Lukas_Gloor

Karma: 6,816

Lukas_Gloor Dec 20, 2023, 2:00 AM
33 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
I think the questions you’re raising are important. I got kind of triggered by the issue I pointed out (and the fact that it’s something that has already been discussed in the comments of the other post), so I downvoted the comment overall. (Also, just because Chloe is currently anonymous doesn’t mean it’s risk-free to imply misleading and damaging things about her – anonymity can be fragile.)

There were many parts of your comment that I agree with. I agree that we probably shouldn’t have a norm that guarantees anonymity unconditionally. (But the anonymity protection needs to be strong enough that, if someone temporarily riles up public sentiment against the whistleblowers, people won’t jump to de-anonymizing [or to other, perhaps more targeted/discreet appropriate measures, such as the one suggested by Ivy here] too quickly; instead, the process there should be diligent and fair as well, just like an initial investigation prompted by the whistleblowers should be. (Not saying that this contradicts any of what you were suggesting!)

When things get heated and people downvote each others comments, it might be good to focus on things we do (probably) agree on. As I said on the Lesswrong version of this post:
Here are the list of values that are important to me about this whole affair and context:
- I want whistleblower-type stuff to come to light because I think the damage bad leaders can do is often very large
- I want investigations to be fair. In many cases, this means giving accused parties time to respond
- I understand that there’s a phenotype of personality where someone has a habit of bad-talking others through false/misleading/distorted claims, and I think investigations (and analysis) should be aware of that
(FWIW, I assume that most people who vehemently disagree with me about some of the things I say in this comment and elsewhere would still endorse these above values.)

Lukas_Gloor Dec 20, 2023, 12:39 AM
39 points
14 ∶ 2
in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
So, what do you all think?
I continue to think that something went wrong for people to come away with takes that lump together Alice and Chloe in these ways.
Not because I’m convinced that Alice is as bad as Nonlinear makes it sound, but because, even based on Nonlinear’s portrayal, Chloe is portrayed as having had a poor reaction to the specific employment situation, and (unlike Alice) not as having a general pattern/history of making false/misleading claims. That difference matters immensely regarding whether it’s appropriate to warn future potential employers. (Besides, when I directly compare Chloe’s writings to Nonlinear’s, I find it more likely that they’re unfair towards her than vice versa.)
FWIW, I’m not saying that coming away with this interpretation is all your fault. If someone is only skim-reading Nonlinear’s post, then I can see why they might form similarly negative views about both Alice and Chloe (though, on close reading, it’s apparent that also Nonlinear would agree that there’s a difference). My point is that this is more a feature of their black-and-white counterattack narrative and not so much appropriate for what I think most likely happened.

Lukas_Gloor Dec 14, 2023, 4:49 PM
38 points
8 ∶ 2
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I do understand where people are coming from defending Nonlinear. Even if, like me, someone thinks there’s a lot about them that didn’t go well or that doesn’t look good in terms of their processing and reflection skills, it’s still important that the “flagship accusations” [edit: this was a poor choice of words, I should have said “smoking-gun, most outrageous-sounding examples of the accusations.” The original post by Ben – search for “summary of my epistemic state” here – listed four bullet points as the main concerns, and I think ³⁄₄ of those still seem obviously strong to me, while the 3rd point is something I’m now more unsure of.] in the original post were mostly wrong, so I’m like, “Did they deserve to go through this public trial?,” maybe not! At the same time, it wouldn’t feel ideal either to pretend like I don’t now have significant concerns about them. And then, what creates additional pressure to keep arguing the point, is that it seems like they’ve succeeded at convincing quite a few people that Chloe might be a malefactor (lending some credibility to initial fears of retaliation), when my best guess is that this isn’t the case at all. To be fair, Chloe is currently protected by anonymity, so you could argue this is the smaller issue. However, some people contemplated de-anonymizing both Chloe and Alice, and I’m truly shocked by the suggestion to de-anonymize Chloe, especially since the message this would be sending is something like, “public judgment that the community considers her a bad actor.” For these reasons, I felt compelled to press the point that I think Nonlinear look bad to me in many ways both regarding initial events under discussion and related to how they now speak about Chloe, even though I’m also sympathetic to the viewpoint of “maybe let it be, they’ve gone through enough.”

Lukas_Gloor Dec 14, 2023, 11:42 AM
29 points
11 ∶ 3
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Note that I didn’t go through all the pages of the appendix looking for something particularly worthy of critique. Instead, I remembered that Chloe’s comments in her own words seemed quite compelling to me three months ago, so I wanted to re-read it and compare it to what Nonlinear wrote about this incident. When I did so, I thought “wow this is worse than I thought; this warrants its own comment.” Note that this is one of the only times I went back to source material and compared it directly to Nonlinear’s appendix.
I feel the same way about what happened itself. [...] It also is completely normal. I would expect that you can find anecdotes like this one from people who are more considerate than average. Not if you meet them for a day, but if you’re with them for several months.
I doubt you can find anecdotes like this from people who are more considerate than average. (But also, I think this would be too high of a standard.)
In any case, I think the gist of your point is reasonable and I might interpret this evidence the same way you do if I had more favorable priors from other places of the discussion.
I just think “Why would you have more favorable priors from other places of the discussion, given that what I pointed out is probably more typical than outlier-y.”
And I’d say the same for this document. You shouldn’t ask “can I find serious errors with this document?” because the answer is bound to be yes, it should be “can I find really egregious errors?”
The following isn’t an “egregious error” exactly, but I think the whole document is outlier-y across the dimension of “how forcefully do they try to push a black-and-white narrative?” They tell us strong things about how to interpret Chloe’s motivations when it doesn’t even pass the test of representing her points accurately. I’m concerned about this and it’s one thing that goes into me having less favorable priors than you do when I then go on to evaluate individual anecdotes and their weight.

Lukas_Gloor Dec 14, 2023, 2:58 AM
88 points
23 ∶ 3
on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I find it interesting and revealing to look at how Nonlinear re-stated Chloe’s initial account of an incident into a shorter version.
First, here’s their shortened version (by Nonlinear):
One of Chloe’s jobs was to organize fun day trips (which she’d join us on). In fact, one of her unofficial titles was Fun Lord of Nonlinear, First of Her Name. One day, spontaneously, we decided to go on a trip to St. Barths. Emerson asked her to do her usual job, and she said “It’s a weekend” and he said, “But you like organizing fun trips!”—she had said so many times—and she said sure.
She continued doing her job (arranging ATV rentals for the group—herself getting to ride as well of course). Then, when she complained, Emerson said “OK” and then just… went and did her job for her. And that was that.
(This is another example of Chloe coming in with the implicit frame that doing her job is abusive. “Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer.” We can empathize with her wishing she could join us before finishing her job, but this was her job. Being an assistant is not abuse.)
The day after she talks to me about it, how she wants to not have work spontaneously sprung on her on a break day. I agree with her. I think break days should be sacred. I talk to Emerson about it and tell him that he can’t do that, and that we cannot spring work on her on break days unless they’re an actual emergency. He disagrees because he thinks it’s totally normal for startup employees to ocassionally work on weekends, but I insist, and that’s that.
We proceed to only ask her to do her job on work days. She must just not remember that we set up this policy. But we did.
For comparison, here’s Chloe’s original:
There was a time during our stay at St Martin when I was overwhelmed from living and seeing only the same people every single day and needed a day off. Sometimes I’d become so overwhelmed I became really bad at formulating sentences and being in social contexts so I’d take a day off and go somewhere on the island where I could be on my own, away from the whole team—I’ve never before and after experienced an actual lack of being able to formulate sentences just from being around the same people for too long. This was one of these times. We had guests over and the team with the guests had decided in the morning that it’s a good vacation day for going to St Barths. I laid low because I thought since I’m also on a weekend day, it would not be mine to organize (me and Kat would take off Tuesdays and Saturdays, these were sometimes called weekend or vacation days).
Emerson approaches me to ask if I can set up the trip. I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself. He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”. I don’t know how to respond nor how to get out of it, I don’t feel like I have the energy to negotiate with him so I start work, hoping that if I get it done quickly, I can have the rest of the day for myself.
I didn’t have time to eat, had just woken up, and the actual task itself required to rally up 7 people and figure out their passport situation as well as if they want to join. St Barths means entering a different country, which meant that I needed to check in with the passport as well as covid requirements and whether all 7 people can actually join. I needed to quickly book some ferry tickets there and back for the day, rally the people to the cars and get to the ferry—all of this within less than an hour. We were late and annoyed the ferry employees—but this is one of the things generally ignored by the Nonlinear team, us being late but getting our way is a sign of our agency and how we aren’t NPCs that just follow the prescribed ferry times—they’re negotiable after all, if we can get away with getting to St Barths anyway.
I thought my work was done. We got to the island, my plan was to make the most of it and go on my own somewhere but Emerson says he wants an ATV to travel around with and without an ATV it’s a bit pointless. Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer. All ATVs have been rented out—it’s tourist season. I check back in, Emerson says I need to call all the places on the island and keep trying. I call all the places I can find, this is about 10 places (small island). No luck. Eventually Emerson agrees that using a moped will be okay, and that’s when I get relieved from my work tasks.
I did describe this to Kat in my next meeting with her that it’s not okay for me to have to do work tasks while I’m on my weekends, and she agreed but we struggled to figure out a solution that would make sense. It remained more of a “let’s see how this plays out”.
It’s probably best for readers to think first about whether they feel like the summary omits important things. I think it’s fine to omit some things and mostly describe the incident from Kat and Emerson’s perspective. But I think not mentioning the following three things, at least, is pretty bad form and misleading:
- There’s a huge difference between
  “I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself”
  versus
  “Emerson asked her to do her usual job, and she said “It’s a weekend”
  This difference above really changes the context for
  ”He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”.”
  Basically, for the version where Chloe only said “It’s a weekend,” it’s defensible to interpret Emerson’s reply as a friendly negotiation attempt. By contrast, in the version where Chloe says “I really need the vacation day for myself,” the comment that most readily comes to my hyperbole-prone mind for “But organizing stuff is fun for you!” is “psychopathic.”
  (To be fair, it could be that Chloe failed at expressing just how much she needed that day off – I think that’s a common pattern with many people to struggle with voicing their needs and limits. Even so, I think it’s bad form by Nonlinear to not acknowledge this discrepancy of accounts and instead impose their own framing on Chloe’s account. It feels like trying to alter the frame covertly rather than discussing what happened in the open.) (Not to mention that “she said so many times” (about liking to organize trips) is totally beside the point, and pretending otherwise is bizarre. Like, if they can’t even get this right here on the forum after three months of thinking about it, things don’t look good.)
- I think it’s not okay to omit relevant context when they summarized the following passage:
  ”(This is another example of Chloe coming in with the implicit frame that doing her job is abusive. “Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer.” We can empathize with her wishing she could join us before finishing her job, but this was her job. Being an assistant is not abuse.)”
  They make it seem like Chloe was complaining about normal work on a normal work day. However, in this story, Chloe had agreed here to work on a weekend and she only expected that she had to organize the trip (St Martin and back) and nothing else. Getting the ATV rentals while everyone else was having coffee was yet another unexpected task on her off day. It’s a very different thing to feel bad about unexpected new tasks coming up on your off day after you already felt like you got talked into doing more than you wanted, than it is to feel bad about normal work while your bosses are resting. It feels unfair not to acknowledge the true source of Chloe’s discontent in this specific story about the cafe.
- Chloe doesn’t seem to agree with the following description:
  “Then, when she complained, Emerson said “OK” and then just… went and did her job for her.”
  Here, what Nonlinear omitted was this contradicting passage in Chloe’s account:
  ”All ATVs have been rented out—it’s tourist season. I check back in, Emerson says I need to call all the places on the island and keep trying. I call all the places I can find, this is about 10 places (small island). No luck. Eventually Emerson agrees that using a moped will be okay, and that’s when I get relieved from my work tasks.”
  It’s strange to omit this. It sounds like Emerson insisted that she made ten phone calls before dropping the idea. To me, it feels quite demanding to ask your assistant to go to such great lengths on what was initially an off day for them (or at all, tbh), especially if you can probably infer based on their mood and behavior that they’re not in the happiest and most energetic of states.
In any case, this is the sort of thing that makes me feel like “Nonlinear are being unfair and somewhat sneaky in their presentation.”

To be clear, I’m not necessarily accusing them of deliberately misrepresenting what Chloe said. They might reasonably reply, “We know Chloe said different things; after all, we linked to her long comment and we think forum readers can read for themselves. We decided to showcase our side of the story, how we remember it.” However, even if that’s how they reply, I think it’s not okay to do things underhandedly like that, especially when they then go on and make strong negative statements about Chloe’s entitlement and bad attitude based on their version of events, without flagging that Chloe disagrees about so much of the context. Doing things underhandedly is manipulative because it hides possible points of disagreement, making it seem like their version of the story is more obviously accurate/objective than it actually is.
What links here?
- Lukas_Gloor's comment on Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by TracingWoodgrains (Dec 20, 2023, 12:39 AM; 39 points)
- Lukas_Gloor's comment on Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims by Kat Woods (Dec 14, 2023, 1:40 AM; 20 points)

Lukas_Gloor Dec 14, 2023, 1:40 AM
20 points
7 ∶ 1
in reply to: Kerry_Vaughan’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Yeah.

Let’s assume Nonlinear are completely right about how they describe Chloe and Alice. I’d summarize their perspective as follows:
Alice-as-described-by-Nonlinear is likely to be destructive in other contexts as well because that is a strong pattern with her generally. :(

By contrast,
Chloe-as-described-by-Nonlinear is significantly less likely to be destructive in other contexts. While Nonlinear claim that Chloe is entitled, it’s still the case that her beef with them is largely around the tensions of living together (primes her to expect equal-ness and friendship) combined with her having to do tasks for them that make her feel like her time isn’t being valued. (Plus things around the vagueness of her role and her being repeatedly negatively surprised by things they expect of her or ways they treat her.)

Even if you take Nonlinear’s account at face value, it seems like you’d have a lot of uncertainty about the claim “Chloe is likely to be destructive in other contexts.”

Lastly, I again want to flag that I don’t consider it established that Chloe is entitled or unreliable. ((To some degree, the same caveats may also apply to claims about Alice, but I haven’t focused on that much because it seems like Nonlinear have a lot of anonymized evidence?, and it’s hard to argue with that..., plus even Ben acknowledged that Alice feels like less reliable a source than Chloe.)) I don’t think someone has to be entitled to feel devalued doing assistant-type tasks for others. It really depends on how you’re treated. It’s a bit suspicious that an assistant feeling unvalued is framed as “the assistant didn’t like being an assistant.” Sure, this could be true. But it could also be true that the assistant simply didn’t like aspects of how they were treated, and these things can be subtle and not easy to explain, but we all know that there are “horrible bosses” and “entitled bosses,” so it’s not like this is a complaint with a very low base rate. For these reasons, I’m still quite skeptical of many of the claims against Chloe, even though I’d say the Nonlinear document has updated me in their direction somewhat.
Edit to add: In case some people lack some of the relevant context, this is Chloe in her own words. I think she comes across well and in a purely vibes-based way, I trust her narration more than I trust the Nonlinear texts. (Not to mention that Nonlinear in their document simply cut out or selectively quoted/re-stated/paraphrased passages in her stories/accounts to make it seem less compelling. Like, a lot of her specific complaints there feel like they aren’t addressed well or at all by Nonlinear. Update: see my comment here for examples.)
What links here?
- Lukas_Gloor's comment on Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by TracingWoodgrains (Dec 20, 2023, 12:39 AM; 39 points)

Lukas_Gloor Dec 13, 2023, 11:13 PM
36 points
13 ∶ 6
in reply to: Kerry_Vaughan’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I don’t know who Chloe is in real life (nor Alice for that matter), but based on what I’ve read, it seems really really off to me to say that she has the potential to be destructive to others in the community. [Edit: I guess you’re not outright saying that, but I’m reading your comment as “if all that Nonlinear are saying about Chloe is true, then...,” and my take on that is that apart from their statements of the sort of “Chloe is so mentally unhealthy that she makes things up” (paraphrased), none of the concrete claims are obviously red flags to me. It’s certainly not great to say things in misleading ways, but it can happen in the heat of battle. Also, I want to flag that we haven’t heard Chloe’s reply to Nonlinear’s presentation, so I don’t consider it established that she’s less reliable than, e.g., the typical person, or Nonlinear themselves. On the compensation dispute for instance, I can see interpretations where it made sense for Chloe to feel misled – see also the fact check exercise someone has done.]

I think something has gone wrong for someone to even bring up this point. (I can see where you’re coming from regarding Alice, if claims about her are correct.) I feel like we wouldn’t be entertaining that possibility if Nonlinear hadn’t lumped Chloe and Alice together and written their post in a unfairly-narrativizing style.

Update: 1h after posting this comment (and long after the edit I made above), this post currently sits at −5 karma and 9 voters. Will be interesting to see where it ends up. I continue to think that something has gone wrong.
What links here?
- Lukas_Gloor's comment on Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by TracingWoodgrains (Dec 20, 2023, 12:39 AM; 39 points)

Lukas_Gloor Dec 13, 2023, 3:11 PM
34 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: Wil Perkins’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Why are you saying “these orgs”? I feel like even though it’s common in EAs to use money to buy time and productivity, combining world travels and living in luxury locations with impactful work is something that was unique to Nonlinear as far as I’m aware.

Also, why are you assuming it’s “donated money” that was used for this, rather than them having earmarked funding for specific projects while they use Emerson’s savings (seems rich or has rich parents) for the luxury expenses? I mean, sure, earmarking is a fuzzy concept, but are you saying that people with independent wealth are prohibited to also fundraise for charitable work they’re doing unless they cut down on the lifestyle they could already independently afford?

I feel like, the important question here is “Do you have a reason to believe that specific Nonlinear donors were misled about the use of funds?” If not, then there’s nothing to complain about.

To be clear, I’m not ruling out that donors were misled here. I just think there’s not necessarily a ton of reason to believe this at this stage, so we should be cautions with the outrage buttons. And only going by pictures with not much about the specifics of this org or the broader context isn’t helpful. (For instance, regarding the broader context, I feel like Nonlinear probably overstates how connected they are to AI safety, so this thing should probably be at most a small update about how AI safety is done and funded more generally within EA.)

Lukas_Gloor Dec 13, 2023, 3:13 AM
20 points
5 ∶ 2
in reply to: Kat Woods’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
On this point, your reply seems very compelling to me. ((Though it’s at least imaginable that Chloe would point out ways in which this is misleading – e.g., maybe her bf had “EA potential” or got along well with Emerson or you and some other friends of hers didn’t, and maybe someone made comments about her other friends. Idk.))

I think it’s important to not hold people to unreasonable standards when they try to present a lot of evidence. If this (the invites allowed list) is one of only few instances where it’s overstated how important a particular piece of evidence is, then that’s still totally compatible with a high degree of objectivity!

I overall felt like there were some other places where I was uncertain how much to update, while your wording “wanted” me to make a very big update. But I also think these things can be hard to judge.

Lukas_Gloor Dec 13, 2023, 2:44 AM
15 points
7 ∶ 2
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Overall, there just feels like too little engagement with the possibility that Chloe’s experience was maybe predictable and not out of the ordinary, i.e., that Chloe wasn’t entitled or disgruntled to react the way she did.
To give some more context on this:

Let’s take the claim that it was discouraged to talk to friends or family (this was one of the things were I thought Nonlinear’s reply seemed more convincing than I would have expected, but still leaves me with uncertainty rather than settling everything for sure).

Nonlinear links to a screenshot with a policy named “Internal: policy for inviting guests.” The policy mentions “friends and family.” Nonlinear frame this as follows. Chloe was lying to claim that she was discouraged from talking to them, because the policy says otherwise. Because she was lying about it, we should discount what she says on other issues.
I’m thinking “maybe, but there are other possibilities.”

Firstly, I’m curious what the following phrase is about “the above roughly reflects the priority list as well.” Is “the priority list” a separate thing? Or is this talking about a ranking of priorities from top to bottom? Even if there’s no intended ranking from top to bottom, I feel like it’s not outlandish to come away with the impression that “friends and family” was maybe added somewhat grudgingly rather than enthusiastically, since another section in the screenshot justifies having visitors with “it can have an extremely high impact to have different people join us” and compares it to a “constant EAG.” (These things apply a lot less to family or EA-disinterested friends.)

Also, sometimes written policies don’t capture implicit sentiments. It’s possible for a policy to say “it’s okay/encouraged to do x” while simultaneously there’s some social pressure in the group to do very little x.
The discussion about the screenshot made it seem like the screenshot settles everything.
Instead, I’d have thought it’s more balanced to say something like “this screenshot at the very least shows that it wasn’t our official policy to discourage these things, so Chloe/Alice should have mentioned this for fairness reasons.”

Lukas_Gloor Dec 13, 2023, 2:10 AM
205 points
45 ∶ 4
on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I read this post and about half of the appendix.

(1) I updated significantly in the direction of “Nonlinear leadership has a better case for themselves than I initially thought” and “it seems likely to me that the initial post indeed was somewhat careless with fact-checking.”

(I’m still confused about some of the fact-checking claims, especially the specific degree to which Emerson flagged early on that there were dozens of extreme falsehoods, or whether this only happened when Ben said that he was about to publish the post. Is it maybe possible that Emerson’s initial reply had little else besides “Some points still require clarification,” and Emerson only later conveyed how strongly he disagreed with the overall summary once he realized that Ben was basically set on publishing on a 2h notice? If so, that’s very different from Ben being told in the very first email reply that Nonlinear’s stance on this is basically “good summary, but also dozens of claims are completely false and we can document that.” That’s such a stark difference, so it feels to me like there was miscommunication going on.)

At the same time:

(2) I still find Chloe’s broad perspective credible and concerning (in a “this is difficult work environment with definite potential for toxicity” rather than “this is outright abusive on all reasonable definitions of the word”). The replies by Nonlinear leadership didn’t change my initial opinion here by too much because there are features of how Kat and Emerson are presenting their side of things that make me think “ah, I see it: not surprised Chloe felt negative emotions about her perceived standing in relation to them.” (Admittedly, I think if I applied more charitable priors here, I could see alternative explanations like “the negative features I believe I see here are best explained by Kat and Emerson feeling hurt and upset by things Chloe said, so they come across as defensive and one-sided in return, but they’d be better able to see and re-state Chloe’s perspective if they were more distanced from the events, and may have been better at seeing Chloe’s perspective earlier, before they all had a falling out.”)

To elaborate on (1):
- If Nonlinear’s description of Alice is even halfway accurate, then I feel like Ben should have decided not to air any of her claims altogether, and only gone with Chloe as the single source. This would have made clear that the picture is one of mostly just one person. This would probably have changed the forcefulness of the post by quite a bit, which would’ve been less immediately condemning towards Nonlinear (making the resulting discussion fairer).
- I also thought some of the replies Nonlinear gave towards Chloe seemed more persuasive than I would’ve expected. (At the same time, I think many of their replies seemed roughly what I would have expected, and in fact seem arguably revealing to me in some ways – see my point below on “(2).” [I guess the people who disagree with me will think I’m still influenced by the priors I’ve formed from the previous discussion, and that it’s hard to be objective after having initially formed a negative-leaning view.])
To elaborate on (2)
- I didn’t like the repeated mentions of phrases like “this would have been your dream day!” or “to many [...], this would have been their dream job!.” Sure, I get where this is coming from: Contrasted with accusations of not feeding people well or not paying them enough money, it makes sense to highlight that the role had lots of perks. At the same time, the lengths to which they went to highlight this, and the talk about hanging out with other high-status community heroes, gave me too much of a feeling that they almost expected Chloe and Alice to feel indebted towards them. I can see how this attitude would lead to difficult dynamics in a setting where you’re co-living and forming “what-can-feel-like-friendships” with people you also expect to do all sorts of tasks for you.
- Relatedly, it’s begging the question to self-describe your group with “Your group has a really optimistic and warm vibe. There’s this sense in the group that anything is possible if you are just creative, brave, and never give up. It feels really empowering and inspiring.” It’s fair if Kat or Emerson perceived their group that way, but, evidently, Chloe felt very different about it. So, it feels like it’s not hearing her perspective when they describe things like that. This is a strange disconnect. (As another commenter pointed out, there’s a similar disconnect with posting the pictures of social fun and tropic scenery, without at least pointing out that it’s not actually what most of the discussion was about. I get the desire to share pictures, fwiw, but I think this could’ve been embedded with a framing that acknowledges the disconnect issue.) (Also relatedly: On “warm vibes,” I’m remembering some of the screenshots in the food-ordering discussion made me feel like “I can see why Chloe wouldn’t necessarily feel like they’re being super warm towards her.” Not in a way that’s too bad or anything, but, Idk, something about how much value is put on productivity and the ability to negotiate, as opposed to, e.g., going out of one’s way to make sure Chloe feels comfortable voicing whenever she struggles with something or needs something when she’s sick or feeling low. [I’m not claiming that all employers need to be particularly warm or proactive about encouraging their employees to become better at asking for their basic needs to be met; I’m just pointing out that it’s problematic if there’s a mismatch between self-perceived warmth vibes and actual effect one has on others, combined with risky work setups like isolated travels and co-working with people who do tasks for you, and blurring potential-for-friendship and professional interactions.]) Overall, there just feels like too little engagement with the possibility that Chloe’s experience was maybe predictable and not out of the ordinary, i.e., that Chloe wasn’t entitled or disgruntled to react the way she did.
- I thought some of the short-summary replies to Chloe seemed uncharitable to the point of being mean. For instance, this part: “CHLOE: I had unclear work boundaries and was pressured into working on a weekend (implies this was a regular occurrence). NONLINEAR: “My boss offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean island St. Barths, which required one hour of work to arrange the boat and ATV rentals (for me to enjoy too). But it was one hour on a weekend, so I complained, and it never happened again.” I remember reading Chloe’s account of this incident and it felt very different to me. When I read Chloe’s account, I could easily see where she was coming from. I admit that it’s okay to use hyperbole in a summary. Maybe they thought it’s okay because everyone can see that this is meant somewhat hyperbolically. However, the following is a case where it’s more unambiguously mean-spirited rather than just hyperbolic: “Complex situations she herself cites: ordering a taxi, asking for a ride, packing suitcases. [...] This is some of the best public evidence of her being mentally unwell. These are not overwhelming tasks for most people.” I feel like this is very unfair. Having read Chloe’s descriptions, I’d say it fails to engage with what makes these things complicated (people having various strong preferences about specifics related to the tasks, and you have juggle all of them and make everyone happy, while taking care of other constraints + brain fog from having worked too much before the weekend you’re supposed to have off).
- “So how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?” Maybe this is a minor point, but I don’t like this style of “writing things as though it’s now conclusively established that Ben and Chloe were in the wrong, so we can move on to lessons learned given that specific conclusion.” It feels premature. I also didn’t like this part: “I wish I could think that Alice, Ben, and Chloe were villains.” Ben and Chloe get tainted by association with Alice. The points made by Nonlinear against Alice are way more concerning-if-true than the points made against Chloe or Ben. (I’m not sure about the degree to which they are contested because some of it goes well beyond earlier things that were said about Alice, and people who know more context about Alice, which doesn’t describe me at all, haven’t had the chance to comment on this.)
- Overall, I thought it’s simply implausible that the most Nonlinear leadership could come up with in terms of “things we could’ve done differently” (see their appendix on this) is stuff like “Emerson shouldn’t have snapped at Chloe during that one stressful day” or “we shouldn’t have have lived together with employees who weren’t previously assistants because, apparently, such employees cannot handle it and will think we’re friends.” (I’m being admittedly a bit unfair/hyperbolic here; also, note that there were like two or three other short items.) To be more fair, I realize that when you’re faced with lots of false accusations (and I agree many of the claims now seem dubious to me and probably uncalled for!), it’s understandable to focus mostly on defending yourself and on highlighting how outrageous everything is. However, I think there are several reasons to also focus a lot on what one could’ve done better. One: I think there’s almost always something one can learn from conflicts, even if one is genuinely 98% percent in the right and dealing with a person who has an unhealthy relationship to their own negative emotions that turn them into a wrecking ball of toxicity. Secondly, it’s sometimes hard to be right about things like that, so one kind of has a duty, when “fighting back,” to make sure one isn’t the one “in the wrong” rationalizing one’s negative perspective of the other party. Thirdly, and very related to the previous point, I feel like pointing out what one could’ve done differently is some of the more reliable types of evidence one can readily give in favor of not being someone who looks at things in a one-sided and distorted fashion. So, even if this is just about making sure one’s defense is credible, it’s strategically smart to inspect and point out what didn’t go well. Lastly, I noticed that the post and appendix by Nonlinear is quite well-written in terms of persuasive rhetoric across a number of dimensions, which makes me think that them not including a more comprehensive takeaways/”lessons learned” section is unlikely to be a simple strategic mistake (not realizing that this sort of thing is something that readers in the audience would look out for). Instead, it feels like maybe more a genuine display of their belief that they’re close to infallible. If this is the case, it’s easy to see why this attitude increases the potential for things to not go well interpersonally.
Even though many the things in my elaboration of “(2)” are negative about Nonlinear, I want to emphasize again that this post made me update positively about them and that I think it’s unfortunate how the initial presentation and resulting discussion was too one-sided. I appreciate the length of this post; it must have been very stressful and anxiety-inducing to feel compelled to write it. (I’m overall inclined to think that it was positive for them/their reputation to write it.)
What links here?
- pseudonym's comment on Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims by Kat Woods (Dec 13, 2023, 10:52 PM; 49 points)

Lukas_Gloor Dec 12, 2023, 6:43 PM
6 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I agree it can be okay/excusable to give in to the urge of taking digs at people who you think have unfairly harmed you. At the same time, I think it can make a big difference whether someone is doing this because of (1) or (2) of the following:

(1) they perceive situations like this as a social game about who manages to get the audience on their side, within which tactics like making insinuations about others’ character or repeating hearsay is fair game as long as it works / if the audience will think it’s okay/excusable/justified, etc.

or whether it’s

(2) while they’re pissed off and tempted to retaliate, they also feel strongly bound to a code of fairness where it’s only really okay to make bad insinuations if you’re very likely to be right, so they’re worried about saying the wrong thing, being biased, etc. I.e., they genuinely consider the possibility that they’re too emotionally invested and in the wrong themselves in the sense of feeling too much negativity about the other party and giving a distorted impression of them.

I interpret John G. Halstead’s point along the lines of “if they were doing (2) instead of (1), why does it look like they’re trying to have their cake and eat it? Why does it look like they’re simultaneously saying that accusations like that (which they chose to repeat/air publicly) are often about things that aren’t actually too bad or shouldn’t be trusted, but also saying that they mostly trust them and think they’re actually bad?”

Lukas_Gloor Dec 4, 2023, 12:21 PM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Rethink Wellbeing: First Year Update & Marginal Funding Opportunity
I’m excited about this!

One question, I notice a bit of a tension with the EA justification of this project (“improving EA productivity”) and the common EA mental health issues around feeling pressure to be productive. I know CBT is more about providing thinking tools rather than giving concrete advice on what to do/try, but might there be a risk that people who take part will feel like they are expected to show a productivity increase? Would you still recommend to EA clients to take time off generously if someone is having burnout symptoms? I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this.

Lukas_Gloor Dec 2, 2023, 12:16 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism — Scott Alexander
By the way, this discussion (mostly my initial comment and what it’s in reaction to; not so much specifics about CEA history) reminded me of this comment about the difficulty of discussing issues around culture and desired norms. Seems like maybe we’d be better off discussing what each of us thinks would be best steps forward to improve EA culture or find a way to promote some kind of EA-relevant message (EA itself, the importance of AI alignment, etc.) and do movement building around that so it isn’t at risk of backfiring.

Lukas_Gloor Dec 1, 2023, 8:06 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism — Scott Alexander
Interesting; I didn’t remember this about Tara.
Two data points in the other direction:
- A few months (maybe up to 9 months, but could be as little as 1 month, I don’t remember the timing) before Larissa had to leave CEA, a friend and I talked to a competent-seeming CEA staff member who was about to leave the org (or had recently left – I don’t remember details) because the org seemed like a mess and had bad leadership. I’m not sure if Leverage was mentioned there – I could imagine that it was, but I don’t remember details and my most salient memory is that I thought of it as “not good leadership for CEA.” My friend and I encouraged them to stay and speak up to try to change leadership, but the person had enough for the time being or had some other reason to leave (again, I don’t remember details). Anyway, this person left CEA at the time without a plan to voice their view that the org was in a bad state. I don’t know if they gave an exit interview or deliberately sought out trustees or if they talked to friends or whether they said nothing at all – I didn’t stay in touch. However, I do remember that my friend discussed if maybe we should at some point get back this former CEA staff person and encourage them again to find out if there are more former colleagues who are dissatisfied and if we could cause a wave of change at CEA. We were so far removed and had so few contacts to anyone who actually worked there that it would’ve been a bit silly for us to get involved in this. And I’m not saying we would’ve done it – it’s easy to talk about stuff like that, but then usually you don’t do anything. Still, I feel like this anecdote suggests that there are sometimes more people interested and invested in good community outcomes than one might think, and multiple pathways to beneficial leadership change (like, it’s very possible this former staff had nothing to do with the eventual chain of causes that led to leadership change, and that means that multiple groups of people were expressing worried sentiments about CEA at that time independently).
- At one point somewhere between 2017-2018, someone influential in EA encouraged me to share more about specific stuff that happened in the EA orgs I worked because they were sometimes talking to other people who are “also interested in the health of EA orgs / health of the EA community.” (To avoid confusion, this was not the community health team.) This suggests that people somewhat systematically keep an eye on things and even if CEA were to get temporarily taken over by a Silicon Valley cultish community, probably someone would try to do something about it eventually. (Even if it’s just writing an EA forum post to create common knowledge that a specific is now taken over and no longer similar to what it was when it was founded. I mean, we see that posts did eventually get written about Leverage, for instance, and the main reasons it didn’t happen earlier are probably more because many people thought “oh, everyone knows already” and “like anywhere else, few people actually take the time to do community-useful small bits of work when you can just wait for someone else to do it.”)

Lukas_Gloor Dec 1, 2023, 6:15 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism — Scott Alexander
Yeah, I should’ve phrased (3) in a way that’s more likely to pass someone like habryka’s Ideological Turing Test.
Basically, I think if EAs were even just a little worse than typical people in positions of power (on the dimension of integrity), that would be awful news! We really want them to be significantly better.
I think EAs are markedly more likely to be fanatical naive consequentialists, which can be one form of “lacking in integrity” and is the main thing* I’d worry about in terms of me maybe being wrong. To combat that, you need to be above average in integrity on other dimensions.
*Ideology-induced fanaticism is my main concern, but I can think of other concerns as well. EA probably also attracts communal narcissists to some degree, or people who like the thought that they are special and can have lots of impact. Also, according to some studies, utilitarianism correlates with psychopathy at least in trolley problem examples. However, EA very much also (and more strongly?) attracts people who are unusually caring and compassionate. It also motivates people who don’t care about power to seek it, which is an effect with strong potential for making things better.

Lukas_Gloor Dec 1, 2023, 5:45 PM
11 points
2 ∶ 3
in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism — Scott Alexander
That’s indeed shocking, and now that you mention it, I also remember the Pareto fellowship Leverage takeover attempt. Maybe I’m too relaxed about this, but it feels to me like there’s no nearby possible world where this situation would have kept going? Pretty much everyone I talked to in EA always made remarks about how Leverage “is a cult” and the Leverage person became CEA’s CEO not because it was the result of a long CEO search process, but because the previous CEO left abruptly and they had few immediate staff-internal options. The CEO (edit: CEA!) board eventually intervened and installed Max Dalton, who was a good leader. Those events happened long ago and in my view they tentatively(?) suggest that the EA community had a good-enough self-correction mechanism so that schemers don’t tend to stay in central positions of power for long periods of time. I concede that we can count these as near misses and maybe even as evidence that there are (often successfully fended off) tensions with the EA culture and who it attracts, but I’m not yet on board with seeing these data points as “evidence for problems with EA as-it-is now” rather than “the sort of thing that happens in both EA and outside of EA as soon as you’re trying to have more influence.”

Lukas_Gloor Dec 1, 2023, 5:01 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism — Scott Alexander
10%.

Worth noting that it’s not the highest of bars.

Lukas_Gloor Dec 1, 2023, 3:56 PM
13 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism — Scott Alexander
Hm. Okay, I buy that argument. But we can still ask whether the examples are representative enough to establish a concerning pattern. I don’t feel like they are. Leverage and Nonlinear are very peripheral to EA and they mostly (if allegations are true) harmed EAs rather than people outside the movement. CFAR feels more central, but the cultishness there was probably more about failure modes of the Bay area rationality community rather than anything to do with “EA culture.”

(I can think of other examples of EA cultishness and fanaticism tendencies, including from personal experiences, but I also feel like things turned out fine as EA professionalized itself, for many of these instances anyway, so they can even be interpreted positively as a reason to be less concerned now.)

I guess you could argue that FTX was such a blatant and outsized negative example that you don’t need a lot of other examples to establish the concerning pattern. That’s fair.

But then what is the precise update we should have made from FTX? Let’s compare three possible takeaways:
(1) There’s nothing concerning, per se, with “EA culture,” apart from that EAs were insufficiently vigilant of bad actors.
(2) EAs were insufficiently vigilant of bad actors and “EA culture” kind of exacerbates the damage that bad actors can do, even though “EA culture” is fine when there isn’t a cult-leader-type bad actor in the lead.
(3) Due to “EA culture,” EA now contains way too many power-hungry schemers that lack integrity, and it’s a permeating problem rather than something you only find in peripheral groups when they have shady leadership.

I’m firmly in (2) but not in (3).

I’m not sure if you’re concerned that (3) is the case, or whether you think it’s “just” (2) but you think (2) is worrying enough by itself and hard to fix. Whereas I think (2) is among the biggest problems with EA, but I’m overall still optimistic about EA’s potential. (I mean, “optimistic” relative to the background of how doomed I think we are for other reasons.) (Though I’m also open to re-branding and reform efforts centered around splitting up into professionalized subcommunities and de-emphasizing the EA umbrella.)

Why I think (2) instead of (3): Mostly comes down to my experience and gut-level impressions from talking to staff at central EA orgs and reading their writings/opinions and so on. People seem genuinely nice, honest, and reasonable, even though they are strongly committed to a cause. FTX was not the sort of update that would overpower my first-order impressions here, which were based on many interactions/lots of EA experience. (FWIW, it would have been a big negative update for me if the recent OpenAI board drama had been instigated by some kind of backdoors plan about merging with Anthropic, but to my knowledge, these were completely unsubstantiated speculations. After learning more about what went down, they look even less plausible now than they looked at the start.)

Lukas_Gloor Nov 20, 2023, 11:09 AM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MathiasKB🔸’s comment on: Sam Altman / Open AI Discussion Thread
Hm, very good point! I now think that could be his most immediate motivation. Would feel sad to build something and then see it implode (and also the team to be left in limbo). On reflection, that makes me think maybe Sam doesn’t necessarily look that bad here. I’m sure Microsoft tried to use their leverage to push for changes, and the OpenAI board stood its ground, so it couldn’t have been easy to find a solution that isn’t the company falling apart over disagreements and stuff.