days I think you’re justified in assuming their claims of counter-evidence are bluster.
When giving time to fact check and gather evidence, get agreement on deadlines up front so things don’t get pushed back repeatedly: “I’ll review anything you get me before EOD Thursday; does that work?” While you should sort out all your claims before starting this process, if you want to add new claims after then you need to push the deadline out to give them more time to respond.
I really like Michael Plant’s comment on a previous post about issues with an EA org (which @Habryka also worked on), responding to someone who thought the post was “charitable and systematic in excess of reasonable caution” and objected to the “fully comprehensive nature of the post and the painstaking lengths it goes to separate out definitely valid issues from potentially invalid ones”:
I take your point as “aren’t we being too nice to this guy?” but I actually really like the approach taken here, which seems extremely fair-minded and diligent. My suspicion is this sort of stuff is long-term really valuable because it establishes good norms for something that will likely recur in future. I’d be much more inclined to act with honesty if I believed people would do an extremely thorough public investigation into everything I’d said, rather than just calling me names and walking away.
If you think that NL was overall in the right then of course LC should have been more careful, but even if you think NL is run by horrible people I think you still should come to that conclusion. This combination of posts and overwhelming amounts of conflicting screenshots and stories seems to have left most of the community not knowing what to think. A post from LC that led with airtight accusations and then included supplementary material for fuzzier issues would have been much more effective towards its goals, enough so that I think more hours spent in ‘adversarial fact checking’, resolving conflicting claims, would have been far more effective per hour than the average for this project.
I almost always post immediately after writing things, since that’s how my motivation works, but in this case I sent my post out for review. I got some good feedback from several people, but now that the top-level post has opened the conversation about appropriate process in situations like these I think talking in public makes more sense.
I don’t see any way you could meaningfully “address” the work/social overlap without trying to get people not to date, live with or befriend people they otherwise would have dated, lived with, or befriended. And if you put it in those terms, it seems messed up, right?
I don’t actually think that’s necessarily messed up? That sometimes your role conflicts with a relationship you’d like to have is unfortunate, but not really avoidable:
A company telling its managers that they can’t date their reports .
A person telling their partner that they can’t date other people.
A person telling their partner that they can’t date a specific other person.
A school telling professors they can’t date their students.
A charity telling their donor services staff that they can’t date major donors.
The person has the option of giving up their role (the manager and report can work with HR to see if either can change roles to remove the conflict, the poly partner can dump the mono one, etc.) but the role’s gatekeeper saying you both can’t keep the role and date the person seems fine in many cases?
The harm isn’t in the harshness or softness of the punishment—it’s friendships nipped in the bud, beautiful relationships that can never even get started. I think people should think harder about the sacrifices that in practice people would have to make, and about how important social relationships are.
In agreement there!
Most of my comments have been trying to say “we should evaluate both sides of these tradeoffs”. Too much of the discussion has been “X has downsides” or “X has upsides” as if these are decisive.
[EDIT: I was assuming from the content of the conversation Sam and Kelsey had some preexisting social connection that made a “talking to a friend” interpretation reasonable. From Kelsey’s tweets people linked elsewhere in this thread it sounds like they didn’t, and all their recent interactions had been around her writing about him as a journalist. I think that makes the ethics much less conflicted.]
I’m conflicted on the ethics of publishing this conversation. I read this as if Sam’s is talking to Kelsey this way because he thought he was talking casually with a friend in her personal capacity. And while the normal journalistic ethics is something like “things are on the record unless we agree otherwise”, that’s only true for professional conversations, right? Like, if Kelsey were talking with a housemate over dinner and then that ended up in a Vox article I would expect everyone would see that as unfair to the housemate? Surely the place you end up isn’t “journalists can’t have honest friendships”, right? Perhaps Kelsey doesn’t think of herself as Sam’s friend, but I can’t see how Kelsey could have gone through that conversation thinking “Sam thinks he’s talking to me as a journalist”.
On the other hand, Sam’s behavior has been harmful enough that I could see an argument that he doesn’t deserve this level of consideration, and falling back on a very technical reading of journalistic ethics is ok?
I think this post is missing how many really positive relationships started with something casual, and how much the ‘plausible deniability’ of a casual start can remove pressure. If you turn flirting with someone from an “I’m open to seeing where this goes” into “I think you might the the one” that’s a high bar. Which means despite the definition of ‘sleeping around’ you’re using looking like it wouldn’t reduce the number of EA marriages and primary relationships I expect it would. Since a lot of EAs in those relationships (hi!) are very happy with them (hi!), this is a cost worth explicitly weighing.
(Writing this despite mostly agreeing with the post and having upvoted it. And also as someone who’s done very little dating and thought I was going to marry everyone I dated.)
I think this is worth talking about, but I think it’s probably a bad idea. I should say up front that I have a pretty strong pro-transparency disposition, and the idea of hiding public things from search engines feels intuitively wrong to me.
I think this has similar problems to the proposal that some posts should be limited to logged-in users, and I see two main downsides:
Discussion of community problems on the Forum is generally more informed and even-handed than I see elsewhere. To take the example of FTX, if you look on the broader internet there was lots of uninformed EA bashing. The discussion on the forum was in many places quite negative, but usually those were places where the negativity was deserved. On most EA community issues the discussion on the Forum is something I would generally want to point interested people at, instead of them developing their perspective with only information available elsewhere.
I expect people would respond to their words being somewhat less publicly visible by starting to talk more as if they are chatting off the record among friends, and that seems very likely to backfire. The Forum has search functionality, RSS feeds, posts with public URLs, and posts and comments are indefinitely persistent. Anyone here who comes across something that rubs them the wrong way can link it to a journalist, journalists can use search, some readers here are journalists, etc. The proposal would make it harder for the lowest effort bashers, but an exchange it sets up a richer pool of material for people who are only slightly more dedicated.
I also just think it’s good for people to be able to find things. If someone is considering getting into EA I do want them to be able to learn about the potential bad things as well as the stuff we’re proud of, and I want them to see the discussions and see how we handle these issues.
I agree that EA should aim to be as good as it could be, but comparisons to other communities are still helpful. If the EA community is worse than others at this kind of thing then maybe:
Someone considering joining should seek out other communities of people trying to do good. (Ex: animal-focused work in EA spaces vs the broader animal advocacy world.)
We should start an unaffiliated group (“Impact Maximizers”) that tries to avoid these problems. (Somewhat like the “Atheism Plus” split.)
We should be figuring what we’re doing differently from most other communities and do more normal things instead. (Ex: this post)
[EDIT: this also feeds into how ashamed people should feel about their association with EA given what’s described here.]
These are quotations from a table that are intended to illustrate “difficult tradeoffs”. Does seeing them in context change your view at all?
(Disclosure: married to Wise)
Putting this here since this is the active thread on the NL situation. Here’s where I currently am:
I think NL pretty clearly acted poorly towards Alice and Chloe. In addition to what Ozy has in this post, the employment situation is really pretty bad. I don’t know how this worked in the other jurisdictions, but Puerto Rico is part of the US and paying someone as an independent contractor when they were really functioning as an employee means you had an employee that you misclassified. And then $1k/mo in PR is well below minimum wage. They may be owed back pay, and consulting an employment lawyer could make sense, though since we’re coming up on the two year mark it would be good to move quickly.
I think some people are sufficiently mature and sophisticated that if they and their employer choose to arrange compensation primarily in kind that’s illegal more like jaywalking is illegal than like shoplifting is illegal. But I don’t think Alice and Chloe fall into this category.
Many of the other issues are downstream from the low compensation. For example, if they had wanted to live separately on their own dime to have clearer live/work boundaries that would have eaten up ~all of the $1k.
I agree with Ozy that NL’s misjudgements here show a really bad fit for their chosen role in connecting and mentoring people.
While I’m overall very glad that LC put the time into collecting this information and writing it up, I think the rushed and chaotic approach to fact checking in the days and hours before publication was unfair to NL, massively increased the noise around this, and may have been enough to make their whole efforts net-negative through a combination of worse outcomes in this case and bad precedent. I think in future cases fact checking without giving the accused an incentive to retaliate against sources to prevent publication is practical with precommitments.
I’m frustrated with myself that in Run Posts By Orgs I didn’t get more into the fact checking benefits, and may have led the LC team to think that the adversarial fact checking stage here was supererogatory.
In general, I think sharing false information is fundamentally unfair to the accused, but if you draft a callout post you’ll almost always have some of this: it’s very difficult to get everything correct when you have only your own perspective and records. Pre-publication fact checking with the accused can mostly fix this, but someone writing about their own experience would then need to be working closely with someone that had hurt them. Since I think that’s too much to ask, we need to be flexible in that case. But when the person writing the post doesn’t have that relationship with the accused, interaction during fact checking doesn’t have the same harms.
Despite my process objections, I don’t think @TracingWoodgrains call to consider this a mistrial can work, and would actually be harmful. We need to do the best we have with the information we have, put things together, gather more information as needed, and make a coherent picture.
I think it might be helpful to look at a simple case, one of the best cases for the claim that your altruistic options differ in expected impact by orders of magnitude, and see if we agree there? Consider two people, both in “the probably neutral role of someone working a ‘bullshit job’”. Both donate a portion of their income to GiveWell’s top charities: one $100k/y and the other $1k/y. Would you agree that the altruistic impact of the first is, ex-ante, 100x that of the second?
And possibly with those numbers humans shouldn’t be dating in general, ignoring EA?
I like GiveDirectly a lot, and I think you’re doing great work! I’m glad to be able to point people to GiveDirectly who are skeptical of less clear cut interventions or who feel very strongly about letting recipients decide what’s most important to them, and I think donations you receive go further than ones to the vast majority of charities.
On the other hand, it doesn’t seem like this post engages with reasons EAs might disagree with the claim that “ending extreme poverty through cash transfers should be a central EA cause”? For example, just within global health and development GiveWell estimates the opportunities they’re able to identify are at least 10x more effective than cash transfers. Do you think cash is undervalued by GiveWell and the EAs who defer to them by >10x?
Which financial claims seem to you like they have been debunked?
The original post uses the low amount of money in Alice’s bank account as a proxy for financial dependence and wealth disparity, which could often be an appropriate proxy but here elides that Alice also owned a business that additionally produced passive income, though there’s disagreement about whether this was in the range of $600/month (your estimate) or $3k/month (what NL claims Alice told them and shows a screenshot of Emerson referencing).
Being owed salary is very different from being owed reimbursements. We have a very strong norm (backed up legally) of paying wages on time. Companies that withhold wages or don’t pay them promptly are generally about to go out of business or doing something super shady. On the other hand, reimbursements normally take some time, and being slow about reimbursements would be only a small negative update on NL.
NL claims the reimbursements were late because Alice stopped filing for reimbursement, and once she did these were immediately paid. If NL is correct here (and this seems pretty likely to me) then this falls entirely on Alice and shouldn’t be included in claims against NL.
One option here could be to lend books instead. Some advantages:
Implies that when you’re done reading the book you don’t need it anymore, as opposed to a religious text which you keep and reference.
While the distributors won’t get all the books back (and that’s fine) the books they do get back they can lend out again.
Less lavish, both in appearance and in reality.
This is what we do at our meetups in Boston.
I agree that the article moves between several situations of issues of hugely varying severity without acknowledging that, and this isn’t very helpful. And I like that EA is able to be a welcoming place for people who enjoy relationship structures that are discriminated against in the wider world. But I did want to push back against one particular piece:
Polyamory is a morally neutral relationship structure that’s practiced happily by lots of people. It doesn’t make you an abuser, or not-an-abuser.
In figuring out how we should view polyamory a key question to me is what it’s effects are. Imagine we could somehow run an experiment where we went back to having a taboo on non-monogamy regardless of partner consent: how would we expect the world to be different? Some predictions I’d make:
People who enjoy polyamorous relationships would be worse off.
Some people would be more productive because they’re less distracted by partner competition.
Other people would be less productive because getting a lot done was part of their approach to partner competition.
Some people would have kids who otherwise wouldn’t, or have kids earlier in life.
...
There would be less of the kind of power abuse described in the article because most high-status men would be married and this would be riskier for them (argued above).
Imagine a similar article talking about how it’s common for people on college campuses to drink and then assault people. While I would agree that drinking alcohol is morally neutral on its own, if it predictably leads to people assaulting each other more than they would in its absence that is one consideration among many for whether to discourage it.
[EDIT: see my response to Kelsey, below—I’m not advocating EAs avoid polyamory]
We don’t have any centralized or formal way of kicking people out of EA. Instead, the closest we have, in cases where someone has done things that are especially egregious, is making sure that everyone who interacts with them is aware. Summarizing the situation in the comments here, on Jacy’s first EA forum post in 3 years (Apology, 2019-03), accomplishes that much more than posting in the open thread.
This is a threaded discussion, so other aspects of the post are still open to anyone interested. Personally, I don’t think Jacy should be in the EA movement and won’t be engaging in any of the threads below.
If SBF wanted to buy Twitter for non-EA reasons, that’s one thing, but if the idea here is that purchasingTwitter alongside Elon Musk is actually worth billions of dollars from an EA perspective, I would need to see way more analysis, much like significant analysis has been done for AI safety, biorisk, animal welfare, and global health and poverty.
If you think investing in Twitter is close to neutral from an investment perspective (maybe reasonable at the time, definitely not by the time Musk was forced to close) then the opportunity cost isn’t really billions of dollars. Possibly this would have been an example of marginal charity.
A lot of these are phrased in ways that immediately sound like “oh, well of course you wouldn’t do that”, but the situations in which people end up doing them are generally much more ambiguous. When I think over my ~15y in the workplace I can find examples of essentially all of these, in my life or a close coworker, that I wouldn’t classify as probably a bad idea:
Live with coworkers, especially when there is a power differential and especially when there is a direct report relationship
In ~2016 one of my housemates who I’d been friends with for 5+ years recruited another of my housemates (who I’d been friends with for 10+ years) to join an EA-aligned company. The next year they recruited me as well. None of us reported to each other, but both of them were tenants of mine (my wife and I owned the house) and we were something like three of five people working for the company in Boston at the time.
I do think there was risk here, but I also think it was a pretty small one, and this would not have been a good reason for either me or my other housemate to say “sorry, not going to consider this job”.
Date coworkers, especially when there is a power differential and especially when there is a direct report relationship
In ~2018 while I was working on a team of ~20 at a tech company, two of my coworkers (reporting peers of each other, but I think maybe one was the tech lead of the other) realized they liked each other. They talked to our manager and HR, one of them moved to another team, and they started dating. As of when I last caught up with them a few months ago they were still together. There was definitely risk here, but from the outside it seems like the process for handling it was good, and it would be really sad for both of them if this relationship hadn’t happened.
In ~2008 my girlfriend (now wife) and I applied for a seasonal job where we’d both be working in the kitchen. We disclosed this relationship to the hiring manager, and while I would normally have reported to the person in my girlfriend’s role they set things up so I’d report to someone else. This wasn’t an issue, and I think refusing to hire us because we were dating would have been worse for both the employer and us. Some coworkers dated each other while we were there, and I think this was generally positive.
On the other hand, cases where the organization does not adjust the org chart in response to relationships are much more risky and almost always a bad idea. Managers shouldn’t date their reports, and neither should anyone date someone where they have significant power over their career. This does mean sometimes choosing between exploring the possibility of a relationship and continuing specific career plans.
Promote drug use among coworkers, including legal drugs, and including alcohol and stimulants
Something like every place I’ve worked made alcohol available to employees in social situations, plus caffeine in ~all situations. If this had been cocaine I think we’d clearly see that as promoting cocaine consumption.
Pressuring people to consume drugs seems quite different, and that I’d agree is almost never a good idea.
Live with their funders/grantees, especially when substantial conflict-of-interest mechanisms are not active … Date their funders/grantees, especially when substantial conflict-of-interest mechanisms are not active
In ~2015 when I was earning to give a large portion of my earnings went to CEA, which employed my wife (who I also lived with). When the EA Infra fund became available I started donating there instead, because a dynamic where I was donating to my wife’s employer didn’t seem ideal, but I don’t think this was so risky that I should have refrained from donating to CEA until then.
How risky this category is depends a lot on how large a portion of the relationship each party is. In ~2015 my donations to CEA were ~$85k, which (I think) was a single-digit portion of their fundraising and my wife was one of ~20 employees. There’s also a sense in which this is different because once I earned the money it was legally joint property with my wife, though at the time our agreement was we each chose where our earnings went.
I do agree that this category is generally pretty risky, though, and how you handle CoI matters a lot.
Date the partner of their funder/grantee, especially when substantial conflict-of-interest mechanisms are not active
No direct experience with this one (not polyamorous) thought it seems like a slightly weaker case of the previous one.
Retain someone as a full-time contractor or grant recipient for the long term, especially when it might not adhere to legal guidelines
I agree we should follow the law on contractors vs employees, but I don’t actually understand what this is trying to get at beyond that? What’s the sort of situation it’s trying to avoid?
Offer employer-provided housing for more than a predefined and very short period of time, thereby making an employee’s housing dependent on their continued employment and allowing an employer access to an employee’s personal living space
In ~2017 I was considering accepting an offer to work for a for-profit EA-adjacent startup in Africa, and the offer to provide housing was a strong positive. In moving to a very different environment, having the support of coworkers who’ve gone through something similar sounded really valuable.
From ~2016-2020 my wife and I employed a series of au pairs to watch our kids, which included providing them a room in our house.
In ~2008 my girlfriend (now wife) and I worked at a seasonal job in a rural area, which included on-site housing. Not having to commute was a strong positive.
...
Now, for all of these I can also easily imagine cases where the risk was not worth it and it went poorly, but I think “probably shouldn’t do” is too strong overall.
Another debunked financial claim: Ben’s original post has:
Chloe’s salary was verbally agreed to come out to around $75k/year. However, she was only paid $1k/month, and otherwise had many basic things compensated i.e. rent, groceries, travel.
Nonlinear provided screenshots of:
An employment agreement stating $1k/month + expenses
NL texting Chloe before she started that the stipend was $1k/month and Chloe confirming
A transcript of the employment interview where NL told Chloe it was a $1k/month stipend + expenses, which they thought was about as valuable as a $70k/year salary.
While it is common for funders to serve on boards, it is not necessarily best practice.
This phrasing is a bit weasely. Is the claim that it’s bad for funders to serve on boards? That it is not best practice? If that’s what you think, why do you think that?
(Given how much of EVF’s budget comes from OP, them having representation on EVF’s board seems reasonable to me.)
I had missed that; thank you for pointing it out!
While using quotation marks for paraphrase or when recounting something as best as you recall is occasionally done in English writing, primarily in casual contexts, I think it’s a very poor choice for this post. Lots of people are reading this trying to decide who to trust, and direct quotes and paraphrase have very different weight. Conflating them, especially in a way where many readers will think the paraphrases are direct quotes, makes it much harder for people to come away from this document with a more accurate understanding of what happened.
Perhaps using different markers (ex: “«” and “»”) for paraphrase would make sense here?