Recently, Ben Pace wrote a well-intentioned blog post mostly based on complaints from 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees who 1) wanted more money, 2) felt socially isolated, and 3) felt persecuted/oppressed.
Of relevance, one has accused the majority of her previous employers, and 28 people of abuse - that we know of.
She has accused multiple people of threatening to kill her and literally accused an ex-employer of murder. Within three weeks of joining us, she had accused five separate people of abuse: not paying her what was promised, controlling her romantic life, hiring stalkers, and other forms of persecution.
We have empathy for her. Initially, we believed her too.
We spent weeks helping her get her “nefarious employer to finally pay her” and commiserated with her over how badly they mistreated her.
Then she started accusing us of strange things.
You’ve seen Ben’s evidence, which is largely the word of two people and a few misleadingly cropped screenshots. Below, we provide extensive evidence (contracts, recordings, screenshots, etc) demonstrating that the post’s claims are false, misleading, or are catastrophizing normal things. This post is a summary; we also include a ~200 page appendix of additional evidence. We also present a hypothesis for how Ben got so much wrong.
Two ways you can read this: 1) stop whenever you’re convinced because you’ve seen enough falsehoods that you no longer think their remaining claims are likely to be true, or 2) jump to the specific claims that are most important to you, and look at the evidence we provide for them. You can see summary tables of the key claims and evidence here, here, and here.
Our request as you read on: consider this new evidence you haven’t seen yet with a scout mindset, and reflect on how to update on the accuracy of the original claims.
It’s messy, sorry. Given the length, we’re sure we’ve made mistakes - please do let us know. We’re very happy to receive good faith criticism - this is what makes EA amazing.
Finally, we want to note that we have a lot of empathy for Alice and Chloe. We believe them when they say they felt bad, and we present a hypothesis for what caused their negative emotions.
Short summary overview table
| Claim | What actually happened |
|---|---|
| Alice claimed: they asked me to travel with illegal drugs. | - False. It was legal medicine - from a pharmacy. - Ben knew this and published it anyway. |
| Alice claimed: I was running out of money, so I was scared to quit because I was financially dependent on them (“[I] had €700 in [my] account”* etc.) | - Alice repeatedly misrepresented how much money she had. She actually had a separate bank account/business generating (according to her) ~$3,000 a month in passive income. - Alice told us she was an independent business owner, so she either lied to Ben, Ben misled his readers about this, or she lied to us about the business. |
| Chloe claimed: they tricked me by refusing to write down my compensation agreement | - False. We did write it down. We have a work contract and interview recordings. And when she realized this accusation was false, instead of apologizing, she tried to change the topic - “it’s not about whether I had a contract or salary.”* - We told Ben we had proof, and he refused to look at it and published this anyway. |
| Alice claimed: they paid me next to nothing and were financially controlling | We were the opposite of “financially controlling”*: - We gave her almost complete control over a ~$240,000 budget we had raised. - We even let her choose her own pay.
|
| Alice/Chloe claimed Nonlinear failed to pay them. Later, they denied ever claiming this. | - Alice/Chloe accused us many times of not paying them - a serious accusation. We proved this was false. - Ben tried to walk this back last minute, saying “I no longer believe this is true”* - However, he didn’t remove all the references to this accusation - each one is proof that they were going around telling people this falsehood. - Even our friends thought we didn’t pay Alice anything (due to the rumors that Alice spread). - So they lied, got caught, and are now lying again by saying they never told the first lie. - Instead of apologizing and questioning Alice/Chloe’s other claims based on them being caught telling him provably false and damaging information, Ben shifted the topic - “the real issue is about the wealth disparity between her and Emerson”* |
| Alice claimed: They refused to get me food when I was sick, starving me into giving up being vegan | False. People heard this and thought we were monsters. We ran around for days getting her food, despite all 3 of us being sick or injured. We also had vegan food in the house that she liked, which Kat offered to cook for her (but she declined the offer). |
| Alice claimed: we were not able to live apart from them | - Strange, false accusation: Alice spent 2 of the 4 months living/working apart (dozens of EAs can verify she lived/worked in the FTX condos, which we did not live at) |
| Chloe claimed: they told me not to spend time with my romantic partner | - Also a strange, false accusation: we invited her boyfriend to live with us for 2 of the 5 months. We even covered his rent and groceries. - We were just about to invite him to travel with us indefinitely because it would make Chloe happy, but then Chloe quit. |
| Alice/Chloe claimed: we could only talk to people that Kat/Emerson invited to travel with us, making us feel socially dependent | - False. Chloe herself wrote the invite policy explicitly saying they were encouraged to invite friends/family. - They regularly invited people who joined us (e.g. Chloe’s boyfriend joined for 40% of the time) |
| Alice claimed: they told me not to see my family, making me socially dependent and isolated | - Bizarre, false accusation given that Alice spent 1 of the 4 months with her family - Kat encouraged her to set up regular calls with her family, and she did. |
| Alice/Chloe claimed: I was paid $1,000 per month (and kept implying this was all she was paid, saying it was “tiny pay” or “low pay”) | - The $1k/month was a stipend on top traveling the world all-expenses-paid, which was the majority of the value (~$58k of the ~$70k estimated value of the compensation package) - It’s not the same as a salary, but it’s the comp Chloe signed up for and we clearly communicated. And when Alice asked for pure cash, we said “sure” and even let her choose how much she paid herself. - It’s also misleading. Imagine somebody goes to the EA Hotel and then loudly shouts, “they only paid me $100 a month”. The biggest thing the EA Hotel provides is room & board. |
Alice/Chloe painted a picture of poverty and isolation, which simply does not match the exotic, socially-rich lifestyle they actually lived.
| Claim | What actually happened |
| Alice: You didn’t pay me! | - We paid Alice consistently on time and she herself often said “Thanks for paying me so fast!” - Once she accused us of not paying but she just hadn’t checked her bank account. - Another time she accused us of not paying her for “many months” when she’d received her stipend just 2 weeks prior. - She said she had to “strongly request” her salary, when really, she just hadn’t filled out the reimbursement system for months - We have text messages & bank receipts and she’s still telling people this. |
| Chloe claimed: I was expected to do chores around the house because I was considered low value | - This was part of her job - she was an assistant. We were very upfront, and have interview recordings showing she knew this before she accepted the job. - Imagine applying to be a dishwasher, hating washing dishes, then writing a “tell all” about how you felt demeaned/devalued because the restaurant “expected” you to wash dishes. |
| Chloe: I felt like they didn’t value me or my time (she implied she spent all her time doing assistant work) | - Chloe spent just ~10% of her time on assistant work (according to her own time tracking), the rest was high level ops & reading - We allocated 25% of her time to professional development (~$17,000 a year) - This is basically unheard of for any job, much less an assistant. - She got to read/develop any skills she wanted 2 hours a day (leadership, M&E, hiring, etc) - a dream to many EAs. - Kat showed so much gratitude that Chloe actually asked her to stop expressing gratitude. She said it made her feel Kat only valued her for her work. So Chloe accuses us of both valuing her work too much and too little. - It’s not that Kat didn’t value Chloe’s assistant work, it’s that Chloe didn’t seem to value assistant work, so constantly felt diminished for doing it (despite having agreed to do it when we hired her) - Base rate: ~50% of people feel undervalued at work. |
| Alice: Kat threatened my career for telling the truth | - False. Alice had spent months slandering Kat by spreading falsehoods that were damaging our reputation (see the numerous pages of evidence below). - Kat reached out multiple times, trying to hear her side, share her own, and make some attempts at conflict resolution. Alice refused. - However, despite being attacked, Kat had not defended herself by sharing the truth about what really occurred (which would have made Alice look very bad) - Kat communicated to Alice: Please stop attacking me. I don’t want to fight. If you don’t stop attacking me, I’ll have to defend myself. I haven’t yet told the truth about what you did, and if I do, it will end your career (paraphrased) - Alice painted herself as the victim and Kat out as the attacker, despite Alice being the attacker for months, who had been harming Kat by telling lies. - Why didn’t Kat defend herself? 1) She felt compassion for Alice. She was clearly struggling and needed professional help, not more discord. 2) She was terrified of Alice. Alice had accused 28+ people of abuse - wouldn’t you be scared knowing that? She was worried Alice would escalate further. Which she did anyway. |
| Saying “if you keep sharing your side, I’ll share mine - and that will end your career” is unethical and retaliatory | - Everybody agrees that if somebody is spreading damaging falsehoods about you that it can be good and ethical to share your side and correct the record. - If the truth would hurt the slanderer’s own career, you should still be able to share the truth - In fact, warning the slanderer first is often preferable to going public with the truth without warning them - it at least gives them a chance to stop. - The question is: did Alice spread falsehoods or “just share her negative experience”? (numerous pages of evidence below) - There’s a double standard here: if you share your experience and you’re lower status, that’s “brave”, but if you do the same thing and you’re higher status, that’s “retaliation”. This epistemic norm will predictably lead to inaccurate beliefs and unethical outcomes. |
This post is long, so if you read just one illustrative story, read this one
Ben wrote: “Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be very dangerous for her personally.”
This conjures up vivid images of Kat as a slavemaster forcing poor Alice to be a cocaine smuggler, risking life in prison. Is it true?
Parts of the story Alice didn’t share:
- Kat requested Alice bring legal medicine from a pharmacy - specifically antibiotics and one pack of ADHD medicine - not illegal drugs. These medicines are cheap and legal without a prescription in other parts of Mexico we’d visited, and she was already going to a pharmacy anyway.
- After arriving, Alice learned that they require a prescription there. When she told Kat and Drew this, they both said “oh well, never mind!” - it wasn’t a big deal. But then Alice just went and got a prescription anyway.
Alice never argued this would be “very dangerous for her personally”:
- In direct contradiction of her story, thinking traveling with legal medicine would be too dangerous, she flew with psilocybin mushrooms for herself to Mexico.
- Not only that, while in Mexico, she did an actual drug deal for herself - she went out and illegally purchased, then traveled internationally with, actual recreational drugs (cannabis), again completely contradicting her story.
- In fact, Alice never told you that she traveled with actual illegal drugs - cannabis/LSD/psilocybin - for herself across most borders we know of. And Kat was the one warning her not to do that! For example, Alice bought psilocybin for herself just before flying out and Kat expressed concern about her traveling with that.
- In contrast to her “I’m a sweet, innocent girl who would never take such legal risks as traveling with drugs” framing, Alice was literally an ex-drug dealer and manufacturer. She told us she used to make a lot of money growing and distributing marijuana and psilocybin, but she was smoking so much of her own product that she stopped making money.
So, she traveled across both international borders with actually illegal drugs for herself on these flights, and accused us of asking her to travel with -- legal medicine.
Alice took a small request - could you swing by a pharmacy and grab some cheap antibiotics/ADHD medicine? - and she twisted it into a narrative of forcing her to risk prison as a drug mule, that had commenters rushing for their pitchforks.
And it’s worse than that - Ben’s post implied that we largely agreed on the facts of the story, so people condemned us viciously in the comments! But he knew we didn’t agree - when he told us this story we literally laughed out loud because it was so absurd.
We shared much of this information with Ben - he knew it was legal medicine, not illegal drugs - yet he still published this misleading version. We were horrified that Ben published this knowing full well it wasn’t true. We told him we’d share these exact screenshots with him, but he refused to look at them.
It would be bad enough if Alice told this story to one person, but she was going around telling lots of people this! We were hearing from friends Alice started telling stories like this just minutes after she met them, completely unprompted. Saying that the only reason she wasn’t succeeding was because Kat was persecuting her, that we refused to pay her, forced her to do demeaning things, etc.
Ben looked into this because Alice/Chloe spent 1.5 years attacking us - and we didn’t defend ourselves by sharing our side. People only heard stories like the one above.
No wonder people treated us like lepers, disinvited us from events, etc. Can you imagine what that would feel like? For 1.5 years, I’ve lived with fear and confusion (“Why is she still attacking me?”), sleepless nights, fear of what Alice’s next attack might be (justified, apparently), and a sludgy, dark, toxic desolation in my chest at being rejected by my community based on false rumors.
The only thing that gave me hope during this entire thing was believing that EAs/rationalists are good at updating based on evidence, and the truth is on our side.
What is going on? Why did they say so many misleading things? How did Ben get so much wrong?
Ben’s hypothesis - “2 EAs are Secretly Evil”: 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees felt bad because while Kat/Emerson seem like kind, uplifting charity workers, behind closed doors they are ill-intentioned ne’er do wells. (Ben said we're "predators" who "chew up and spit out" the bright-eyed youth of the community - witch hunter language.)
If what Alice and Chloe told Ben is true, then this hypothesis has merit. Unfortunately, they told him falsehoods. For instance, Alice falsely claims that she couldn’t live/work apart and yet did so for 2 of the 4 months.
Why would she say something so false that she must know is false?
Maybe they’re deliberately lying? We mostly don’t think so, because they wouldn’t keep lying about things we can easily disprove with evidence. Like, Chloe said we tricked her with a verbal contract when she knows we sent her a work contract and we recorded her interviews. So why would she say that?
Maybe they’re just exaggerating and trying to share an emotional truth? Like, Alice felt starved and uncared for, and she’s trying to share that by bending the truth (even though she knows that Kat offered to cook her food, and ended up going out to get her food even though Kat was sick also)?
The thing is, they bend the truth far beyond what anyone would consider normal. For example, with the “they starved me” thing, Alice told Drew she was “completely out of food” just one hour after Kat (also sick) had offered to cook her any of the vegan food in the house that Alice usually loved and ate every day.
This is quite extreme. And there are dozens of similar examples.
So what is going on? Below, we present relevant information to support an alternative hypothesis:
“2 EAs are Mentally Unwell”: They felt bad because, sadly, they had long-term mental health issues, which continued for the 4-5 months they worked for us.
| Relevant mental health history | - Alice has accused the majority of her previous employers, and 28 people - that we know of - of abuse. She accused people of: not paying her, being culty, persecuting/oppressing her, controlling her romantic life, hiring stalkers, threatening to kill her, and even, literally, murder. - They both told us they struggled with severe mental health issues causing extreme negative emotions for much of their lives. Alice said she’d had it for ~90% of her life. She told us that she’d been having symptoms just 4 months before joining us. But she told us then, as she tells people now, she’s totally better and happy all the time. - If she’s been suffering extreme negative emotions for most of her life, it could be that we caused the emotions this time. But it’s more likely a continuation of a longstanding issue. - She was forced to spend a month in a mental hospital. Shortly after, while still getting her bachelor’s, Alice started advertising herself as a life coach to make money. She has offered herself to EAs as a “spiritual guru” claiming she has achieved “unshakeable joy”. - During the period she started accusing us of strange things, she was microdosing LSD every day, only sleeping a few hours a night for weeks, speaking incoherently, writing on mirrors, etc. - She, sadly, claimed to have six separate painful health issues. (When she’s in pain she seems to see ill intent everywhere.) |
| Relevant instances of acting erratically | 1) Alice attempted to steal a Nonlinear project, one that she and 6 other people at Nonlinear had worked on for months. She locked us out of the project and was going around EA claiming it was solely her invention. We told her she could use it if she at least gave Nonlinear some credit for it - it would be insulting to all her colleagues who worked hard on it not to. She kept refusing to share any credit - not even a tiny mention. 2) Alice created a secret bank account and a separate organization (without telling us), and attempted to transfer $240,000 from our control despite being repeatedly told it was not her money and telling people she wasn’t sure if it was her money. However, we do not think she had malicious intent. Our best guess as to why she did this is that she was having an episode and lost touch with reality. 3) While at Nonlinear, Alice worked on a project. Then, weeks after she quit, she continued working on it without telling us, and then demanded we pay her for those weeks she worked after she quit. 5) Alice repeatedly lied about getting job offers to try to extort more money out of us. That or else she made them up as a part of her pattern of delusions. She’s groundlessly claimed to have 4 fabricated job/funding offers that we know of. |
| Key pattern: Alice/Chloe confuse emotions for reality | Example: Alice was saying we literally made her homeless - a very serious accusation. We reminded her of the proof that this was false, and she said “It doesn’t matter, because I felt homeless.” But it really does matter. This is a key pattern of Alice/Chloe’s - they think that feeling persecuted/oppressed means they were persecuted/oppressed, even if they weren’t. |
Why share this? If we refute their claims point by point without explaining the patterns, it’s hard not to think “but they felt bad. Surely you did something bad.” There needs to be a plausible alternative hypothesis for why they felt oppressed.
This info is relevant because mental health issues, particularly having delusions of persecution, explain what happened better:
- Hypothesis 1: actual persecution
- Hypothesis 2: delusions of persecution
To support Hypothesis 2, we simply must share relevant mental health history.
Of course, just because somebody has frequent delusions of persecution doesn’t mean that they’re all false. We agree. That’s why this doc contains numerous pages of evidence to counter their unsupported claims.
And just because somebody has mental health issues doesn’t mean they’re less worthy of compassion. If they are mentally unwell, knowing that allows us to actually help them. If somebody is experiencing delusions, going after whatever “demon” they claim to see won’t actually help them.
If you learn that someone has made many false accusations, which follow a similar pattern to their previous delusions, and many are quite implausible (e.g. hiring stalkers is a weird accusation), then those patterns are relevant. And if somebody was mentally unwell most of their life, then that’s a relevant explanatory factor for why they felt bad.
Ben admitted in his post that he was warned in private by multiple of his own sources that Alice was untrustworthy and told outright lies. One credible person told Ben "Alice makes things up."
We are horrified we have to share all this publicly, but Ben, who refused to look at our evidence, left us no choice. We do not want Alice’s accusations to destroy yet more people’s lives and more drama is the last thing EA needs right now, so we do not intend to expand the scope of accusations in this post, but we think it’s important to share a flavor for Alice’s past with the specifics redacted.
However, we want to make sure it’s clear, this is just the tip of the iceberg for the lives Alice has ruined.
Here is an illustration of how many people we know Alice has accused:
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
- Alice accused [a previous employer] of [refusing to pay her, stalking her, toxic culture, making her do unethical/illegal things, assault and murder. Yes, she literally accused her former boss of murder.]
- Alice accused [a previous employer] of [abuse, toxic culture, sexism]
- Alice accused [a previous employer] of [abuse, toxic culture, doing illegal/unethical things, refusing to pay her]
- Alice accused [a previous employer] of [being a cult, toxic culture, doing illegal/unethical things]
- Alice accused [a previous employer] of [abuse]
- Alice accused [a previous employer] of [child abuse, assault, threatening to kill her]
- Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
- Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
- Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
- Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
- Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
- Alice lied about [serious thing] on her resume
- Alice [____] involving [police]
- Alice [____] involving [police]
- Alice [____] involving [police]
Continuing the pattern, the only public writing I can find of hers outside of social media and the forum is her publicly accusing a person of persecution.
Within weeks of joining us, she accused five separate, unrelated people of abuse. This should have been a major warning sign, but we just thought she’d been unlucky. We hadn’t known her long enough yet to spot the pattern and we were trusting.
These are just the ones we know of from a very shallow investigation. How many would we find if we spent 6 months investigating her? Then we contacted each of these people she accused of abuse and only shared their side? What do they think of Alice?
What would they think if they heard that she was once again accusing a former employer of oppressing her?
We actually completely understand why Ben and most people believed her when she accused us of things - because we believed her too. Within just weeks of first arriving, she told us how:
- Her current employer was refusing to pay her and she’d been waiting for months for payment.
- They had “unclear boundaries” and were disorganized and unprofessional.
- They promised her control of projects then reneged later.
- Her previous employer was culty and unethical.
- Her boyfriend was trying to control her by pressuring her to stop practicing the type of poly she preferred (“no rules” relationship anarchy)
And we just believed her, because 1) we didn’t hear the other side and 2) who lies about things like that?
Also, Alice is one of the most charming people we’ve ever met. She stares deeply into your eyes and makes you feel like the most special person, like you’ve been friends forever. It’s so easy to believe her when she says these people have been being mean to her for no reason. She believes it herself and makes you feel protective of her.
We ourselves were trying to help her get paid by her “evil employer who was refusing to pay her” and congratulating her for “escaping from her culty ex-employer”.
And then she started accusing us of the same kinds of things.
Of course, she could be just very unlucky. But it’s very rare to be that unlucky. If one person is a jerk to you, then that person’s probably a jerk. If everybody’s “mysteriously mean” to you for “no reason” - she kept saying this - maybe it’s not the other people.
And anybody who knows her will notice that she appears to have endless stories of people “bullying/oppressing/mistreating” her, often for what seem to be strange reasons or no reason at all (e.g. she was “bullied” in university for “being too happy”. She almost got a kid expelled from school for this.)
Alice would randomly get texts saying “You ruined my life. I wish I had never met you.” Apparently Alice had destroyed that person’s marriage. She claimed to have done nothing wrong, as is her pattern.
We also wish we had never met Alice. She seems to hop from community to community leaving a trail of wreckage in her wake.
Shortly after being forced to spend a month in a mental hospital, while still in university, Alice started advertising herself as a life coach to make money. She said she stopped because she’d ruined multiple peoples’ lives. At least, this is what she told us.
It looks like she’s started up again. At a recent EAG she told people that she had figured out “unshakeable joy” years ago and offered to teach EAs. Just before she started accusing us of things that made no sense, she was again offering to be a “spiritual guru” to an EA in the Bahamas. She did not follow through because she spent the next months, according to her, “mentally all over the place”.
In other words, during the same time she’s claiming she was miserable, subjected to the worst experience of her life, she was at the same time offering to teach EAs her secret to “unshakeable joy”.
Many people reached out to us privately after Ben released his article who were afraid to come to our defense publicly because it’s dangerous to defend a witch burning on a pyre lest ye be accused of being a witch yourself. Many EA leaders are quietly keeping their heads down since FTX, because visibility in EA has become dangerous.
We had to redact quotes here because, as one person said, “I’m worried Alice will attack me like she’s attacking you.”
Alice has similarities to Kathy Forth, who, according to Scott Alexander, was “a very disturbed person” who, multiple people told him, “had a habit of accusing men she met of sexual harassment. They all agreed she wasn't malicious, just delusional.” As a community, we do not have good mechanisms in place to protect people from false accusations.
Scott wrote a post saying that some of Kathy's accusations were false, “because those accusations were genuinely false, could have seriously damaged the lives of innocent people.”
Of note, we tried to handle this like Scott, who minimized what was shared in public “in order to not further harm anyone else's reputation (including Kathy's)”. This is why we avoided publicly saying anything for the last 1.5 years. Also, once we learned about her history of accusations, we were terrified of Alice, because… well, wouldn’t you be?
Multiple people have actually recommended I get a restraining order on her. Unfortunately, given her previous behavior, it’s unlikely that would help.
Scott said: “I think the Kathy situation is typical of how effective altruists respond to these issues and what their failure modes are. … the typical response in this community is the one which, in fact, actually happened - immediate belief by anyone who didn't know the situation and a culture of fear preventing those who did know the situation from speaking out. I think it's useful to acknowledge and push back against that culture of fear.”
“Suppose the shoe was on the other foot, and some man (Bob), made some kind of false and horrible rumor about a woman…Maybe he says that she only got a good position in her organization by sleeping her way to the top. If this was false, the story isn't "we need to engage with the ways Bob felt harmed and make him feel valid." It's not "the Bob lied lens is harsh and unproductive". It's 'we condemn these false and damaging rumors.'"
We need to carefully separate two questions: 1) is Alice deserving of sympathy? and 2) did Alice spread damaging falsehoods?
For 1) Yes, we feel sympathy for Alice. Seeing secret ill-intent everywhere must be horrible. We hope she gets professional help.
But if she’s going around saying that we forced her to travel with illegal drugs, we starved her, we isolated her on purpose, we refused to pay her, and other horrible false things, then the story isn’t that she felt isolated or she felt scared, the story is that she told false and damaging rumors.
And we need to not mix up our laudable compassion for all with our need to set up systems to prevent false accusations from causing massive harm. In addition to a staggering misallocation of the community’s time, Alice, Ben, and Chloe hurt me (Kat) so much I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and I cried more than any other time in my life. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t type responses to comments. I wouldn’t wish this experience on anyone.
Why didn’t Ben do basic fact-checking to see if their claims were true? I mean, multiple people warned him?
In sum, Ben appears to have believed Alice/Chloe, unaware of their history, prematurely committed to the “2 EAs are Secretly Evil Hypothesis”, then looked exclusively for confirming evidence.
Crucially, by claiming that they were afraid of retaliation, despite the fact that they’d been attacking us for 1.5 years without us retaliating, Alice/Chloe convinced him that he shouldn’t give us time to provide evidence, that he should just take them at their word. As a result, he shot us in the stomach before hearing our side.
His “fact-checking” seems to have been mostly talking to Alice and Chloe, Alice/Chloe’s friends, and a few outsiders who didn’t know much about the situation.
Imagine applying Ben’s process after a messy breakup: “I heard you had a bad breakup with your ex. To find the truth, I’m going to talk to your ex and her friends and uncritically publicly share whatever they tell me, without giving you the chance first to provide counterevidence, because they told me I shouldn’t let you. Also, I paid them a total of $10,000 before looking at your evidence, so it may be difficult to convince me I wasted all that time and money.”
One example of Ben’s bias: one source told Ben lots of positive things about us. How much of that did Ben choose to include? ~Zero.
A few more examples:
| Claim | What actually happened |
| Ben implied: Kat/Emerson didn’t write things down because they’re dangerously negligent | Actually, when we heard this, we said “What? Yes we did. Just give us time to show you.” (He did not.) |
| Ben: After my call with Kat/Emerson I sent over my notes. Emerson said “Good summary!” (implying Kat/Emerson largely agreed with the facts of the article) | - We were horrified to see that Ben cut off the second part of Emerson’s statement - “Some points still require clarification” and “You don't want to post false things that if you'd waited a bit, you'd know not to include. This draft is filled with literally dozens of 100% libelous and false claims - and, critically, claims that we can prove are 100% false.” - This was especially damaging because many people thought the story was complete, instead of just being one side. People were so angry at us for things “we admitted to” (we didn’t!) |
| Ben: these are consistent patterns of behavior, so you should avoid Nonlinear because of these patterns | - Ben was so committed to his hypothesis, he didn’t speak to any of the people who worked for us in the 1.5 years since Alice/Chloe left to see if any of these patterns were actual patterns. - 100% of them left overall positive reviews. |
| Ben: Alice was the only person to go through their incubator program | - False. Ben’s “fact-checking” appears to mostly have consisted of asking Alice/Chloe’s friends, he thought Alice was the only person we incubated. Actually, there were 6 others, 100% of whom reported a positive experience. He talked to 0 of them. - Alice & Chloe knew this was false and did not correct it. |
Ben: Emerson’s previous company had a bad culture
| - Actually, people liked working for Emerson. His anonymous Glassdoor ratings were similar to the 57th best place to work. - However, not only did he not apologize, despite the facts changing massively, he kept the vibe/conclusion the same. And still, after all this, he included false information! - Side note: the EA Forum, months later, banned someone for sockpuppeting the original unsubstantiated gossip EA Forum thread (based on Alice/Chloe’s falsehoods) - the sockpuppets created even more false consensus. |
| Acknowledging the elephant in the room: a number of reviewers advised us to at least point to the common hypothesis that Ben white-knighted for Alice too hard, given both their personalities and Alice’s background. We’ll leave the pointer, but don’t think it’s hugely appropriate to discuss further. |
Longer summary table
Below you’ll find another longer summary. It’s not comprehensive - the full appendix correcting all the falsehoods (200+ pages) is here. We cover many things in the full appendix that aren’t linked to here.
It’s messy, sorry. We were originally going to literally go sentence by sentence to point out all the inaccuracies, then that got too complicated. There were just too many because Ben didn’t wait to see our evidence. Many claims are partially rebutted in different places and it’s hard to see the big picture.
Ben Gish galloped us by just uncritically sharing every negative thing he heard without fact-checking. Gish galloping means “overwhelming your opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place, which is known as Brandolini's law.
Read on to consider which hypothesis seems more plausible:
2 EAs are Secretly Evil Hypothesis: 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees felt bad because while Kat/Emerson seem like kind, uplifting charity workers publicly, behind closed doors they are ill-intentioned ne’er do wells. (Ben said we're "predators" who "chew up and spit out" the bright-eyed youth of the community - witch hunter language.)
2 EAs are Mentally Unwell Hypothesis: They felt bad because, sadly, they had long-term mental health issues, which continued for the 4-5 months they worked for us.
| Claim | What actually happened |
| “Chloe was only paid $1k/month, and otherwise had many basic things compensated i.e. rent, groceries, travel” Ben describes this as - “next to nothing” and “tiny pay” (they kept implying they were only paid $1,000, so many people walked away with that impression) | - We offered a compensation package: all-expenses-paid (jetsetting around the Caribbean) plus a $1,000 a month stipend on top, working for a charity, as a recent college grad. - We estimated this would be around $70,000, but there was never a plan to make it “add up”. It was simple: “We pay for everything - you live the same lifestyle as us.” - This is “next to nothing”? What happened to EA?
- She was living what for many is a dream life. She was so financially comfortable she didn’t even have to think about money - She somehow turns this into blaming Emerson for her forgetting about her own savings. We don’t think she had to spend a penny of her stipend and 100% of it went into her savings. |
| Alice: I was paid next to nothing! | - Alice was in the top 1-0.1% of income globally - working for a charity! - yet she was paid “next to nothing”. - She was allowed to choose how much she got paid and she chose $72,000, annualized. She also had a separate business making, according to her, around $36,000 a year. That adds up to $108,000 annualized income. - Even before she got the pay raise just 3 months into her job, her comp was $12k stipend, room, board, travel, and medical adding up to around $73k total per year, plus $36k per year from her business. That’s $109k total, living virtually the same lifestyle as us. - This was a huge increase in pay for her - her previous jobs were ~minimum wage. |
| Alice: They asked me to help around the house even when I was sick. This is abuse! | She neglected to mention that
|
| Chloe’s first story: I was packing and Kat/Emerson just sat there on their laptops, working on AI safety instead of helping | This was her job. She was explicitly hired to do “life ops” so that Kat and Emerson could spend more time on AI safety. She knew this before she took the job and we have interview transcripts proving it. |
| Chloe’s second story: Emerson snapped at me | Emerson shouldn’t have done that. But also, Chloe snapped at Emerson sometimes too. It was a really stressful travel day for everybody. This was not an ongoing pattern and the only time we recall this happening. Kat checked in the next day and Chloe said she actually loved the chaos of traveling and it was just that she’d had a bad sleep the night before. |
| Chloe’s third story: Kat threw out all of my hard work right in front of me, showing that my work hours are worth so little | - Chloe got the wrong product and Kat just hadn’t told her till then because she was trying to protect her feelings since she’d worked so hard on it. Chloe knew this and still published this story. - Chloe got so much appreciation from Kat that Chloe actually asked her to do it less. |
| Chloe: I had unclear work boundaries and was pressured into working on a weekend (implies this was a regular occurrence) | “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.” |
| Chloe: I was put into complex situations and told I could do it | - This is not actually bad - We said in the job ad that you would be a good fit if "It’s hard to phase you. You like the challenge of tackling complex problems instead of feeling stressed out about them" - This is some of the best public evidence of her being mentally unwell. These are not overwhelming tasks for most people. |
| Alice: they told me not to talk to locals! | Strange accusation. She asked “How can I increase my impact?” and we said, “you might try spending less time with random bartenders and more time with all the high-level EAs Kat introduced you to”. She continued to talk to locals all the time she was with us, which was totally fine by us. |
| Alice: the Productivity Fund ($240,000) was mine | - We have in writing in multiple places that Alice was the project manager of the Productivity Fund, a project under Nonlinear. - We never did anything to make her think it was hers. She was still attending Nonlinear weekly meetings. We were still reimbursing her for expenses. We never sent her the money. We never sent her a grant agreement. We told her to not make a separate bank account for the money (she did anyway in secret). We threw a party and toasted her promotion (not grant or new charity) in front of many people. We told her if she wanted to do something outside of the scope of the project, she’d have to get our permission. Chloe, our operations manager, was handling all of her ops. - The only thing she has to show it was “hers” is her word, where she remembers a conversation very differently than Emerson or Kat. - This is one of at least 4 separate times we know of where she’s said she was offered money/employment when she wasn’t. |
| Alice/Chloe complain about “unclear boundaries” as if we kept them unclear as part of a nefarious plot. | If they wanted clear boundaries, they should have applied to Bureacracy Inc, not a tiny nomadic startup with a tiny budget. Our job ad said to expect “flexibility, informality” and “startup culture”. |
| Chloe: A tiny startup with a tiny budget did very little accounting! | - Chloe was literally hired to do accounting - We did all of the accounting that we are legally and practically required to do, to the best of our knowledge |
Chloe: I gained no professional advancement from my 5 months there!
| A strange accusation given that: |
| Alice: I couldn’t work for months afterward, I was so upset. | - We have multiple text messages of her telling us that she’d been working that entire time. She told us she hadn’t even taken weekends off. - Perhaps relevant: she was trying to get more money from us by saying she’d continued working. But when talking to Ben, she’d get money saying that she hadn’t worked. - Either way, she lied to Ben or she lied to us. |
| Alice/Chloe: Emerson told us stories of him being a shark | - Emerson shared stories about how he almost died in shark attacks to help Alice/Chloe defend themselves against shark attacks. They then painted Emerson as a shark. - A different Nonlinear team member heard the same stories, but spent weeks taking notes and was grateful! |
| Alice: I got constant compliments from the founders that ended up seeming fake. | Strange accusation. Alice was in a dark place and interpreted compliments as evidence that Kat/Emerson were secretly evil. |
| Alice: Emerson said, "how much value are you able to extract from others in a short amount of time?" - he openly advocates exploiting people! | He said “to have productive conversations, ask good questions to maximize learning/value per second” |
| Chloe: I was pressured into learning to drive | - Chloe was an enthusiastic consenting adult for the independence it gave her (“I was excited to learn how to drive”) - She regularly drove on her own for fun - She was told many times that she didn’t have to drive if she didn’t want to. We’d just pay for Ubers for her. She always insisted she did. - We spent 1 hour a day for 2 months patiently teaching her in parking lots. She had tons of supervised practice. - Ben said she risked “substantial risk of jail time in a foreign country” (sounds terrifying). False, it was just a $50 fine, the same amount you’d be fined for jaywalking (we told him this. The article is filled with falsehoods he refused to correct). - She once decided to stop driving. She didn’t even tell Kat/Em because it was so not a big deal. She just told Drew, and he was like “cool”. She started driving around a week later because she missed driving. Drew didn’t talk to her about it and Em/Kat didn’t even know so there was no pressure to start again. |
| Ben: Alice/Chloe are “finally” speaking out. They couldn’t speak out for fear of retaliation. and didn’t want anyone to know until. | - False. Alice/Chloe spent the last 1.5 years telling many people in EA, which seriously damaged Nonlinear's reputation. - Chloe and Alice have been attacking us that whole time - without us retaliating against them! They report being worried about us hiring stalkers, doing spurious lawsuits, or otherwise legally dubious actions. None of those things happened. |
| Ben: 12 years ago in a dispute Emerson used “intimidation tactics” | - Someone tried to steal Emerson’s company, throwing his 25 employees on the street, with a legal loophole. Emerson said he would countersue and actually share his side (he hadn’t). Ben frames this as Emerson is the evil attacker, not the defender. Everything Emerson does is “intimidation” tactics, it doesn’t matter if he’s the one getting knifed in the chest. - This is another instance of the double-standard: somebody is allowed to sue Emerson & share their side, but if Emerson does the same, Ben frames it as unethical and "retaliatory". |
| Ben: “I think standard update rules suggest not that you ignore the information, but you think about how bad you expect the information would be if I selected for the worst, credible info I could share” | - The most common criticisms ex-employees have of their orgs is low pay, feeling not valued enough by management, and a “toxic” work culture. - Most of Ben's article is totally run-of-the-mill criticisms (but presented as very serious) - Base rate: ~50% of people feel undervalued at work. - Base rate: 71% of EAs claim to have a mental illness. - The probability that 2 (of 21) people who work for any EA org felt this way is extremely high |
| “But you threatened to sue Lightcone if they didn’t give you a week to gather your evidence” | - We did that because we had tried everything else, yet Ben kept, unbelievably, refusing to even look at our evidence. What were we supposed to do? He was about to publish reputation-destroying things he would know were false if he just waited to see the evidence. - Despite the fact that he published numerous things he knew were false (e.g. verbal agreement, accounting, vegan food, legal medicine, & many more), we decided not to sue because we think that would increase p(doom). |
| What are we doing differently in the future? | - We’ve spent ages analyzing this and trying to figure out what happened and what we can do differently. - We asked Alice and Chloe multiple times to share their side and do some conflict resolution and they refused - The accusations are almost entirely false, misleading, or catastrophizing normal things, so we cannot improve on that front. Nevertheless, some things we are doing differently are: - Not living with employees & all employees being remote. - Not using that compensation structure again. - Hiring assistants who’ve already been assistants, so they know they like it. |
| Alice/Chloe: Nonlinear, a charity startup, had an entrepreneurial and creative problem-solving culture. However, this is actually a bad thing, because sometimes that leads to people feeling pressured and overwhelmed | - Accurate. We did have a culture of “being entrepreneurial and creative in problem-solving”. The fact that they applied to work at a startup and considered this to be bad is strange. Others have said this is the best part about being around us, our “contagious mindset around problem-solving” -The things they felt “pressured” into are disproven elsewhere. Evidence/read more, evidence #2, evidence #3, evidence #4, evidence #5 |
| “But Alice seems so open and nice” | Why does Alice get away with telling falsehoods so much? - It takes months to catch her in enough falsehoods to see the pattern. In the meantime, she seems so joyful. - She bounces from jobs/communities quickly. Her longest job is 13 months, so by the time you start catching on, she’s already gone. - She (well, part of her) believes what she says and she’s genuinely kind, so she’s convincing. - She builds trust by quickly telling you things that seem very personal - “wow, she must really like and trust me to be telling me all this!” - about how other people have oppressed her, which triggers protective instincts. |
To many EAs, this would have been a dream job
Alice/Chloe/Ben painted a picture of Alice/Chloe having terrible jobs and they barely survived those few months they were with us. Now, I do not deny that Alice and Chloe suffered, and I deeply wished they hadn’t. But a lot of people would have loved these jobs. Look at the job ad - “you get paid to see the world and live in endless summer, since we only stay in places where it’s warm and sunny.”
Clearly aspects of the job didn’t work for Alice (wanted 100% control and nothing less) and Chloe (found being an assistant to be beneath her). However, I’d like to describe the job to the people who would have liked it.
Chloe beat out 75 other “overqualified” (which she described herself as being) EAs who applied for Chloe’s job - getting an EA job is hard.
Imagine a job where you’re always in beautiful, sunny, exotic places. Part of the year is spent in various EA Hubs: London, Oxford, Berkeley, San Francisco. Part of the year you explore the world: Venice, the Caribbean, Rome, Paris, the French Riviera, Bali, Costa Rica.
You’re surrounded by a mix of uplifting, ambitious entrepreneurs and a steady influx of top people in the AI safety space. In the morning, you go for a swim with one of your heroes in the field. In the evening, a campfire on a tropical beach. Jungle hiking. Adventure. Trying new foods. Surfing. Sing-a-longs. Roadtrips. Mountain biking. Yachting. Ziplining. Hot tub karaoke parties. All with top people in your field.
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.
Chloe’s job was a lot of operations people’s dream job. She got to set up everything from scratch, instead of having to work with existing sub-optimal systems. She was working on big, challenging operations puzzles that were far above the usual entry-level admin stuff that you’d get as a person who just graduated from uni.
About 10% of the time was doing laundry, groceries, packing, and cooking - and she has to do many of those things for herself anyways! At least this is on paid time, feels high impact, and means she’s not sitting in front of the computer all day. Also, everybody starts somewhere, and being in charge of setting up all of the operations for an org is a pretty great place to start, even if it does also include doing some pretty simple tasks. As a job straight out of university, this is a pretty plush job. And getting a job in EA is hard.
And she gets two hours a day of professional development. Paid! She spends the time learning things like management, lean methodology, measuring impact, etc. She gets to choose basically whatever it is she wants to learn. Getting paid to read whatever you want for 2 hours a day would be a dream for many EAs.
Even more people would have loved Alice’s job, especially entrepreneurial types. When Alice arrived, just as a friend, she was encouraged to read a book a day on entrepreneurship, to quickly skill up. She started working with us building a product that seemed likely to be very high impact. Especially since it was a project that was meant to help do decentralized, automated prioritization research, so she’d be able to use the product herself to find the idea she wanted to start.
She had tons of freedom on strategy and she was very quickly given more responsibility. Within a few weeks of starting, she was managing an intern. She received hours of mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs every single day. She was quickly introduced to a huge percentage of all the major players in the field, to help her design the product better.
Then, within just a few months of starting, she was given nearly complete control of $240,000 - so much control that she could also choose how much she got paid! Imagine being quickly given so much financial and strategic freedom. As long as it falls within the scope of the department, you have control over nearly a quarter million dollars. Whatever you want to pay yourself out of that budget, you can. If you do a good job, that $240,000 could rapidly expand to $2-3 million a year.
Especially given that there’s a chance in half a year or so that you could spin out and be an entirely separate organization. Or hand it off to somebody else after gaining invaluable experience launching a really big project, all the while with the guidance and guardrails of an experienced entrepreneur.
Sure, it’s an unorthodox payment arrangement. But, man, you are certainly living a glamorous lifestyle. Always in sunny, exotic, places. Living in beautiful homes. Going on adventures in bioluminescent bays, yachting, kayaking, and snorkeling in tropical reefs. And you’re living that glam life while working for a charity. Not bad.
And, I mean, you had been considering living at the EA Hotel, where you’d be living in much less nice conditions, wouldn’t see the sun for half the year, and wouldn’t get nearly the exposure to experienced entrepreneurs and top people in the field. Maybe you’d get a stipend of max $150 a month.
Anyways, for you, it’s not about the money. You’re an aspiring charity entrepreneur, for goodness sake! That’s not a career you go into for the money. It’s about the impact and the life you’re living. And you want a job where you’re seeing the world and doing your best to save it.
Sure, maybe when you’re older, you’ll get a job that pays more and stays in one place so you can put down more roots, but right now you’re young. You want to explore. You’re living the dream and seeing the world.
You could maybe get a job with higher pay, though your previous jobs were ~minimum wage, and Nonlinear is paying you a lot more than that, so maybe not. But none would involve the travel. None would involve the adventure.
You want to go snorkeling in tropical reefs with EA leaders but also work in Oxford and have deep conversations with your favorite EA researchers at lunch. You want to pet the cats in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul while you’re also building something really high impact. You want to be investing so much into your personal growth that you get to spend a quarter of your time just learning. You want adventure and impact.
Again - this doesn’t mean everybody would like the job. However, to paint this job as “inhumane” or as if Alice was “a fully dependent and subservient house pet” - is a dark, paranoid view of the warm, positive, uplifting environment we created.
Alice was constantly given more and more responsibility. She was given more freedom than almost any EA job and then told everybody she was kept in metaphorical shackles. She made Ben (and everybody else in the community she spent the last year telling) think that she was essentially a slave, kept under the oppressive hold of a controlling and isolating group of abusers.
[Emerson’s note: Kat paid herself $12,000 a year - half of minimum wage - for most of her charity career because she took the drowning child argument seriously. Not $1,000 a month on top of all-expenses-paid travel, adventures, villas, and restaurants - $1k/month total. In Canada’s most expensive city. Sharing a single always-damp towel with her partner. Kat doesn’t usually bring this up because she doesn’t want to make people feel bad who won’t or can’t do the same, but I think it’s important information about her character. Say what you will about her, but she deeply cares about altruism.]
But through some combination of mental illness, daily LSD use, and a society that uncritically rewards anyone claiming to be a victim, she turned financial freedom into financial servitude. She turned gratitude into manipulation.
Yes, Alice suffered. Chloe did too. Nobody is doubting that. The question is what caused the suffering. Because for most people, having to work for an hour on a weekend, then clearing it up with your boss and it never happening again isn’t a cause for months of depression.
For most people, having a separate business bringing in $3,000 a month and being able to choose your own pay is financial freedom, not servitude.
For most people who applied to these jobs, they would be considered great jobs. And if they found out they didn’t like it, they’d just quit and do something else. They wouldn’t demand a public lynching.
Sometimes people are depressed and see everything as bad and hostile. Sometimes people are sleep deprived, taking LSD every day, in chronic pain, and start seeing plots everywhere. Sometimes people have been struggling with mental health issues for their entire life.
This was not an objectively bad job that caused them psychological harm. It was a woman who kept forgetting she was an assistant and feeling outraged when asked to do her job. She felt she was overqualified and turned that resentment on her employers. It was a woman who’s struggled with severe mental illness for over 90% of her life and continued to do so while she was with us.
Sharing Information on Ben Pace
Since the article was published, an alarming number of people in the community have come forward to report worrying experiences with Ben Pace, and report feeling frightened about speaking out because of what Ben might do to them.
As just one example, one woman had a deeply traumatic experience with Ben but is afraid to say anything, because he runs LessWrong and is surrounded by so many powerful people in the community who would defend him. She’s worried if she comes forward that he’ll use his power to hurt her career, both directly by attacking her again, or indirectly, by making sure none of her posts get onto the front page. (We’ve heard multiple reports of people having a conflict with one of the Lightcone team and then suddenly, their posts just never seem to be on the front page anymore. We don’t know if this is true.)
She asked me to not share it with Ben because she’s frightened of him, but she said it was finally time to be strong and speak up now, as long as she was fully anonymized. She couldn’t live with herself if she allowed another person to be hurt by Ben the way Ben hurt her. I ask you to please respect her privacy and if you know her, not bring this up unless she does.
She’s been struggling with mental health issues since he attacked her, unable to sleep or eat. She still, after all this time, just randomly breaks down crying on sidewalks. She even considered leaving effective altruism. She no longer feels safe at Lightcone events and no longer goes to them, despite missing the many good people in the rationalist community. It’s shaken her trust in the community and talking about it still makes her visibly upset.
She told me to not talk to Ben about it, because he takes absolutely no responsibility for the harm he’s done, and has explicitly told her so. And he shows a friendly face to people, which is how he gets away with it, all the while professing simply an interest in truth. But he’ll be smiling at you and friendly, all the while having the intention to stab you in the back. One source reported that “Ben is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
People who knew what happened to this woman confirmed that what Ben had done to her was “horrifying” and “they couldn’t believe he would do that to a person”. They were shocked at his lack of concern for her suffering and confirmed that he would probably really hurt her career if she came forward with her information.
She knows of at least one other person who’s had really worrying experiences with him. Where deep and preventable harm was happening and he just didn’t seem to care. He actually blamed the person who was being hurt! She hasn’t brought it up with the person much because she doesn’t want to stir up old hurts. She can tell it still hurts them, but they’ve managed to move on and remember the things they really care about.
She had heard about what had happened to this person before, but she thought it was probably just a one-off thing and it wouldn’t happen to her. She wishes she had paid more attention so she could have avoided her own traumatic experience. She’s still suffering. She’s still lying awake each night, replaying, over and over, the nightmare of what Ben did to her.
Another person reports “I wish I had never met Ben. He hurt me more than I even thought was possible. I highly recommend not being friends with him and if you see him at a party, I would just subtly avoid him. I hope he gets better and stops doing to others what he did to me, but as far as I’ve heard, he’s still completely in denial about the harm he’s caused and has no intention of changing.”
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This information above is true to the best of my knowledge. What other worrying things might I find if I spent months investigating like Ben did?
However, this is completely unfair to Ben. It’s written in the style of a hit piece. And I believe you should not update much on Ben’s character from this.
- Like Ben did to us, I did basically no fact-checking.
- Like Ben did to us, I assumed ill-intent.
- Like Ben did to us, I unfairly framed everything using emotional language to make Ben seem maximally nefarious.
- Like Ben did to us, I uncritically shared anonymous accusations. Since they’re anonymous, Ben can’t even properly defend himself, which is why courts don’t accept anonymous hearsay.
- Ask legal history scholars what happens when courts allow anonymous hearsay: kangaroo courts and mob justice.
- Like Ben did to us, I didn’t give him a proper chance to respond to these accusations before publishing them.
- I mentioned none of his many very good qualities.
- I interviewed none of the people who like Ben, and exclusively focused on the testimonies of a small number of people who don’t like him.
- I even left out the good things these people said about Ben, like he did to us. It reads very differently when it’s not just negative.
- I used culture-war optimized language (victim/oppressor) to turn people’s brains off.
- I used wording that was technically accurate but implied “a lot of people are saying”, like Ben did to us.
I’m not yet worried about these “patterns” about Ben because I don’t know if they are patterns. I haven’t heard his side. And I refuse to pass judgment on someone without hearing their side.
Further, through using emotional and one-sided language, I made it sound like it was incredibly obvious that what Ben did was awful and you’d be a monster to disagree. However, given what I know about these allegations, I think 35-75% of EAs would think that they’re not nearly as bad as the witnesses made them out to be. The other 35-75% would think it was clearly and deeply unethical. It would depend on each allegation and how it was presented.
It would be a matter of debate, not a matter of public lynching.
At least, it would be if we presented it in an even-handed manner, investigating both sides, looking for disconfirming evidence, and not presuming guilt until proven innocent.
Also, in case you’re worried about these people, they all say they’re OK. All of the situations are either being taken care of or have ended and they’re no longer suffering and do not want to pursue further actions to prevent Ben from doing it to other people.
I could do this for anybody. Just to give one example: almost everybody has had “bad breakups” and if you only speak to “disgruntled exes” you will get a warped, distorted view of reality.
I don’t think Ben should even have to respond to these. It would also be a very expensive use of time, since in his follow-up post, he said he’s now available for hire as an investigative journalist for $800,000 a year.
At that hourly rate, he spent perhaps ~$130,000 of Lightcone donors’ money on this. But it’s more than that. When you factor in our time, plus hundreds/thousands of comments across all the posts, it’s plausible Ben’s negligence cost EA millions of dollars of lost productivity. If his accusations were true, that could have potentially been a worthwhile use of time - it's just that they aren't, and so that productivity is actually destroyed. And crucially, it was very easy for him to have not wasted everybody’s time - he just had to be willing to look at our evidence.
Even if it was just $1 million, that wipes out the yearly contribution of 200 hardworking earn-to-givers who sacrificed, scrimped and saved to donate $5,000 this year.
I am reminded of this comment from the EA Forum: “digging through the threads of previous online engagements of someone to find some dirt to hopefully hurt them and their associated organizations and acquaintances is personally disgusting to me, and I really hope that we don't engage in similar sort of tactics…though I don't think it's a really worry because the general level of decency from EAs at least seems to be higher than the ever lowering bar journalists set."
As a community, if we normalize this, we will tear ourselves apart and drown in a tidal wave of fear and suspicion.
This is a universal weapon that can be used on anybody. What if somebody exclusively only talked to the people who didn’t like you? What if they framed it in the maximally emotional and culture-war way? Have you ever accidentally made people uncomfortable? Have you ever made a social gaff? Does the idea of somebody exclusively looking for and publishing negative things about you make you feel uneasy? Terrified?
I actually played this game with some of my friends to see how easy it was. I tried to say only true things but in a way that made them look like villains. It was terrifyingly easy. Even for one of my oldest friends, who is one of the more universally-liked EAs, I could make him sound like a terrifying creep.
I could do this for any EA org. I know of so many conflicts in EA that if somebody pulled a Ben Pace on, it would explode in a similar fashion.
But that’s not because EA orgs are filled with abuse. It’s because looking exclusively for negative information is clearly bad epistemics and bad ethics (and so is not something I would do). It will consistently be biased and less likely to come to the truth than when you look for good and bad information and try to look for disconfirming evidence.
And it will consistently lead to immense suffering. Knowing that somebody in the community is deliberately looking for only negative things about you, then publishing it to your entire community? It’s a suffering I wouldn’t wish on anybody.
EA’s high trust culture, part of what makes it great, is crumbling, and “sharing only negative information about X person/charity” posts will destroy it.
----
In the preceding pages and our extensive appendix we presented evidence supporting an alternative hypothesis:
2 EAs are Secretly Evil Hypothesis: 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees felt bad because while Kat/Emerson seem like kind, uplifting charity workers, behind closed doors they are ill-intentioned ne’er do wells.
2 EAs are Mentally Unwell Hypothesis: They felt bad because, sadly, they had long-term mental health issues, which continued for the 4-5 months they worked for us.
Below we share concluding thoughts.
So how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?
Imagine that you are a sophomore in college. It’s midwinter, and you’ve been feeling blue and anxious. You sit down with your new therapist and tell him how you’ve been feeling lately.
He responds, “Oh, wow. People feel very anxious when they’re in great danger. Do you feel very anxious sometimes?”
This realization that experiencing anxiety means you are in great danger is making you very anxious right now. You say yes. The therapist answers, “Oh, no! Then you must be in very great danger.”
You sit in silence for a moment, confused. In your past experience, therapists have helped you question your fears, not amplify them.
The therapist adds, “Have you experienced anything really nasty or difficult in your life? Because I should also warn you that experiencing trauma makes you kind of broken, and you may be that way for the rest of your life.”
He briefly looks up from his notepad. “Now, since we know you are in grave danger, let’s discuss how you can hide.
Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind
EA is becoming this therapist.
EA since FTX has trauma. We’re infected by a cancer of distrust, suspicion, and paranoia. Frequent witch burnings. Seeing ill-intent everywhere. Forbidden questions (in EA!) Forbidden thoughts (in EA!)
We’re attacking each other instead of attacking the world’s problems.
Anonymous accounts everywhere because it’s not safe anymore, too easy to get cancelled.
People afraid to come to the defense of the accused witch lest they be accused (as Scott Alexander said).
High impact people and donors quietly leaving, turned off by the insularity and drama.
Well, did a bunch of predators join overnight or is it more that we have trauma?
If you were new to EA and you looked at the top posts of all time and saw it was anonymous gossip from 2 (of 21) people who worked for a tiny charity for a few months, what would you think this community values? What is its revealed preference?
Would that community seem healthy to you? If you weren’t already part of this community, would that make you want to join?
People spent hours debating whether a person in a villa in a tropical paradise got a vegan burger delivered fast enough - would you think this community cared about scope sensitivity and saving the world (like we normally do)?
“First they came for one EA leader, and I did not speak out --
because I just wanted to focus on making AI go well.
Then they came for another, and I did not speak out --
because surely these are just the aftershocks of FTX, it will blow over.
Then they came for another, and I still did not speak out --
because I was afraid for my reputation if they came after me.
Then they came for me - and I have no reputation to protect anymore.”
So, what do we do? We have a choice to make:
Are we fragile - continuing to descend into a spiral of PTSD madness with regular lynchings?
Are we resilient - continuing to do good despite the trauma?
Or are we antifragile - can we experience post-traumatic growth and become stronger?
Can this be the last EA leader lynching, and the beginning of the EA community becoming stronger from what we’ve learned post-FTX? If we want to do the most good, we must be antifragile.
Alice, Chloe, or Ben mean well and are trying to do good, so we will not demand apologies from them. We are all on the same team. We wish them the best, we hope they’re happy, and we hope they learn from this.
As Tim Urban of Wait But Why said: “In a liberal democracy, the hard cudgel of physical violence isn't allowed. You can't burn villains at the stake. But you can burn their reputation and livelihood at the stake. This is the soft cudgel of social consequences. It only works if everyone decides to let it work. If enough people stand up for the target and push back against the smear campaign, the soft cudgel loses its impact.”
Conclusion: a story with no villains
I wish I could think that Alice, Ben, and Chloe were villains.
They hurt me so much, I couldn’t sleep. I cried more than any other time in my life.
My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t type responses to comments, and people attacked me for this, saying my not responding immediately was evidence I was a witch.
Alice, Ben, and Chloe show absolutely no remorse and I don’t predict they’re going to stop. They’re in too deep now. They can’t change their minds.
Although I certainly hope they do. If they updated I think the community would applaud them, because that takes epistemic courage similar to Geoffrey Hinton updating on AI.
And yet, despite all the harm they’ve done to me and the community, I can see their good intentions clear as day. So why are they hurting us if they have such good intentions?
Most harm done by good people is either accidental or because they think they’re fighting the bad guys. And they’ve full-on demonized us.
Demonizing somebody is the best way for good people to hurt other good people. Hence them calling us “predators”, going after the “bright-eyed” youth of the community, “chewing them up and spitting them out”. This is the language of a witch hunter, not a truthseeking rationalist.
Chloe explicitly says she can’t empathize with us at all. Reflect on this.
I don’t think they’re villains. But they think we are. And you’re allowed to do all sorts of things to people if they’re bad.
And that’s just what happened. Alice/Chloe had been telling everyone, Ben heard about it, and… monsters don’t deserve fair trials! They’ll just use their time to manipulate the system. And the two young women were afraid of retaliation!
Sure, they’d been telling lots of people in the community their false narratives for over a year and none of their strange fears of us “hiring stalkers” or “calling their families” had happened. But that doesn’t matter. You don’t stop while saving a community to check and see if there’s actually a witch. He’s the hero saving the collective from the nefarious internal traitors who must be purged.
Chloe isn’t a villain. She’s a woman who didn’t like her entry level job and wanted more money. She was a fresh graduate who felt entitled to something better. She struggled with mental health issues and blamed her feelings of worthlessness and overwhelm on Emerson and I. She took totally normal things and catastrophized them. Her story probably wouldn’t have been a scandal if it weren’t for our community’s PTSD around FTX.
Alice isn’t a villain. She’s an incredible human being who has struggled with mental health issues her entire life, and one of the symptoms is delusions of persecution - people trying to control her. This is why we’re #27 and #28 on her list of 28 people she’s accused of abuse (that we know of).
Imagine being able to choose how much you got paid and having a whole separate income stream (unrelated to your job) and yet feeling financially controlled? Imagine seeing ill-intentions everywhere?
That sounds horrible. I genuinely hope she gets the help she needs.
And finally, we’re not villains either. We paid our team what we said we’d pay them. We set it up so that they socialized with more people than the average person. We valued their time so much that we paid for Chloe to spend two hours a day doing professional development. I valued Chloe’s time so much that she asked me to stop sharing my gratitude as much. When Alice asked for a raise 3 months into her job, we let her choose her pay. We continue to have good experiences with the vast majority of people we work with.
We were not faultless. Emerson should not have snapped on that travel day and he should have apologized immediately. I should have scheduled a weekly meeting right after the conference instead of not properly talking to Alice about work stuff for three weeks, letting the misunderstanding last for so long.
But overall, it wasn’t that the job was bad or they were mistreated. They felt oppressed for some other reason. Maybe it was that Chloe hated being an assistant and found normal assistant work demeaning. Maybe it was because Alice was microdosing LSD nearly every day, sleeping just a few hours a night, and has a lifelong pattern of seeing persecution everywhere. Maybe it’s just because they’ve both struggled to be happy most of their lives and continued to do so for the 4-5 months they were with us. We’ll leave it to them and their loved ones to figure it out.
This combined poorly with our community being traumatized by FTX, being hyper-vigilant for another potential SBF. It also combined with poor epistemics because of the (unfounded) concern about retaliation. And it certainly didn’t help that Ben had already committed to paying them $10,000 before seeing our evidence.
This was a tragedy of errors. It was a bunch of well-intentioned and fallible humans trying to do good in the world. A recipe for trouble, really.
And there will be other conflicts in EA. I know of countless EA conflicts that if somebody pulled a Ben Pace, only looking for negative information attacking one side, would explode in a similarly spectacular fashion.
This doesn’t mean EA is rife with abuse, it just means that EA is rife with humans
Humans with strong moral emotions and poor social skills on average. We should expect a lot of conflict.
We need to find a better way to deal with this. Our community has been turning on itself with increasing ferocity, and we need to find a better way to recover from FTX.
Let’s do what EA does best: optimize dispassionately, embody scout mindset, and interpret people charitably.
Remember:
Almost nobody is evil.
Almost everything is broken.
Almost everything is fixable.
Let’s fix this.
If you are disturbed by what happened here, here are some ways you can help
How do we prevent the methodology of exclusively seeking and publishing negative information, without fact checking, from becoming an acceptable norm? This methodology will predictably lead to incorrect conclusions because wild accusations will always be more viral than boring bank receipts and work contracts. Because looking for disconfirming evidence is vital for truth-seeking and scout mindset.
Currently, the original post is one of the most upvoted posts of all time on EA Forum and LessWrong, so now one of the first things people see about EA is a gossip column whose claims have been debunked. This reflects poorly on our ethics, epistemics, and priorities.
- Consider if your vote on this post, the original post (EA Forum, LessWrong), and Ben’s victory lap post (EA Forum, LessWrong), reflect your beliefs.
- Contribute to the discourse in the comments. It can be scary to say what you believe in these sorts of threads, but that’s also why it’s especially impactful to do so.
- Given what they have done, a number of people expressed to us that they think Alice/Chloe are a danger to the health of the community and should not be anonymized. We will leave that to the community to decide.
- Publicly or privately say that you would respect Ben massively if he updated on this new information. Right now, he paid $10,000 and received massive karma, so the psychological pressure for him to dig in and never change his mind is immense. However, if Ben pulled a Geoffrey Hinton and was able to update based on new information despite massive psychological pressure against that, that would be an act of impressive epistemic virtue. As a community, we want to make it so that people are rewarded for doing the right but hard thing, and this is one of those times.
Acknowledgments
A big thank you to Spencer Greenberg, Neel Nanda, Nuño Sempere, Geoffrey Miller, Vlad Firoiu, Manuel Allgaier, Luca De Leo, Matt Berkowitz, River Bellamy, and others for providing insightful feedback (though they do not necessarily agree with/endorse anything in this post).
Hey folks, a reminder to please be thoughtful as you comment.
The previous Nonlinear thread received almost 500 comments; many of these were productive, but there were also some more heated exchanges. Following Forum norms—in a nutshell: be kind, stay on topic, be honest—is probably even more important than usual in charged situations like these.
Discussion here could end up warped towards aggression and confusion for a few reasons, even if commenters are generally well intentioned:
Regarding this paragraph from the post:
... (read more)Brief update: I am still in the process of reading this. At this point I have given the post itself a once-over, and begun to read it more slowly (and looking through the appendices as they're linked).
I think any and all primary sources that Kat provides are good (such as the page of records of transactions). I am also grateful that they have not deanonymized Alice and Chloe.
I plan to compare the things that this post says directly against specific claims in mine, and acknowledge anything where I was factually inaccurate. I also plan to do a pass where I figure out which claims of mine this post responds to and which it doesn’t, and I want to reflect on the new info that’s been entered into evidence and how it relates to the overall picture.
It probably goes without saying that I (and everyone reading) want to believe true things and not false things about this situation. If I made inaccurate statements I would like to know that and correct them.
As I wrote in my follow-up post, I am not intending to continue spear-heading an investigation into Nonlinear. However this post makes some accusations of wrongdoing on my part, which I intend to respond to, and of course for... (read more)
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?
The "«" and "»" suggestion is one that could be done mostly with a search-and-replace – having the more at the top of the appendix is not enough if it also applies to the post itself. This significantly affects how trustworthy I would consider the post to be (and I say that as someone sympathetic to your situation).
My attention continues to be on the question of whether my post was accurate and whether this post debunks the claims and narratives shared in mine. To minimize public attention costs and also to preserve my own sanity, I am aiming to engage with Nonlinear’s response in a way that focuses only on the clearest and most direct critiques of my post. I’m currently focusing on 2-3 of the claims in their response that most contradict my post, investigating them further, and intend to publish the results of that.
Once I’ve finished that process and shared my thinking (including making edits to my original post to correct any mistakes), I’ll engage more with the rest of the comments and what the appropriate norms are and whether I should’ve done things substantially differently, but in the meantime I think my efforts are better spent figuring out what is actually true about the relationship Nonlinear had with its employees.
I am trying to avoid writing my bottom line, and reduce any (further) friction to me changing my mind on this subject, which is a decent chunk of why I’m not spending time arguing in the comments right now (I expect that to give me a pretty strong “digging in my heels” in... (read more)
I hope that while you’re investigating this, you talk to us and ask us for any evidence we have. We’re more than happy to share relevant evidence and are willing to set reasonable deadlines for how long it’ll take for us to send it to you.
We also don’t want to waste more people’s time on going back and forth publicly about the evidence when you can easily check with us first before publishing.
I also recommend you talk to us and see our evidence before you write the post. If you’ve already written the post, it’s hard to update afterward when you get more information. And it’s hard to write an accurate post before you’ve seen all the relevant information.
We did not share all of the relevant evidence because it was already hundreds of pages long and we tried to prioritize. We have more evidence that might be relevant to your post.
I think this is smart and appreciate it.
I strongly think much of the commentary could have been removed in favour of adding more evidence
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 "... (read more)
I just noticed that Kat posted the following on Facebook Dec 13 @11:34 PST (after older thoughtful messages such as this one, and the ones from Yarrow, David Mathers, OllieBase, etc). It seems like Kat disregarded the community's concerns and doubled down on her original PR strategy (including painting Alice and Chloe with the same brush):
... (read more)Yeah, at least several comments have much more severe issues than tone or stylistic choices, like rewording ~every claim by Ben, Chloe and Alice, and then assuming that the transformed claims had the same truth value as the original claim.
I'm in a position very similar to Yarrow here: While I think Kat Woods has mostly convinced me that the most incendiary claims are likely false, and I'm sympathetic to the case for suing Ben and Habryka, there was dangerous red flags in the responses, so much so that I'd stop funding Nonlinear entirely, and I think it's quite bad that Kat Woods responded the way they 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 ... (read more)
This on its own, maybe. But Chloe's boyfriend was invited to travel with us for 2 of the 5 months she was with us, and we were about to invite him to travel with us indefinitely, free of charge. That's a hard to fake signal that she was more than welcome to invite friends and family.
We also show text messages of us encouraging them to invite people over. We even have text messages showing me encouraging Chloe to see her boyfriend sooner and her saying no. Alice invited multiple friends to travel with us. When Chloe quit one of her friends was visiting us for 2-4 weeks (can't quite remember). To be fair, that friend we invited. But if she'd invited him, we would have been thrilled.
Their portrayal of us saying that only me and Emerson could invite people to travel with us is clearly established to be false.
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.
I closely read the whole post and considered it carefully. I'm struggling to sum up my reaction to this 15,000-word piece in way that's concise and clear.
At a high level:
Even if most of what Kat says is factually true, this post still gives me really bad vibes and makes me think poorly of Nonlinear.
Let me quickly try to list some of the reasons why (if anyone wants me to elaborate or substantiate any of these, please reply and ask):
- Confusion, conflation, and prevarication between intent and impact.
- Related to the above, the self-licensing, i.e. we are generally good people and generally do good things, so we don't need to critically self-reflect on particular questionable actions we took.
- The varyingly insensitive, inflammatory, and sensationalist use of the Holocaust poem (truly offensive) and the terms "lynching" (also offensive) and "witch-burning".
- Conflation between being depressed and being delusional.
- Glib dismissal of other people's feelings and experiences.
- The ridiculous use of "photographic evidence", which feels manipulative and/or delusional to me.
- Seeming to have generally benighted views on trauma, abuse, power dynamics, boundaries, mental health, "victimhood", resilience,
... (read more)In my experience, observing someone getting dogpiled and getting dogpiled yourself feel very different. Most internet users have seen others get dogpiled hundreds of times, but may never have been dogpiled themselves.
Even if you have been dogpiled yourself, there's a separate skill in remembering what it felt like when you were dogpiled, while observing someone else getting dogpiled. For example, every time I got dogpiled myself, I think I would've greatly appreciated if someone reached out to me via PM and said "yo, are you doing OK?" But it has never occurred to me to do this when observing someone else getting dogpiled -- I just think to myself "hm, seems like a pretty clear case of unfair dogpiling" and close the tab.
In any case, I've found getting dogpiled myself to be surprisingly stressful, relative to the experience of observing it -- and I usually think of myself as fairly willing to be unpopular. (For example, I once attended a large protest as the only counter-protester, on my own initiative.)
It's very easy say in the abstract: "If I was getting dogpiled, I would just focus on the facts. I would be very self-aware and sensitive, I wouldn't dismiss anyone, I wouldn't... (read more)
I agree with the points made in this comment. It's important to remember that people getting dogpiled on can feel pretty awful about it. It reminded me of this Sam Harris podcast interview with a documentary fillmmaker who described her experience of being "cancelled" as being worse than her experience of being kidnapped.
That said, I don't know how well they address the original comment they're replying to. The post we're looking at was posted three months after the impetus for it, so while I do see that the whole experience is very stressful and can make it difficult to be charitable on the spot, the extended period to craft a reply means it's possible to overcome one's initial impulses and figure out how to respond. Ultimately, if this post chooses to adopt certain rhetorical tactics (for good or bad), I think Kat and the Nonlinear term do need to take responsibility for these tactics. And to my understanding, they have -- for instance, in this comment Kat says that some of the controversial decisions around inclusion of stuff in the post were things that the team discussed and decided on.
Apart from the 3 month period, this also had multiple reviewers. It would quite surprising if none or only a few of these pushbacks by Yarrow or others in the comment section were raised. So (along with Kat's comment that there was a lot of internal debate) I think it is better to model these decisions as intentional and considered, rather than due to "loss of equanimity".
To add on to this vibe of "getting dogpiled is an unusually stressful experience that is probably hard to imagine accurately", I feel a bit strange to be reading so many "reasoned" comments about how specific improvements in replies/wordings could have been decisively accurate/evident, as though anything less seems like a negative sign.
I relate to that logically as an observer, but at the same time I don't particularly think the whole sea of suggestions are meaningfully actionable. I think a lot of time and thought went into these posts, virtually any variant would still be vulnerable to critique because we have limited time/energy, let alone the fact that we're human beings and it's more than okay to produce incomplete/flawed work. Like what expectations are we judging others by in this complex situation, and would we really be able to uphold our own expectations, let alone the combined expectations of hundreds of people in the community? It's insanely hard to communicate all the right information in one go, and that's why we have conversations. Though this broader discussion of "what's the real story" isn't one that I consider myself entitled to, nor do I think we should all be entitled to it just because we're EAs.
This is a really good comment. It gets at a tough issue. Someone wise once told me: when we feel unsafe, we want to be right. A consequence of this is that if we want someone to admit wrongdoing, or even just to admit the validity of a different perspective, we have to make it safe for them to do so. We can't just dogpile them. It's clear that Kat feels unsafe and wants to be right. And, in a way, we are dogpiling her.
However, it also must be said that someone admitting wrongdoing, or admitting the validity of a different perspective, isn't the only goal for a community faced with an instance of alleged harm. Preventing future harm is an even more important goal. If someone credibly accused of doing harm to another person can't overcome their need to be right, the community must explore different options for preventing other people from coming to harm in the future. These options include (but aren't limited to) exclusion from the community.
I agree with this. I think overall I get a sense that Kat responded in just the sort of manner that Alice and Chloe feared*, and that the flavor of treatment that Alice and Chloe (as told by Ben) said they experienced from Kat/Emerson seems to be on display here. (* Edit: I mean, Kat could've done worse, but it wouldn't help her/Nonlinear.)
I also feel like Kat is misrepresenting Ben's article? For example, Kat says
I just read that article and don't remember any statement to that affect, and searching for individual words in this sentence didn't lead me to a similar sentence in Ben's article on in Chloe's followup. I think the closest thing is this part:
... (read more)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... (read more)
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. These points would still be relevant even in a hypothetical disagreement where there was no financial relationship between the parties.
I agree that Ben leaves an impression that abuse took place. I am unsure on that point; it could have been mainly a "clash of personalities" rather than "abuse". Regardless, I am persuaded (partly based on this post) that Kat & Emerson have personalities that are less honest, kind and self-reflective than typical EAs, so that probably few EAs would be happy working for Nonlinear as "part of the family". But to judge properly, I think I'd have to hear what other remote/former employees think about NL.
I think there should be a norm against treating paraphrases as quotes. What it said was "I expect that if Nonlinear does more hiring in the EA ecosystem it is more-likely-than-not to chew up and spit out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world. I relatedly think that the EA ecosystem doesn’t have reliable defenses against such predators."
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?
... (read more)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.
No worries, very understandable!
While I agree that these are both helpful, I would have been most excited to see a clear separation between careful direct refutations ("here are several clear examples where Ben's post contained demonstrably false claims") and fuzzier context ("here is an explanation why this specific claim from Ben's post, while arguably literally true, is pretty misleading").
(But this is hard!)
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... (read more)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
Another debunked financial claim: Ben's original post has:
Nonlinear provided screenshots of:
Consider the hypothesis that Alice lied to us about how much money the business was making. (I actually remember her telling me it brought in $5,000 a month. We chose the $3,000 because that seemed more charitable and was what Emerson remembers her telling him). Or that she lied to you about how much it made. Or both.
Everybody already agrees that she gives unreliable testimony. There's also a clear motive. When she's talking to you, she's trying to seem maximally like a helpless victim, because otherwise she wouldn't get the $5,000 or the support. When she was talking to us, she was trying to seem maximally successful as an entrepreneur so we would incubate her.
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.
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."
Perhaps something missed from your list. The lack of moral seriousness regarding the value of the money being spent. I can imagine my global development and animal welfare colleagues, would be pretty displeased to learn that nonlinear has received over 500,000 USD in funding.
From reading into this discussion, including the linked appendix document. There's no reason for me to think that they were ready to receive this amount of money, or likely to use it effectively.
I agree with this though it is unfortunately much the same in lots of longtermism/AI safety. Also, if I am not mistaken, Emerson funds a lot of Nonlinear himself.
I down voted because it isn't directly relevant to the dispute. High-spending in longtermist EA communities is a question that has been frequently discussed on this forum without consensus views. I don't think restarting that argument here is productive.
I'm a professional nanny and I've also held household management positions. I just want to respond to one specific thing here that I have knowledge about.
It is upsetting to see a "lesson learned" as only hiring people with experience as an assistant, because a professional assistant would absolutely not work with that compensation structure.
It is absolutely the standard in professional assistant type jobs that when traveling with the family, that your travel expenses are NOT part of your compensation.
When traveling for work (including for families that travel for extensive periods of time) the standard for professionals is:
-Your work hours start when you arrive at the airport.(Yes, you charge for travel time)
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... (read more)You charge your full, standard hourly rate for all hours worked.
You ALSO charge a per diem because you are leaving the comfort of being in your own home / being away from friends and pets and your life.
You are ONLY expected to work for the hours tha
This got a lot of upvotes so I want to clarify that this kind of arrangements isn't UNUSUALLY EVIL. Nanny forums are filled with younger nannies or more desperate nannies who get into these jobs only to immediately regret it.
When people ask my opinion about hiring nannies I constantly have to show how things they think are perks (live in, free tickets to go places with the kids) don't actually hold much value as perks. Because it is common for people to hold that misconception.
It is really common for parents and families to offer jobs that DON'T FOLLOW professional standards. In fact the majority of childcare jobs don't. The educated professionals don't take those jobs. The families are often confused why they can't find good help that stays.
So I look at this situation and it immediately pattern matches to what EDUCATED PROFESSIONALS recognize as a bad situation.
I don't think that means that NL folks are inherently evil. What they wanted was a common thing for people to want. The failure modes are the predictable failure modes.
I think they hold culpability. I think they "should have" known better. I don't think (based on this) that they are evil. I think some of their responses aren't the most ideal, but also shoot it's a LOT of pressure to have the whole community turning on you and they are responding way better than I would be able to.
From the way they talk, I don't think they learned the lessons I would hope they had, and that's sad. But it's hard to really grow when you're in a defensive position.
In my reading of the post and the appendix, the point Kat seemed to be making was not that professional assistants would be cheaper, but that professional assistants would have a better upfront idea of what they were getting into, and therefore be less likely to retroactively feel that this was a bad decision. This is consistent with the idea that having that upfront idea could also come with demanding higher compensation upfront before entering into the arrangement; what Kat was trying to guard against was regretting it after agreeing to it.
In a section of the appendix Kat says that she currently has a (remote) assistant charging $50/hour and it seems to be working well:
Just wanted to ask a quick question: It sounds like you’re describing the conditions when someone who normally works with a family is asked to come on a trip with them, rather standards terms for nanny’s travelling with digital nomad families? (Which may not be common enough to be a thing).
I guess the reason I’m asking is because those are two quite distinct asks: one is asking you to uproot your normal life, with the nanny still presumably having to pay rent on their usual place.
In contrast, the other ask is looking for people who are keen on a particular lifestyle and who can avoid paying rent altogether.
Anyway, please let me know if I’m wrong here.
I do not think it is necessarily morally wrong to try to find a win win situation where you employ someone who really just has a passion for travel. But I think it is a generally bad idea. That situation tends towards exploitation, and it is hard to see it when you are in your own point of view.
This job also required that a young person just out of college choose to spend over 80% of their "income" on a luxurious travel budget.
Yes, but also there is a similar issue for live in nannies, where a professional live in nannies will not charge that much less hourly even when room and board are provided by the family. (They will charge slightly less) This is because it is not actually fun or nice to live with your bosses, and having a live-in is considered more a perk for the FAMILY than the nanny.
Meanwhile many well-meaning but uninformed bosses think their room is worth a lot of money to the nanny because it is expensive to the family.
For example, I live in the Bay and I would RATHER pay $1000/mo to rent a room in grouphouse than stay in my bosses' extremely expensive fancy house for free, even though my bosses' mortgage for that room is very expensive to them.
Similarly, a boss spending $5000 to take you to Costa Rica is not giving you $5000 of value. You aren't choosing where you are going or what the money is spent on. Maybe they really value beachfront property, but if you were in charge of expenses you'd rather choose a less expensive Airbnb but put more towards experiences or whatnot. Your bosses want to go to the theater but you don't really like the theater. They pay $100 on a ticket for you, but you w... (read more)
Also children and sometimes bosses do not understand that sometimes you are off the clock and not working. So children will want your attention and engagement if you are around even when you're "off", and bosses might not respect your time off and ask you to do little tasks or last minute jobs when you aren't working.
If you were away at your own house, then your time off is completely yours, but if you're a live in then they might pull stuff like "Hey could you watch the kids for half an hour so I can run pick up some milk?" and next thing you know they consider your "time off" to be just a suggestion.
Agreed. If you're calculating equivalent compensation, you need to apply a steep discount to work-provided perks to adjust for the restrictions. That said, it also makes sense to take into account the benefits of networking/career capital in order to figure out whether the whole deal offered is fair. I'll leave that for others to debate, was just trying to get clarification on your specific point.
Disclaimer: Previously interned remotely at Non-Linear
I drew a random number for spot checking the short summary table. (I don't think spot checking will do justice here, but I'd like to start with something concrete.)
This seems to be about this paragraph from the original post:
There aren't any other details in the original post specifically from Chloe or specifically about her partner, including in the comment in Chloe's words below the post. The only specific detail about romantic partners I see in the original post is about Alice, and it pl... (read more)
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.
I'm not sure if you meant to reply to a different comment, but yes, exactly.
I think what you're asking is, supposing Nonlinear has after all done nothing remarkable with respect to anyone's romantic partners, how do I come to believe that? How does Nonlinear present counterevidence or discredit Chloe in exactly the right way such that I'm swayed towards the true conclusion? If they deny it, it's just their word. If they show me a text conversation, well, no one actually said that they didn't have that text conversation, so it's not responsive to the complaint. There's basically no winning. It's genuinely, upsettingly unfair.
I mean, in some se... (read more)
Very valuable contribution. Crowd sourcing this type of effort seems good.
Maybe! I'm hoping it at least saves people some energy. It's too late for me, but I confess I'm ambivalent myself about the point of all this. Spot-checking some high level claims is at least tractable, but are there decisions that depend on the outcome? What I care about isn't whether Nonlinear accurately represented what happened or what Ben said. I was unlikely to ever cross paths with Nonlinear or even Ben beforehand. I want people to get healthy professional experience, and I want the EA community to have healthy responses to internal controversy and bad actors.
Something went wrong long before I started looking at any particular claim. Did they discourage Chloe from spending time with her boyfriend? Was it maybe a unreasonable amount of time, though? Are they being sincere in saying they were happy to see her happy? Is it toxic passive-aggressive behavior to emphasize that they felt that way even though she was distracted and unproductive with him around? Did they fail to invite him on all-expenses-paid world travel? Is Ben Pace a good person?
Like, huh? How did we even get here? Don't ask your employees to live with you. Don't engage in social experiments with your employees. Don't make their romantic partnerships your business. Don't put people in situations where these are the questions they're asking. 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.
"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 don't think Nonlinear can get much done if no one wants to work with them. "Incubating AI x-risk nonprofits by connecting founders with ideas, funding, and mentorship" (site) is not really compatible with 'exile'.
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.
To recap, I thought Ben’s original post was unfair even if he happened to be right about Nonlinear because of how chilling it is for everyone else to know they could be on blast if they try to do anything. It sounded like NL made mistakes, but they sounded like very typical mistakes of EA/rationalists when they try out new or unusual social arrangements. Since the attitude around me if you don’t like contracts you entered is generally “tough shit, get more agency”, I was surprised at the responses saying Alice and Chloe should have been protected from an arrangement they willing entered (that almost anyone but EAs/rationalists would have told them was a bad idea). It made me think Ben/Lightcone had a double standard toward an org they already didn’t like because of Emerson talking about Machiavellian strategies and marketing.
Idk if Emerson talking about libel was premature. Many have taken it as an obvious escalation, but it seems like he called it exactly right because NL’s reputation is all but destroyed. Maybe if he hadn’t said that Ben would have waited for their response before publishing, and it would have been better. I think it’s naive and irresponsible for Ben/Lightcone to... (read more)
Where is "around you" where this is the norm? FWIW I think it's a terrible one.
Rationality/the Bay. I heard it the most regarding polyamory. The good version of it is "people have the freedom to agree to things that could be bad for them or that might turn out bad for the average person".
I’m surprised to hear you say this Habryka: “I think all the specific statements that Ben made in his post were pretty well-calibrated (and still seem mostly right to me after reading through the evidence)”
Do you think Ben was well calibrated/right when he made, for instance, these claims which Nonlinear has provided counter evidence for?
“She [Alice] was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days. Alice eventually gave in and ate non-vegan food in the house” (from my reading of the evidence this is not close to accurate, and I believe Ben had access to the counter evidence at the time when he published)
“Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free” (from my reading of the evidence Nonlinear provided, it seems Alice was asked to buy ADHD medicine that they believed was lega... (read more)
Yes, indeed I think in all of these quotes Ben basically said pretty reasonable things that still seem reasonably accurate to me even after reading the whole appendix that Nonlinear provided.
You start with the one that I do think I made the biggest update on, though I also think most of the relevant evidence here was shared back during the original discussion. I am still kind of confused what happened here, and am hoping to dig into it, but I agree that there are some updates for me (and I assume others) here, and I currently think Alice's summary is overall pretty misleading.
To be clear, in the quoted section Ben is summarizing what Alice told him, and Ben's original post also directly includes this summary from Kat:
... (read more)You say: "This is inaccurate. I don't think there is any evidence that Ben had access to that doesn't seem well-summarized by the two sections above. We had a direct report from Alice, which is accurately summarized in the first quote above, and an attempted rebuttal from Kat, which is accurately summarized in the second quote above. We did not have any screenshots or additional evidence that didn't make it into the post."
Actually, you are mistaken, Ben did have screenshots. I think you just didn't know that he had them. I can send you proof that he had them via DM if you like.
Regarding this: "As Kat has documented herself, she asked Alice to bring Schedule 2 drugs across borders without prescription (whether you need a prescription in the country you buy it is irrelevant, what matters is whether you have one in the country you arrive in), something that can have quite substantial legal consequences (I almost certainly would feel pretty uncomfortable asking my employee to bring prescription medications across borders without appropriate prescription)."
It sounds like you're saying this paragraph by Ben:
"Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of i... (read more)
... (read more)Sure! DMd you. I might also ping Ben, though want to mostly give him space and time to write a reply and not have to worry about stuff in the comments for now.
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.]
Ben made a bunch of other changes the day of publication. I know that because I pointed out errors in his post that day, and he was correcting them based on me pointing them out (e.g., all of his original quotes from glassdoor that he claimed were about Emerson were not actually about Emerson, which he didn't realize until I pointed it out, and then he rushed to find new quotes to correct it). I'm sure he had a lot on his mind at that time, so I don't think it's egregious that he didn't add mention of the fact that he had screen shot counter evidence about the "no food while sick stuff", but it clearly seems to me to be a mistake on his part to not adjust the post or at least acknowledge it in the post. And I know he received the screenshots because he acknowledged getting them. You're saying it made it into a comment as though Ben gets credit for that - but wasn't it Kat who posted that comment? He also chose to rush the post out that night despite knowing there was counter evidence. I was honestly shocked he was trying to rush the post out that night because of all the errors I was finding in his post, which I expressed to Ben that day.
Update: I only just saw this point you made,... (read more)
Is it just me or does the number keep going up with every retelling?
When we did a postmortem on it, somewhat over 1000 hours is how high the total staff cost seemed to us, and that was a few months ago.
I think it's totally plausible that in a few places I or someone else on the team used a lower number that they felt more confident in. In-general the structure of "over X" is something I usually use when I am not sure about X, but want to give a quick lower bound that allows me to move ahead with the argument, so it seems totally possible that in another context I would have said "multiple hundreds of hours" or "300+" hours or something like that, because that was enough to prove the point at hand.
Edit: Oh, I see the links now, didn't see them when I first wrote the comment.
I think the key difference with that quote and my number is that it just includes Ben's time, as opposed to total staff time. For example, it o... (read more)
Thanks. I didn't mean my comment to come across as a "gotcha" question fwiw (not saying that you said it was a gotcha question, but I realized after I commented that it'd be a reasonable interpretation of my comment).
For what it's worth, I find it extremely plausible that a post like this both took an inordinately large amount of time, and that people will systematically underestimate how much it took before they started doing more accurate time-tracking.
Hmm, well Ben said "(for me) a 100-200 hour investigation" in the first post, then said he spent "~320 hours" in the second. Maybe people thought you should've addressed that discrepancy?️ Edit: the alternative―some don't like your broader stance and are clicking disagree on everything. Speaking of which, I wonder if you updated based on Spencer's points?
This would make sense to me if Ben had been working to an external deadline, but instead this is directly downstream from Ben's choice to allocate very little time to draft review and ensuring he had his facts right. It sounds like Spencer sent these text messages <24hr after being sent the draft; how quickly would he have needed to turn around his review to count?
I don't really see how this is a defense. The fact that you have promised some third parties to do X does not justify you in doing X if X would otherwise not be morally acceptable. And publishing harmful statements about someone that you have good reason to think are false does not seem morally acceptable.
Yes, this does seem like deciding in advance what side you're on and who deserves consideration like determining when the post goes up.
It is a defense that in as much as I think anyone working on a post similar to this, mostly independently of skill level, would end up having to make promises to sources of this type, in order to be able to share concerning information publicly.
Of course, if you think posts of this whole reference class are bad, and it was bad for us to even attempt to make a post that tries to publicize the extensive rumors and concerns that we heard about Nonlinear, then I think it's not a defense.
But if you think people should attempt to spread that kind of information and share it with more parties, then I think this will somewhat inevitable come with constraints like having to keep publication deadlines and coordinating the many stakeholders involved in such a thing.
Like, what is the alternative that you propose we should have done instead? Not made any promises to our sources at all about doing things that protect them from retaliation and limiting the costs on them? I think in that case you don't get to talk to sources, or you only get to do it for a bit as people get burned and hurt and stop talking to you.
I am pretty sure Ben has published no harmful statements about someone that he thought were false. Indeed, as I have said many times, he seems to have been exceptionally careful with the epistemic states he attached to his statements in his post.
I'm well aware of the difficulties of balancing competing stakeholders giving you feedback late on posts and trying to hit publication timing targets. I think you had several valid options:
I strongly disagree. Alice's and Nonlinear's perspectives are portrayed with very different implicit levels of confidence in those paragraphs. Alice's perspective is stated as a fact -- "nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food," not "Alice says nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food." In contrast, Nonlinear's perspective is shared as "[Nonlinear] says [x]."
I think most readers who trust Ben to be truthful would assume, from the way those paragraphs were worded, that Alice had much better evidence to support her claims, and that Nonlinear was doing some slightly deceitful reputational management by countering them. But that isn't what turned out to be the case:
- Nonlinear has evidence that on December 15, they had oatmeal, peanuts, almonds, prunes, tomatoes, cereal, an orange, mixed nuts, and quinoa (which Kat offered to cook) in the house.
- On the same day, Kat had successfully purchased mashed potatoes f
... (read more)I'm not sure if Spencer sent you all the screenshots or just some of them, but something along the lines of:
I'm a little bit confused about Kelsey's summary - it contains a line about rejecting burgers because they were 'fast food' that doesn't seem to be in the original. So I don't think it can reflect Ben's state of mind in that way.
If you only had the one screenshot (9:53 to 10:28 timestamps), I agree that you can't infer that Kat cooked for 'Alice', nor is there proof that the discussed burger trip actually took place, though I think they strongly imply it will - certainly Alice seems to think it has been agreed and will occur. However, I find your comment about 15th vs 16th unconvincing because 'Alice' explicitly claims a 2 day duration, so food the next day would also contradict this (assuming the 15th is the first day).
Here is another possible version that reflects just the one screenshot:
... (read more)This is false. Alice got food on December 15th. She got food 2.5 hours after she asked. Actually, she never asked me, I just offered when it seemed like she was struggling.
It says December 16 at 12:14am because I was in Europe at the time, so it's showing the European time zone. It was Dec 15 at 7:13pm in the local time when this occurred.
She brought up being hungry at 4:53pm. I immediately offered to cook her the food in the house. When she didn't want any of the food in the house or food from any non-fast food restaurant within a 12 minute drive of home, I went out, while sick myself, and got and cooked her food. The only vegan food that fit her criteria in the store.
The only complaint she can legitimately say is that we did not get her Panda Express as fast as she would have liked (we got it for her the next day). She waited 2.5 hours for food. And she could have had it sooner if she'd wanted any of the food in the house, which she usually ate nearly daily and enjoyed. She just didn't want that food. She wanted fast food and didn't get it as fast as she preferred.
I'm currently back on the same time zone, so here's the same screenshot, but showing the right time zone dates and times
Kelsey's summary was wrong in a number of important ways.
- She missed the fact that we did indeed succeed in getting her vegan food (I found at the nearby store, despite being sick myself). 2.5 hours after we first offered. And it would have been faster if she'd wanted any of the food in the house, or chosen a restaurant that had vegan options for Emerson and Drew to go to.
- It doesn't mention the vegan food that was in the house already that I offered to cook (Alice ate oatmeal almost every day and she loved quinoa. Later when I cooked some up for her, she loved it, like usual, cause quinoa is the Queen of All Foods).
- It doesn't mention that Drew said he would go to any restaurant within a 12 minute drive from our place and she just... didn't choose a restaurant. She only wanted fast food. So they ended up choosing a restaurant that didn't happen to have vegan options aside from the usual fries.
- A quick look at Google Maps shows that there was over 20 restaurants that fit that criteria in the area. It wasn't restrictive at all.
- She frames it as they didn't get her the food she wanted "because they [didn't] want to get fast food." It's important to note that Emerso
... (read more)Uh, the word in that screenshot is "meditating". She was asking people to not talk too loudly while she was meditating.
That is correct.
Sorry, I'm trying to talk about the amount of time for 'adversarial' fact checking: when Nonlinear knew the accusations and could provide specific counter evidence. I agree he put a ton of time into the project overall.
Just a note that standard practice on these kinds of jobs is that you get a credit card to make purchases with, and are never using your own money that is later reimbursed.
A big reason for this is the massive mismatch in what money is worth. Employers might think covering a $100 grocery trip until you get reimbursed is not a big deal, but to an employee that might have been their own food money or rent.
The standard answer is you either let your employee borrow your credit card, or you give them their own credit card. You can put a lower limit on it to protect yourself, and can also see the credit card statement (which can be paired with receipts if you don't trust them not to add on extras. I was always careful that my families get all the receipts but they generally just threw them away because they trusted me)
To me it seems like everyone individually applying social pressure is hard to calibrate. Oli seems to be saying that he and Ben did not intend the level of social consequences NL has felt based on what they shared, but rather an update that NL shoudn’t be a trusted EA org. I think that it’s hard to control the impression that people will get when you provide a lot of evidence even if it’s all relatively minor, and almost impossible to control snowballing dynamics in comment sections and on social media when people fear being judged for the wrong reaction, so it just might not be possible for a post like Ben’s to received in a calibrated way.
This sounds right, but the counterfactual (no social accountability) seems worse to me, so I am operating on the assumption it's a necessary evil.
I live high trust country, which has very little of this social accountability, i.e. if someone does something potentially rude or unacceptable in public, they are given the benefit of the doubt. However, I expect this works because others are employed, full time, to hold people accountable. I.e. police officers, ticket inspectors, traffic wardens. I don't think we have this in the wider Effective Altruism community right now.
I think this comment will be frustrating for you and is not high quality. Feel free to disagree, I'm including it because I think it's possible many people (or at least some?) will feel wary of this post early on and it might not be clear why. In my opinion, including a photo section was surprising and came across as near completely misunderstanding the nature of Ben's post. It is going to make it a bit hard to read any further with even consideration (edit: for me personally, but I'll just take a break and come back or something). Basically, without any claim on what happened, I don't think anyone suspects "isolated or poor environment" to mean, "absence of group photos in which [claimed] isolated person is at a really pretty pool or beach doing pool yoga." And if someone is psychologically distressed, whether you believe this to be a misunderstanding or maliciously exaggerated, it feels like a really icky move to start posting pictures that add no substance, even with faces blurred, with the caption "s'mores", etc.
In addition to the overall tone of this post being generally unprofessional.
Yeah, I don't necessarily mind an informal tone. But the reality is, I read [edit: a bit of] the appendix doc and I'm thinking, "I would really not want to be managed by this team and would be very stressed if my friends were being managed by them. For an organisation, this is really dysfunctional." And not in an, "understandably risky experiment gone wrong" kind of way, which some people are thinking about this as, but in a, "systematically questionable judgement as a manager" way. Although there may be good spin-off convos around, "how risky orgs should be" and stuff. And maybe the point of this post isn't to say, "nonlinear did a reasonably sufficient job managing employees and can expect to do so in the future" but rather, "I feel slandered and lied about and I want to share my perspective."
I'll commit to not commenting more now unless I've gotten something really wrong or it's really necessary or something :')
I'm disappointed that much of this document involves attacking the people who've accused you of harmful actions, in place of a focus on disputing the evidence they provided (I appreciate that you also do the latter). I also really bounce off the distraction tactics at play here, where you encourage the reader to turn their attention back to the world's problems. It doesn't seem like you've reflected carefully and calmly about this situation; I don't see many places where you admit to making mistakes and it doesn't seem like you're willing to take ownership of this situation at all.
I don't have time to engage with all the evidence here, but even if I came away convinced that all of the original claims provided by Ben weren't backed up, I still feel really uneasy about Nonlinear; uneasy about your work culture, uneasy about how you communicate and argue, and alarmed at how forcefully you attack people who criticise you.
The vast majority of what they gave is disputing the evidence. There is a whole 135 pages of basically nothing but that. You then even refer to it saying:
How can both these be true at once? Either it's a lot so you don't have time to go through it all or they haven't done much in which case you should be able to spend some time looking at it?
I think it's not actually accurate to say that
as it's constantly interspersed with stuff like how great it is to work in a hot tub.
I don't think I, as a reader, am obliged to review all the evidence here and adjudicate with full information. You certainly shouldn't read my comment as me implying I've done that.
This post struck me as unpleasant and off the mark in the ways I describe it, and I think it's okay for me to just say that.
I want to push back on this framing, and I think it shows a lack of empathy with the position Nonlinear have been put in. (Though I do agree with your dislike of many of the stylistic choices made in this post)
This post is 15K words, and does a mix of attacking the credibility of Ben, Alice and Chloe and disputing the claims with evidence. The linked doc is 58K words, and seems predominantly about collecting an exhaustive array of evidence. Nonlinear have clearly put in a *lot* of work to the linked doc, and try hard to dispute the evidence. So it seems to me that your complaint is really about what aspects Nonlinear chose to make prominent in this post, which in my opinion is a strategic question about how to write a good post, plus some emotional baggage from Nonlinear feeling aggrieved about this whole thing.
From Nonlinear's perspective (not necessarily mine, to be clear), they have two disgruntled ex-employees who had a bad time, told a bunch of lies about them, and got an incredibly popular and widely read EA Forum post about it. This has destroyed their reputation in EA, and been catastrophic to the org, in a way that they consider ill-deserved. They want to write a post to c... (read more)
I can see where Ollie's coming from, frankly. You keep referring to these hundreds of pages of evidence, but it seems very likely you would have been better off just posting a few screenshots of the text messages that contradict some of the most egregious claims months ago. The hypothesising about "what went wrong", the photos, the retaliation section, the guilt-tripping about focusing on this, etc. - these all undermine the discussion about the actual facts by (1) diluting the relevant evidence and (2) making this entire post bizarre and unsettling.
I think you forgot to mention that you also accused the person criticising you of being personally abusive in the post
Yeah and you called him a predator/abuser in response no? And this was, depending on which part of the post/comments you read, confirmed by multiple people/unfair/definitely true/very bad/not bad
Whatever people think about this particular reply by Nonlinear, I hope it's clear to most EAs that Ben Pace could have done a much better job fact-checking his allegations against Nonlinear, and in getting their side of the story.
In my comment on Ben Pace's original post 3 months ago, I argued that EAs & Rationalists are not typically trained as investigative journalists, and we should be very careful when we try to do investigative journalism -- an epistemically and ethically very complex and challenging profession, which typically requires years of training and experience -- including many experiences of getting taken in by individuals and allegations that seemed credible at first, but that proved, on further investigation, to have been false, exaggerated, incoherent, and/or vengeful.
EAs pride ourselves on our skepticism and our epistemic standards when we're identifying large-scope, neglected, tractable causes areas to support, and when we're evaluating different policies and interventions to promote sentient well-being. But those EA skills overlap very little with the kinds of investigative journalism skills required to figure out who's really telling the truth, in contexts... (read more)
One area where Ben didn't follow investigative journalism "best practices" (that I had missed early on, but saw mentioned in Kat's post, and went back and checked) was that he financially compensated his sources ($5,000 each, or $10,000 total). This is frowned upon pretty heavily in investigative journalism (see e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chequebook_journalism). I don't have any reason to believe this meaningfully distorted the outcomes here (for instance, if the sources had no indication right until the end that Ben would compensate them financially, it is unlikely to have influenced their behavior) but it is a clear departure from an existing norm in the investigative journalism field. I appreciate that Ben disclosed this information; disclosure does address some but not all of the concerns around compensating sources.
I don't rule out the possibility that the investigative journalism norm against paying sources is flawed, or it doesn't apply in this case, or that a different set of norms should be applied.
Hmm, this seems like a pretty weak norm. In-particular the Wikipedia article you link says:
And I don't have a sense that European investigative journalism is worse than U.S. investigative journalism.
Separately, whistleblower prices are quite common in the U.S. as well, for example: https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower
The linked Wikipedia article also has many quotes saying that really the central problem here is disclosure:
Habryka - Note that when the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) offers substantial whistleblower bounties, they do not simply take the whistleblowers' word for it and start arresting people. They apply huge teams of auditors, lawyers, investigators, and federal agents to see if the whistleblower allegations are good enough to warrant legal action. If in doubt, they might convene a grand jury to see if the evidence is strong enough to take to trial. And they know from bitter experience that if they simply offered bounties to anybody who makes allegations, they would be deluged with false accusations.
Likewise with journalists. Yes, they offer payments in some cases for whistleblowers. But good journalists fact-check, with the expectation that many 'whistleblowers' will turn out to be bad actors with dubious agendas.
If we incentivize accusations, we'll get a lot of false accusations. There has to be some good-faith effort to check if they are actually true.
Yep, I agree that it's ideal for the prizes to be paid out conditional on them passing fact-checking or leading to a conviction. I think that was hard for various reasons in this case, but it seems clearly better for incentives.
I do think there was quite substantial good-faith effort of fact-checking involved. It might still be the case that it failed, I am still reading the giant 135-page document, but as many have pointed out, this investigation involved hundreds of hours of effort and interviews with over a dozen people, dozens of drafts, and many many fact-checks. So I do object to you implying there wasn't any such process.
I think implying that the process that was present wasn't enough and there should have been more, or that there were substantial issues with it, seems like a reasonable critique that I am still thinking about, but I think implying the absence of one seem bad.
My key point about investigative journalist expertise is that amateurs can invest a huge amount of time, money, and effort into investigations that are not actually very effective, fair, constructive, or epistemically sound.
As EAs know, charities vary hugely in their cost effectiveness. Investigative activities can also vary hugely in their time-effectiveness.
There isn't a track record of retaliation. We didn't retaliate against your sources. We know who almost all of them are and what they said and nothing happened to them.
Alice's messages simply show me saying that if she continued sharing her side, I would share mine. Sharing your side is not unethical.
And the examples that people gave of retaliation for Emerson were of him being sued and people sharing their side online, and him replying saying he's countersue and he'd share his side (which he hadn't done yet). This isn't unethical, but a very reasonable thing to do.
For the libel, Ben knowingly said multiple things that were false and damaging, and he said dozens of things that he could have easily known were false if he'd just waited a week out of 6 months.
But we never wanted to sue Ben. We just wanted Ben to give us time to look at the evidence we were more than willing to share with him. I really recommend reading this section, because I think it gets across very well what was happening.
Here's a quick excerpt:
... (read more)My original comment left a pretty wide window of possibilities open, and your reply falls within that window, so I don't quite think we disagree a lot. However, in the spirit of nitpicking, I'll make a couple of points:
Prominence of disclosure matters. The fact that Ben included the information in his post shows that he didn't intend to hide it; nonetheless, my sense is that he didn't highlight it as a disclosure / disclaimer / caveat for readers to keep in mind when interpreting the post. He did include other disclaimers around his process and motivation at the start of the post, that I found helpful, and his non-inclusion of payment along with those disclosures gives me the sense that he didn't consider the distortionary effect of payment as a biasing factor worth highlighting to readers. My guess is that it would be pretty likely for readers to miss it (as I did). I'm genuinely uncertain whether the lack of discussion around this was driven by people not noticing it, or noticing it and not thinking it mattered.
I'm familiar with the broad outlines of the whistleblower law (from this podcast episode). I think there's a distinction, though, between awarding money after a determination / judgment of harm, versus awarding money as a journalist or investigator who's trying to report on the situation. I don't know exactly how Ben perceived his role, and perhaps the point is that he didn't perceive his role as being strictly one or the other, but a mix.
Alas, I do not know. I have some internal Slack records suggesting it as a thing to consider in April, but I don't know when Ben brought it up to Alice or Chloe. I am confident nothing was confirmed until quite close to the post being published, but I don't know when the idea was first floated (with the only bound I have is that it probably wasn't before April).
Agree that in as much as people were paid directly for propagating inaccurate information, then that seems sad and clearly sets the wrong incentives. I am not currently convinced of that after the initial reading of your evidence document, but I am still reading, and there really is a lot of stuff to process.
In this thread I am trying to have a locally valid discussion on the actual presence of norms against paying for information among investigative journalists. I would prefer if we can keep the discussion here more local since it seems like an interesting and somewhat important question, and I think it would be an important update for me if there were was a consensus among investigative journalists and similar professions that whistleblower prizes and paying for information is a bad idea.
vipulnaik -- good point.
This is also why I would be very wary of the EA Community Safety team offering 'whistleblower support' (which could boil down to 'bounties for false accusations').
Thanks. I don't see any confirmation from him of actually offering to pay upfront, so barring that further evidence I would not read anything too definite from this.
Oh, you're right! I misread. I'll update my comment to be more accurate.
Although I do think it's decent odds that if he said that his plan was to discuss whistleblowing fees with them then, that he probably did. But it is much weaker evidence than I originally thought and conveyed.
I’ll concede that your comment which I criticised at the time is coming off better now. I still feel like it was over-claiming, but as I said, I’m now more sympathetic to it.
I agree with @Habryka that this comment is underspecified and likely written without proper review of the appendix linked. I suspect many readers are likely to conflate disputed with debunked, and this comment plays into that. This works so well, and it's use is so widespread, that it has a name, FUD.
In the comments below, I have asked Spencer Greenberg to specify the most important claims he feels have been repudiated, and why he thinks so. I expect the answer will be genuinely elucidating to me.
ElliotJDavies - I had read earlier versions of the post and the appendix, which is why I felt somewhat confident in commenting on the quality of Ben Pace's fact-checking (or lack thereof).
Habryka - I read several earlier versions of the documentation. I'm familiar with the contents. I understand that others will want to take their time before reaching judgments. Fair enough.
Yes, I should have said 'I hope it will be clear to most EAs that Ben Pace could have done a much better job....'
'- Alice has accused the majority of her previous employers, and 28 people - that we know of - of abuse. She accused people of: not paying her, being culty, persecuting/oppressing her, controlling her romantic life, hiring stalkers, threatening to kill her, and even, literally, murder.'
The section of doc linked to here does not in fact provide any evidence whatsoever of Alice making wild accusations against anyone else, beyond plain assertions (i.e. there are no links to other people saying this).
[I have not read the whole post and might be missing something]
Yeah, I also felt confused/uneasy about this section and it did not feel like a strong piece of evidence to have a numbered list that only contains stuff like:
This feels especially true since our basic assumption should probably be that cases like this ... (read more)
I want to share the following, while expecting that it will probably be unpopular.
I feel many people are not being charitable enough to Nonlinear here.
I have only heard good things about Nonlinear, outside these accusations. I know several people who have interacted with them - mainly with Kat - and had good experiences. I know several people who deeply admire her. I have interacted with Kat occasionally, and she was helpful. I have only read good things about Emerson.
As far as I can tell from this and everything I know/have read, it seems reasonable to assume that the people at Nonlinear are altruistic people. They have demonstrably made exceptional commitments to doing good; started organisations, invested a lot of time and money in EA causes, and helped a lot of people.
Right now, on the basis of what could turn out to have been a lot of lies, their reputations, friendship futures and careers are at risk of being badly damaged (if not already so).
This may have been (more) justified if the claims in the original post were all found and believed to be clearly true. However, that was, and is not, clearly the case at this point in time.
At present, ... (read more)
I think it is entirely possible that people are being unkind because they updated too quickly on claims from Ben's post that are now being disputed, and I'm grateful that you've written this (ditto chinscratch's comment) as a reminder to be empathetic. That being said, there are also some reasons people might be less charitable than you are for reasons that are unrelated to them being unkind, or the facts that are in contention:
Without commenting on whether Ben's original post should have been approached better or worded differently or was misleading etc, this comment from the Community Health/Special Projects team might add some useful additional context. There are also previous allegations that have been raised.[1]
Perhaps you are including both of these as part of the same set of allegations, but some may suggest that not being permitted to run sessions / recruit at EAGs and considering blocking attendance (especially given the reference class of ... (read more)
I was initially concerned that I might be double counting information if that comment turned out to be from Alice or Chloe, but it is dated 2022-11-14 and and I interpret it as being from a current employee. Ben's post has:
Before Ben's post, I had heard some good things and many bad things about Nonlinear, to the point that I was trying to figure out who their board members were in case I needed to raise concerns about one or both of the co-founders (I failed to figure it out because they weren't a registered charity and didn't have their board members listed on their website either).
I haven't looked into the evidence here at all, but fwiw the section on 'sharing information on ben pace' is deranged. I know you are using this as an example of how unfounded allegations can damage someone's reputation. But in repeating them, you are also repeating unfounded allegations and damaging someone's reputation. You are also obviously doing this in retaliation for him criticising you. You could have used an infinite number of examples of how unfair allegations can damage someone's reputation, including eg known false allegations against celebrities or other people reported in the news, or hypotheticals.
Just share your counter-evidence, don't in the process try to smear the person criticising you.
For someone who seems to have made at least 20 comments on this post, why haven't you bothered to at least look into the evidence they provided?
Edited to add: My objection to John’s comment in what I write below lies with the “deranged” part. If John had instead said something like “unnecessary” or “overly escalatory/ad hominem,” then I would not have responded. But “deranged” — dictionary definition: “completely unable to think clearly or behave in a controlled way, especially because of mental illness” (source) — which I take as John implying that the direction Kat has gone in is so completely nonsensical that there can’t possibly be a reasonable explanation, struck me as sufficiently inaccurate for the opening assertion in such a highly upvoted comment that I felt the need to weigh in.
I think Kat could reasonably claim that, from her perspective, Ben has opted out of the social convention around not damaging someone’s reputation through less-than-solid allegations, so she is now fighting fire with fire.
I’m not saying I agree with Kat’s move here [edited to add: and I would personally prefer it if Kat had focused solely on engaging, in a factual manner, with the evidence Ben put forward], but I think there’s a frame in which it makes sense, and therefore it seems unfair to label this move “deranged.”
Retaliation is bad. If you think doing X is bad, then you shouldn't do X, even if you're 'only doing it to make the point that doing X is bad'.
People seem to be using “retaliation” in two different senses: (1) punishing someone merely in response to their having previously acted against the retaliator’s interests, and (2) defecting against someone who has previously defected in a social interaction analogous to a prisoner’s dilemma, or in a social context in which there is a reasonable expectation of reciprocity. I agree that retaliation is bad in the first sense, but Will appears to be using ‘retaliation’ in the second sense, and I do not agree that retaliation is bad in this sense.
(I haven’t followed this thread closely and I do not have object-level views about the Nonlinear dispute. Sharing just in case it helps clear unnecessary misunderstandings.)
So you endorse "always cooperate" over "tit-for-tat" in the Prisoner's Dilemma?
Seems to me there are 2 consistent positions here:
The thing is bad, in which case the person who did it first is worse. (They were the first to defect.)
The thing is OK, in which case the person who did it second did nothing wrong.
I don't think it's particularly blameworthy to both (a) participate in a defect/defect equilibrium, and (b) try to coordinate a move away from it.
EDIT: A couple other points
I know the payoff structure here might not be an actual Prisoner's Dilemma, but I think my point still stands.
David's consistent use of "doing X" seems important here. If someone does X (e.g. blows the whistle on unethical practices), and someone else does Y in response (e.g. fires the person who blew the whistle), that's a different situation.
IIRC, Truman said something at the United Nations like "we need to keep the world free from war", right after having fought one of the largest wars in history (WW2). Doesn't seem that weird to me.
I'm not sure I would have used Ben as the example had I been writing it, but I think I understand why they did, and I certainly don't blame them for it. There is no drama where everyone is on the same side, so any real life example would antagonize some readers. Hypothetical examples are always weaker because the reader might think they are unrealistic. And Ben is in no position to complain about people sharing negative one-sided stories on the EA forum.
It's obvious retaliation for Ben criticising nonlinear in his post.
This word "retaliation" seems to be doing a lot of work in your thinking, so I'd like to disect it a little bit. What exactly do you mean by "retaliation"? One could use retaliation to mean "any time Alice hurts Bob, and later Bob does something that hurts Alice, which he would not have done but for Alice's initial hurtful action." If that is your definition, then yes, sure, this is obvious retaliation. So what? Lots of things that are retaliation under this definition are fine, some are even optimal. Every time that a US military unit attacked a Japanese one during ww2 was retaliation for Pearl Harbor under this definition, yet clearly waging war on Japan was correct. I think when you use the word though, you mean it to carry some additional meaning. You seem to think that it is necessarily bad. And that requires a more constricted definition and an argument that nonlinear's actions satisfy it.
Disagree.
I think this section illustrated something important, that I would not have properly understood without a real demonstration with real facts about a real person. It hits different emotionally when it's real, and given how important this point is, and how emotionally charged everything else is, I think I needed this demonstration for the lesson to hit home for me.
I also don't think this is retaliation. If that was the goal Kat could have just ended the section after making Ben look maximally bad, and not adding the clarifying context.
This is not true. If Kat had just left in the section making Ben look bad, everyone would have been "what? Where is the evidence for this? This seems really bad?".
The way it is written it still leaves many people with an impression, but alleviates any burden of proof that Kat would have had.
You might still think it's a fine rhetorical tool to use, but I think it's clear that Kat of course couldn't have just put the accusations into the post without experiencing substantial backlash and scrutiny of her claims.
I strongly disagree. You logically have to either believe that the entire post of Ben was equally deranged, or that the section in this post is obviously worse than what Ben wrote, or both.
And yes, you could have used other examples to make the point. But it matters that you can do this with Ben in particular because people may have trusted the initial allegations because Ben wrote them. It seem to me to be a valid part of the argument, and one that Kat is morally justified in making.
'You logically have to either believe that the entire post of Ben was equally deranged, or that the section in this post is obviously worse than what Ben wrote, or both.'
I don't get the argument here. Surely there is obviously more reason to trust a report coming from someone who had no known prior beef with the people being accused of misconduct, then one from someone who has massive independent reason to (fairly or unfairly, doesn't matter) detest the person the accusation is about.
Yeah, I mean that would be an argument for why the section is worse than what Ben did. If you do conclude that, then I think your original comment becomes reasonable. It doesn't strike me as obvious though, which might be the crux.
Since the anecdotes in the section are real rather than made-up, it seems nontrivial to me that you can write a section like that even if you have prior reason to dislike the person. I agree with your other comment that it's non-crazy to do some amount of updating based on the section despite Kat saying you shouldn't update. But I don't agree that Kat is therefore not "morally allowed" to write it.
I think the principle is something like, "if X socially harms Y, then Y is morally justified to pull analogous moves on X to make a point as long as this clearly causes only a fraction of the harm, maybe at most 10% something". Which I recognize isn't obvious; you could argue that X harming Y doesn't give Y any permission to be less than maximally ethical. But that is not how most people assess things most of the time. People are generally not expected to be maximally nice to people who mistreated them. And given how humans work, I think that's a norm that makes sense.
Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be (even though, as I said, I agree that it doesn't remove it entirely). This looks to me like a high enough ethical standard given the context.
For the most part, an initial reading of this post and the linked documents did have the intended effect on me of making me view many of the original claims as likely false or significantly exaggerated. With that said, my suggestion would have been to remove some sorts of stuff from the post and keep it only in the linked documents or follow-up posts. In particular, I'd say:
- The photos provide a bit of information, but can be viewed as distracting and misleading. I think the value of information they provide is probably sufficient for their inclusion in a linked Google Doc, but including them twice in the post (and once near the top) gives them a lot of salience, and as some of the comments here show, this can cause some readers to switch off or view your post with hostility.
- Some of the alternative hypothesis stuff, and the stuff related to claims about Ben Pace, may also have been better suited to a linked Google Doc -- something that curious readers could dig into, but that was not given a lot of salience for somebody who was just interested in the core claims. I think there's some value to these exercises, but it would muddy the waters less if this were less salient, so that r
... (read more)Also, I think that not linking to Ben's post near the top can come across as bad form. I fully understand the desire to not link to a post you consider to be making false and misleading claims, and I also expect readers to have no problem locating the original post, so I expect the lack of a link to not matter materially. But it does come across as bad form (Ben's post has been updating to link to yours, so there is now a clear asymmetry).
Updated! Just didn't occur to us. We linked it elsewhere, but it is indeed better to have it near the top. Thanks for pointing it out!
I am commenting to encourage everyone to think about the real people at the centre of all of the very ugly accusations being made, which I hope is acceptable to do, even though this comment does not directly address the evidence presented by either Lightcone or Nonlinear.
This is getting a lot of engagement, as did Ben Pace’s previous post, and for the people being discussed, this must be incredibly stressful. No matter how you think events actually played out, the following are true:
a) at least one group of people is having unfair accusations made against them, either of creating abusive working conditions and taking advantage of the naivety of young professionals, or of being delusional and unreliable or malicious. Neither of these are easy to deal with.
b) the situation is ongoing, and there is no clear timeline for when things will be neatly wrapped up and concluded.
Given this, and having read several comments speaking to the overwhelming experience of being dogpiled on the internet, I just want to encourage everyone who is friendly with any of the people at the centre of this, including Alice, Chloe, Kat Woods, Emerson and Drew Spartz, Ben Pace, and Habryka to reach out and make sure they are coping well. The goal here is hopefully to get to the truth and to update community norms, and it is far too easy for individuals to become casualties of this process. A simple ‘how ya doing?’ can make a big difference when people are struggling.
I've pretty much stayed away from this thread (my family has already exceeded my ability to cope with drama this month/year), but I'd also encourage people to consider that the affected persons have already had to deal with 476 comments when deciding whether authoring comment 477 is worth it.
If you're in a disagreement with someone, it can be OK to say: "I respectfully disagree with that, but this topic has already taken so much time and caused so much angst that I am going to let you have the last word on this one and move on." At this point in the discussion, I don't think anyone should read any negative inferences into a decision to exercise good self-care and step back from further discussion.
My basic takeaway from all of this is not who is right/wrong so much as that EA professional organisations should act more like professional organisations. While it may be temporarily less enjoyable I would expect overall the organisations with things like HR professionals, safeguarding policies, regular working hours, offices in normal cities and work/life boundaries to be significantly more effective contributors to EA
I’m less interested in “debating whether a person in a villa in a tropical paradise got a vegan burger delivered fast enough” or “whether it’s appropriate for your boss to ask you to pick up their ADHD medication from a Mexican pharmacy” or “if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary”? Than in interrogating whether EA wouldn’t be better off with more “boring” organisations led by adults with significant professional experience managing others, where the big company drama is the quality of coffee machine in the office canteen.
I think it's valuable to have social experiments. However, I do think the social experiment of living and working with your employees while traveling has now been experimented with and the results are "it's very risky". I've been doing it with Emerson and Drew for years now and it's been fine, but I think we have a really good dynamic and it's hard to replicate.
As for HR professionals, we had only 3 full-time people at the time, so that would have been too early/small for us to have one.
For safeguarding policies, Chloe was working on creating those. But yeah, she was our first full-time employee where we could even have policies, so it was understandable not to have them yet.
For regular working hours, we did. Chloe only ever worked once on a weekend and never again (she said she didn't like it, and we set up a policy to never do it again).
For offices in a normal city, I don't think that should matter much. Rethink Priorities is fully remote last I checked and in all sorts of cities and it's fine.
As for work/life boundaries, I think the biggest thing was to no live with employees, which we are no longer doing. It's worked in the past for me but I think it's just too risky.
Strong disagree here. I don't think people realize how cumbersome this type of stuff can be, especially for small organizations and how important it is to not just work during regular working hours in normal offices. HR professionals usually only exists for organizations with >20 people. I don't know anyone who is highly effective and gets everything done between 9 and 5 from Mon-Fri.
Really? Those are the companies/organizations that are just surviving off inertia and usually die in 5-50 years accomplishing/changing nothing in the mean time but continuing to churn out some widgets, eventually to be replaced by a new company doing it better.
Churning out widgets is accomplishing something if the product is useful or brings pleasure. The implication otherwise feels snobby to me. And the point of EA is to accomplish stuff, not to be at the cutting edge of innovation (though obviously those two goals are related.)
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all large organizations led by experienced managers, and to the best of my knowledge all three have "HR professionals, safeguarding policies, regular working hours, offices in normal cities and work/life boundaries".
I completely agree with this. I've seen many worse scenarios play out in other organizations due to unprofessionalism, mostly due to lack of experience and the tendency to bootstrap and work in startup mode. While that approach is helpful in some cases, it causes a lot of dysfunction across many organizations and I'd like to see more efforts put into instituting professional norms within EA organizations. This is only a well publicized event - there are many worse ones that I've witnessed that aren't highlighted here. But that brings up another point that a few other commenters mentioned - are we creating an environment that: A) encourages the "move fast and break things" lack of professionalism approach But then: B) condemns them for making mistakes It seems to me that we cannot believe both. Either we supposed the first approach and accept that mistakes will be made, or we do not tolerate mistakes, but then discourage unprofessionalism. That, it seems to me, is the systemic issue surrounding this particular one.
Huh? No, that is a succinct and accurate description of a disputed interpretation, and I think Nonlinear's interpretation is wrong there. They keep saying in their defense that they paid Alice (the equivalent of) $72,000 when they didn't - it's really not the same thing at all if 80% of it is comped flights, food, and hotels. At least for me, the amount of cash that would be an equivalent value to Alice's compensation package is something like $30-40,000.
I’m glad to see that Nonlinear’s evidence is now public, since Ben’s post did not seem to be a thorough investigation. As I said to Ben before he posted his original post, I knew of evidence that strongly contradicted his post, and I encouraged him to temporarily pause the release of his post so he could review the evidence carefully, but he would not delay.
1) Do you have any concerns the section above on Ben Pace could be considered an ad hominem attack? I.e. attacking someone's character rather than their claims? [1]
2) How long do you think it would have been reasonable for Ben Pace to wait? With the benefit of hindsight, we can see it has taken nonlinear 96 days to write a response to his post. [2]
3) What specific claims do you think have been rebutted? Perhaps you can quote Ben's original piece; link to the evidence which disproves it; and include your interpretation of what said evidence shows.
Whilst I think @John G. Halstead comment could have been written better. I agree the question needs to be asked.
It's taken 1 year and 29 days if considering the first time these comments were made https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L4S2NCysoJxgCBuB6/announcing-nonlinear-emergency-funding?commentId=5P75dFuKLo894MQFf
Hi Elliot. To respond to your questions:
(1) I interpreted the section "Sharing Information About Ben Pace" as making the point that it's quite easy to make very bad-sounding accusations that are not reliable and that are not something people should update to any significant degree on if one applies a one-sided and biased approach. It sounds like some people interpreted it differently, but I thought the point of the section was quite clear (to me, anyway) based on this part of it: "However, this is completely unfair to Ben. It’s written in the style of a hit piece. And I believe you should not update much on Ben’s character from this.
[...list of reasons why you shouldn't update given...]
I’m not yet worried about these “patterns” about Ben because I don’t know if they are patterns. I haven’t heard his side. And I refuse to pass judgment on someone without hearing their side"
(2) I think it would have been reasonable for Ben to wait 4 or 5 weeks (e.g., 3 or 4 weeks for them to gather their evidence, 1 or 2 weeks to review it). I assume (though I could be wrong) that Nonlinear could have provided a lot of the key evidence in 3 weeks, though not written it up in long-form prose and... (read more)
I would have loved to hear in your own words the most important claims that you think have been rebutted, and why you think so. When I look through the appendix document, I see a tangle of screenshots; mildly to moderately related points about these screenshots; and subjective claims about the ex-employees' personal dispositions. I am not sure if this is because nonlinear is highly dysfunctional, or whether this is practicing a "[...] see what sticks" strategy.
Taking two important claims from Ben's post. (1) Chloe wasn't paid what she was promised (2) The employees were asked to transport drugs across a border.
(1) The first thing any union employee, HR person, or employment lawyer will ask: Was there a contract and what does it say?
When I come away from reading the appendix, I am un... (read more)
We show Chloe’s work contract in the third row of the very first table. We also link to interview transcripts showing that we paid her exactly what she was promised. This is a clear example of Chloe lying.
If you don’t, update based on that, I’m not sure what to say. She knowingly and clearly lied, despite knowing that we had a work contract and interview transcripts showing this. Please consider that you shouldn't trust somebody who has provably lied to you and the community multiple times.
For #2, you are saying you're worried about a people who want to buy antibiotics? We travel all the time and it's often hard to interact with local medical systems since we don't speak the language. And I get frequent UTIs (if you must know), and very frequently end up being in pain for days because it's hard to navigate a new medical system where I don't speak the language, so it just seems pretty good to be prepared and travel with some antibiotics, just in case.
The link you share isn't saying that pharmacies are illegal, it’s saying that they sometimes sell counterfeit drugs, and that's illegal. It’s not related to this situation.
Lastly, we thought since she was getting a... (read more)
Can I confirm I am seeing the correct image. I see a screenshot of a google document. As oppose to contract signed by both parties. Would you be able to confirm this contract was signed by both parties?
It indeed looks like the article I linked was related to counterfeit drugs, and not necessarily dispensing drugs without prescription. Although, I still suspect the reason adderall is accessible in tourist areas, is not related to their inherent legality, but instead some of the themes this article. I will research this further and make edits below.
If I understand these complaints to have been made in 2021, ChatGPT was launched in Nov 2022. Is it possi... (read more)
Are you referring to the part of the post called "Sharing Information on Ben Pace" when you say "attempted smear of Ben in retaliation for writing the post"? If so, I don't interpret that section the way you might because (from my perspective) it seemed clear that it was trying to make a point about how easy it is to make allegations sound bad when they are flimsy. Especially since the section says:
"However, this is completely unfair to Ben. It’s written in the style of a hit piece. And I believe you should not update much on Ben’s character from this.
[...list of reasons why you shouldn't update given...]
I’m not yet worried about these “patterns” about Ben because I don’t know if they are patterns. I haven’t heard his side. And I refuse to pass judgment on someone without hearing their side"
I didn't interpret the original post as saying you should update 0%, just that you should update only a very small amount because it's flimsy and sloppily reported on evidence.
I tried starting from the beginning of the appendix, and almost immediately encountered a claim for which I feel Nonlinear has overstated their evidence.
Were Alice and Chloe "advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/visitors that Nonlinear invited"? This is split into three separate rebuttals (family, romantic partners, and locals).
Nonlinear provides screenshots demonstrating that they encouraged Alice and Chloe to regularly spend time with their families, and encouraged Chloe to spend time with her boyfriend as well as letting him live with them... and also, in their own words (which I have reproduced verbatim below) they did, in fact, advise Alice to hang out with EAs they knew instead of family once, and instead of locals at least twice.
Their reporting of the family advice:
... (read more)Another random spot check: page 115 of the Google Doc. (I generated a random number between 1 and 135.)
This page is split between two sections. The first starts on page 114:
The quote given in support of this is "I think Emerson is very ambitious and would like a powerful role in EA/X-risk/etc." In my opinion, the quote and the paraphrase are very different things, especially since, as it happens, that quote is not even from the original post, it's from a comment.
The Google Doc then goes on to describe the reasons Drew believes that Emerson is not ambitious for status within EA. This is ultimately a character judgement, and I don't have a strong opinion about who is correct about Emerson's character here. However, I do not think it's actually important to the issue at hand, since the purported ambition was not in fact load-bearing to the original argument in any way.
The second section is longer, and goes on for several pages. It con... (read more)
Reading Lukas_Gloor’s comment (and to a lesser extent, this still helpful one from Erica_Edelman) made me realize what I think is the big disagreement between people and why they are talking past each other.
It comes down to how you would feel about doing Alice/Chloe’s job.
Some people, like the Nonlinear folks and most of those sympathetic to them, think something like the following:
“Why is she such an ungrateful whiner? She has THE dream job/life. She gets to travel the world with us (which is awesome since we can do anything and this is what we chose to do), living in some insanely cool places with super cool and successful people AND she has a large degree of autonomy over what she does AND we are building her up and like 15% of her job is some menial tasks that we did right before she joined and come on it’s fine. How can you complain about the smallest unpleasant thing when the rest of your life rocks and this is your FIRST job out of college when this lifestyle is reserved for multimillionaires? She gets to live the life of a multimillionaire and is surrounded by cool EA people”
Others look at Alice/Chloe’s life and think something like the following:
“Wow,... (read more)
I 100% agree with you that people should be allowed to enter mutually beneficial trades, even when those same trades would be terrible for most people if they entered them. This is really important; there are so many important things we can't accomplish if every job needs to be safe for the lowest common denominator. And "allowed" includes "allowed to be imperfect at identifying who is a good fit, which means some people will get hurt". I think the burden on people is somewhat higher when they're deliberately recruiting people with less life experience, but you still can't expect perfection.
My guess is Chloe and Alice were unusually fragile, and unusually bad at leaving (and I believed this before Kat's post). You should expect that almost everywhere, regardless of quality: the people having the worst time are the ones who are unusually sensitive and unusually bad at exiting situations they don't like. But it seems pretty inevitable that Nonlinear's recruiting strategy at the time would attract these types (to their credit, they seem to have realized they can't get the risk acceptably low, and stopped that recruiting).
Why do I think they were near-destined to recr... (read more)
It sounds like you think that the other 19 employees of nonlinear had the same arrangement (travel with them and be paid $12k/year). I doubt this is true. Probably many of the 19 are being remotely employed.
Many people spend money besides rent+food+travel, so this sounds exaggerated.
Yeah I believe they were the only in person employees - so 0/2 not 19/21
I can't speak about the other interns, but I remotely interned at Nonlinear for free because of the potential to contribute/upskill/open up new opportunities. I was working 4 days/week at a programming job and 1-2 days/week at Nonlinear. My internship helped give me the confidence to organise the Sydney AI Safety Fellowship, which was the first thing I organised in terms of my AI Safety movement building.
It looks like they are bought phones, laptops, SIM cards, productivity tools, etc.
I know of only two people who worked at Nonlinear. They were both in person. Both had good experiences.
My current understanding is that almost all employees who participated in this arrangement had a pretty bad time, but I am not confident of this. I am pretty confident it was >50% though (not counting Kat, Emerson or Drew, who were in positions of authority and so we should expect their experience to be quite different).
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):
... (read more)This comment sounds very reasonable, but I think it really isn't. Not because anything you said is false; I agree that the summary left out relevant sections, but because the standard is unreasonably high. This is a 134 page document. I expect that you could spend hours poking one legitimate hole after another into how they were arguing or paraphrasing.
Since I expect that you can do this, I don't it makes sense to update based on you demonstrating it.
I feel the same way about what happened itself. It seems like Chloe really wanted to have a free day, but Emerson coerced her into working because it was convenient for him, that he probably wouldn't have insisted if she had argued the point, but that she didn't have the social courage to do so (which is super understandable, I don't think I'd have argued in that sitaution). If so, that's very much not cool from Emerson. 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.
Now if Chloe complained about this and the same thing kept happening, then we're talking. I think that puts... (read more)
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 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... (read more)
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 p... (read more)
(I edited an earlier comment to include this, but it's a bit buried now, so I wanted to make a new comment.)
I've read most of the post and appendix (still not everything). To be a bit more constructive, I want to expand on how I think you could have responded better (and more quickly):
... (read more)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.
The evidence collected here doesn’t convince me that Alice and Chloe were lying, or necessarily that Ben Pace did a bad job investigating this. I regret contributing another long and involved comment to this discourse, but I feel like “actually assessing the claims” has been underrepresented compared to people going to the meta level, people discussing the post’s rhetoric, and people simply asserting that this evidence is conclusive proof that Alice and Chloe lied.
My process of thinking through this has made me wish more receipts from Alice and Chloe were included in Ben’s post, or even just that more of the accusations had come in their own words, because then it would be clear exactly what they were claiming. (I think their claims being filtered through first Ben and then Kat/Emerson causes some confusion, as others have noted).
I want to talk about some parts of the post and why I’m not convinced. To avoid cherry-picking, I chose the first claim, about whether Alice was asked to travel with illegal drugs (highlighted by Kat as “if you read just one illustrative story, read this one”), and then I used a random number generator to pick two pages in the appendix (following the lead ... (read more)
Places I think people messed up and where improvement is needed
The Nonlinear Team
Ben Pace
- I think it is pretty reasonable to assume that ~1000-10000 hours and possibly more were spent by the community due to his original post (I am including all the reading and all the
... (read more)Strong disagree.
A) Sure, all else equal speed would have been better. But if you take the hypothesis that NL is mostly innocent as true for a moment. Getting such a post written about you must be absolutely terrible. If it was me, I'd probably not be in a good shape to write anything in response very quickly.
B) Taking their time to write one long thorough rebuttal is probably better for everyone involved than several rushed responses. I think this reduces the total time me and every other concerned observer will spend on this drama.
Good point
I will again link to my original comments on this issue:
... (read more)How about you email them something like
"We are afraid of undue retaliation but also think it would be good for you guys to provide some counter-evidence for us to include. Therefore, we are going to delay publishing the post by 168 hours from the time of this email to give you time to collect evidence and send to us before we post. We don't commit to updating the post based on your evidence but will consider it to make the post as truthful as possible. However, if we get the sense that you are spending this time threatening people and preparing retaliation instead of gathering evidence/screenshots, we will post immediately"
I also want to add that it's not like Lightcone is some feeble powerless organization. Lightcone (and by extension, you + Ben) have a decent amount of power/status in EA. What exactly are you afraid of Emerson/Nonlinear doing?
As i said, I think Emerson threatening the libel lawsuit was dumb.
I don't think we were in a position to reliably find out about them retaliating and threatening people. A lot of our sources were very afraid and IMO had decent evidence to back up why they were afraid.
Also, to be clear, we did share most of our evidence with them before publication, and we did give them a round to respond, which is what like half of Ben's post consists of (the whole summary of Nonlinear's response to the evidence we were presenting was unsurprisingly the result of us sharing the evidence with them). We didn't share the full post, since that included some information that seemed too risky to share, and some of our sources only wanted shared directly publicly and not to Nonlinear first.
I don't understand how the thing that you are asking us to do is that different from what we did. At least in my Slack I have an email we were planning to send out 7 days before publishing (Ben can confirm whether indeed this email was sent out, but I am at 90% it happened):
... (read more)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 abou... (read more)
It's misleading to frame the argument as "them claiming things were inaccurate was appropriate reason to delay publication." The appropriate reason to delay publication was their evident willingness to compile specific counter-evidence within a week. Of course subjects of hostile articles will always claim inaccuracies, but it matters whether they can credibly claim ability to provide contrary information. "Very last-minute screenshots" simply should not be a thing when working on an investigative piece of this magnitude—if you're doing investigative work, you have a duty to do it right, not call it short based on the "time [you] had budgeted" and publish whatever you have.
Here's my standard: epistemic disclaimers do not matter much when it comes to articles impugning reputations. What matters is presenting all available information accurately to the best of your ability. Your claim that the alternative was not a delay simply does not hold water: whether the alternative was a delay or no publication at all was fully within your control. There's no reason to suspect any retaliation would be greater without publication than with publication; your time budget is nobody's concern but your own. If the post contained a single meaningful falsehood at publication that could have been prevented by reviewing the information the subject of the article was actively preparing for you, publication at the chosen time was unreasonable no matter how many disclaimers Ben included.
"Meaningful" covers cases like the ones you mentioned. I stand by my words.
Journalists are responsible, to the best of my understanding, for the accuracy of every single thing they say, which includes the things their sources say. If a source says something a journalist knows to be false and the journalist reports that claim, knowing it to be false, they are not fulfilling their duty. As far as I can observe, this aligns with the legal standard (as I discuss here) as well as the ethical standard.
When you amplify someone's claims, you take responsibility for those claims. When you amplify false claims where contradictory evidence is available to you and you decline to investigate that contradictory evidence, you take responsibility for that.
If someone had evidence of fraud at FTX, they should have published specifically the limited set of evidence they were confident in and could independently verify. If they lacked the time to build a more cohesive, complete story, they should have found someone who had that time.
People live and die on their reputations, and spreading falsehoods that damage someone's reputation is and should be seen as more than just a minor faux pas. I understand the environment that makes EAs want to overcorrect on this right now, but due diligence is not optional when whistleblowing.
I am not an effective altruist, but I am broadly adjacent and I work on stories about sensitive and complex situations with competing information from various parties regularly. I am coming to this fresh, not having heard of Nonlinear or Lightcone prior to yesterday.
Of all responses in this saga, I confess this is the one I'm least sympathetic to. Lawsuit threats are distinctly unfriendly. Here's another thing that's distinctly unfriendly: publishing libelous information likely to do irreparable damage to an organization without giving them the opportunity to proactively correct falsehoods. The legal system is a way of systematizing responses to that sort of unfriendliness; it is not kind, it is not pleasant, but it is a legitimate response to a calculated decision to inflict enormous reputational harm.
So you would have lost 40 hours of productive time? Respectfully: so what? You have sources actively claiming you are about to publish directly false information about them and asking for time to provide evidence that information is directly false. A lot of time, when people do that, they provide a different gloss on the same substantive information, and your original story can go ah... (read more)
Also, I think it is worth Oli/Ben estimating how many productive hours were lost to the decision to not delay; it would not surprise me if much of the benefit here was illusory.
One of the big disputes here is over whether Alice was running her own incubated organization (which she could reasonably expect to spin out) or just another project under Nonlinear. Since Kat cites this as significant evidence for Alice's unreliability, I wanted to do a spot-check.
(Because many of the claims in this response are loosely paraphrased from Ben's original post, I've included a lot of quotes and screenshots to be clear about exactly who said what. Sorry for the length in advance.)
Let's start with claims in Ben's original post:
and
... (read more)Okay, I think it would be helpful to clarify some definitions.
I read your use of "separate organization" to mean a fully independent organization not operating under the legal entity of Nonlinear at all. That's because you talk about Alice using Nonlinear's bank account, ops support, etc. as evidence that she does not have a separate org, while these things would all be perfectly normal for an incubated or fiscally sponsored org. Ben never claims, and never claims that Alice claimed, that she had a fully independent entity of this type. When he says she "gave Nonlinear ownership" of the organization, I did not read that as him saying that she transferred legal control of an indendent entity, but ceded practical control of the project she was incubating inside Nonlinear. I think this is more consistent with the other quotes from Ben's document, where he says that the organization was indeed using Nonlinear's bank account and being incubated by Nonlinear.
I was using fiscally sponsorsed and incubated interchangeably, and apologize for any confusion that may have caused. In my parlance, these would be equivalent – an incubated org is understood to be under the control... (read more)
This post spends a lot of time touting the travel involved in Alice’s and Chloe’s jobs, which seems a bit off to me. I guess some people deeply value living in beautiful and warm locations and doing touristy things year-round, but my impression is that this is not very common. “Tropical paradises” often lack much of the convenience people take for granted in high-income countries, such as quick and easy access to some products and services that make life more pleasant. I also think most people quickly get bored of doing touristy things when it goes beyond a few weeks per year, and value being close to their family, friends, and the rest of their local community. Constantly packing and traveling can also be tiring and stressful, especially when you’re doing it for others.
Putting those things together, it’s plausible that Alice and Chloe eventually started seeing the constant travel as a drawback of the job, rather than as a benefit.
Can confirm. In the family assistant type professional sphere, travel is generally considered a drawback that needs to be highly compensated in order to do.
I strongly agree with the end of your post:
I want you to know that I don't think you're a villain, and that your pain makes me sad. I wrote some comments that were critical of your responses ... and still I stand by those comments. I dislike and disapprove the approach you took. But I also know that you're hurting, and that makes me sad.
So... I'd like you to dwell on that for a minute.
I wrote something in an edited paragraph deep within a subthread, and thought I should raise the point more directly. My sense is that you and Emerson have some characteristics or habits that I would call flawed or bad, and that it was justified to publicly write something about that.
But I also have a sense that Ben's post contains errors.
I think you are EAs and rationalists at heart. I respect that. And I respect the (unknown to me but probably large) funds you've put into trying to do good. Because of that, I think Ben & co should've spent more time to get Ben's initial post right.
And I guess I'm sad about this situation because I feel that both Ben's post and your post were worded in somewhat unfair ways, an... (read more)
Thank you for the empathy. Means a lot to me. This has been incredibly rough, and being expected to exhibit no strong negative emotions in the face of all of this has been very challenging.
And, yes, I do think an alternative timeline like that was possible. I really wish that had happened, and if the multiverse hypothesis is true, then it did happen somewhere, so that's nice to think about.
Thanks for sharing all this information Kat. It seems like this situation has been very difficult for everyone involved. Members of the community health team will look through the post, comments and appendix and work out what our next steps (if any) will be.
Thanks, community health team. I’m wondering if it’d be helpful for the CHT +/- forum mods to develop guidelines regarding standards of evidence for sensitive forum posts, e.g.: under what circumstances (if any) should mods censor a post/parts of a post for making insufficiently substantiated and potentially harmful allegations? Perhaps the answer is “under no circumstances,” but even this would be worth clarifying, I think, so readers know never to expect this and understand the rationale for never doing so.
The forum does have guidance on infohazards, and I assume a post that contained serious infohazards would be censored. Given there are presumably limitations on harmful true things people might say, it seems prima facie plausible that there should be limitations on harmful potentially false things people might say, but I’m not sure when/whether/how that’s right, and it seems worth devoting some serious thought to this. (Sorry if this guidance does exist somewhere, or if this would be outside the purview of what the CHT does, but thanks for considering it.)
Writing in a personal capacity.
“An update to our policies on revealing personal information on the Forum” covers some of what you’re asking about, I think, although the framing there is more about revealing private vs public info than about “How substantiated is substantiated enough?” The most relevant part:
... (read more)Thank you for taking the time to write up all of this evidence, and I can only imagine how time-consuming and challenging this must have been.
Apologies if I missed this, but I didn't see a response to Chloe's statement here that one of her tasks was to buy weed for Kat in countries where weed is illegal. This statement wasn't in Ben's original post, so I can see how you might have missed it in your response. But I would appreciate clarification on whether it is true that one of Chloe's tasks was to buy weed in countries where weed is illegal.
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."
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.
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.
This is a bit tangential/meta, but looking at the comment counter makes me want to express gratitude to the Community Health Team at CEA.
I think here we see a 'practical demonstration' of the counterfactuals of their work:
- insane amount of attention sucked by this
- the court of public opinions on fora seems basically strictly worse at all relevant dimensions like fairness, respect of privacy or compassion to people involved
As 'something like this' would be quite often the counterfactual to CH to trying to deal with stuff ...it makes it clear how much value they are creating by dealing with these problems, even if their process is imperfect
While I agree that the discussion here is bad at all those metrics, I'm not sure how you infer that the CH team does better at e.g. fairness or compassion.
Came here via the FB post by Kat Woods: https://www.facebook.com/katxiowoods/posts/pfbid02mbupEfdsrmkcJwmDWS3E1qmpJQBycapzeFcijhBpi7rQMVx9iHjksA9koGC9b3WCl
"
which starts out with "𝗔𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟳𝟓% 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲!
and follows up with "Two mentally unwell ex-employees told dozens of falsehoods about us, but even in the darkest times, I told myself to trust that EAs/rationalists would update when they saw the evidence, and now I feel justified in that trust.
Turns out that 200+ pages of evidence showing that their accusations were false or misleading is enough for most people
"
Since I am much more of a frequent flyer on FB than on the EA Forum I wonder: Where does the 75% measure come from?
EDIT: Asking this despite the post ending with "Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio." since this doesn't help much with deriving said 75%.
As best as I can tell, it's made up.
(Edit: The FB post now says "*Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio.". I don't really see how you get that number based on vote count and karma.)
If I'm understanding this right, you assume that if someone upvoted the post, it's because they changed their mind?
I think many people (including myself and people at Lightcone) upvoted this post for signal-boosting reasons, and because it seems important to share contradicting evidence whether you agree with it or not. I really don't think upvote to downvote ratio is a reasonable estimate of "having changed their mind" in this case.
I disagree, I think it's entirely possible to upvote things you disagree with, or to upvote the post, read it and update negatively, which is presumably not what you meant here by "people changed their minds".
". One charitable interpretation is that you genuinely believe post upvotes to represent people who agree or have updated positively, but this would be surprising to me.
I think this is a very poor way to make this estimate for most reasonable interpretations of "people changed their minds
One uncharitable interpretation is that this is a way of implying a consensus where it doesn't exist, and conflating "good epistemics" with "people who agree with me". ("75% of people agree with us! I'm so grateful that EA epistemics are trustworthy"). Doing this may create some social pressure to conform both to the majority and to people who apparently have "good epistemics", especially given this claim came alongside the link to the EA Forum post on your FB post, and your call for action at the bottom including voting behavior. This is subtle and not necessarily what you intended, but I thought worth pointing out because the effects may exist regardless of your intentions.
On the unch... (read more)
Or "agreed with Nonlinear before this post and still agrees now". Kat's math assumes that literally everyone agreed with Ben's post until now.
The repurposing of a holocaust poem seems insensitive to me
FWIW I've seen that poem used ironically multiple times before, and I don't recall it being flagged as offensive or insensitive in past incidences.
Eg here's the query on Twitter, <10% of hits are about the Holocaust, and 0% of the replies I spot checked talked about the implied comparison being offensive or insensitive.
First they came for the... But I said nothing.
This is extremely distasteful. We have sufficient evidence now about nonlinear I think, and fortunately it is all in public view
I said at the time that I felt that Ben made a mistake in not waiting a week, though I wasn’t completely confident about this. Having skimmed parts of the document, I’m now much more confident that not waiting was indeed a mistake.
Disclaimer: I remotely interned at Nonlinear.
Most of this seems focused on Alice's experience and allegations. As I understand it, most parties involved - including Kat - believe Chloe to be basically reliable, or at least much more reliable.
Given all that, I'm surprised that this piece does not do more to engage with what Chloe herself wrote about her experience in the original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/32LMQsjEMm6NK2GTH/sharing-information-about-nonlinear?commentId=gvjKdRaRaggRrxFjH
Chloe has been unreliable. She lied about not having a work contract, she lied about the compensation structure, she lied about how many incubatees we had, she lied about being able to live/work apart, doing the accounting, etc etc. Almost all of the falsehoods and misleading claims we cover are also told by her because she signed off on Ben's post and didn't correct the dozens of falsehoods and misleading claims in it.
We originally thought she was more reliable because we hadn't heard from reliable sources what she was saying. Now that it's in writing, we have firm evidence that she has told dozens of falsehoods and misleading claims.
I've been talking to Nonlinear and Lightcone trying to understand how much time LC gave NL for 'adversarial' fact checking on the final claims. Here's what I've ended up with for the timeline; dates are ET since that's where I am:
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... (read more)September 2nd (~5d before), LC reached out to NL to set up a meeting. (source)
September 4th (~3d before), LC shares a high level summary of the claims, an overview of which is public.
Later on September 4th (~2.5d before), the call happens. NL asks for a week to pull together evidence counter to claims in the draft. (source)
September 5th (~2d before), LC says they intend to write a draft that week, and will send it to NL for feedback before publishing. Their wording is ambiguous on whether that's the timeline for publishing or drafting ("I intend to write a public update this week").
Later on September 5th (~1.5d before), NL repeats their request for more time.
September 6th (21hr before), LC shares a draft of their post with NL. This includes additional accusations. (source) Note that NL and LC disagree on how much this added: NL claims this introduced many new accusations (source), while LC claims they'd already shared all the important o
Kat, I'm pretty confused about the tax situation. (Disclaimer: not a tax attorney, unfamiliar with PR + tax codes for other countries you worked from)
Alice/Chloe are referred to as "employees" and you provide a work contract titled "Employment Agreement", so it seems like you think they were employees (instead of independent contractors, which would have different tax liabilities associated with their work.)
Your org was based out of Puerto Rico, so presumably subject to things like PR minimum wage and tax reporting requirements. I know PR differs from US states in some federal income tax regulations, but IIUC PR income is still subject to Social Security, Medicare, and local taxes.
This post suggests the value of the housing should be counted as part of the "compensation" which is valued at ~$70k per year. Housing provided as a fringe benefit is taxable and subject to withholding, just like regular income tax.
Maybe it's inaccurate to consider the AirBnB's "housing" (it's ambiguous given the temporary nature of the housing during travel, but also does seem to be the employees' primary residences during their employment.) Suppose it's not "housing", it's just a travel stipend --... (read more)
Once again, where is the board?
Two of the biggest questions for me are whether or not Nonlinear had a board of directors when Alice and Chloe worked for them and, if they did, whether an employee would know the identities and contact information of the board members and could feel reasonably safe approaching board members to express concerns and seek intervention. I can't find evidence they had a board at the time of the complaints or do now a year and a half after Alice and Chloe stopped working with them. The only reference to a board of directors I see in the Google Doc is Lightcone's board, which seems telling on a few levels.
Nonprofit boards are tasked with ensuring legal compliance, including compliance with relevant employment law considerations, and including above board practices in unconventional and riskier structures like Nonlinear chose to operate through. This situation looks very different if a legitimate board is in place than if employees don't have that safeguard.
Though I'm sad about the hurt experienced by many people across the Nonlinear situation, I'm personally less concerned with the minutiae of this particular organization and more about what structures, norms, and safeguards can be established across the EA ecosystem as a whole to reduce risk and protect EA community members going forward. Boards and institutional oversight are a recurring theme, from FTX to Nonlinear (to maybe OpenAI?) and I'm personally more skeptical of any organization that does not make its board information readily apparent.
Yes, I've been wondering who's on Nonlinear's board for the better part of a year!
Hi,
(writing as the COO of Rethink Priorities).
Nonlinear is not, and has never been fiscally sponsored by Rethink Priorities. RP has never had a legal or financial connection to Nonlinear.
In the grant round you cite, it looks like the receiving charity is listed as Rethink Charity. RP was fiscally sponsored by RC until 2020, but is no longer legally connected to RC. RC is a separate legal entity with a separate board. RP and RC do not have a legal connection anymore, and have not since 2020.
Hey just some notes on how nonprofit fiscal sponsorship stuff works (I have worked in ops for charities for a while now) --
- Not sure if the grant acceptance was your only evidence, but the fact that RC was the receiving charity for a grant in 2022 doesn't necessarily mean they are fiscally sponsoring Nonlinear (or were at the time). I can think of a few reasons related to bank set up times, international transactions, etc. that a charity might ask another charity to receive the grant for them, although it is a bit weird.
- If RC is the fiscal sponsor, it looks like most of RC's fiscal sponsorship projects are Model C. There are a bunch of different fiscal sponsorship models with different implications for the relationship. Model C means they are basically just a pass-through for funds, so Nonlinear would have had to have its own governance board, if one exists.
- Depending on what exactly Nonlinear is, from a legal perspective, it may not have a board. As far as I can tell, they have no information about their corporate structure on their website; they list several "advisors" but that doesn't seem to be a governance board. If Nonlinear doesn't have a board, that reflects
... (read more)I think it's bad to repeatedly accuse people of things they didn't do, or having responsibilities they didn't have, and then write "Oops, sorry!", and we should do less of this.
You could have easily checked in with them, as with Macaskill last time, so that RP didn't have to rush in immediately with a correction, since otherwise way fewer people will see the correction than the original claim/accusation (if any). It lowers this forum's epistemics, wastes people's time, and stains accused people's reputation for no reason.
The tradeoff between writing a claim instantly or spending some time to confirm its correctness usually favours the latter. If I were on the board of RP, having my name on this thread could be damaging, and I would feel lucky that it got corrected immediately. I downvoted because I want to see fewer comments like that.
Just for context, I posted this comment after I messaged a Rethink board member who told me:
"So the Rethink Board delegates authority to govern non-linear to a specific sub-board. I’ll find out who is on that sub-board."
I really feel like given that response, I sure felt justified in my epistemic state that Rethink Priorities was indeed the appropriate organization. It turned out to be a miscommunication, which is unfortunate, but I did actually try to confirm this before posting.
Yeah, Rethink Priorities, and yeah he was just wrong, which confused me. To be clear, I don't think this was his fault, I asked the question in a kind of leading way, and he responded very quickly, and so I model this more as an unfortunate miscommunication.
I just got very excited and posted immediately because I thought that maybe there would be some way out of this that doesn't primarily route through the court of public opinion which my guess was everyone would appreciate.
Confirming that I was wrong about this in my communication with Oli. Also agreeing with Oli here on the context in which those comments were made.
I have made a note in my reflective journal entry on this event to be more careful with my comms in circumstances such as this one.
That's rough! It sounds like you did the right thing (checking with an RP board member before saying NL was under RP) and then the harsh response was because others couldn't tell you'd done the right thing.
My guess is if you had posted a second comment with the true information people would have downvoted the first incorrect one, upvoted the second, and the net would be negative (because people are very averse to false information being shared).
I feel like I shared very relevant information in either case, and IMO it feels like a reasonable mistake to make to think that Rethink Charity is the same as Rethink Priorities, given that they were indeed the same organization in the past.
I also messaged Niel from the Rethink board who himself said to me things that sounded like it confirmed that Nonlinear was fiscally sponsored (happy to share the text in DMs), so I feel like my epistemic state was really quite reasonable.
Re: Checking that claims are true
Adding on as former Nonlinear intern who was aware of a “falling out” between Alice and Nonlinear for almost a year now:
I’m not against Ben and Alice choosing to post this. I believe we should normalise people exercising their option to speak out publicly. The alternative is being silenc... (read more)
I wrote this in response to Ben's post
I have now read the above post, some of the comments, and very little of the appendix.
Nonlinear seems to have more evidence on their side than I had expected. I had the impression that the whole situation was very informal, with practically nothing written down. Now it looks like Nonlinear actually have documentations on their side. Although I have not actually looked at them. I might do this at some point, but mostly I'm hoping that other impartial observers will do this work for me, and I can just read ... (read more)
While there are several stylistic things one might disagree with in the post, to the main charges raised by Ben, this seems about as close to exonerating as one can reasonably expect to get in such cases.
Thanks for writing such an exhaustive post; it can't have been easy.
Sometimes, it is not enough to make a point theoretically, it has to be made in practice. Otherwise, the full depth of the point may not be appreciated. In this case, I believe the point is that, as a community, we should have consistent (high-quality) standards for investigations or character assessments.
This is why I think it is reasonable to have the section "Sharing Information on Ben Pace". It is also why I don't see it as retaliatory.
The response to that section is negative by some even though Kat specifically pointed out all the flaws in it, said that people shouldn't update about it, and that Ben shouldn't have to respond to such things. Why? I believe she is illustrating the exact problem with saying such things, even if one tries to weaken them. The emotional and intellectual displeasure you feel is correct. And it should apply to anyone being assessed in such a way.
I fear there are those who don't see the parallel between Ben's original one-sided (by his own statements) post and Kat's one-sided example (also by her own statements), that is clearly for educational purposes only.
Although apparently problematic to some, I hope the section has been useful to highlight the larger point: assessments of character should be more comprehensive, more evidence-based, and (broadly) more just (eg allowing those discussed time to respond).
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 effor... (read more)
Thanks! This line in particular changed my mind about whether it was retributive, I genuinely can't think of anyone else it would be appropriate to do this for
Overall, I think Nonlinear looks pretty good here. I definitely think they made some mistakes, especially adding members to their work+travel arrangements, but on the whole, I think they acted pretty reasonably and were unjustly vilified.
A lot of people seem very concerned with the tone of the post, whether the “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” section was in bad taste/too retaliatory, whether there were too many pictures depicting the lifestyle, how exactly to compute their employees' salaries, and so on. The primary thing that matters is the veracity and accuracy of the claims made in Ben’s original post, whether Nonlinear successfully refuted (enough of) the claims made, how good their evidence is and finally how open should the EA community be in continuing to work with Nonlinear in the future.
On the whole, I think Nonlinear fairly successfully refuted the vast majority of the concerning claims in Ben’s post, their evidence is pretty good and I’d be happy for the EA community to work with Nonlinear folks in the future.
From Ben: "After this, there were further reports of claims of Kat professing her romantic love for Alice, and also precisely opposite reports of Alice professing her romantic love for Kat. I am pretty confused about what happened."
Could you comment?
I think the preliminary takeaway is that non-linear are largely innocent, but really bad at appearing that way. They derailed their own exoneration via a series of bizarre editorials, which do nothing but distract, borne out of (seemingly) righteous indignation
I think the best thing for readers to do is to await Ben Pace's response, which he aims to have done in week or two.
This whole fiasco has wasted enough EA time as it is. Whether it continues to is in the hands of each reader. Let's put down the popcorn / pitchforks and get back to work.
"she said it was finally time to be strong and speak up now, as long as she was fully anonymized ... She’s still lying awake each night, replaying, over and over, the nightmare of what Ben did to her."
And then you publish it for the first time telling everyone not to believe her???
If what you describe is actually what she told you, how dare you use it for your own gain here? What a cruel and bizarre thing to do
Isn't the implication that the (EDIT: alleged) victim gave consent for Kat to share anonymously?
I see. In that case, it's not a false allegation. I have information that makes me very confident it happened
Why on earth are you reporting it here, given that it is completely irrelevant to the truth of the allegations against nonlinear?
If that's the case, then yeah, she gave permission and was happy for me to share it, as long as it was anonymized. She signed off on this post.
Yes, that's what I mean. If a friend of mine confided in me about something really bad that had happened to her, I wouldn't want to publish it 2/3 of the way down a post about my own drama, even if she said it was okay - and especially wouldn't then tell people not to believe her. But obviously I wasn't sitting in on the conversation and there might be important context I'm missing. It just seems really wrong to me.
Does it matter that she wanted me to share this? Are you going to say that she shouldn't be allowed to do it because you wouldn't want to do it?
Ah, gotcha. In that case, I disagree. I think if somebody is accused of something, it is OK and good to debate whether a) the thing happened and b) whether the thing is bad.
This seems crucial for ethics and epistemics. Imagine the alternative. If somebody accuses somebody of something, people are not allowed to debate whether it happened or if it's bad. This would lead to all accusations being treated as true by default and there would be no way to determine whether it was true or bad. False accusations would be a win-button for anybody.
And I think the main point I was making was that you shouldn't believe or not believe the accusation based on what I wrote because the methods I used were bad (e.g. one sided, loaded phrasing, no disconfirming evidence, etc) which I stand by. If she had just told me that information in that way, I wouldn't update a lot. I would ask Ben for his perspective and get more evidence before I came down too harshly on him.
I have just had too many times where somebody told me this terrible thing happened to them, but when I heard the other side, it almost always turns out to be more nuanced than that. If you only hear one side of a fight, you have very little information about what actually happened.
Yes, I meant some combination of this + this was not a good place to publish that allegation, which again imo harms the accuser if it's true. No worries at all Joel!
While it's generally poor form to attempt to de-anonymize stories, since it's at issue here it seems potentially worth it. It seems like this could be Kat's description of Kat's experience of Ben, which she (clearly) consents to sharing.
Hmm, there are a bunch of rhetorical components like "she told me not to talk to Ben about it" that I think almost any reader would interpret as disconfirmation of this being the case.
I think if this is a summary of Kat's experiences with Ben, then I think that section would IMO be pretty misleading (and that is relevant and not just pre-empted by it trying to be a reductio-ad-absurdum, since the level of misleadingness is trying to be parallel to the original Nonlinear post).
"she told me not to talk to Ben about it" still can be true (but misleading) under this hypothesis. In a section written as true but misleading, this does not seem to me like evidence against "she" referring to Kat in that sentence.
We never dated. We only interacted briefly once before this whole thing happened
She asked me to share this and is grateful I did.
I think you might have misunderstood what I was trying to convey. I wasn't telling people not to believe her. I was telling people that if they heard the full story, there would be debate about whether what happened to her was bad/as bad as she made it out to be.
I for one think that what happened to her was very bad. But I predict ~50% of EAs would disagree.
Kat, I appreciate you responding in detail to Ben's post. I haven't had time yet to look at all the evidence but will hopefully do that in more detail later. One thing that stood out to me from the appendix:
This sounds a bit like you haven't really reflected on whether the setup of living with your employees is a good idea in general, regardless of the climate in EA. In your comment below, you say:
I liked Holly's comment on Ben's original post sa... (read more)
Hi Luzia. We did acknowledge that we're no longer living with employees for exactly the reasons you expressed. You can see our "lessons learned" section here. And it's not going to show up as much in the post, but I have probably spent a full month of full-time work analyzing what happened and what I can do better in the future.
I think we had reason to believe that living and working together would be fine. I've done it with many employees in the past and me and Emerson had been doing it for years. However, I do think it's risky and it's not worth the cost. I hope other EA orgs learn from what happened to us.
However, I do think that overall, this was small relative to the amount of things they lied or experienced delusions about. We've presented hundreds of pages of evidence showing that they told serious falsehoods that were extremely damaging to us.
I think that focusing on our tone or what we did wrong when they've demonstrably lied about dozens of claims is missing the point.
Maybe it was unwise of us to live with employees, but they told dozens of falsehoods and misled people in a way that will cause damage to us until the singularity.
Everybody shou... (read more)
[Third edit to add my current position on 22/12/23]
I said below that I would read the arguments from both sides and then make a final decision. I haven't done that because I didn't have time, and it didn't feel like high value. Especially in light of later posts and comments by people who are better qualified. I feel that it is still better (or at least closer to keeping my prior commitment) to state my current position for future readers than to not say anything further. With that in mind, this (copied from elsewhere) is where I ended up:
Before BP post: NL are a sort of atypical, low structure EA group, doing entrepreneurial and coordination focused work that I think is probably positive impact.
After BP post: NL are actually pretty exploitative and probably net negative overall. I'll wait to hear their response, but I doubt it will change my mind very much.
After NL post: NL are probably not exploitative. They made some big mistakes (and had bad luck) with some risks they took in hiring and working unconventionally. I think they are probably still likely to have a positive impact on expectation. I think that they have been treated harshly.
After this post: I update to be feeling mor... (read more)
One lesson I see in this saga that we, as a community, and hopefully as a society, should be more aware of the fact that accusations are sometimes false and a little slower to pass judgement or react to them.
I think that EAs are particularly vulnerable to a sort of 'moral hazard' of being especially receptive to perceived victims; many of us are empathetic people who feel strong moral obligations to help others. In this case, I can imagine Ben feeling a strong need or even obligation to do something and acting according. If so, what he did was actually very admirable, even if it turns out to have been misguided in hindsight.
I'll also just quickly say that I am still somewhat conflicted about how to interpret the threat of legal action made by NL. On one hand, that seems extreme and a very bad signal for an EA organisation.
On the other hand, as we see here, someone publishing a lot of (in your view) false information about your organisation is extremely harmful and time-consuming to those who are invested in that organisation. It does irreparable damage to reputations and trust.
So this does seem like an exceptional circumstance where you might consider exceptional actions/threats - especially if you have a background in business and entrepreneurship, areas where threatening and taking legal action is normal and necessary.
Having written that, I am realising that I feel NL acted reasonably, knowing what I now know.
Yeah, I think that is my current position.
Kat, thank you for this post. I appreciate the very helpful/understanding manner in which it is written. I'm really sorry that you needed to invest so much into this, although I think you made the right decision in doing so.
I'll read more fully, probably sit with this for some time, and respond properly after that. (Keeping in mind my conditional pre-commitments to signal boost and seriously engage.)
Just to be clear, was this work contract was signed by both parties? If one has made a verbal contract to do X, but before any work is done, a different written contract to do Y is drafted and signed, the written contract will take precedence over the verbal contract (Y>X). I.e. it wouldn't matter what was promised in interviews, as long as you have a written contract agreeing the compensation package. [1]
GPT 4 Tells me this is often referred to as the "parol evidence rule" , and identifies some exceptions to this rule https://chat.openai.com/share/9139370f-9004-4717-85a6-f83a6a3cb07d
I won't comment on who is right and who is wrong. That's not what is relevant here in my opinion anyway. Rather the carelessness with which the money is used and the attitude behind, which gives ground to EA critics, and how could they be not wrong? If we trust the picture given by these people--luxurious salaries, luxurious retreats, carelessness about the money and romantic involvement with each other that leads to drama--, I'm ashamed to be an EA. The fact that no one comments on this worries me tremendously.
This situation disappoints me deeply, and it prompts reflection on what is EA in such circles, and what should be EA. It's disheartening to witness the allocation of funds in a manner that seemingly deviates from the core values of this movement.
My concern extends beyond individual actions; what truly troubles me is the apparent lack of stewardship over financial resources. The discretion given to Chloé regarding her compensation, supposedly from funds "raised," raises questions about accountability. Additionally, extravagant expenditures, like Ben's $5000 for evaluating job applicants, appear starkly incongruent with the principles of effectiveness and impact that EA ... (read more)
Tell me more about these "luxurious AI safety retreats"? I haven't been to an AI safety workshop in several years, and wonder if something has changed. From searching the web, I found this:
and this:
And not much visible evidence of luxury.
Can I suggest you make this a new top-level post and link to it here? It sounds like you've been thinking about it a lot, and I think continued discussion would probably be better in its own post rather than here (although your original comment makes sense here for sure!)
Fellowships where you seek people with excellent machine learning skills should be well-paid to attract talent, especially given how much such people can make doing capacity research.
This seems unlikely - these numbers on Glassdoor are way lower than I'd expect for most of these job titles. Can anyone from OP corroborate?
The Glassdoor numbers are outdated. We share salary information in our job postings; you can see examples here ($84K/year plus a $12k 401k contribution for an Operations Assistant) and here (a variety of roles, almost all of which start at $100k or more per year — search "compensation:" to see details).
I am confident many of these salaries are inaccurate. I don't know the operation-jobs pay-scales, since I've interfaced more with the grantmakers and research associates, but I would be very surprised if these are the current numbers.
I really like the "no villains" conclusion. It might be naive and definitely would be difficult, but I would love to see us all have that attitude of goodwill and forgiveness towards one another.
I read the author's intention, when she makes the case for 'forgiveness as a virtue', as a bid to (1) seem more virtuous herself, and (2) make others more likely to forgive her (since she was so generous to her accusers - at least in that section - and we want to reciprocate generosity). I think this is an effective persuasive writing technique, but is not relevant to the questions at issue (who did what).
Another related 'persuasive writing' technique I spotted was that, in general, Kat is keen to phrase the hypothesis where Nonlinear did bad things in an extreme way - effectively challenging skeptics "so, you saying we're completely evil moustache-twirling vagabonds from out of a children's fairytale?". That's a straw person, because what's at issue is the overall character of Nonlinear staff, not whether they're cartoon villains. The word 'witch' is used 7 times in this post, and 'evil' half a dozen times too. Quote:
> 2 EAs are Secretly Evil Hypothesis: 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees felt bad because while Kat/Emerson seem like kind, uplifting charity workers publicly, behind closed doors they are ill-intentioned ne’er do wells.
I'm confused. You say "what's at issue is the overall character of Nonlinear staff", but that Kat displaying virtues like forgiveness is "is not relevant to the questions at issue (who did what)". (I think both people's character and "who did what" are relevant, and a lot of the post addresses "who did what").
Incidentally, your interpretation of Kat as being manipulative happens to be an example of the lack of goodwill that my original comment was referring to. Whether or not goodwill is in general desirable, I think viewing things through such an overly negative lens puts you at risk of confirmation bias.
If what's at issue was the 'overall character of Nonlinear staff', then is it fair to assume you fully disagreed with Ben's one-sided approach?
Looking at this from a systemic perspective, I wonder how we can prevent this situation from happening again. To clarify, the situation I refer to is intense criticism presented without consideration of the facts that requires significant resources to be directed towards defense in order to maintain credibility.
Writing and responding to discrediting posts consumes a lot of resources that counterfactually could have been used for more impactful purposes.
Additionally, it creates a lot of fear - I can only imagine the distress this situation caused Kat and NL. It takes a lot of personal strength and conviction to stand up to such negativity, and I fear that this kind of whistleblowing is more likely to push people away from doing the hard job of being a nonprofit entrepreneur.
I'd love to hear any suggestions about how to prevent this from happening again.
Contradicting myself to write comments that it wouldn't be helpful for me to sit with...
- Posting a price at which you're willing to do investigative work does not imply that this price is your current average wage.
- The lost productivity claim somewhat rubs me the wrong way. It feels like this could be used as motivated reasoning to underinvest in community norm/safety enforcement.
- That said, I totally agree that if someone does have cheap ways to spare the (very real) productivity costs, they should do so.
- I think the crux might be whether or not Ben did have a cheap option. My memory (maybe misremembered) is that he and Hab
... (read more)Yeah, this was quick napkin math to illustrate the point. It was intended to be an intuition pump about how expensive it can be to spend this much time on something. I won't stand by that particular math.
In terms of the delay, we only asked for a week and Ben had already been working on it for 6 months, so it felt like it wasn't that much of an ask. He sent us the draft in the morning and said he was going to publish it that day. On a day he knew we were traveling and wouldn't have the capacity to respond. He also knew that one of us was sick so couldn't respond. It was the worst day of my life.
Also, I think the main point was that if he'd asked for our side and evidence sooner, he could have saved even more time. He spent over 6 months working on this and spent virtually none of the time talking to us or looking for disconfirming evidence. And according to his second post, he'd already written almost the entire post before he spoke to us and had already promised Alice and Chloe $10,000.
Totally agree that people should be willing to look into claims about somebody. I think the main thing I'd like to see different in the future is truth-seeking and trying to look for disconfirming evidence. Waiting to see the evidence of the other side before dropping a bomb on them that will cause permanent damage to them seems like basic ethics and epistemics.
Apologies for the repeat, I asked these questions on LessWrong but didn’t get an answer so I'm trying here.
I am pretty confused by some of the comments here. I think "Sharing information on Ben Pace" is supposed to be about Kat's experiences and that Kat is expecting/wanting that to be obvious.
Re-reading that section, it was surprisingly consistent with that interpretation, but this line seems to make no sense if it's about Kat's experience - if the trauma is publishing the previous post then "probably really hurt her career if she came forward with her information" does not make sense because the trauma was a public event
I am also confused by this. I think it would be good for Kat to quickly clarify if it was or wasn't her. Since the section is for rhetorical affect, I don't think this should matter, and it seems like an easy misunderstanding to clear up.
FWIW, that was not obvious to me on first reading, until the comments pointed it out to me.
A slightly different possibility is that "Sharing information on Ben Pace" is supposed to be about Kat's experiences, and Kat did not want it to be obvious, because it makes Ben look bad and untrustworthy. But that would be a really dishonest and manipulative thing to do, and would undermine her post, which is supposed to establish that other people are telling lies about her. Kat should clarify that she didn't intend it this way and the section is about someone else.
In Ben's post, he paraphrased Nonlinear as saying (N.B.: these are Ben's words, written from Nonlinear's perspective, not Nonlinear's words):
Regarding Ben's summary of his call with Nonlinear, of which the above is part, Ben claimed in his post:
In this Nonlinear post responding to Ben's post, they write:
And:
... (read more)Thanks for the questions!
Yes. We wouldn’t ask somebody to travel across borders with illegal drugs. We thought they were legal where she was going, and that’s the only reason we asked her. We actually recommended she not travel across borders with illegal recreational drugs, which she was in the habit of doing.
Yes, it was false. We told him that. We sent him multiple emails saying that the article was riddled with falsehoods and misleading claims. The rest of that sentence was “Good summary. Some points still require clarification”. I think this was very intellectually dishonest of Ben to publish just one part of the sentence.
We didn’t ask for any recreational drugs across borders. We asked for one pack of producitivity medicine which we thought were legal where she was going. When we found out it required a prescription, we said never mind.
It's with a heavy heart that I find myself (a) spotting this post (b) starting to read it. Rightly or wrongly, I'm not enjoying the community drama.
I feel like I just want to forget that I'd ever seen any of these posts, and just continue being kind and friendly to anyone I know who's involved in this.
This solution sounds like a crude cludge (shouldn't I be more truth-seeking that that? can't I be more thoughtful?) But I just don't think I have the energy to do better than that.
Minimally, this is an account of an organisation riddled with mismanagement and confusion; that Nonlinear was responsible for allocating non-trivial sums of money, career coaching, or whatever else is a symptom of the degradation of "Effective" Altruism in recent years.
There's a human cognitive bias that may be relevant to this whole discussion, but that may not be widely appreciated in EA yet: gender bias in 'moral typecasting'.
In a 2020 paper, my UNM colleague Tania Reynolds and coauthors found a systematic bias for women to be more easily categorized as victims and men as perpetrators, in situations where harm seems to have been done. The ran six studies in four countries (total N=3,317).
(Ever since a seminal paper by Gray & Wegner (2009), there's been a fast-growing literature on moral typecasting. Beyond t... (read more)
I don't think it's productive to name just one or two of the very many biases one could bring up. I would need some reason to think this bias is more worth mentioning than other biases (such as Ben's payment to Alice and Chloe, or commenters' friendships, etc.).
David - I mention the gender bias in moral typecasting in this context because (1) moral typecasting seems especially relevant in these kinds of organizational disputes, (2) I've noticed some moral typecasting in this specific discussion on EA Forum, and (3) many EAs are already familiar with the classical cognitive biases, many of which have been studied since the early 1970s, but may not be familiar with this newly researched bias.
Where is the evidence people are seeing this as primarily E vs A&C rather than K vs A&C? The post is written by Kat, and the comments on this and other recent posts are from Kat…
TL;DR: In this comment I share my experience being coached by Kat.
I care about the world and about making sure that we develop and implement effective solutions to the many global challenges we face. To accomplish this, we need more people actively working on these issues. I think that Kat plays an important role in facilitating this.
Since I have not followed or analyzed all the recent developments surrounding Nonlinear in detail, I cannot and will not provide my opinion on these developments.
However, I think it’s still useful to share my experience ... (read more)
@Kat Woods
I'm trying to piece together a timeline of events.
You say in the evidence doc that
Can you tell me what month this was? Does this mean just after she quit her previous job or just after she started traveling with you?
[NOTE: This comment is specifically about things that Nonlinear could have done better after the employees in question had left the organization. This is not intended to connote that others were faultless; I'm just focusing on things from Nonlinear's perspective for the purpose of this comment. Also, I am assuming the essential truth of the information Nonlinear has shared, again for the sake of argument.]
One thing I would have suggested Nonlinear do differently in the past few months, after getting clear information that Alice/Chloe were spreading informa... (read more)
Your description of Chloe's driving seems consistent with hers- she didn't want to drive without a license, but there were no ubers available and getting her boss to drive her was too hard.
There were taxis available.
She said she wanted to drive without a license. We gave her alternatives (us paying for taxis/ubers for the once a week or two grocery shop she had to do). She could have done that until she went home and got her license, but she wanted to drive.
Did you see the section where it shows how difficult it was for her to get a ride? She just asked and Emerson said yes. It wasn't very difficult.
Deleting this comment after some fair criticism.
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.)
As far as I know they weren't funded by donated money, they received a grant from the S&F Fund and a smaller one from Open Phil (I don't think either org take donations). The rest was self funded, more details in the original post.
Executive summary: A response was provided to allegations from former employees published on forums, with documentation to support different perspectives on the disputed claims. Issues related to investigation practices and community norms were raised.
Key points:
- Claims were made regarding compensation, work environment, and other topics. Counter-evidence regarding these claims was provided.
- Alternative explanations for the differing perspectives were proposed.
- Concerns were raised about investigation practices used prior to publication of the original allega
... (read more)Perhaps inevitable given the nature of the post, but I thought this was a pretty poor summary; it is too far abstracted from the concrete issues. And "good intentions were acknowledged all around" seems false, as a key part of the post's argument is that Alice is a serial liar.
I asked ChatGPT for a summary and thought it did somewhat better. It was a little less abstract and also shorter, though still more abstract than I would have liked.
While I have been interested in EA since the beginning, I feel like a cultural outsider. One thing that struck me was what seems to be a clear mistake you haven't acknowledged, which many might see as your most significant error: continuing to work with and trust someone who, according to your account, is a serious and long-term drug user.
I weakly agree that the EA social scene is too drug-y. (By which I mean: people doing psychedelics even though they have mental health issues that psychedelics might exacerbate, one person talking about having once done cocaine in casual conversation, plus I just suspect that psychedelics are bad for your epistemics and make you more likely to believe what I'd class as "new age-y bullshit".)
But I still think talking about drug use on this way is a bit melodramatic. A large % of the population in Western countries are fairly to very regular users of alcohol. A significant minority of those people semi-regularly drink to excess. And alcohol is I think regarded by most public health people as having a worse risk profile than many illegal drugs, including weed and pretty much any psychedelic. But whilst "don't hire a (non-recovered) alcoholic" is a common-sense rule, no one says "don't hire long-term frequent alcohol users".