Added (11th Sept): Nonlinear have commented that they intend to write a response, have written a short follow-up, and claim that they dispute 85 claims in this post. I'll link here to that if-and-when it's published.
Added (11th Sept): One of the former employees, Chloe, has written a lengthy comment personally detailing some of her experiences working at Nonlinear and the aftermath.
Added (12th Sept): I've made 3 relatively minor edits to the post. I'm keeping a list of all edits at the bottom of the post, so if you've read the post already, you can just go to the end to see the edits.
Added (15th Sept): I've written a follow-up post saying that I've finished working on this investigation and do not intend to work more on it in the future. The follow-up also has a bunch of reflections on what led up to this post.
Added (12th Dec): Nonlinear has written a lengthy reply, which you can read here.
Epistemic status: Once I started actively looking into things, much of my information in the post below came about by a search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders, not from a search to give a balanced picture of its overall costs and benefits. 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, and then update based on how much worse (or better) it is than you expect I could produce. (See section 5 of this post about Mistakes with Conservation of Expected Evidence for more on this.) This seems like a worthwhile exercise for at least non-zero people to do in the comments before reading on. (You can condition on me finding enough to be worth sharing, but also note that I think I have a relatively low bar for publicly sharing critical info about folks in the EA/x-risk/rationalist/etc ecosystem.)
tl;dr: If you want my important updates quickly summarized in four claims-plus-probabilities, jump to the section near the bottom titled "Summary of My Epistemic State".
When I used to manage the Lightcone Offices, I spent a fair amount of time and effort on gatekeeping — processing applications from people in the EA/x-risk/rationalist ecosystem to visit and work from the offices, and making decisions. Typically this would involve reading some of their public writings, and reaching out to a couple of their references that I trusted and asking for information about them. A lot of the people I reached out to were surprisingly great at giving honest references about their experiences with someone and sharing what they thought about someone.
One time, Kat Woods and Drew Spartz from Nonlinear applied to visit. I didn't know them or their work well, except from a few brief interactions that Kat Woods seems high-energy, and to have a more optimistic outlook on life and work than most people I encounter.
I reached out to some references Kat listed, which were positive to strongly positive. However I also got a strongly negative reference — someone else who I informed about the decision told me they knew former employees who felt taken advantage of around things like salary. However the former employees reportedly didn't want to come forward due to fear of retaliation and generally wanting to get away from the whole thing, and the reports felt very vague and hard for me to concretely visualize, but nonetheless the person strongly recommended against inviting Kat and Drew.
I didn't feel like this was a strong enough reason to bar someone from a space — or rather, I did, but vague anonymous descriptions of very bad behavior being sufficient to ban someone is a system that can be straightforwardly abused, so I don't want to use such a system. Furthermore, I was interested in getting my own read on Kat Woods from a short visit — she had only asked to visit for a week. So I accepted, though I informed her that this weighed on my mind. (This is a link to the decision email I sent to her.)
(After making that decision I was also linked to this ominous yet still vague EA Forum thread, that includes a former coworker of Kat Woods saying they did not like working with her, more comments like the one I received above, and links to a lot of strongly negative Glassdoor reviews for Nonlinear Cofounder Emerson Spartz's former company “Dose”. Note that more than half of the negative reviews are for the company after Emerson sold it, but this is a concerning one from 2015 (while Emerson Spartz was CEO/Cofounder): "All of these super positive reviews are being commissioned by upper management. That is the first thing you should know about Spartz, and I think that gives a pretty good idea of the company's priorities… care more about the people who are working for you and less about your public image". A 2017 review says "The culture is toxic with a lot of cliques, internal conflict, and finger pointing." There are also far worse reviews about a hellish work place which are very worrying, but they’re from the period after Emerson’s LinkedIn says he left, so I’m not sure to what extent he is responsible he is for them.)
On the first day of her visit, another person in the office privately reached out to me saying they were extremely concerned about having Kat and Drew in the office, and that they knew two employees who had had terrible experiences working with them. They wrote (and we later discussed it more):
Their company Nonlinear has a history of illegal and unethical behavior, where they will attract young and naive people to come work for them, and subject them to inhumane working conditions when they arrive, fail to pay them what was promised, and ask them to do illegal things as a part of their internship. I personally know two people who went through this, and they are scared to speak out due to the threat of reprisal, specifically by Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz.
This sparked (for me) a 100-200 hour investigation where I interviewed 10-15 people who interacted or worked with Nonlinear, read many written documents and tried to piece together some of what had happened.
My takeaway is that indeed their two in-person employees had quite horrendous experiences working with Nonlinear, and that Emerson Spartz and Kat Woods are significantly responsible both for the harmful dynamics and for the employees’ silence afterwards. Over the course of investigating Nonlinear I came to believe that the former employees there had no legal employment, tiny pay, a lot of isolation due to travel, had implicit and explicit threats of retaliation made if they quit or spoke out negatively about Nonlinear, simultaneously received a lot of (in my opinion often hollow) words of affection and claims of familial and romantic love, experienced many further unpleasant or dangerous experiences that they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t worked for Nonlinear, and needed several months to recover with friends and family afterwards before they felt able to return to work.
(Note that I don’t think the pay situation as-described in the above quoted text was entirely accurate, I think it was very small — $1k/month — and employees implicitly expected they would get more than they did, but there was mostly not salary ‘promised’ that didn’t get given out.)
After first hearing from them about their experiences, I still felt unsure about what was true — I didn’t know much about the Nonlinear cofounders, and I didn’t know which claims about the social dynamics I could be confident of. To get more context, I spent about 30+ hours on calls with 10-15 different people who had some professional dealings with at least one of Kat, Emerson and Drew, trying to build up a picture of the people and the org, and this helped me a lot in building my own sense of them by seeing what was common to many people’s experiences. I talked to many people who interacted with Emerson and Kat who had many active ethical concerns about them and strongly negative opinions, and I also had a 3-hour conversation with the Nonlinear cofounders about these concerns, and I now feel a lot more confident about a number of dynamics that the employees reported.
For most of these conversations I offered strict confidentiality, but (with the ex-employees’ consent) I’ve here written down some of the things I learned.
In this post I do not plan to name most of the people I talked to, but two former employees I will call “Alice” and “Chloe”. I think the people involved mostly want to put this time in their life behind them and I would encourage folks to respect their privacy, not name them online, and not talk to them about it unless you’re already good friends with them.
Conversation with Kat on March 7th, 2023
Returning to my initial experience: on the Tuesday of their visit, I still wasn’t informed about who the people were or any details of what happened, but I found an opportunity to chat with Kat over lunch.
After catching up for ~15 mins, I indicated that I'd be interested in talking about the concerns I raised in my email, and we talked in a private room for 30-40 mins. As soon as we sat down, Kat launched straight into stories about two former employees of hers, telling me repeatedly not to trust one of the employees (“Alice”), that she has a terrible relationship with truth, that she's dangerous, and that she’s a reputational risk to the community. She said the other employee ("Chloe") was “fine”.
Kat Woods also told me that she expected to have a policy with her employees of “I don’t say bad things about you, you don’t say bad things about me”. I am strongly against this kind of policy on principle (as I told her then). This and other details raised further red flags to me (i.e. the salary policy) and I wanted to understand what happened.
Here’s an overview of what she told me:
- When they worked at Nonlinear, Alice and Chloe had expenses covered (room, board, food) and Chloe also got a monthly bonus of $1k/month.
- Alice and Chloe lived in the same house as Kat, Emerson and Drew. Kat said that she has decided to not live with her employees going forward.
- She said that Alice, who incubated their own project (here is a description of the incubation program on Nonlinear’s site), was able to set their own salary, and that Alice almost never talked to her (Kat) or her other boss (Emerson) about her salary.
- Kat doesn’t trust Alice to tell the truth, and that Alice has a history of “catastrophic misunderstandings”.
- Kat told me that Alice was unclear about the terms of the incubation, and said that Alice should have checked in with Kat in order to avoid this miscommunication.
- Kat suggested that Alice may have quit in substantial part due to Kat missing a check-in call over Zoom toward the end.
- Kat said that she hoped Alice would go by the principle of “I don’t say bad things about you, you don’t say bad things about me” but that the employee wasn’t holding up her end and was spreading negative things about Kat/Nonlinear.
- Kat said she gives negative references for Alice, advises people “don't hire her” and not to fund her, and “she’s really dangerous for the community”.
- She said she didn’t have these issues with her other employee Chloe, she said she was “fine, just miscast” for her role of “assistant / operations manager”, which is what led to her quitting. Kat said Chloe was pretty skilled but did a lot of menial labor tasks for Kat that she didn’t enjoy.
- The one negative thing she said about Chloe was that she was being paid the equivalent of $75k[1] per year (only $1k/month, the rest via room and board), but that at one point she asked for $75k on top of all expenses being paid and that was out of the question.[2]
A High-Level Overview of The Employees’ Experience with Nonlinear
Background
The core Nonlinear staff are Emerson Spartz, Kat Woods, and Drew Spartz.
Kat Woods has been in the EA ecosystem for at least 10 years, cofounding Charity Science in 2013 and working there until 2019. After a year at Charity Entrepreneurship, in 2021 she cofounded Nonlinear with Emerson Spartz, where she has worked for 2.5 years.
Nonlinear has received $599,000 from the Survival and Flourishing Fund in the first half of 2022, and $15,000 from Open Philanthropy in January 2022.
Emerson primarily funds the project through his personal wealth from his previous company Dose and from selling Mugglenet.com (which he founded). Emerson and Kat are romantic partners, and Emerson and Drew are brothers. They all live in the same house and travel across the world together, jumping from AirBnb to AirBnb once or twice per month. The staff they hire are either remote, or live in the house with them.
My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe). Alice was the only person to go through their incubator program.
Nonlinear tried to have a fairly high-commitment culture where the long-term staff are involved very closely with the core family unit, both personally and professionally. However they were given exceedingly little financial independence, and a number of the social dynamics involved seem really risky to me.
Alice and Chloe
Alice travelled with Nonlinear from November 2021 to June 2022 and started working for the org from around February, and Chloe worked there from January 2022 to July 2022. After talking with them both, I learned the following:
- Neither were legally employed by the non-profit at any point.
- Chloe’s and Alice’s finances (along with Kat's and Drew's) all came directly from Emerson's personal funds (not from the non-profit). This left them having to get permission for their personal purchases, and they were not able to live apart from the family unit while they worked with them, and they report feeling very socially and financially dependent on the family during the time they worked there.
- Chloe’s salary was verbally agreed to come out to around $75k/year. However, she was only paid $1k/month, and otherwise had many basic things compensated i.e. rent, groceries, travel. This was supposed to make traveling together easier, and supposed to come out to the same salary level. While Emerson did compensate Alice and Chloe with food and board and travel, Chloe does not believe that she was compensated to an amount equivalent to the salary discussed, and I believe no accounting was done for either Alice or Chloe to ensure that any salary matched up. (I’ve done some spot-checks of the costs of their AirBnbs and travel, and Alice/Chloe’s epistemic state seems pretty reasonable to me.)
- Alice joined as the sole person in their incubation program. She moved in with them after meeting Nonlinear at EAG and having a ~4 hour conversation there with Emerson, plus a second Zoom call with Kat. Initially while traveling with them she continued her previous job remotely, but was encouraged to quit and work on an incubated org, and after 2 months she quit her job and started working on projects with Nonlinear. Over the 8 months she was there Alice claims she received no salary for the first 5 months, then (roughly) $1k/month salary for 2 months, and then after she quit she received a ~$6k one-off salary payment (from the funds allocated for her incubated organization). She also had a substantial number of emergency health issues covered.[3]
- Salary negotiations were consistently a major stressor for Alice’s entire time at Nonlinear. Over her time there she spent through all of her financial runway, and spent a significant portion of her last few months there financially in the red (having more bills and medical expenses than the money in her bank account) in part due to waiting on salary payments from Nonlinear. She eventually quit due to a combination of running exceedingly low on personal funds and wanting financial independence from Nonlinear, and as she quit she gave Nonlinear (on their request) full ownership of the organization that she had otherwise finished incubating.
- From talking with both Alice and Nonlinear, it turned out that by the end of Alice’s time working there, since the end of February Kat Woods had thought of Alice as an employee that she managed, but that Emerson had not thought of Alice as an employee, primarily just someone who was traveling with them and collaborating because she wanted to, and that the $1k/month plus other compensation was a generous gift.
- Alice and Chloe reported that Kat, Emerson, and Drew created an environment in which being a valuable member of Nonlinear included being entrepreneurial and creative in problem-solving — in practice this often meant getting around standard social rules to get what you wanted was strongly encouraged, including getting someone’s favorite table at a restaurant by pressuring the staff, and finding loopholes in laws pertaining to their work. This also applied internally to the organization. Alice and Chloe report being pressured into or convinced to take multiple actions that they seriously regretted whilst working for Nonlinear, such as becoming very financially dependent on Emerson, quitting being vegan, and driving without a license in a foreign country for many months. (To be clear I’m not saying that these laws are good and that breaking them is bad, I’m saying that it sounds to me from their reports like they were convinced to take actions that could have had severe personal downsides such as jail time in a foreign country, and that these are actions that they confidently believe they would not have taken had it not been due to the strong pressures they felt from the Nonlinear cofounders and the adversarial social environment internal to the company.) I’ll describe these events in more detail below.
- They both report taking multiple months to recover after ending ties with Nonlinear, before they felt able to work again, and both describe working there as one of the worst experiences of their lives.
- They both report being actively concerned about professional and personal retaliation from Nonlinear for speaking to me, and told me stories and showed me some texts that led me to believe that was a very credible concern.
An assortment of reported experiences
There are a lot of parts of their experiences at Nonlinear that these two staff found deeply unpleasant and hurtful. I will summarize a number of them below.
I think many of the things that happened are warning flags, I also think that there are some red lines, I’ll discuss my thoughts on which are the red lines in my takeaways at the bottom of this post.
My Level of Trust in These Reports
Most of the dynamics were described to me as accurate by multiple different people (low pay, no legal structure, isolation, some elements of social manipulation, intimidation), leading me to have high confidence in them, and Nonlinear themselves confirmed various parts of these accounts.
People whose word I would meaningfully update on about this sort of thing have vouched for Chloe’s word as reliable.
The Nonlinear staff and a small number of other people who visited during Alice and Chloe’s employment have strongly questioned Alice’s trustworthiness and suggested she has told outright lies. Nonlinear showed me texts where people who had spoken with Alice came away with the impression that she was paid $0 or $500, which is inaccurate (she was paid ~$8k on net, as she told me).
That said, I personally found Alice very willing and ready to share primary sources with me upon request (texts, bank info, etc), so I don’t believe her to be acting in bad faith.
In my first conversation with her, Kat claimed that Alice had many catastrophic miscommunications, but that Chloe was (quote) “fine”. In general nobody questioned Chloe’s word and broadly the people who told me they questioned Alice’s word said they trusted Chloe’s.
Personally I found all of their fears of retaliation to be genuine and earnest, and in my opinion justified.
Why I’m sharing these
I do have a strong heuristic that says consenting adults can agree to all sorts of things that eventually hurt them (i.e. in accepting these jobs), even if I paternalistically might think I could have prevented them from hurting themselves. That said, I see clear reasons to think that Kat and Emerson intimidated these people into accepting some of the actions or dynamics that hurt them, so some parts do not seem obviously consensual to me.
Separate from that, I think it’s good for other people to know what they’re getting into, so I think sharing this info is good because it is relevant for many people who have any likelihood of working with Nonlinear. And most importantly to me, I especially want to do it because it seems to me that Nonlinear has tried to prevent this negative information from being shared, so I am erring strongly on the side of sharing things.
(One of the employees also wanted to say something about why she contributed to this post, and I've put it in a footnote here.[4])
Highly dependent finances and social environment
Everyone lived in the same house. Emerson and Kat would share a room, and the others would make do with what else was available, often sharing bedrooms.
Nonlinear primarily moved around countries where they typically knew no locals and the employees regularly had nobody to interact with other than the cofounders, and employees report that they were denied requests to live in a separate AirBnb from the cofounders.
Alice and Chloe report that they were 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. Alice and Chloe report this made them very socially dependent on Kat/Emerson/Drew and otherwise very isolated.
The employees were very unclear on the boundaries of what would and wouldn’t be paid for by Nonlinear. For instance, Alice and Chloe report that they once spent several days driving around Puerto Rico looking for cheaper medical care for one of them before presenting it to senior staff, as they didn’t know whether medical care would be covered, so they wanted to make sure that it was as cheap as possible to increase the chance of senior staff saying yes.
The financial situation is complicated and messy. This is in large-part due to them doing very little accounting. In summary Alice spent a lot of her last 2 months with less than €1000 in her bank account, sometimes having to phone Emerson for immediate transfers to be able to cover medical costs when she was visiting doctors. At the time of her quitting she had €700 in her account, which was not enough to cover her bills at the end of the month, and left her quite scared. Though to be clear she was paid back ~€2900 of her outstanding salary by Nonlinear within a week, in part due to her strongly requesting it. (The relevant thing here is the extremely high level of financial dependence and wealth disparity, but Alice does not claim that Nonlinear failed to pay them.)
One of the central reasons Alice says that she stayed on this long was because she was expecting financial independence with the launch of her incubated project that had $100k allocated to it (fundraised from FTX). In her final month there Kat informed her that while she would work quite independently, they would keep the money in the Nonlinear bank account and she would ask for it, meaning she wouldn’t have the financial independence from them that she had been expecting, and learning this was what caused Alice to quit.
One of the employees interviewed Kat about her productivity advice, and shared notes from this interview with me. The employee writes:
During the interview, Kat openly admitted to not being productive but shared that she still appeared to be productive because she gets others to do work for her. She relies on volunteers who are willing to do free work for her, which is her top productivity advice.
The employees report that some interns later gave strongly negative feedback on working unpaid, and so Kat decided that she would no longer have interns at all.
Severe downsides threatened if the working relationship didn’t work out
In a conversation between Emerson Spartz and one of the employees, the employee asked for advice for a friend that wanted to find another job while being employed, without letting their current employer know about their decision to leave yet. Emerson reportedly immediately stated that he now has to update towards considering that the said employee herself is considering leaving Nonlinear. He went on to tell her that he gets mad at his employees who leave his company for other jobs that are equally good or less good; he said he understands if employees leave for clearly better opportunities. The employee reports that this led them to be very afraid of leaving the job, both because of the way Emerson made the update on thinking the employee is now trying to leave, as well as the notion of Emerson being retaliative towards employees that leave for “bad reasons”.
For background context on Emerson’s business philosophy: Alice quotes Emerson advising the following indicator of work progress: "How much value are you able to extract from others in a short amount of time?"[5] Another person who visited described Emerson to me as “always trying to use all of his bargaining power”. Chloe told me that, when she was negotiating salaries with external partners on behalf of Nonlinear, Emerson advised her when negotiating salaries, to offer "the lowest number you can get away with".
Many different people reported that Emerson Spartz would boast about his business negotiations tactics to employees and visitors. He would encourage his employees to read many books on strategy and influence. When they read the book The 48 Laws of Power he would give examples of him following the “laws” in his past business practices.
One story that he told to both employees and visitors was about his intimidation tactics when involved in a conflict with a former teenage mentee of his, Adorian Deck.
(For context on the conflict, here’s links to articles written about it at the time: Hollywood Reporter, Jacksonville, Technology & Marketing Law Blog, and Emerson Spartz’s Tumblr. Plus here is the Legal Contract they signed that Deck later sued to undo.)
In brief, Adorian Deck was a 16 year-old who (in 2009) made a Twitter account called “OMGFacts” that quickly grew to having 300,000+ followers. Emerson reached out to build companies under the brand, and agreed to a deal with Adorian. Less than a year later Adorian wanted out of the deal, claiming that Emerson had made over $100k of profits and he’d only seen $100, and sued to end the deal.
According to Emerson, it turned out that there’s a clause unique to California (due to the acting profession in Los Angeles) where even if a minor and their parent signs a contract, it isn’t valid unless the signing is overseen by a judge, and so they were able to simply pull out of the deal.
But to this day Emerson’s company still owns the OMGfacts brand and companies and Youtube channels.
(Sidenote: I am not trying to make claims about who was “in the right” in these conflicts, I am reporting these as examples of Emerosn’s negotiation tactics that he reportedly engages in and actively endorses during conflicts.)
Emerson told versions of this story to different people who I spoke to (people reported him as ‘bragging’).
In one version, he claimed that he strong-armed Adorian and his mother with endless legal threats and they backed down and left him with full control of the brand. This person I spoke to couldn’t recall the details but said that Emerson tried to frighten Deck and his mother, and that they (the person Emerson was bragging to) found it “frightening” and thought the behavior was “behavior that’s like 7 standard deviations away from usual norms in this area.”
Another person was told the story in the context of the 2nd Law from “48 Laws of Power”, which is “Never put too much trust in friends, learn how to use enemies”. The summary includes
“Be wary of friends—they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical… you have more to fear from friends than from enemies.”
For this person who was told the Adorian story, the thing that resonated most when he told it was the claim that he was in a close, mentoring relationship with Adorian, and leveraged knowing him so well that he would know “exactly where to go to hurt him the most” so that he would back off. In that version of the story, he says that Deck’s life-goal was to be a YouTuber (which is indeed Deck's profession until this day — he produces about 4 videos a month), and that Emerson strategically contacted the YouTubers that Deck most admired, and told them stories of Deck being lazy and trying to take credit for all of Emerson's work. He reportedly threatened to do more of this until Deck relented, and this is why Deck gave up the lawsuit. The person said to me “He loved him, knew him really well, and destroyed him with that knowledge.”[6]
I later spoke with Emerson about this. He does say that he was working with the top YouTubers to create videos exposing Deck, and this is what brought Deck back to the negotiating table. He says that he ended up renegotiating a contract where Deck receives $10k/month for 7 years. If true, I think this final deal reflects positively on Emerson, though I still believe the people he spoke to were actively scared by their conversations with Emerson on this subject. (I have neither confirmed the existence of the contract nor heard Deck’s side of the story.)
He reportedly told another negotiation story about his response to getting scammed in a business deal. I won’t go into the details, but reportedly he paid a high-price for the rights to a logo/trademark, only to find that he had not read the fine print and had been sold something far less valuable. He gave it as an example of the "Keep others in suspended terror: cultivate an air of unpredictability" strategy from The 48 Laws of Power:
Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.
In that business negotiation, he (reportedly) acted unhinged. According to the person I spoke with, he said he’d call the counterparty and say “batshit crazy things” and yell at them, with the purpose of making them think he’s capable of anything, including dangerous and unethical things, and eventually they relented and gave him the deal he wanted.
Someone else I spoke to reported him repeatedly saying that he would be “very antagonistic” toward people he was in conflict with. He reportedly gave the example that, if someone tried to sue him, he would be willing to go into legal gray areas in order to “crush his enemies” (a phrase he apparently used a lot), including hiring someone to stalk the person and their family in order to freak them out. (Emerson denies having said this, and suggests that he was probably describing this as a strategy that someone else might use in a conflict that one ought to be aware of.)
After Chloe eventually quit, Alice reports that Kat/Emerson would “trash talk” her, saying she was never an “A player”, criticizing her on lots of dimensions (competence, ethics, drama, etc) in spite of previously primarily giving Chloe high praise. This reportedly happened commonly toward other people who ended or turned down working together with Nonlinear.
Here are some texts between Kat Woods and Alice shortly after Alice had quit, before the final salary had been paid.
A few months later, some more texts from Kat Woods.
(I can corroborate that it was difficult to directly talk with the former employee and it took a fair bit of communication through indirect social channels before they were willing to identify themselves to me and talk about the details.)
Effusive positive emotion not backed up by reality, and other manipulative techniques
Multiple people who worked with Kat reported that Kat had a pattern of enforcing arbitrary short deadlines on people in order to get them to make the decision she wants e.g. “I need a decision by the end of this call”, or (in an email to Alice) “This is urgent and important. There are people working on saving the world and we can’t let our issues hold them back from doing their work.”
Alice reported feeling emotionally manipulated. She said she got constant compliments from the founders that ended up seeming fake.
Alice wrote down a string of the compliments at the time from Kat Woods (said out loud and that Alice wrote down in text), here is a sampling of them that she shared with me:
“You’re the kind of person I bet on, you’re a beast, you’re an animal, I think you are extraordinary"
"You can be in the top 10, you really just have to think about where you want to be, you have to make sacrifices to be on the top, you can be the best, only if you sacrifice enough"
"You’re working more than 99% because you care more than 99% because you’re a leader and going to save the world"
"You can’t fail if you commit to [this project], you have what it takes, you get sh*t done and everyone will hail you in EA, finally an executor among us."
Alice reported that she would get these compliments near-daily. She eventually had the sense that this was said in order to get something out of her. She reported that one time, after a series of such compliments, the Kat Woods then turned and recorded a near-identical series of compliments into their phone for a different person.
Kat Woods reportedly several times cried while telling Alice that she wanted the employee in their life forever and was worried that this employee would ever not be in Kat’s life.
Other times when Alice would come to Kat with money troubles and asking for a pay rise, Alice reports that Kat would tell them that this was a psychological issue and that actually they had safety, for instance they could move back in with their parents, so they didn’t need to worry.
Alice also reports that she was explicitly advised by Kat Woods to cry and look cute when asking Emerson Spartz for a salary improvement, in order to get the salary improvement that she wanted, and was told this was a reliable way to get things from Emerson. (Alice reports that she did not follow this advice.)
Many other strong personal costs
Alice quit being vegan while working there. She 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. She also said that the Nonlinear cofounders marked her quitting veganism as a ‘win’, as they thad been arguing that she should not be vegan.
(Nonlinear disputes this, and says that they did go out and buy her some vegan burgers food and had some vegan food in the house. They agree that she quit being vegan at this time, and say it was because being vegan was unusually hard due to being in Puerto Rico. Alice disputes that she received any vegan burgers.)
Alice said that this generally matched how she and Chloe were treated in the house, as people generally not worth spending time on, because they were ‘low value’ (i.e. in terms of their hourly wage), and that they were the people who had to do chores around the house (e.g. Alice was still asked to do house chores during the period where she was sick and not eating).
By the same reasoning, the employees reported that they were given 100% of the menial tasks around the house (cleaning, tidying, etc) due to their lower value of time to the company. For instance, if a cofounder spilled food in the kitchen, the employees would clean it up. This was generally reported as feeling very demeaning.
Alice and Chloe reported a substantial conflict within the household between Kat and Alice. Alice was polyamorous, and she and Drew entered into a casual romantic relationship. Kat previously had a polyamorous marriage that ended in divorce, and is now monogamously partnered with Emerson. Kat reportedly told Alice that she didn't mind polyamory "on the other side of the world”, but couldn't stand it right next to her, and probably either Alice would need to become monogamous or Alice should leave the organization. Alice didn't become monogamous. Alice reports that Kat became increasingly cold over multiple months, and was very hard to work with.[7]
Alice reports then taking a vacation to visit her family, and trying to figure out how to repair the relationship with Kat. 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”. Privately, Drew said that Kat would “love her forever” if she did this. I bring this up as an example of the sorts of requests that Kat/Emerson/Drew felt comfortable making during Alice’s time there.
Chloe was hired by Nonlinear with the intent to have them do executive assistant tasks for Nonlinear (this is the job ad they responded to). After being hired and flying out, Chloe was informed that on a daily basis their job would involve driving e.g. to get groceries when they were in different countries. She explained that she didn’t have a drivers’ license and didn’t know how to drive. Kat/Emerson proposed that Chloe learn to drive, and Drew gave her some driving lessons. When Chloe learned to drive well enough in parking lots, she said she was ready to get her license, but she discovered that she couldn’t get a license in a foreign country. Kat/Emerson/Drew reportedly didn’t seem to think that mattered or was even part of the plan, and strongly encouraged Chloe to just drive without a license to do their work, so she drove ~daily for 1-2 months without a license. (I think this involved physical risks for the employee and bystanders, and also substantial risks of being in jail in a foreign country. Also, Chloe basically never drove Emerson/Drew/Kat, this was primarily solo driving for daily errands.) Eventually Chloe had a minor collision with a street post, and was a bit freaked out because she had no idea what the correct protocols were. She reported that Kat/Emerson/Drew didn’t think that this was a big deal, but that Alice (who she was on her way to meet) could clearly see that Chloe was distressed by this, and Alice drove her home, and Chloe then decided to stop driving.
(Car accidents are the second most common cause of death for people in their age group. Insofar as they were pressured to do this and told that this was safe, I think this involved a pretty cavalier disregard for the safety of the person who worked for them.)
Chloe talked to a friend of hers (who is someone I know fairly well, and was the first person to give me a negative report about Nonlinear), reporting that they were very depressed. When Chloe described her working conditions, her friend was horrified, and said she had to get out immediately since, in their words, “this was clearly an abusive situation”. The friend offered to pay for flights out of the country, and tried to convince her to quit immediately. Eventually Chloe made a commitment to book a flight by a certain date and then followed through with that.
Lax on legalities and adversarial business practices
I did not find the time to write much here. For now I’ll simply pass on my impressions.
I generally got a sense from speaking with many parties that Emerson Spartz and Kat Woods respectively have very adversarial and very lax attitudes toward legalities and bureaucracies, with the former trying to do as little as possible that is asked of him. If I asked them to fill out paperwork I would expect it was filled out at least reluctantly and plausibly deceptively or adversarially in some way. In my current epistemic state, I would be actively concerned about any project in the EA or x-risk ecosystems that relied on Nonlinear doing any accounting or having a reliable legal structure that has had the basics checked.
Personally, if I were giving Nonlinear funds for any project whatsoever, including for regranting, I’d expect it’s quite plausible (>20%) that they didn’t spend the funds on what they told me, and instead will randomly spend it on some other project. If I had previously funded Nonlinear for any projects, I would be keen to ask Nonlinear for receipts to show whether they spent their funds in accordance with what they said they would.
This is not a complete list
I want to be clear that this is not a complete list of negative or concerning experiences, this is an illustrative list. There are many other things that I was told about that I am not including here due to factors like length and people’s privacy (on all sides). Also I split them up into the categories as I see them; someone else might make a different split.
Perspectives From Others Who Have Worked or Otherwise Been Close With Nonlinear
I had hoped to work this into a longer section of quotes, but it seemed like too much back-and-forth with lots of different people. I encourage folks to leave comments with their relevant impressions.
For now I’ll summarize some of what I learned as follows:
- Several people gave reports consistent with Alice and Chloe being very upset and distressed both during and after their time at Nonlinear, and reaching out for help, and seeming really strongly to want to get away from Nonlinear.
- Some unpaid interns (who worked remotely for Nonlinear for 1-3 months) said that they regretted not getting paid, and that when they brought it up with Kat Woods she said some positive sounding things and they expected she would get back to them about it, but that never happened during the rest of their internships.
- Many people who visited had fine experiences with Nonlinear, others felt much more troubled by the experience.
- One person said to me about Emerson/Drew/Kat:
- "My subjective feeling is like 'they seemed to be really bad and toxic people'. And they at the same time have a decent amount of impact. After I interacted repeatedly with them I was highly confused about the dilemma of people who are mistreating other people, but are doing some good."
- Another person said about Emerson:
- “He seems to think he’s extremely competent, a genius, and that everyone else is inferior to him. They should learn everything they can from him, he has nothing to learn from them. He said things close to this explicitly. Drew and (to a lesser extent) Kat really bought into him being the new messiah.”
- One person who has worked for Kat Woods (not Alice or Chloe) said the following:
- I love her as a person, hate her as a boss. She’s fun, has a lot of ideas, really good socialite, and I think that that speaks to how she’s able to get away with a lot of things. Able to wear different masks in different places. She’s someone who’s easy to trust, easy to build social relationships with. I’d be suspicious of anyone who gives a reference who’s never been below Kat in power.
- Ben: Do you think Kat is emotionally manipulative?
- I think she is. I think it’s a fine line about what makes an excellent entrepreneur. Do whatever it takes to get a deal signed. To get it across the line. Depends a lot on what the power dynamics are, whether it’s a problem or not. If people are in equal power structures it’s less of a problem.
There were other informative conversations that I won’t summarize. I encourage folks who have worked with or for Nonlinear to comment with their perspective.
Conversation with Nonlinear
After putting the above together, I got permission from Alice and Chloe to publish, and to share the information I had learned as I saw fit. So I booked a call with Nonlinear, sent them a long list of concerns, and talked with Emerson, Kat and Drew for ~3 hours to hear them out.
Paraphrasing Nonlinear
On the call, they said their primary intention in the call was to convince me that Alice is a bald-faced liar. They further said they’re terrified of Alice making false claims about them, and that she is in a powerful position to hurt them with false accusations.
Afterwards, I wrote up a paraphrase of their responses. I shared it with Emerson and he replied that it was a “Good summary!”. Below is the paraphrase of their perspective on things that I sent them, with one minor edit for privacy. (The below is written as though Nonlinear is speaking, but to be clear this 100% my writing.)
- We hired one person, and kind-of-technically-hired a second person. In doing so, our intention wasn't just to have employees, but also to have members of our family unit who we traveled with and worked closely together with in having a strong positive impact in the world, and were very personally close with.
- We nomadically traveled the globe. This can be quite lonely so we put a lot of work into bringing people to us, often having visitors in our house who we supported with flights and accommodation. This probably wasn't perfect but in general we'd describe the environment as "quite actively social".
- For the formal employee, she responded to a job ad, we interviewed her, and it all went the standard way. For the gradually-employed employee, we initially just invited her to travel with us and co-work, as she seemed like a successful entrepreneur and aligned in terms of our visions for improving the world. Over time she quit her existing job and we worked on projects together and were gradually bringing her into our organization.
- We wanted to give these employees a pretty standard amount of compensation, but also mostly not worry about negotiating minor financial details as we traveled the world. So we covered basic rent/groceries/travel for these people. On top of that, to the formal employee we gave a $1k/month salary, and to the semi-formal employee we eventually did the same too. For the latter employee, we roughly paid her ~$8k over the time she worked with us.
- From our perspective, the gradually-hired employees gave a falsely positive impression of their financial and professional situation, suggesting they'd accomplished more than they had and were earning more than they had. They ended up being fairly financially dependent on us and we didn't expect that.
- Eventually, after about 6-8 months each, both employees quit. Overall this experiment went poorly from our perspective and we're not going to try it in future.
- For the formal employee, we're a bit unsure about why exactly she quit, even though we did do exit interviews with her. She said she didn't like a lot of the menial work (which is what we hired her for), but didn't say that money was the problem. We think it is probably related to everyone getting Covid and being kind of depressed around that time.
- For the other employee, relations got bad for various reasons. She ended up wanting total control of the org she was incubating with us, rather than 95% control as we'd discussed, but that wasn't on the table (the org had $250k dedicated to it that we'd raised!), and so she quit.
- When she was leaving, we were financially supportive. On the day we flew back from the Bahamas to London, we paid all our outstanding reimbursements (~$2900). We also offered to pay for her to have a room in London for a week as she got herself sorted out. We also offered her rooms with our friends if she promised not to tell them lies about us behind our backs.
- After she left, we believe she told a lot of lies and inaccurate stories about us. For instance, two people we talked to had the impression that we either paid her $0 or $500, which is demonstrably false. Right now we're pretty actively concerned that she is telling lots of false stories in order to paint us in a negative light, because the relationship didn't work out and she didn't get control over her org (and because her general character seems drama-prone).
There were some points around the experiences of these employees that we want to respond to.
- First; the formal employee drove without a license for 1-2 months in Puerto Rico. We taught her to drive, which she was excited about. You might think this is a substantial legal risk, but basically it isn't, as you can see here, the general range of fines for issues around not-having-a-license in Puerto Rico is in the range of $25 to $500, which just isn't that bad.
- Second; the semi-employee said that she wasn't supported in getting vegan food when she was sick with Covid, and this is why she stopped being vegan. This seems also straightforwardly inaccurate, we brought her potatoes, vegan burgers, and had vegan food in the house. We had been advising her to 80/20 being a vegan and this probably also weighed on her decision.
- Third; the semi-employee was also asked to bring some productivity-related and recreational drugs over the border for us. In general we didn't push hard on this. For one, this is an activity she already did (with other drugs). For two, we thought it didn't need prescription in the country she was visiting, and when we found out otherwise, we dropped it. And for three, she used a bunch of our drugs herself, so it's not fair to say that this request was made entirely selfishly. I think this just seems like an extension of the sorts of actions she's generally open to.
Finally, multiple people (beyond our two in-person employees) told Ben they felt frightened or freaked out by some of the business tactics in the stories Emerson told them. To give context and respond to that:
- I, Emerson, have had a lot of exceedingly harsh and cruel business experience, including getting tricked or stabbed-in-the-back. Nonetheless, I have often prevailed in these difficult situations, and learned a lot of hard lessons about how to act in the world.
- The skills required to do so seem to me lacking in many of the earnest-but-naive EAs that I meet, and I would really like them to learn how to be strong in this way. As such, I often tell EAs these stories, selecting for the most cut-throat ones, and sometimes I try to play up the harshness of how you have to respond to the threats. I think of myself as playing the role of a wise old mentor who has had lots of experience, telling stories to the young adventurers, trying to toughen them up, somewhat similar to how Prof Quirrell[8] toughens up the students in HPMOR through teaching them Defense Against the Dark Arts, to deal with real monsters in the world.
- For instance, I tell people about my negotiations with Adorian Deck about the OMGFacts brand and Twitter account. We signed a good deal, but a California technicality meant he could pull from it and take my whole company, which is a really illegitimate claim. They wouldn't talk with me, so I was working with top YouTubers to make some videos publicizing and exposing his bad behavior. This got him back to the negotiation table and we worked out a deal where he got $10k/month for seven years, which is not a shabby deal, and meant that I got to keep my company!
- It had been reported to Ben that Emerson said he would be willing to go into legal gray areas in order to "crush his enemies" (if they were acting in very reprehensible and norm-violating ways). Emerson thinks this has got to be a misunderstanding, that he was talking about what other people might do to you, which is a crucial thing to discuss and model.
(Here I cease pretending-to-be-Nonlinear and return to my own voice.)
My thoughts on the ethics and my takeaways
Summary of My Epistemic State
Here are my probabilities for a few high-level claims relating to Alice and Chloe’s experiences working at Nonlinear.
- Emerson Spartz employs more vicious and adversarial tactics in conflicts than 99% of the people active in the EA/x-risk/AI Safety communities: 95%
- Alice and Chloe were more dependent on their bosses (combining financial, social, and legally) than employees are at literally every other organization I am aware of in the EA/x-risk/AI Safety ecosystem: 85%[9]
- In working at Nonlinear Alice and Chloe were both took on physical and legal risks that they strongly regretted, were hurt emotionally, came away financially worse off, gained ~no professional advancement from their time at Nonlinear, and took several months after the experience to recover: 90%
- Alice and Chloe both had credible reason to be very scared of retaliation for sharing negative information about their work experiences, far beyond that experienced at any other org in the EA/x-risk/AI Safety ecosystem: 85%[10]
General Comments From Me
Going forward I think anyone who works with Kat Woods, Emerson Spartz, or Drew Spartz, should sign legal employment contracts, and make sure all financial agreements are written down in emails and messages that the employee has possession of. I think all people considering employment by the above people at any non-profits they run should take salaries where money is wired to their bank accounts, and not do unpaid work or work that is compensated by ways that don’t primarily include a salary being wired to their bank accounts.
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. These are not the first, nor sadly the last, bright-eyed well-intentioned people who I expect to be taken advantage of and hurt in the EA/x-risk/AI safety ecosystem, as a result of falsely trusting high-status people at EA events to be people who will treat them honorably.
(Personal aside: Regarding the texts from Kat Woods shown above — I have to say, if you want to be allies with me, you must not write texts like these. A lot of bad behavior can be learned from, fixed, and forgiven, but if you take actions to prevent me from being able to learn that the bad behavior is even going on, then I have to always be worried that something far worse is happening that I’m not aware of, and indeed I have been quite shocked to discover how bad people’s experiences were working for Nonlinear.)
My position is not greatly changed by the fact that Nonlinear is overwhelmingly confident that Alice is a “bald-faced liar”. From my current perspective, they probably have some legitimate grievances against her, but that in no way makes it less costly to our collective epistemology to incentivize her to not share her own substantial grievances. I think the magnitude of the costs they imposed on their employees-slash-new-family are far higher than I or anyone I know would have expected was happening, and they intimidated both Alice and Chloe into silence about those costs. If it were only Alice then I would give this perspective a lot more thought/weight, but Chloe reports a lot of the same dynamics and similar harms.
To my eyes, the people involved were genuinely concerned about retaliation for saying anything negative about Nonlinear, including the workplace/household dynamics and how painful their experiences had been for them. That’s a red line in my book, and I will not personally work with Nonlinear in the future because of it, and I recommend their exclusion from any professional communities that wish to keep up the standard of people not being silenced about extremely negative work experiences. “First they came for the epistemology. We don't know what happened after that.”
Specifically, the things that cross my personal lines for working with someone or viewing them as an ally:
- Kat Woods attempted to offer someone who was really hurting, and in a position of strong need, very basic resources with the requirement of not saying bad things about her.
- Kat Woods’ texts that read to me as a veiled threat to destroy someone’s career for sharing negative information about her.
- Emerson Spartz reportedly telling multiple people he will use questionably legal methods in order to crush his enemies (such as spurious lawsuits and that he would hire a stalker to freak someone out).
- Both employees were actively afraid that Emerson Spartz would retaliate and potentially using tactics like spurious lawsuits and further things that are questionably legal, and generally try to destroy their careers and leave them with no resources. It seems to me (given the other reports I’ve heard from visitors) that Emerson behaved in a way that quite understandably led them to this epistemic state, and I consider that to be his responsibility to not give his employees this impression.
I think in almost any functioning professional ecosystem, there should be some general principles like:
- If you employ someone, after they work for you, unless they've done something egregiously wrong or unethical, they should be comfortable continuing to work and participate in this professional ecosystem.
- If you employ someone, after they work for you, they should feel comfortable talking openly about their experience working with you to others in this professional ecosystem.
Any breaking of the first rule is very costly, and any breaking of the second rule is by-default a red-line for me not being willing to work with you.
I do think that there was a nearby world where Alice, having run out of money, gave in and stayed at Nonlinear, begging them for money, and becoming a fully dependent and subservient house pet — a world where we would not have learned the majority of this information. I think we're not that far from that world, I think a weaker person than Alice might have never quit, and it showed a lot of strength to quit at the point where you have ~no runway left and you have heard the above stories about the kinds of things Emerson Spartz considers doing to former business partners that he is angry with.
I’m very grateful to the two staff members involved for coming forward and eventually spending dozens of hours clarifying and explaining their experiences to me and others who were interested. To compensate them for their courage, the time and effort spent to talk with me and explain their experiences at some length, and their permission to allow me to publish a lot of this information, I (using personal funds) am going to pay them each $5,000 after publishing this post.
I think that whistleblowing is generally a difficult experience, with a lot riding on the fairly personal account from fallible human beings. It’s neither the case that everything reported should be accepted without question, nor that if some aspect is learned to be exaggerated or misreported that the whole case should be thrown out. I plan to reply to further questions here in the comments, I also encourage everyone involved to comment insofar as they wish to answer questions or give their own perspective on what happened.
Addendum
This is a list of edits made post-publication.
- "Alice worked there from November 2021 to June 2022" became "Alice travelled with Nonlinear from November 2021 to June 2022 and started working for the org from around February"
- "using Lightcone funds" became "using personal funds"
- "I see clear reasons to think that Kat, Emerson and Drew intimidated these people" became "I see clear reasons to think that Kat and Emerson intimidated these people".
- ^
In a later conversation, Kat clarified that the actual amount discussed was $70k.
- ^
Comment from Chloe:
In my resignation conversation with Kat, I was worried about getting into a negotiation conversation where I wouldn’t have strong enough reasons to leave. To avoid this, I started off by saying that my decision to quit is final, and not an ultimatum that warrants negotiation of what would make me want to stay. I did offer to elaborate on the reasons for why I was leaving. As I was explaining my reasons, she still insisted on offering me solutions to things I would say I wanted, to see if that would make me change my mind anyway. One of the reasons I listed was the lack of financial freedom in not having my salary be paid out as a salary which I could allocate towards decisions like choices in accommodation for myself, as well as meals and travel decisions. She wanted to know how much I wanted to be paid. I kept evading the question since it seemed to tackle the wrong part of the problem. Eventually I quoted back the number I had heard her reference to when she’d talk about what my salary is equivalent to, suggesting that if they’d pay out the 75k as a salary instead of the compensation package, then that would in theory solve the salary issue. There was a miscommunication around her believing that I wanted that to be paid out on top of the living expenses - I wanted financial freedom and a legal salary. I believe the miscommunication stems from me mentioning that salaries are more expensive for employers to pay out as they also have to pay tax on the salaries, e.g. social benefits, pension (depending on the country). Kat was surprised to hear that and understood it as me wanting a 75k salary before taxes. I do not remember that conversation concluding with her thinking I wanted everything paid for and also 75k.
- ^
Note that Nonlinear and Alice gave conflicting reports about which month she started getting paid, February vs April. It was hard for me to check as it’s not legally recorded and there’s lots of bits of monetary payments unclearly coded between them.
- ^
Comment from one of the employees:
I had largely moved on from the subject and left the past behind when Ben started researching it to write a piece with his thoughts on it. I was very reluctant at first (and frightened at the mere thought), and frankly, will probably continue to be. I did not agree to post this publicly with any kind of malice, rest assured. The guiding thought here is, as Ben asked, "What would you tell your friend if they wanted to start working for this organization?" I would want my friend to be able to make their own independent decision, having read about my experience and the experiences of others who have worked there. My main goal is to create a world where we can all work together towards a safe, long and prosperous future, and anything that takes away from that (like conflict and drama) is bad and I have generally avoided it. Even when I was working at Nonlinear, I remember saying several times that I just wanted to work on what was important and didn't want to get involved in their interpersonal drama. But it's hard for me to imagine a future where situations like that are just overlooked and other people get hurt when it could have been stopped or flagged before. I want to live in a world where everyone is safe and cared for. For most of my life I have avoided learning about anything to do with manipulation, power frameworks and even personality disorders. By avoiding them, I also missed the opportunity to protect myself and others from dangerous situations. Knowledge is the best defense against any kind of manipulation or abuse, so I strongly recommend informing yourself about it, and advising others to do so too.
- ^
This is something Alice showed me was written in her notes from the time.
- ^
I do not mean to make a claim here about who was in the right in that conflict. And somewhat in Emerson’s defense, I think some of people’s most aggressive behavior comes out when they themselves have just been wronged — I expect this is more extreme behavior than he would typically respond with. Nonetheless, it seems to me that there was reportedly a close, mentoring relationship — Emerson’s tumblr post on the situation says “I loved Adorian Deck” in the opening paragraph — but that later Emerson reportedly became bitter and nasty in order to win the conflict, involving threatening to overwhelm someone with lawsuits and legal costs, and figure out the best way to use their formerly close relationship to hurt them emotionally, and reportedly gave this as an example of good business strategy. I think this sort of story somewhat justifiably left people working closely with Emerson very worried about the sort of retaliation he might carry out if they were ever in a conflict, or he were to ever view them as an ‘enemy’.
- ^
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.
- ^
Note that during our conversation, Emerson brought up HPMOR and the Quirrell similarity, not me.
- ^
With the exception of some FTX staff.
- ^
One of the factors lowering my number here is that I’m not quite sure what the dynamics are like at places like Anthropic and OpenAI — who have employees sign non-disparagement clauses, and are involved in geopolitics — or whether they would even be included. I also could imagine finding out that various senior people at CEA/EV are terrified of information coming out about them. Also note that I am not including Leverage Research in this assessment.
On behalf of Chloe and in her own words, here’s a response that might illuminate some pieces that are not obvious from Ben’s post - as his post is relying on more factual and object-level evidence, rather than the whole narrative.
“Before Ben published, I found thinking about or discussing my experiences very painful, as well as scary - I was never sure with whom it was safe sharing any of this with. Now that it’s public, it feels like it’s in the past and I’m able to talk about it. Here are some of my experiences I think are relevant to understanding what went on. They’re harder to back up with chatlog or other written evidence - take them as you want, knowing these are stories more than clearly backed up by evidence. I think people should be able to make up their own opinion on this, and I believe they should have the appropriate information to do so.
I want to emphasize *just how much* the entire experience of working for Nonlinear was them creating all kinds of obstacles, and me being told that if I’m clever enough I can figure out how to do these tasks anyway. It’s not actually about whether I had a contract and a salary (even then, the issue wasn’t the amount or even the legali... (read more)
I confirm that this is Chloe, who contacted me through our standard communication channels to say she was posting a comment today.
Thank you very much for sharing, Chloe.
Ben, Kat, Emerson, and readers of the original post have all noticed that the nature of Ben's process leads to selection against positive observations about Nonlinear. I encourage readers to notice that the reverse might also be true. Examples of selection against negative information include:
- Ben has reason to exclude stories that are less objective or have a less strong evidence base. The above comment is a concrete example of this.
- There's also something related here about the supposed unreliability of Alice as a source: Ben needs to include this to give a complete picture/because other people (in particular the Nonlinear co-founders) have said this. I strongly concur with Ben when he writes that he "found Alice very willing and ready to share primary sources [...] so I don’t believe her to be acting in bad faith." Personally, my impression is that people are making an incorrect inference about Alice from her characteristics (that are perhaps correlated with source-reliability in a large population, but aren't logically related, and aren't relevant in this case).
- To the extent that you expect other people to have been silenced (e.g. via antici
... (read more)😬 There's a ton of awful stuff here, but these two parts really jumped out at me. Trying to push past someone's boundaries by imposing a narrative about the type of person they are ('but you're the type of person who loves doing X!' 'you're only saying no because you're the type of person who worries too much') is really unsettling behavior.
I'll flag that this is an old remembered anecdote, and those can be unreliable, and I haven't heard Emerson or Kat's version of events. But it updates me, because Chloe seems like a pretty good source and this puzzle piece seems congruent with the other puzzle pieces.
E.g., the vibe here matches something that creeped me out a lot about Kat's text message to Alice in the OP, which is the apparent attempt to corner/railroad Alice into agreement via a bunch of threats and strongly imposed frames, followed immediately by Kat repeatedly stat... (read more)
This sounds like a terribly traumatic experience. I'm so sorry you went through this, and I hope you are in a better place and feel safer now.
Your self-worth is so, so much more than how well you can navigate what sounds like a manipulative, controlling, and abusive work environment.
It sounds like despite all of this, you've tried to be charitable to people who have treated you unfairly and poorly - while this speaks to your compassion, I know this line of thought can often lead to things that feel like you are gaslighting yourself, and I hope this isn't something that has caused you too much distress.
I also hope that Effective Altruism as a community becomes a safer space for people who join it aspiring to do good, and I'm grateful for your courage in sharing your experiences, despite it (very reasonably!... (read more)
Wow. Sincere apologies you went through that. Even if Kat and Emerson thought they were being reasonable (no comment), and/or even if bad instances were few and far between (no comment), such instances would affect me and most people I know very deeply. Probably including the multi-month hangover and residual pain today. And that matters, and is something we need managers/bosses/colleagues to consider. Even if it was only painful at the time, that would matter. Really sorry.
P.S. I previously put a "changed my mind" react to this comment, but I really meant "brought new things to mind". Put them in other comments
I hope this doesn't seem heartless, but: Given the degree of contested narratives in this affair, can someone not-anonymous with access to Chloe confirm that this account speaks for her?
(i think it probably does, to be clear, but also think it's worth checking)
Confirmed, this is Chloe.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Zooming out from this particular case, I’m concerned that our community is both (1) extremely encouraging and tolerant of experimentation and poor, undefined boundaries and (2) very quick to point the finger when any experiment goes wrong. If we don’t want to have strict professional norms I think it’s unfair to put all the blame on failed experiments without updating the algorithm that allows people embark on these experiments with community approval.
To be perfectly clear, I think this community has poor professional boundaries and a poor understanding of why normie boundaries exist. I would like better boundaries all around. I don’t think we get better boundaries by acting like a failure like this is due to character or lack of integrity instead of bad engineering. If you wouldn’t have looked at it before it imploded and thought the engineering was bad, I think that’s the biggest thing that needs to change. I’m concerned that people still think that if you have good enough character (or are smart enough, etc), you don’t need good boundaries and systems.
Yep, I think this is a big problem.
More generally, I think a lot of EAs give lip service to the value of people trying weird new ambitious things, "adopt a hits-based approach", "if you're never failing then you're playing it too safe", etc.; but then we harshly punish visible failures, especially ones that are the least bit weird. In cases like those, I think the main solution is to be more forgiving of failures, rather than to give up on ambitious projects.
From my perspective, none of this is particularly relevant to what bothers me about Ben's post and Nonlinear's response. My biggest concern about Nonlinear is their attempt to pressure people into silence (via lawsuits, bizarre veiled threats, etc.), and "I really wish EAs would experiment more with coercing and threatening each other" is not an example of the kind of experimentalism I'm talking about when I say that EAs should be willing to try and fail at more things (!).
"Keep EA weird" does not entail "have low ethical standards... (read more)
Maybe I’m wrong— I really don’t know, and there have been a lot of “I don’t know” kind of incidents around Nonlinear, which does give me pause— but it doesn’t seem obviously unethical to me for Nonlinear to try to protect its reputation. That’s a huge rationalist no-no, to try to protect a narrative, or to try to affect what another person says about you, but I see the text where Kat is saying she could ruin Alice’s reputation as just a response to Alice’s threat to ruin Nonlinear’s reputation. What would you have thought if Nonlinear just shared, without warning Alice, that Alice was a bad employee for everyone’s information? Would Alice be bad if she tried to get them to stop?
My read on Alice’s situation was that she got into this hellish set of poor boundaries and low autonomy where she felt like a dependent servant on these people while traveling from country to country. I would have hated it, I already know. I would have hated having to fight my employer about not having to drive illegally in a foreign country. I am sure she was not wrong to hate it, but I don’t know if that’s the fault of Nonlinear except that maybe they should have predicted that was bad engineering that no one would like. Some people might have liked that situation, and it does seem valuable to be able to have unconventional arrangements.
EDIT: Sorry, it was Chloe with the driving thing.
Alice did not threaten to ruin Nonlinear's reputation, she went ahead and shared her impressions of Nonlinear with people. If Nonlinear responded by sharing their honest opinions about Alice with people, that would be fine. In fact, they should have been doing this from the start, regardless of Alice's actions. Instead they tried to suppress information by threatening to ruin her career. Notice how their threat reveals their dishonesty. Either Alice is a bad employee and they were painting her in a falsely positive light before, or she is a good employee and they threatened to paint her in a falsely negative light.
I think it's totally normal and reasonable to care about your reputation, and there are tons of actions someone could take for reputational reasons (e.g., "I'll wash the dishes so my roommate doesn't think I'm a slob", or "I'll tweet about my latest paper because I'm proud of it and I want people to see what I accomplished") that are just straightforwardly great.
I don't think caring about your reputation is an inherently bad or corrupting thing. It can tempt you to do bad things, but lots of healthy and normal goals pose temptation risks (e.g., "I like food, so I'll overeat" or "I like good TV shows, so I'll stay up too late binging this one"); you can resist the temptation without stigmatizing the underlying human value.
In this case, I think the bad behavior by Nonlinear also would have been bad if it had nothing to do with "Nonlinear wants to protect its reputation".
Like, suppose Alice honestly believed that malaria nets are useless for prev... (read more)
Can you give examples of EAs harshly punishing visible failures that weren't matters of genuine unethical conduct? I can think of some pretty big visible failures that didn't lead to any significant backlash (and actually get held up as positive examples of orgs taking responsibility). For example, Evidence Action discovering that No Lean Season didn't work and terminating it, or GiveDirectly's recent fraud problems after suspending some of their standard processes to get out money in a war zone. Maybe people have different standards for failure in longtermist/meta EA stuff?
To add sources to recent examples that come to mind that broadly support MHR's point above RE: visible (ex post) failures that don't seem to be harshly punished, (most seem somewhere between neutral to supportive, at least publicly).
Lightcone
Alvea
ALERT
AI Safety Support
EA hub
No Lean Season
Some failures that came with a larger proportion of critical feedback probably include the Carrick Flynn campaign (1, 2, 3), but even here "harshly punish" seems like an overstatement. HLI also comes to mind (and despite highly critical commentary in earlier posts, I think the highly positive response to this specific post is telling).
============
On the extent to which Nonlinear's failures relate to integrity / engineering, I think I'm sympathetic to both Rob's view:
As well as Holly's:
... (read more)I was thinking of murkier cases like the cancelation of Leverage and people taking small infractions on SBF's part as foreshadowing of the fall of FTX (which I don't think was enough of an indications), but admittedly those all involve parties that are guilty of something. Maybe I'm just trying too hard to be fair or treat people the way I want to be treated when I make a mistake.
"I’m concerned that people still think that if you have good enough character (or are smart enough, etc), you don’t need good boundaries and systems."
I strongly agree with this.
I think EA fails to recognise that traditional professional boundaries are a safeguard against tail risks and that these tail risks still remain when people appear to be kind / altruistic / rational.
I agree about the bad engineering. Apart from boundary norms we might also want to consider making our organizations more democratic. This kind of power abuse is a lot harder when power is more equally distributed among the workers. Bosses making money while paying employees nothing or very little occurs everywhere, but co-ops tend to have a lot less inequality within firms. They also create higher job satisfaction, life satisfaction and social trust. Furthermore, research has shown that employees getting more ownership of the company is associated with higher perception of fairness, information sharing and cooperation. It's no wonder then that co-ops have a lower turnover rate.
EDIT: After Ben's comment I changed 'raking in profits' to 'making money'. I do think this proposal is relevant for the conversation since the low pay, bad work environment and worsening mental health are a big part of the problem described in the post.
Concerns about "bosses raking in profits" seem pretty weird to raise in a thread about a nonprofit, in a community largely comprised of nonprofits. There might be something in your proposal in general, but it doesn't seem relevant here.
Thanks for writing this post. It looks like it took a lot of effort that could have been spent on much more enjoyable activities, including your mainline work.
This isn’t a comment on the accuracy of the post (though it was a moderate update for me). I could imagine nonlinear providing compelling counter evidence over the next few days and I’d of course try to correct my beliefs in light of new evidence.
Posts like this one are a public good. I don’t think anyone is particularly incentivised to write them, and they seem pretty uncomfortable and effortful, but I believe they serve an important function in the community by helping to root out harmful actors and disincentivising harmful acts in the first place.
This situation reminded me of this post, EA's weirdness makes it unusually susceptible to bad behavior. Regardless of whether you believe Chloe and Alice's allegations (which I do), it's hard to imagine that most of these disputes would have arisen under more normal professional conditions (e.g., ones in which employees and employers don't live together, travel the world together, and become romantically entangled). A lot of the things that (no one is disputing) happened here are professionally weird; for example, these anecdotes from Ben's summary of Nonlinear's response (also the linked job ad):
- "Our intention wasn't just to have employees, but also to have members of our family unit who we traveled with and worked closely together with in having a strong positive impact in the world, and were very personally close with."
- "We wanted to give these employees a pretty standard amount of compensation, but also mostly not worry about negotiating minor financial details as we traveled the world. So we covered basic rent/groceries/travel for these people."
- "The formal employee drove without a license for 1-2 months in Puerto Rico. We taught her to drive, which she was excited about. You mi
... (read more)Vulnerable EAs also want to follow only good norms while disposing of the bad ones!
If you offer people the heuristic "figure out if it's reasonable and only obey it if it is" then often they will fail.
You mention clear-cut examples, but oftentimes they will be very grey, or they will seem grey while being inside them. There may be several strong arguments why the norm isn't a good one; the bad actor will be earnest, apologetic, and trying to let you have your norm even though they don't believe in it. They may seem like a nice reasonable person trying to do the right thing in an awkward situation.
Following every norm would be quite bad. Socially enforced gendered cosmetics are disgusting and polyamory is pretty nifty.
Nonetheless, we must recognize that the same process that produces "polyamory is pretty nifty" will also produce in many people: "there's no reason I can't have a friendly relationship with my employer rather than an adversarial one" (these are the words they will use to describe the situation while living in their employer's house) and "I can date my boss if we are both ethical about it."
We must not look down on these people as though we'd never fall for it - everyone... (read more)
I use this phrase a lot, so if you think this phrase is a red flag, well, include me on the list of people who have that flag.
Agreed (here, and with most of your other points). Instincts like those can be wrong, but they can also be right. "Rationality" requires taking all of the data into consideration, including illegible hunches and intuitions.
Agreed!
Yeah a quick search finds 10,000+ hits for comments about "saving the world") on this forum, many of which are by me.
I do think the phrase is a bit childish and lacks some rigor, but I'm not sure what's a good replacement. "This project can avert 10^-9 to 10^-5 dooms defined as unendorsed human extinction or worse at 80% resilience" just doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
I think the phrase is imprecise, relative to phrases like "prevent human extinction" or "maximize the probability that the reachable universe ends up colonized by happy flourishing civilizations". But most of those phrases are long-winded, and it often doesn't matter in conversation exactly which version of "saving the world" you have in mind.
(Though it does matter, if you're working on existential risk, that people know you're being relatively literal and serious. A lot of people talk about "saving the planet" when the outcome they're worried about is, e.g., a 10% loss in current biodiversity, rather than the destruction of all future value in the observable universe.)
If a phrase is useful and tracks reality well, then if it sounds "childish" that's more a credit to children than a discredit to the phrase.
And I don't know what "lacks some rigor" means here, unless it's referring to the imprecision.
Mostly, I like "saves the world" because it owns my weird beliefs about the situation I think we're in, and states it bluntly so others can easily understand my view and push back against it if they disagree.
Being in a situation... (read more)
My impression is that it's very normal for employees to expense food and living costs during business travel without any negotiation, and that there exist common jobs where free room and board are a part of the compensation (e.g. working at a resort or on an oil rig).
I think it's fairly common for companies to ask their employees to break the law. (Often a bad thing, from society's perspective. But common.) I was asked to do it multiple times a day at a previous job. (A good job, at a well-regarded company. I'm not sure they even knew they were breaking the law until I pointed it out. Eventually they changed their practices -- possibly because it made very little difference to the bottom line.)
With regard to weirdness in general: The biggest mistakes I see the EA movement making -- with harms I estimate as far larger than harms in the OP -- are a result of insufficient weirdness, not excess weirdness. So I don't like to discourage weirdness in a blanket sort of way.
It's easy with the benefit of hindsight to point out a bunch of things which might have created a bad situation. What we really need is the ability to forecast the effects of individual norms in advance.
My thoughts, for those who want them:
- I don't have much sympathy for those demanding a good reason why the post wasn't delayed. While I'm generally quite pro sharing posts with orgs, I think it's quite important that this doesn't give the org the right to delay or prevent the posting. This goes double given the belief of both the author and their witnesses that Nonlinear is not acting in good faith.
- There seem to be enough uncontested/incontestable claims made in this post for me to feel comfortable recommending that junior folks in the community stay away from Nonlinear. These include asking employees to carry out illegal actions they're not comfortable with, and fairly flagrantly threatening employees with retaliation for saying bad things about them (Kat's text screenshotted above is pretty blatant here).
- Less confidently, I would be fairly surprised if I come out of the other end of this, having seen Nonlinear's defence/evidence, and don't continue to see the expenses-plus-tiny-salary setup as manipulative and unhealthy.
- More confidently than anything on this list, Nonlinear's threatening to sue Lightcone for Ben's post is completely unacceptable, decreases my sympathy for them by
... (read more)The problem with Kat’s text is that it’s a very thinly veiled threat to end someone’s career in an attempt to control Nonlinear’s image. There is no context that justifies such a threat.
Just for the record, I think there are totally contexts that could justify that threat. I would be surprised if one of those had occurred here, but I can totally imagine scenarios where the behavior in the screenshot is totally appropriate (or at the very least really not that bad, given the circumstances).
I really respect that even in the middle of all this you (and other members of the LW team) still team leave comments like these.
I think serious mistakes were made in how this situation was handled but I have never doubted that you guys are trying your best to help the community, and comments like this are proof of that.
Could any realistic scenario justify both the threat and not dishing on the employees bad behavior when asked about them, in order to stop the employee bad-mouthing you though? Presumably someone would have to have behaved incredibly badly before threatening their career could possibly be appropriate, but then you surely shouldn't be prepared to tell friends and acquaintances at allied orgs that the person is fine, or keep silent about their misbehavior when asked about them.
I'm particularly interested in whether or not they were encouraged to break the law for people who had financial and professional power over them, which seems less nuanced than 'how threatening is or isn't this WhatsApp exchange'.
Could be! I might end up with egg on my face here, in which case I will do my best to admit it. That said, my most important claim is my last: if you wanted me and others to truly withhold judgement, you really shouldn't have threatened to sue.
I concur with David. Irrespective of the circumstances, the threat is unmistakably apparent. It appears that thus far, both of you have issued threats to individuals, either to tarnish their reputation or to initiate legal action against them. Regrettably, these actions are not enhancing your own reputation. In fact, they are casting a shadow of suspicion upon you.
I have no personal insight on Nonlinear, but I want to chime in to say that I've been in other communities/movements where I both witnessed and directly experienced the effects of defamation-focused civil litigation. It was devastating. And I think the majority of the plaintiffs, including those arguably in the right, ultimately regretted initiating litigation. I sincerely hope this does not occur in the EA community. And I hope that threats of litigation are also discontinued. There are alternatives that are dramatically less monetarily and time-intensive, and more likely to lead to productive outcomes. I think normalizing (threats of) defmation-focused civil litigation is extremely detrimental to community functioning and community health.
Can you say anything more about what the effects of this litigation were?
Could you say more about the alternatives approaches?
Some thoughts on the general discussion:
(1) some people are vouching for Kat's character. This is useful information, but it's important to note that behaving badly is very compatible with having many strengths, treating one's friends well, etc. Many people who have done terrible things are extremely charismatic and charming, and even well-meaning or altruistic. It's hard to think bad things about one's friends, but unfortunately it's something we all need to be open to. (I've definitely in the past not taken negative allegations against someone as seriously as I should have, because they were my friend).
(2) I think something odd about the comments claiming that this post is full of misinformation, is that they don't correct any of the misinformation. Like, I get that assembling receipts, evidence etc can take a while, and writing a full rebuttal of this would take a while. But if there are false claims in the post, pick one and say why it's false.
This makes these interventions seem less sincere to me, because I think if someone posted a bunch of lies about me, in my first comments/reactions I would be less concerned about the meta appropriateness of the post having been post... (read more)
Just to clarify, nonlinear has now picked one claim and provided screen shots relevant to it, I’m not sure if you saw that.
I also want to clarify that I gave Ben a bunch of very specific examples of information in his post that I have evidence are false (responding to the version he sent me hours before publication). He hastily attempted to adjust his post to remove or tweak some of his claims right before publishing based on my discussing these errors with him. It’s a lot easier (and vastly less time consuming) to provide those examples in a private one-on-one with Ben than to provide them publicly (where, for instance, issues of confidentially become much more complicated, and where documentation and wording need to be handled with extreme care, quite different than the norms of conversation).
The easiest to explain example is that Ben claimed a bunch of very bad sounding quotes from Glassdoor were about Emerson that clearly weren’t (he hadn’t been at the company for years when those complaints were written). Ben acknowledged somewhere in the comments that those were indeed not about Emerson and so that was indeed false information in the original version of the post.
My understand... (read more)
Spencer -- good reply.
The crux here is about 'how bad it is to make public, false, potentially damaging claims about people, and the standard of care/evidence required before making those claims'.
I suspect there are two kinds of people most passionately involved in this dialogue here on EA Forum:
(1) those who have personally experienced being harmed by false, damaging claims (e.g. libel, slander) in the past (which includes me, for example) -- who tend to focus on the brutal downsides of reckless accusations that aren't properly researched, and
(2) those who have been harmed by people who should have been called out earlier, but where nobody had the guts to be a whistle-blower before -- who tend to focus on the downsides of failing to report bad behavior in a quick and effective and public way.
I think if everybody does a little soul-searching about which camp they fall into, and is a little more upfront about their possible personal biases around these issues, the quality of discourse might be higher.
Hi Rebecca. To clarify: that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that in the version Ben showed me hours before publication none of the disparaging Glassdoor comments he used in the post (that he claimed were all about Emerson) were actually about Emerson. He has acknowledged this point. Based on me pointing this out, he hastily fix these mistakes before releasing the public version, hence you won’t find this error in the version of his post above. I use this as an example of just one of a number of what I see as important errors (based on the evidence I have access to) in his draft that was shared with me right before publishing, which made me fear his research was done in a biased, sloppy and/or error prone way, with (from my point of view) not enough care being taken to avoid making false harmful claims.
Thanks Tiresias for your thoughtful comments. I agree with much of what you say but I seemingly have a few important differences of opinion:
I agree. I don't think I was holding the report to an incredibly high standard though. When I read it I was immediately chagrined by the amount and severity of false information (i.e., false as far as I can tell based on the evidence I have access to). I was also distressed that Ben was not seeking out evidence he could have easily gotten from nonlinear.
... (read more)Hi Amber. We were working as fast as we could on examples of the evidence. We have since posted this comment here, demonstrating Alice claiming that nobody in the house got her vegan food when we have evidence that we did.
The claim in the post was “Alice claims she 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.”. (Bolding added)
If you follow the link, you’ll see we have screenshots demonstrating that:
1. There was vegan food in the house, which we offered her.
2. I personally went out, while I was sick myself, to buy vegan food for her (mashed potatoes) and cooked it for her and brought it to her.
I have empathy for Alice. She was hungry (because of her fighting with a boyfriend [not Drew] in the morning and having a light breakfast) and sick. That sucks, and I feel for her. And that’s why I tried (and succeeded) in getting her food.
I would be fine if she told people that she was hungry when she was sick, and she felt sad and stressed. Or that she was hungry but wasn’t interested in any of the food we had in th... (read more)
Seconding this.
I would be pretty interested to read a comment from nonlinear folks listing out everything that they believe to be false in the narrative as stated, even if they can't substantiate their counter-claims yet.
I agree that if it were just a few disputed claims that would be a a reasonable thing to do, there are so many. And there is so much nuance.
Here is one example, however. This took us hours to prepare, just to rebut a single false claim:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5pksH3SbQzaniX96b/a-quick-update-from-nonlinear
Crostposted from LessWong (link)
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like it should take less than an hour to read the post, make a note of every claim that's not true, and then post that list of false claims, even if it would take many days to collect all the evidence that shows those points are false.
I imagine that would be helpful for you, because readers are much more likely to reserve judgement if you listed which specific things are false.
Personally, I could look over that list and say "oh yeah, number 8 [or whatever] is cruxy for me. If that turns out not to be true, I think that substantially changes my sense of the situation.", and I would feel actively interested in what evidence you provide regarding that point later. And it would let you know which points to prioritize refuting, because you would know which things are cruxy for people reading.
In contrast, a generalized bid to reserve judgement because "many of the important claims were false or extremely misleading"...well, it just seems less credible, and so leaves me less willing to actually reserve judgement.
Indeed, deferring on producing such a list of claims-you-think-are-false suggests the possibi... (read more)
I would think you could go through the post and list out 50 bullet points of what you plan to contest in a couple of hours.
I've confirmed with a commenter here, whom left a comment positive of non-linear, that they were asked to leave that comment by nonlinear. I think this is low-integrity behaviour on behalf of nonlinear, and an example of brigading. I would appreciate the forum team looking into this.
Edit: I have been asked to clarify that they were encouraged to comment ’by nonlinear, rather than asked to comment positively (or anything in particular).
I think asking your friends to vouch for you is quite possibly okay, but that people should disclose there was a request.
It's different evidence between "people who know you who saw this felt motivated to share their perspective" vs "people showed up because it was requested".
Yeah, this seems right.
I'm not sure that should count as brigading or unethical in these circumstances as long as they didn't ask people to vote a particular way.
Remember that even though Ben is only a single author, he spent a bunch of time gathering negative information from various sources[1]. I think that in order to be fair, we need to allow them to ask people to present the other side of the story. Also consider: if Kat or Emerson had posted a comment containing a bunch of positive comments from people, then I expect that everyone would be questioning why those people hadn't made the comments themselves.
I think it might also be helpful to think about it from the opposite perspective. Would anyone accuse me of brigading if I theoretically knew other people who had negative experiences with Nonlinear and suggested that they might want to chime in?
If not, then we've created an asymmetry where people are allowed to do things in terms of criticism, but not in terms of defense, which seems like a mistake to me.
That said, it is useful for us to know that some of these comments were solicited.
Disclaimer: I formerly interned at Nonlinear. I don't want my meta-level stance to be taken as support of the actio... (read more)
I completely agree "I have had great experiences with Kat at EAGs" is irrelevant to the claim "Kat encouraged me to drive without a license", which is why I've been pretty clear in my comments that I don't see Nonlinear leadership coming out looking good after this.
At the same time, this post isn't narrowly focused on this issue or just a few issues, but rather seems like a summary of the negative things that Ben found out when he started investigating Nonlinear.
... (read more)So I think "it's off-topic" could have been a valid position had Ben chosen a narrower focus, but I don't think that applies in general given this particular case. On the other hand, if you think any specific comments are a distraction, I'd encourage you to (politely!) pick one or two of them (perhaps the top-voted) and explain why the comment is a distraction from the real issues here.
I'm a friend of Kat's and spoke to her about this situation. At the end of the conversation she asked me to post a comment (which I'd been meaning to do anyways), but made it clear that I should do it only if I wanted to and that there was no pressure at all for me to do so. The way she did this was quite wholesome, to the point that it stuck with me; I could feel that she really meant what she said (i.e. she really cared that I only post if I wanted to), and I did not in fact feel any pressure in the request.
Just a note to say that we—the moderators—began looking into this two days ago. The current status is that Elliot has let the user who was allegedly asked to comment by Nonlinear know to reach out to us, if they are comfortable, so that we might determine whether what has happened here is an instance of brigading.
At this point, it seems worth mentioning that it is not the opinion of the moderators that every activity that looks like this is brigading. See the linked post for our full take on brigading: the summary is “your vote (or comment) should be your own”.
Good work. It occurred to me that this might be happening but I didn’t do the sleuth work. Thanks.
Hi all, I wanted to chime in because I have had conversations relevant to this post with just about all involved parties at various points. I've spoken to "Alice" (both while she worked at nonlinear and afterward), Kat (throughout the period when the events in the post were alleged to have happened and afterward), Emerson, Drew, and (recently) the author Ben, as well as, to a much lesser extent, "Chloe" (when she worked at nonlinear). I am (to my knowledge) on friendly terms with everyone mentioned (by name or pseudonym) in this post. I wish well for everyone involved. I also want the truth to be known, whatever the truth is.
I was sent a nearly final draft of this post yesterday (Wednesday), once by Ben and once by another person mentioned in the post.
I want to say that I find this post extremely strange for the following reasons:
(1) The nearly final draft of this post that I was given yesterday had factual inaccuracies that (in my opinion and based on my understanding of the facts) are very serious despite ~150 hours being spent on this investigation. This makes it harder for me to take at face value the parts of the post that I have no knowledge of. &nb... (read more)
(Copying over the same response I posted over on LW)
I don't have all the context of Ben's investigation here, but as someone who has done investigations like this in the past, here are some thoughts on why I don't feel super sympathetic to requests to delay publication:
In this case, it seems to me that there is a large and substantial threat of retaliation. My guess is Ben's sources were worried about Emerson hiring stalkers, calling their family, trying to get them fired from their job, or threatening legal action. Having things be out in the public can provide a defense because it is much easier to ask for help if the conflict happens in the open.
As a concrete example, Emerson has just sent me an email saying:
For the record, ... (read more)
I think it is reasonable to share information without providing people the opportunity to respond if you’re worried they’ll abuse your generosity (which may indeed have been Ben’s reasoning here), but I’m generally against the norm of not waiting for a response if the main reason is “can’t be bothered” *.
I guess my reasoning here is the drama can consume a community if it let it, so I would prefer that we choose our norms to minimise unnecessary drama.
(I don’t want this comment to be taken as a defense of Nonlinear leadership in relation to these claims. I want to be clear that I am very disappointed with what they have admitted even if we were to imagine that nothing else claimed is true. I should mention that I interned at Nonlinear and was subsequently invited to collaborate with them on Superlinear, but I turned this down because of some of the rumours I was hearing).
agreed
It is a lot easier to explain to your employer or your friends or your colleagues what is happening if you can just link them to a public post, if someone is trying to pressure you. That week in which the person you are scared of has access to the post, but the public does not, is a quite vulnerable week, in my experience.
I think threatening a libel lawsuit with the intensity that Emerson did strikes me as above "calling my family" in terms of what counts as threats/intimidation/retaliation, especially if you are someone who does not have the means for a legal defense (which would be true of Ben's sources for this post). Libel suits are really costly, and a quite major escalation.
... (read more)My current model is that we have enough money to defend against a defamation lawsuit like this. The costs are high, but we also aren't a super small organization (we have a budget of like $3M-$4M a year), so I think we could absorb it if it happened, and my guess is we could fundraise additionally if the costs somehow ballooned above that.
I looked a bit into liability insurance but it seemed like a large pain, and not worth it given that we are probably capable of self-insuring.
I might be confused here, but it sure seemed easy to hand over money, but hard to verify that the insurance would actually kick in in the relevant situation, and wouldn't end up being voided for some random reason.
Can you give some examples of the serious errors you found?
Yes, here two examples, sorry I can’t provide more detail:
-there were claims in the post made about Emerson that were not actually about Emerson at all (they were about his former company years after he left). I pointed this out to Ben hours before publication and he rushed to correct it (in my view it’s a pretty serious mistake to make false accusations about a person, I see this as pretty significant)!
-there was also a very disparaging claim made in the piece (I unfortunately can’t share the details for privacy reasons; but I assume nonlinear will later) that was quite strongly contradicted by a text message exchange I have
To confirm: I had a quickly written bit about the glassdoor reviews. It was added in without much care because it wasn't that cruxy to me about the whole situation, just a red flag that suggested further investigation was worth it, that someone else suggested I add for completeness. The reviews I included were from after the time that Emerson's linkedin says he was CEO, and I'm glad that Spencer corrected me.
If I'm remembering the other one, there was also a claim that I included not because it was itself obviously unethical, but because it seemed to indicate a really invasive social environment, and when I think information has been suppressed I have strong heuristics suggesting to share worrying information even if it isn't proven or necessarily bad. Anyway, Spencer said he was confident in a very different narrative of events, so I edited it the comment to be more minor.
In general I think Spencer's feedback on this and other points improved the post (though he also had some inaccurate information).
I think the idea is that it was in a draft but got edited out last-minute? That seems to be corroborated by Ben's comment.
Could this be an instance of the rationalist tendency to "decouple"?
From one perspective, Ben is simply "Sharing information about nonlinear." What's wrong with providing additional information? It's even caveated with a description of one's epistemic status and instruction on how to update accordingly! Why don't we all have such a "low bar for publicly sharing critical info about folks in the EA/x-risk/rationalist/etc ecosystem"?
From another perspective, Ben has chosen to "search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders" and then - without inviting or even permitting the accused party to share their side of the story in advance - share it in a public space full of agents whose tendency to gossip is far stronger than their tendency to update in an appropriately Bayesian manner (i.e. human beings).
I suspect Ben does in fact have some understanding of the political dimension of his decision to share this post, but I think his behaviour is more understandable when you consider that he's embedded in a culture that encourages people to ignore the political consequences of what they say.
You may have missed the section where I had a 3hr call with them and summarized what they told me? It's not everything we'd want but I think this sentence is inaccurate.
Of course I do! I thought about it a bunch and came to the conclusion that it's best to share serious and credible accusations early and fast.
I'm confused - wouldn't you consider the "Conversation with Nonlinear" section to be letting the accused party share their side of the story in advance?
I don't know, but I know that negotiating confidentiality is a major part that often takes a lot of calendar time. They might have emails or text chats from people that they would like to share, but they first need to get permission to share, or at least provide adequate warning. This can definitely take a few days in my experience.
It might simply take a lot of time to track it all down. If there was one big Google Doc with all of the relevant information in a disorganized/scrambled format (and it didn't have other information, such as someone's social security number), then it might make sense to share the messy information and organize it later. But what is more likely is that there are tidbits of information scattered across dozens of email threads, chat groups, slack channels, Google Calendars, etc., and that merely copying and pasting a bunch of stuff into a messy Google Doc would take many, many hours.
To be clear I only informed them about my planned writeup on Friday.
(The rest of the time lots of other people involved were v afraid of retaliation and intimidation and I wanted to respect that while gathering evidence. I believe if I hadn't made that commitment to people then I wouldn't have gotten the evidence.)
The vast majority of people should probably be withholding judgment and getting back to work for the next week until Nonlinear can respond.
I'm contributing to it now, but it's a bit of a shame that this post has 183 comments at the time of writing when the post is not even a day old and not being on the front page. EA seems drawn to drama and controversy and it would accomplish its goals much better if it were more able to focus on more substantive posts.
For me, this is a substantive post. Nonlinear do a lot of "meta" EA work so their business practices and future matter to me
Fwiw “EA seems drawn to drama” is a take I’ve heard before and I feel like it’s kind of misleading. The truth is probably closer to “small communities are drawn to drama, EA is also drawn to drama and should (maybe) try to mitigate this”. It’s not super clear to me whether EA is worse or better than it’s reference class. Modelling the community as unusually bad is easy to say from the inside and could lead us to correct against drama in the wrong ways
I’m one of the Community Liaisons for CEA’s Community Health and Special Projects team. The information shared in this post is very troubling. There is no room in our community for manipulative or intimidating behaviour.
We were familiar with many (but not all) of the concerns raised in Ben’s post based on our own investigation. We’re grateful to Ben for spending the time pursuing a more detailed picture, and grateful to those who supported Alice and Chloe during a very difficult time.
We talked to several people currently or formerly involved in Nonlinear about these issues, and took some actions as a result of what we heard. We plan to continue working on this situation.
From the comments on this post, I’m guessing that some readers are trying to work out whether Kat and Emerson’s intentions were bad. However, for some things, intentions might not be very decision-relevant. In my opinion, meta work like incubating new charities, advising inexperienced charity entrepreneurs, and influencing funding decisions should be done by people with particularly good judgement about how to run strong organisations, in addition to having admirable intentions.
I’m looking forward to seeing what information Nonlinear shares in the coming weeks.
Re “work like incubating new charities, advising inexperienced charity entrepreneurs, and influencing funding decisions should be done by people with particularly good judgement about how to run strong organisations, in addition to having admirable intentions”, I think this is the single best sentence that has been written on this so far.
What happened as a result of this, before Ben posted?
Hmm. I think if I had been in an abusive situation such as the ones OP describes, and I (privately) went to the Community Health team about it, and the only outcomes were what you just listed, I would have considered it a waste of my time and emotional energy.
Edit: waste of my time relative to "going public", that is.
I assume the actions you’ve taken can’t be shared? (No pressure if it can’t).
Thanks for asking Yadav. I can confirm that:
Since then we have not invited or permitted Kat or Emerson to run any type of session.
Are you familiar with any concerns about nonlinear not raised in Ben's post? Ben seems particularly concerned that nonlinear creates an epistemic environment where he wouldn't know if there was more. If there is, that seems pretty central to confirming Ben's concerns.
No, because if nothing else you need to give them time to respond.
I think the pertinent question here is primarily not "Were Kat and Julia close", but "What standard should we hold the Community Health team to here". If you updated significantly negatively on Julia/the Community Health team due to recent events, you might want to hold them to a standard closer to the one Morpheus is proposing. This is especially true if you view the cause of inaction closer to some kind of deferral/information cascade (they are well-established and well-regarded members of the EA community), rather than due to Julia's close personal relationship with the people in question. I do think this may be a good opportunity for the community health team to regain some trust though, and I would be interested in hearing more about the Community Health team's involvement too, and whether we should be understanding this as "Ben spent his time on something that the Community Health team should have done but actively deprioritized", or "The Community Health team played an active role in this investigation", or something else.
For what it's worth, I actually strongly upvoted Morpheus' comment. I just think 'she once interviewed her' is a bit unfair to cite as somehow evidence of corruption, regardless of how confident people should be in Julia Wise overall.
Hello!
I’m Minh, Nonlinear intern from September 2022 to April 2023. The last time allegations of bad practices came up, I reiterated that I had a great time working at Nonlinear. Since this post is >10,000 words, I’m not able to address everything, both because:
I’m just sharing my own experience with Nonlinear, and interpreting specific claims made about Kat/Emerson’s character/interaction styles based on my time with Nonlinear. In fact, I’m largely assuming Alice and Chloe are telling the truth, and speaking in good faith.
Disclaimers
In the interest of transparency, I’d like to state:
- I have never been approached in this investigation, nor was I aware of it. I find this odd, because … if you’re gonna interview dozens of people about a company’s unethical treatment of employees, why wouldn’t you ask the recent interns? Nonlinear doesn’t even have that many people to interview, and I was very easy to find/reach. So that’s … odd.
- I was not asked to write this comment. I just felt like it. It’s been a while since I’ve writte
... (read more)Hi Minh, Appreciate you sharing your views publicly here. I think you're acting in good faith, and if others engage with this comment I hope they see that as well.
I think it's very possible the Nonlinear team handled different employees very differently, especially since you started interning with them after Alice and Chloe had left and from Nonlinear's account, it sounds like they made some changes (e.g. not having employees live and work with them).
Overall, I don't think I've updated my views much as a result of this comment. I won't cite every example in detail to save time, and won't have capacity to do write it up publicly but happy to talk about it off the Forum, but here's a quick overview of why I haven't:
1) Most of the points you comment on here seem to be your interpretation of the accounts of the post. It seems like you don't necessarily have a unique perspective on at least the first point, and overall I don't agree with the conclusions you draw based on the evidence provided in the original post (e.g. the point about intimidation and Emerson)
I don't think you are always engaging with all the context of the post (e.g. I think more so than talking about tactics, Em... (read more)
Oh yeah, don’t take this as a direct refutation of Alice/Chloe's accounts. I definitely agree that the context was different. If the claims are true, then yeah, that sounds really bad.
Re: Core Claims
For the “core claims”. I have a personal opinion that these claims started from unfortunate, honest misunderstanding, and were substantively exaggerated. But those claims are specific and very sensitive. Clearly, at least one party involved is misleading people. So I’ll let Kat/Emerson represent themselves with whatever evidence they showed me.
Re: Patterns of behaviour
I’m addressing parts of the post that cite other concerning behaviour. Maybe it’s unintentional, but this post references a lot of extra details that make the core claims feel much more believable as a pattern of behaviour. If this post was just about “Nonlinear abused this specific employee in this specific context”, that’s one thing. But this post says “Nonlinear abused employees, and they openly brag about how cutthroat/exploitative they are, and they tell employees their problems and time and personal life don’t really matter”. Hell, I’d be convinced.
Also, … I’m disagreeing with this conclusion... (read more)
I don't quite agree with your summary.
Kat explicitly acknowledges at the end of this comment that "[they] made some mistakes ... learned from them and set up ways to prevent them", so it feels a bit unfair to say that that Non-Linear as a whole hasn't acknowledged any wrongdoing.
OTOH, Ben's testimony here in response to Emerson is a bit concerning, and supports your point more strongly.[1] It's also one of the remarks I'm most curious to hear Emerson respond to. I'll quote Ben in full because I don't think this comment is on the EA Forum.
... (read more)I think given what you know, your level of skepticism is reasonable here.
I mean, obviously, I'm disagreeing based on my subjective experience/knowledge. But these are reasonable concerns for an outside observer to have. My take is that how unreasonable this level of defensiveness is, would vary based on how true the actual claims are. If they're say, 80% false, vs 80% true.
And honestly, even the most charitable interpretation states that Nonlinear team really dropped the ball on communicating to employees and frequently says a lot of weird, shady stuff. So I'm not gonna pretend like Nonlinear does nothing wrong, just because they're "my team".
I mean, for all I know, there's 2 parties each claiming the other maintains a complex web of deception and lies, and I might be believing the wrong one 🤔
Guess we'll find out.
Yeah, I hope we will! Thanks for engaging with me in a productive and open way, this conversation has been helpful.
Thank you for sharing Minh, I think this is one of the most important updates.
If our goal is (as I think it should be) only to figure out whether we want to interact with any of these people in the future, and not to exact retribution for past wrongs against third parties, then we don't need to know exactly what happened between nonlinear and Alice and Chloe. That's good, since we probably never will. What does seem to be the case is this. (1) Everybody involved agrees that something went badly wrong in the relationships between Kat/Emerson and Alice/Chloe, though they may dramatically disagree about what. (2) Kat/Emerson have changed their behavior in a way that prevents a repeat. Your testimony is good evidence for 2. And given that, I don't think I will update much on whether I want to interact with them in the future. So thank you for your testimony.
(disclaimers: my past interactions with Kat have been positive but not extensive. I don't believe I have interacted with Emerson. And I was not asked to comment by anyone involved.)
I have read the OP. I have skim read the replies. I'm afraid I am only making this one post because involvement with online debates is very draining for me.
My post is roughly structured along the lines of:
Kat is a good friend, who I trust and think highly of. I have known her personally (rather than as a loose acquaintance, as I did for years prior) since summer 2017. I do not know Emerson or his brother from Adam.
I see somebody else was asked about declaring interests when they spoke positively about Kat. I have never been employed by Kat. Back in 2017, Charity Science had some legal and operational infrastructure (e.g. charity status, tax stuff) which was hard to arrange. And during that time, .impact - which later became Rethink Charity, collaborated with Charity Science in order to shelter under that charitable status in order to be able to hire people, legally process funds and so forth. So indirectly the entity that employed me was helped out by Charity Science.
However, I never collaborated in a work sense... (read more)
This in particular I liked:
It seems to me that (gradually but most obviously) since FTX there was this switch to thinking that its somehow healthy or appropriate to launch a kind of autophagic self-immolation process whereby bits of the community launch toxic witchhunts against other bits. It's not healthy. It's not constructive. It's not effective, and to add insult to injury - it's not necessary.
Duncan
Yes, this tends to bug me a lot. I think Ben is being different here, because
This gave me pause for thought, so thank you for writing it. I also respect that you likely won't engage with this response to protect your own wellbeing.
I just want to raise, however, that I think you have almost completely failed to address a) the power dynamics involved; and b) the apparently uncontroversial claim that people were asked to break laws by people who had professional and financial power over them.
It seems impossible to square the latter with being "honest, honourable and conscientious".
There are a lot of dumb laws. Without saying it was right in this case, I don't think that's categorical a big red line.
Thanks, this also made me pause. I can imagine some occasions where you might encourage employees to break the law (although this still seems super ethically fraught) - for example, some direct action in e.g. animal welfare. However, the examples here are 'to gain recreational and productivity drugs' and to drive around doing menial tasks'.
So if you're saying "it isn't always unambiguously ethically wrong to encourage employees to commit crimes" then I guess yes, in some very limited cases I can see that.
But if you're saying "in these instances it was honest, honourable and conscientious to encourage employees to break the law" then I very strongly disagree.
I think it matters a lot to be precise with claims here. If someone believes that any case of people with power over others asking them to commit crimes is damning, then all we need to establish is that this happened. If it's understood that whether this was bad depends on the details, then we need to get into the details. Jack's comment was not precise so it felt important to disambiguate (and make the claim I think is correct).
This is not a question for you, but the forum generally.
I agree call-out culture makes me uncomfortable and has many negative aspects. But what alternative is there to improving community health and function? Previous methods, like relying on private systems or CEA, seem to have been catastrophically ineffective. What else could people who have experienced systematically bad behavior, do? How else will we learn to work on ways to try to prevent this sort of thing?
[Edit: I now realize that this is what Spencer discussed below and other people have been discussing too. But maybe the community norms roadmap makes it seem less pie-in-the-sky]
I first had this idea about that Toby Ord post a few months back, and regret not writing it up then.
Idea: I think people who write something that could be considered a "criticism" (or worse, a "hitpiece") should send a heads-up message to the person in question, with their finished post attached.
Example: "Hey, I have written [this post] about things I am concerned about regarding you/you project. I plan to post it on the EA Forum on [date]. I understand this is unfortunate and troubling from your perspective and you will probably want to respond. That's why I'm letting you know my publishing date. You have until then to write a response, which I expect you will want to post shortly after I make this one go live. (optional: I am available to read your response post before I publish my piece if you wish, but I would need your retort by [earlier date] to take your response into account.)"
How it might become a norm:
Forum mods and power users could comment on critical posts that giving heads up with final dr
Massive thanks to Ben for writing this report and to Alice and Chloe for sharing their stories. Both took immense bravery.
There's a lot of discussion on the meta-level on this post. I want to say that I believe Alice and Chloe. I currently want to keep my distance from Nonlinear, Kat and Emerson, and would caution others against funding or working with them. I don't want to be part of a community that condones this sort of thing.
I’m not and never have been super-involved in this affair, but I reached out to the former employees following the earlier vague allegations against Nonlinear on the Forum, and after someone I know mentioned they’d heard bad things. It seemed important to know about this, because I had been a remote writing intern at Nonlinear, and Kat was still an occasional mentor to me (she’d message me with advice), and I didn’t want to support NL or promote them if it turned out that they had behaved badly.
Chloe and Alice’s stories had the ring of truth about them to me, and seemed consistent with my experiences with Emerson and Kat — albeit I didn’t know either of them that well and I didn’t have any strongly negative experiences with them.
It seems relevan... (read more)
We're coming up on two weeks now since this post was published, with no substantive response from Nonlinear (other than this). I think it would be good to get an explicit timeline from Nonlinear on when we can expect to see their promised response. It's reasonable to ask for folks to reserve judgement for a short time, but not indefinitely. @Kat Woods @Emerson Spartz
Another two weeks later, and with no response or acknowledgement from Nonlinear (or even a statement about when they plan to give a response), I'm personally updating moderately towards the view that Nonlinear's communications around the initial release of this post were more about FUD/DARVO than honesty. I've also updated further towards the position that it was right for Ben to post when he did, and that delaying would have been playing into the hands of bad actors. These remain defeasible positions, but I'm not holding my breath.
Have no fear! We are responding. We’ve been working on this full time the entire time. We have over 200 pages written so far and are in the last stages of editing to the point where we’ll be able to get feedback from friends. We’re aiming to get this done in the next few weeks because we want to be working on things that actually help with AI. However, it’s a very large doc, it’s a hostile audience, it takes way more effort to debunk something than to say something, etc. Also, man, I really hate editing, so it’s a bit of a slog.
(Obviously didn’t mean to write over 200 pages. Just Ben accused us of a lot of things and we were writing in multiple documents, so didn’t see what had happened until it was too late 😛.)
Still working on it full time! I'd guess we'll publish in the next 1-4 weeks. I really hope it is sooner. I want to finish this more than anybody.
Sorry for it taking so long. This is the first time I've ever done crisis communication and if I had a time machine, I'd do things differently.
Notably, it's now been about twice as long as Nonlinear says they originally requested Ben to give them to prepare their side of the story (a week).
Balanced against that, whatever you think about the events described, this is likely to have been a very difficult experience to go through in such a public way from their perspective - one of them described it in this thread as "the worst thing to ever happen to me". That may have affected their ability to respond promptly.
Just want to signal my agreement with this.
My personal guess is that Kat and Emerson acted in ways that were significantly bad for the wellbeing of others. My guess is also that they did so in a manner that calls for them to take responsibility: to apologise, reflect on their behaviour, and work on changing both their environment and their approach to others to ensure this doesn't happen again. I'd guess that they have committed a genuine wrongdoing.
I also think that Kat and Emerson are humans, and this must have been a deeply distressing experience for them. I think it's possible to have an element of sympathy and understanding towards them, without this undermining our capacity to also be supportive of people who may have been hurt as a result of Kat and Emerson's actions.
Showing this sort of support might require that we think about how to relate with Nonlinear in the future. It might require expressing support for those who suffered and recognising how horrible it must have been. It might require that we think less well of Kat and Emerson. But I don't think it requires that we entirely forget that Kat and Emerson are humans with human emotions and that this must be pretty diffi... (read more)
Stated more eloquently than I could have, SYA.
I'd also add that, were I to be offering advice to K & E, I'd probably advise taking more time. Reacting aggressively or defensively is all too human when facing the hurricane of a community's public opinion - and that is probably not in anyone's best interest. Taking the time to sit with the issues, and later respond more reflectively as you describe, seems advisable.
I think there are practical reasons why it might take longer to prepare a comprehensive public response than the private response they were envisaging for Ben + Lightcone. That said, I also think that there are a lot of non-comprehensive responses that would have taken less time to write while still supporting their version of events, and I think it's reasonable to update against Nonlinear in their absence.
Post on everybody who’s living together and dating each other and giving each other grants when?
Clarification: I’m just kind of surprised to see some of the things in this post portrayed as bad when they are very common in EA orgs, like living together and being open to unconventional and kind of unclear boundaries and pay arrangements and especially conflicts of interest from dating coworkers and bosses. I worry that things we’re all letting slide could be used to discredit anybody if the momentum turns against them.
The brief relationship Alice had with Drew did not feature prominently in this post and/or what I take to be the central list of complaints. Nor did the main problematic issues in that paragraph seem to be a typical example of what I consider to be abuse of power in a romantic relationship qua romantic relationship:
(Tbh I'm a bit con... (read more)
I strongly think that, like with FTX, we should wait two weeks (or more) before forming opinions and reaching conclusions, as more information comes out[1]. But I want to quickly highlight footnote 7, as I think it might be relevant for some people and a bit buried
I really don't know if the new information will be better or worse for Nonlinear, I just expect the picture to become clearer in a few weeks, and to be better to look for lessons then as opposed to now
I suspect that most of these behaviors are harmful for employer-employee dyads (and possibly harmful in other ways?):
For each of these items (or for multiple items occurring together), I don't think that they necessitate a harmful situation; I could imagine dating a co-worker or living together and it working out fine. But I do think that each of these serves as a factor which increases the probability of harm. In the ~30 seconds that I've spent thinking about it so far, what I come up with is "power" and "freedom." I think that they aren't damning in themselves, but they are like red flags: something to be extra cautious about because it often is correlated with (or causing) other problems.
I would be very happy to see someone write a post about these "together and dating each other and giving each other grants" experiences with actual examples, norms, suggestions, caveats, etc.
Or, you know, if we want to tighten that stuff up, I would also be interested. For now I think it doesn’t work well but I don’t consider it immoral, and a lot of the stuff in the post strikes me as in the same category.
Most of the allegations in the OP seem comfortably out-of-distribution to me. (Unless the distribution includes FTX & Leverage, but we know how those went.)
I think the sentiment in Lilly's comment are read not as saying that all of these behaviours are always bad, but that they are often in contravention of professional norms and that, sometimes, there's a reason for this.
For what it's worth, I think romantic entanglements between employees at different power levels (especially company leaders, or those who have power to fire others) is something to be concerned about. I have similar thoughts toward romantic relationships between grantors and grantees - that should be default transparent in my opinion.
Some of the things in this category seem bad, some of them good. I think if people walk away with a generic conventionality bias from reading this, then that seems like a mistake and a recipe for witch hunts. Most of the dynamics explored in this post feel predictable and the result of specific aspects of the context and environment that was set up, and I would feel pretty happy putting my predictions on the record on what kind of error modes we will see from different initial conditions, and for different existing organizations.
E.g. I will put it on the record that I don't think Open Phil has really any of the dynamics that this post is talking about, despite me also having many disagreements with how Open Phil operates.
I'm just going to share my implicit model of this situation, which is that Lightcone is preoccupied with a particular kind of perceived integrity violation that Kat and Emerson are more okay with. I think a lot of people are more okay with cutting corners and especially with managing PR than people strongly influenced by the morality of the Sequences, but those people will read about these things that Ben thinks are bad for that reason and think they are bad because they are unconventional or not best practices at work. I think it's easy to witch hunt on the basis of things that many EAs/rats do with tacit or explicit approval from the community without readers actually agreeing as to why you think it is bad. So I'm concerned that airing stuff like this could damage people's reputations and not be useful enough in the way you intended-- giving people information so they can decide who to trust-- to justify the harm, paranoia, and witch hunting that may result.
Using "preoccupied" feels a bit strawmanny here. People using this situation as a way to enforce general conservativism in a naive way was one of the top concerns that kept coming up when I talked to Ben about the post and investigation.
The post has a lot of details that should allow people to make a more detailed model than "weird is bad", but I don't think it would be better for it to take a stronger stance on the causes of the problems that its providing evidence for, since getting the facts out is IMO more important.
It would seem low-integrity by my standards to decline to pursue this case because I would be worried that people would misunderstand the facts in a way that would cause inconvenient political movements for me. It seems like a lot of people have a justified interest in knowing what happened here, and I don't want to optimize hard against that, just because they will predictably learn a different lesson than I have. The right thing to do is to argue in favor of my position after the facts are out, not to withhold information like this.
Also, I think the key components of this story are IMO mostly about the threats of retaliation and associated information control, which I think mostly comes across to readers (at least based on the comments I've seen so far), and also really doesn't seem like it has much to do with general weirdness. If anything this kind of information control is more common in the broader world, and things like libel suits are more frequent.
The thing I think is potentially unfair is that ~Lightcone has its own strict morality about integrity violations. For instance, I don’t think on its face trying to control your reputation is bad in the same way that it seems to be a smoking gun to you. A lot of people reading this probably don’t either, but when it’s presented this way they see it as consistent with all the other infractions that were listed and really damning.
I think integrity violations are dangerous and corrosive, and I think it’s a good impulse to share information like that when you have it, but despite all the words here, I don’t think that info is properly contextualized for most people to use it correctly. It easily comes across as a laundry list of reasons to cancel them rather than the calibrated honest reporting it’s trying to be.
This continues to feel quite a bit too micromanagy to me. Mostly these are the complaints that seemed significant to Ben (which also roughly aligned with my assessment).
The post was already like 100+ hours of effort to write. I don't think "more contextualizing" is a good use of at least our time (though if other people want to do this kind of job and would do more of that, then that seems maybe fine to me).
Like, again, I think if some people want to update that all weirdness is bad, then that's up to them. It is not my job, and indeed would be a violation of what I consider cooperative behavior, to filter evidence so that the situation here only supports my (or Ben's) position about how organizations should operate.
Yeah, I agree, I don’t think it’s worth the amount of contextualizing it would take to make this kind of info properly received and useful. I’m doubting that we can gossip in the way that, for example, you may have thought was needed for SBF, that productively in this forum. I think you and Ben have a rather complex worldview that explains why these incidents are very significant to you whereas superficially similar things that are common in EA are not (or are positive). I’m less concerned that weirdness will be discouraged and more concerned that people will be on blast in a way that seems arbitrary to them and is hard for them to predict without e.g. seeking your permission first if they don’t want to be called out on main later. Being called out is very damaging and I don’t like the whiff of “you have nothing to fear if have nothing to hide” that I’m getting in this comment section. Seems like the only defense against this kind of thing is never being successful enough to control money or hire employees.
I’m looking at maybe starting a new org in the next year and doing something that’s a little outside the Sequences morality (advocacy, involving politics and PR and being in coal... (read more)
I want to try to paraphrase what I hear you saying in this comment thread, Holly. Please feel free to correct any mistakes or misframings in my paraphrase.
I hear you saying...
- Lightcone culture has a relatively specific morality around integrity and transparency. Those norms are consistent, and maybe good, but they're not necessarily shared by the EA community or the broader world.
- Under those norms, actions like threatening your ex-employees's carrer prospects to prevent them from sharing negative info about you are very bad, while in broader culture a "you don't badmouth me, I don't badmouth you" ceasefire is pretty normal.
- In this post, Ben is accusing Nonlinear of bad behavior. In particular, he's accusing them of acting particularly badly (compared to some baseline of EA orgs) according to the integrity norms of lightcone culture.
- My understanding is that the dynamic here that Ben considers particularly egregious is that Nonlinear allegedly took actions to silence their ex-employees, and prevent negative info from propagating. If all of the same events had occurred between Nonlinear, Alice, and Chloe, except for Nonlinear suppressing info about what happened after the
... (read more)Yes, I think a lot of commenters are almost certainly making bad updates about how to judge or how to run an EA org off of this, or are using it to support their own pre-existing ideas around this topic.
This kinda stinks, but I do think it is what happens by default. I hope the next big org founder picks up more nuance than that, from somewhere else?
That said, I don't think "callout / inventory of grievances / complaints" and "nuanced post about how to run an org better/fix the errors of your ways" always have to be the same post. That would be a lot to take on, and Lesswrong is positioned at the periphery here, at best; doing information-gathering and sense-making from the periphery is really hard.
I feel like for the next... week to month... I view it as primarily Nonlinear's ball (...and/or whoever it is who wants to fund them, or feels responsibility to provide oversight/rehab on them, if any do judge that worthwhile...) to shift the conversation towards "how to run things better."
Given their currently demonstrated attitude, I am not starting out hugely optimistic here. But: I hope Nonlinear will rise to the occasion, and take the first stab at writing some soul-searching/error-... (read more)
I do not want to actually do this, because I love Lightcone and I trust you guys, but would it help you understand if a redteamer wrote a post like this about your org? Would you be fine with all the donors that were turned off and the people who didn’t want to work with you because you had the stink of drama on you?
Still, the most upvoted comment on this post does seem to push in the direction of "weird is bad":
I get that this applies to some parts of these critiques. But to me, the allegations made here seem to be on another level, particularly asking an intern to take on unnecessary legal risk.
As one of the people Ben interviewed:
Sorry, maybe this is addressed elsewhere, but what relationship have you had with Nonlinear?
Nonlinear staff were participants on the FTX EA program, which I ran, and where I was in part responsible for participant welfare. Some of the important events took place in this period. This led me to start supporting Alice and Chloe. I have continued to be involved in the case on-and-off since then.
Appreciate the comment Joel :)
(And of course, if you later come to have a critical/negative opinion of parts of my post, you're v welcome to share those too!)
Yes, I think that the post does not do enough to make it clear that the central allegations are not about Drew Spartz. Happy to expand.
That sounds quite plausible. Will do a re-read of my post (and my notes) to check what I say, and think about what edit/additions are worth making.
(Will come back for that tomorrow. I'm signing off for today and taking the evening to rest.)
I looked through all the mentions of his behavior in the post. I think only one of them is plausibly misleading. I say
I only have reports of intimidating actions from Emerson and Kat, not Drew. I don't have any reason to think he reduced the level of intimidation, but I don't want to convey that I know of positive acts of intimidation that he took, beyond broadly participating in the dynamics set up by Emerson and Kat and being supportive of his brother. I've edited that bit and included it in an addendum collecting all edits.
Speaking from my perspective, not from anyone else's (e.g. Alice's, Chloe's, yours) I don't see Drew as exonerated from the dynamics at Nonlinear, even while I think that Emerson and Kat are each substantially more responsible for them.
I think the best thing to be said in his favor is that Alice felt he was the only one of the three of them to really hear her concerns (e.g. financially) and sometimes advocate for her needs.
Here's another thing.
Let's suppose that Nonlinear have crossed red lines, and that additional information from them won't change this. (In reality I think that this is up in the air for the next week or so; I won't allow my limited imagination to diminish the hope.)
Do you not believe in the possibility of rehabilitation in this case?
I haven't read up on what norms here work well in other high-trust communities. But at least in criminal vs. society settings I would want to be a strong proponent of rehabilitation. It seems pretty plausible to me that, after thinking more about best norms in high-trust communities, I could come to think that "create horrendous work environment" and "create credible fear of severe retaliation" were things that could change (and be monitored) upon rehabilitation, and that it would be good for this to happen after X period of time.
I don't mean to imply that I couldn't see evidence that persuaded me that this concern had been mediated sufficiently. But silencing and intimidating into being quiet is a problem that self-reinforces — when it's happening, it stops you from learning about it, and about anything else bad that's happening. So I think it's important to take a much more hardline stance against it than with other norm-violations even if the two norm-violations caused a similar amount of damage.
Because there's barely anything relevant that is common to both. We don't have any moral obligation to companies, nor does it make the world better in my view to "rehabilitate" companies. A person has to continue existing in society even after committing a crime. A company doesn't have to continue existing.
One example of the evidence we’re gathering
We are working hard on a point-by-point response to Ben’s article, but wanted to provide a quick example of the sort of evidence we are preparing to share:
Her claim: “Alice claims she 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.”
The truth (see screenshots below):
Months later, after our relationship deteriorated, she went around telling many people that we starved her. She included details that depict us in a maximally damaging light - what could be more abusive than refusing to care for a sick girl, alone in a foreign country? And if someone told you that, you’d probably believe them, because who would make something like that up?
Evidence
- The screenshots below show Kat offering Alice the vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, cereal, etc), on the first day she was sick. Then, when she wasn’t
... (read more)It could be that I am misreading or misunderstanding these screenshots, but having read through them a couple of times trying to parse what happened, here's what I came away with:
On December 15, Alice states that she'd had very little to eat all day, that she'd repeatedly tried and failed to find a way to order takeout to their location, and tries to ask that people go to Burger King and get her an Impossible Burger which in the linked screenshots they decline to do because they don't want to get fast food. She asks again about Burger King and is told it's inconvenient to get there. Instead, they go to a different restaurant and offer to get her something from the restaurant they went to. Alice looks at the menu online and sees that there are no vegan options. Drew confirms that 'they have some salads' but nothing else for her. She assures him that it's fine to not get her anything.
It seems completely reasonable that Alice remembers this as 'she was barely eating, and no one in the house was willing to go out and get her nonvegan foods' - after all, the end result of all of those message exchanges was no food being obtained for Alice and her requests for Burger King being rep... (read more)
I should also add that this (including the question of whether Alice is credible) is not very important to my overall evaluation of the situation, and I'd appreciate it if Nonlinear spent their limited resources on the claims that I think are most shocking and most important, such as the claim that Woods said "your career in EA would be over with a few DMs" to a former employee after the former employee was rumored to have complained about the company.
I agree that this is a way more important incident, but I downvoted this comment because:
- I don't want to discourage Nonlinear from nitpicking smaller claims. A lot of what worries people here is a gestalt impression that Nonlinear is callous and manipulative; if that impression is wrong, it will probably be because of systematic distortions in many claims, and it will probably be hard to un-convince people of the impression without weighing in on lots of the claims, both major and minor.
- I expect some correlation between "this concern is easier to properly and fully address" and "this concern is more minor", so I think it's normal and to be expected that Nonlinear would start with relatively-minor stuff.
- I do think it's good to state your cruxes, but people's cruxes will vary some; I'd rather that Nonlinear overshare and try to cover everything, and I don't want to locally punis
... (read more)Well put, Rob - you changed my mind
Yep this changed my mind as well - thank you!
I'd have thought "Emerson boasted about paying someone to stalk an enemy" was the most shocking claim. (Not that you said otherwise.) It surprises me how little the discussion has been focused on that. Whether or not it's worse, it is way weirder than "threatened to get an employee blacklisted for saying bad things about them".
I find the idea of doing that absolutely awful and I've never done anything like that. Unfortunately, it's a lie there is no possibility of defending myself from, since it's hearsay from an anonymous source.
To clarify, do you mean you have never asked/recruited someone to stalk, intimidate, or harass someone else, or do you mean you have never boasted about it?
Neither!
I can tell you that someone was quite actively scared of you doing something like this, and believed you to have said it to them. I wasn't there myself so I cannot confirm whether it's a mishearing or whatever.
There's a broader question that I am often confused about regarding whether it's good or bad to think carefully about how to really deceive someone, or really hurt someone, even if it's motivated defensively. Then people can be unsure about the boundaries of whether you'll use it against them. If someone were to tell you that they know general skills to get people fired, or get people swatted, or get people on immigration black-lists for certain countries, this information inherently makes them a more worrying person to be in conflicts with. Even if they say they'd only do it when it was justified. It's one reason why I find myself trying to avoid simple games of deception like Werewolf, I'd prefer to not have practiced lying in general, so that my friends and allies have less reason to think I'm good at deception.
My current guess is that you can wield some of these normally-unethical weapons if you also have sent pretty credible signals about what principles you use to decide whether to use them, and otherwise it's not much good to figure out how you would really hurt someone, as it predictably leads to people being very scared and intimidated.
100% agreed with this. The chat log paints a wildly different picture than what was included in Ben's original post.
Agreed. I did update toward "there's likely a nontrivial amount of distortion in Alice's retelling of other things", and toward "normal human error and miscommunication played a larger role in some of the Bad Stuff that happened than I previously expected". (Ben's post was still a giant negative update for me about Nonlinear, but Kat's comment is a smaller update in the opposite direction.)
I think a crux in this is what you think the reason is for Alice being so unassertive towards Kat in the messages - was it because she's worried, based on experience, about angering her employers and causing negative consequences for herself, e.g. them saying she's being too difficult and refuse to help her at all, or some other, more favourable to Kat and Emerson, reason?
We definitely did not fail to get her food, so I think there has been a misunderstanding - it says in the texts below that Alice told Drew not to worry about getting food because I went and got her mashed potatoes. Ben mentioned the mashed potatoes in the main post, but we forgot to mention it again in our comment - which has been updated
The texts involved on 12/15/21:
I also offered to cook the vegan food we had in the house for her.
I think that there's a big difference between telling everyone "I didn't get the food I wanted, but they did get/offer to cook me vegan food, and I told them it was ok!" and "they refused to get me vegan food and I barely ate for 2 days".
Also, re: "because of this professional/personal entanglement" - at this point, Alice was just a friend traveling with us. There were no professional entanglements.
Agreed.
This also updates me about Kat's take (as summarized by Ben Pace in the OP):
When I read the post, I didn't see any particular reason for Kat to think this, and I worried it might be just be an attempt to dismiss a critic, given the aggressive way Nonlinear otherwise seems to have responded to criticisms.
With this new info, it now seems plausible to me that Kat was correct (even though I don't think this justifies threatening Alice or Ben in the way Kat and Emerson did). And if Kat's not correct, I still update that Kat was probably accurately stating her epistemic state, and that a lot of reasonable people might have reached the same epistemic state.
The post says
Is that incorrect? When did Alice start working for Nonlinear?
Yes, that is incorrect. One of many such factual inaccuracies and why we told Ben to give us a week. The exact date is not simple to explain, since she gradually began working with us, but we will clarify ASAP.
Yeah, I mis-wrote there, will update that line in the post (though I say it correctly a few paragraphs later[1]). They traveled together between those dates.
From my perspective it's fairly ambiguous at what point Alice started "working" for Nonlinear.
- On the call with me, Kat said (roughly verbatim) "If you asked each of me/Emerson/Drew at what point Alice became an employee, we'd each give three different answers." Kat said that her answer was at the end of February when they claim that they started paying Alice $1k/month, and that was when Kat started giving her Nonlinear tasks and negotiated things like vacation time.
- Emerson said he didn't know that was happening and thought he was just giving Alice a gift, and Alice reports after she quit he said he'd never thought of her as an employee.
- Alice herself reports that the first conversation she had with Emerson, at EAG, lasting 4 hours, they explicitly discussed working together and salary. She says she walked away from that conversation believing they'd agreed that if she were to work for him, she would need $2.5k-$3k/month in salary to make ends meet, and was generally expecting to eventually work with Nonli
... (read more)I think it's telling, that Kat thinks that the texts speak in their favor. Reading them was quite triggering for me because I see a scared person, who asks for basic things, from the only people she has around her, to help her in a really difficult situation, and is made to feel like she is asking for too much, has to repeatedly advocate for herself (while sick) and still doesn't get her needs met. On one hand, she is encouraged by Kat to ask for help but practically it's not happening. Especially Emerson and Drew in that second thread sounded like she is difficult and constantly pushed to ask for less or for something else than what she asked for. Seriously, it took 2.5 hours the first day to get a salad, which she didn't want in the first place?! And the second day it's a vegetarian, not vegan, burger.
The way Alice constantly mentioned that she doesn't want to bother them and says that things are fine when they are clearly not, is very upsetting. I can't speak to how Alice felt but it's no wonder she reports this as not being helped/fed when she was sick. To me, this is accurate, whether or not she got a salad and a vegetarian burger the next day.
Honestly, the burger... (read more)
It sounds like you're interpreting Nonlinear folks as saying that the burger incident was the only false claim in Ben's piece?
My interpretation is that Nonlinear objects to many claims in the piece but published this one ("one example of the evidence we’re gathering...") in response to encouragement that they give examples of claims they object to. Probably because this was some combination of quicker to respond to / Nonlinear thought it looked better for them / easier for outsiders to understand.
I’d be particularly interested in evidence against claims that nonlinear staff enforced (or encouraged) policies that prevent whistleblowing or the spread of negative information about nonlinear and its staff, (though my guess is that countering these claims is going to be a lower priority than some of the other more shocking ones).
It's worth noting that empathetic members on the forum seem to recognize that Alice, as evidenced by her messages, is someone earnestly seeking assistance while being mindful not to cause any disruptions. Regrettably, individuals who have experienced psychological abuse often tend to exhibit such behaviors—expressing excessive apologies and striving to avoid any form of disturbance or trouble. While I lack formal training in psychology, I am prompted to consider whether a qualified practitioner might discern traits indicative of co-dependency and narcissistic abuse within the communicated messages. This, naturally, remains open to interpretation.
Of more substantial note, however, is the observation that the initial responses have been directed towards seemingly inconsequential elements. This particular approach is reminiscent of tactics employed in portrayals of legal proceedings within dramatic television series, where the objective is to unveil minor falsehoods in an attempt to cast doubt upon the credibility of a witness. The implication is that if one can establish a falsehood in a trivial matter, it follows that untruths may similarly permeate more significant claims.
What the ... (read more)
Just to identify a crux, do you think it's acceptable that someone in your duty of care doesn't eat hot food for a day whilst they are sick?
Can you explain? She did eat.
On December 15, as your screenshots seem to illustrate that you were not able to provide her hot (vegan) food, despite >2 hours of text messaging with both Kat and Drew.
Some confidentiality constraints have been lifted in the last few days, so I’m now able to share more information from the Community Health and Special Projects team to give people a sense of how this case went from our perspective, and how we think about these things.
Previous updates:
To give a picture of how things happened over time:
- Starting mid last year, our team heard about many of the concerns mentioned in this post.
- At the time of our initial conversations with former staff/associates of Nonlinear, they were understandably reluctant for us to do anything that would let on to Nonlinear that they were raising complaints. This limited our ability to hear Nonlinear’s side of the story, though members of our team did have some conversations with Kat that touched on some of these topics. It also meant that the former staff/associates did not give permission at that time for us to take some steps that we suggested. They also suggested some steps that we didn’t see as feasible for us.
- At one point we discussed the possibility of the ex-staff
... (read more)Catherine, you and Nicole are both CH team members who advise the EAIF and the LTFF. Given that CH “heard about many of the concerns mentioned in [Ben’s] post” in mid-2022, did either of you share those concerns with the EAIF team prior to that fund granting $73k to Nonlinear in 4Q22?
You’ve previously written that “meta work like incubating new charities, advising inexperienced charity entrepreneurs, and influencing funding decisions should be done by people with particularly good judgement about how to run strong organisations, in addition to having admirable intentions.” Since the grant was for work of that type (“6-12 months of salary for 3 experienced EAs to set up an EA recruiting/hiring agency”), I would think the case for raising the concerns you’d heard about with the EAIF management team would be particularly strong. If you did not share those concerns, what was the rationale?
Catherine from Community Health here. I was aware of this grant application. After discussion with my colleagues in Community Health who were also aware of the same concerns about Nonlinear mentioned in this post, I decided not to advise EAIF to decline this application. Some of the reasons for that were:
- The funding was for a project run by three other people (not Nonlinear staff), and I had no concerns about those people working on this project
- The three people were not going to be living with Kat and Emerson, which made risks to them lower
- At that stage, I had heard some but not all of the complaints listed in this post, so I didn't have the same picture as I do now. The complaints were confidential, which constrained the possible moves I could make – I wasn’t able to get more information, and I couldn’t share information with the EAIF team that might lead to someone identifying the complainant or Nonlinear guessing that someone complaining had affected their grant decision.
- I could and did put some risk mitigation measures in place, in particular, by requiring the grant to be made on the condition that they set up an incubation contract to formalise the roles, redu
... (read more)Just in case it wasn't clear from Catherine's comment, if Catherine hadn't recommended that we require an incubation contract, it's very unlikely that we would have asked for one. In light of Ben's post, setting up this contract seems like a very good decision.
The EAIF did make a grant for $73k - but it was to a project that Nonlinear was incubating (not to Nonlinear themselves) - I'll update the website to reflect this. Looking at the email thread for this grant now we actually made the grant out to a separate company (the new hiring agency) so the money never went through nonlinear and required (at com health's advice) that they set up an incubation contract to formalise the roles, responsibilities and decision making between the founders and Nonlinear.
I'll let the com health team speak for themselves, but I think given the information that we had the grant was reasonable and looking back I am happy with the advice com health gave us.
Thanks for clarifying that Caleb, that does seem substantially less problematic than granting to Nonlinear themselves.
In your earlier post, you write:
Nonlinear has not been invited or permitted to run sessions or give talks relating to their work, or host a recruiting table at EAG and EAGx conferences this year.
And
Kat ran a session on a personal topic at EAG Bay Area 2023 in February. EDIT: Kat, Emerson and Drew also had a community office hour slot at that conference.
Community office hours are an event that organizers invite you to sign up for (not all EAG attendees can sign up). While not as prominent as a recruiting table or talk, they still signal status to the attendees.
Given that public comments were made as early as November, it seems that there was sufficient time to ensure they were disunited from the event in February. Additionally, even if you don't table at EAG, you can still actively recruit via 1-1 meetings.
I think the lack of acknowledgement or explanation of how this choice happened - and whether CHT sees this as a mistake - worries me, especially now that the anonymity constraints have been lifted.
Some thoughts:
- Vibewise, I find this unsurprising. I am not utterly shocked by any of the above and am not particularly surprised by much of it. Nonlinear does have a move fast and break things approach and I imagine they have patterns of behaviour that have predictably hurt people in the past. As evidence of this I made a market on it about it 8 months ago.
- I like the nonlinear team personally and guess they do good/interesting work. I thought superlinear was a good test-case of bounty-based funding. I also use the Non-Linear library and find it valuable. I am confident that Kat, Emerson and Drew have good intentions on a deep level.
- The above statements can both be true.
- Thanks Ben for doing this, I think it was brave and good
- I particularly like this advice "Going forward I think anyone who works with Kat Woods, Emerson Spartz, or Drew Spartz, should sign legal employment contracts, and make sure all financial agreements are written down in emails and messages that the employee has possession of. I think all people considering employment by the above people at any non-profits they run should take salaries where money is wired to their bank accounts, and not do unpaid work
... (read more)I have no knowledge specific to Puerto Rico, but my understanding is that by far the most important risk incurred when driving without a license is that an unlicensed driver will also almost certainly be uninsured or be in violation of the terms of their insurance such that their insurance will decline claims related to unlicensed driving they were doing, and therefore that an unlicensed driver would potentially be liable for extraordinary sums of money if they were to get into an accident for which they were at fault. Was this person insured? Did the car insurance policy allow unlicensed drivers? What would have happened if there had been an at-fault car accident with another driver?
I initially upvoted/delta'd/insightful'd this, but on looking into it further I don't think that this concern can possibly be right. You mention "extraordinary sums of money", but Puerto Rico only requires $3,000 dollars of liability insurance; the default liability insurance wouldn't be relevant if "extraordinary sums of money" are involved. It's possible that Nonlinear had better insurance for their car; but I feel like the concern here should be about them pressuring their employee to break the law, while your comment's proposed harms would be almost equally bad if everything were legal but Nonlinear didn't have good supplemental insurance. (In particular, your comment seems to imply that it's significantly immortal/problematic for anybody to drive in Puerto Rico without additional insurance.)
(Regardless, I think it's important to note that, even after receiving Nonlinear's comments, the original post gives driving without a license as an example of something that "could have had severe personal downsides such as jail time in a foreign country"; that's what they were presumably responding to.)
If you crash and injure someone when driving without a license you'll likely get a much stiffer punishment than if you did have a license.
So, Nonlinear-affiliated people are here in the comments disagreeing, promising proof that important claims in the post are false. I fully expect that Nonlinear's response, and much of the discussion, will be predictably shoved down the throat of my attention, so I'm not too worried about missing the rebuttals, if rebuttals are in fact coming.
But there's a hard-won lesson I've learned by digging into conflicts like this one, which I want to highlight, which I think makes this post valuable even if some of the stories turn out to be importantly false:
If a story is false, the fact that the story was told, and who told it, is valuable information. Sometimes it's significantly more valuable than if the story was true. You can't untangle a web of lies by trying to prevent anyone from saying things that have falsehoods embedded in them. You can untangle a web of lies by promoting a norm of maximizing the available information, including indirect information like who said what.
Think of the game Werewolf, as an analogy. Some moves are Villager strategies, and some moves are Werewolf strategies, in the sense that, if you notice someone using the strategy, you should make a Bayesian update in the direction of thinking the person using that strategy is a Villager or is a Werewolf.
It sounds like you're claiming something like "all information is valuable information, because even if the information is false you've learned something (e.g. that the source is untrustworthy)". I think this is too strong of a claim. Trying to figure out what's true amidst lots of falsehoods is very difficult and takes time. Most people in real life aren't playing perfect Werewolf with a complex Bayesian model that encompasses all hypotheses. Quite the opposite, from what I've seen both in myself and others, our natural tendency is to quickly collapse on one hypothesis and then interpret everything through that lens (confirmation bias). I think this is what's happening with a lot of the reactions to this post, and I don't think it's valuable.
If you'd instead said "this post is valuable if you view it as a game of Werewolf, keep your hypothesis space open and update as new evidence comes in" then I'd be more in agreement. I think this is still a very difficult task though, and I'd rather that Ben had waited for Nonlinear's counter-evidence and taken that that into consideration instead of forcing us to play Werewolf with his post. (Basically, I'm suggesting that Ben does the hard job of playing Werewolf for us. This is explicitly not what he did, as he himself says in his disclaimer of explicitly seeking out anti-nonlinear evidence.)
Disclaimer: I am friends with Kat and know some of the counter-evidence.
On an earlier discussion of Nonlinear's practices, I wrote:
I would also like to share my experience negotiating my salary with Kat when I first joined Charity Science Health, i.e., before we were friends. It was extremely positive. She was very committed to frugality, and she initially offered me the position of Associate Director at a salary of $25K/year, the bottom end of the advertised salary range. We exchanged several long emails discussing the tradeoffs in a higher or lower salary (team morale, risk of value drift, resources available for the core work, counterfactual us... (read more)
I'm unclear on how this comment speaks to the content of the post, which is compatible with Kat being a courageous, frugal, and dedicated friend and leader.
I suppose it's relevant if you want to get a sense of the chances of ending up in a situation reminiscent of the one depicted in this post if you work for Nonlinear.
Are you implying that you don't believe what's reported here, because it's very different, or something else?
(crossposted from LessWrong)
This is a pretty complex epistemic/social situation. I care a lot about our community having some kind of good process of aggregating information, allowing individuals to integrate it, and update, and decide what to do with it.
I think a lot of disagreements in the comments here and on LW stem from people having an implicit assumption that the conversation here is about "should [any particular person in this article] be socially punished?". In my preferred world, before you get to that phase there should be at least some period focused on "information aggregation and Original Seeing."
It's pretty tricky, since in the default, world, "social punishment?" is indeed the conversation people jump to. And in practice, it's hard to have words just focused on epistemic-evaluation without getting into judgment, or without speech acts being "moves" in a social conflict.
But, I think it's useful to at least (individually) inhabit the frame of "what is true, here?" without asking questions like "what do those truths imply?".
With that in mind, some generally useful epistemic advice that I think is relevant here:
Try to have Multiple Hypotheses
It's useful to have at... (read more)
Based only on the allegations which Nonlinear admits to, which I think we can assume are 100% true, I would:
a) very strongly discourage anyone from working for Emerson Spartz and Kat Woods.
and
b) very strongly encourage CEA and other EA orgs to distance themselves from Nonlinear.
"First; the formal employee drove without a license for 1-2 months in Puerto Rico. We taught her to drive, which she was excited about. You might think this is a substantial legal risk, but basically it isn't, as you can see here, the general range of fines for issues around not-having-a-license in Puerto Rico is in the range of $25 to $500, which just isn't that bad."
This is illegal. Employers should not be asking employees to do things which are illegal, even if the punishment is a small fine.
"Third; the semi-employee was also asked to bring some productivity-related and recreational drugs over the border for us. In general we didn't push hard on this. For one, this is an activity she already did (with other drugs). For two, we thought it didn't need prescription in the country she was visiting, and when we found out otherwise, we dropped it. And for three, she used a bunch of ... (read more)
1. In Israel, I'm not allowed to buy melatonin without a prescription.
Also, delivery is expensive and slow from the U.S. Would you react this way if I'd ask an employee from the U.S to bring Melatonin?
(I never had employees, this is hypothetical)
2. How about crossing the road when there is a red light and no cars around, when going to eat?
Everyone does that here.
My point it: I'm guessing you don't care about what is strictly legal or not
I'm guessing you have some other standard.
Like maybe something about abusing power dynamics, or maybe something else
what do you think?
I don't think employers should tell employees to do illegal things, it's about both power dynamics and legality.
I would very strongly recommend that employers do not ask employees to illegally move melatonin across borders.
Obviously jaywalking is much less bad and asking your employees to jaywalk is much less bad - but I would still recommend that employers do not ask employees to jaywalk. Generally I'd say that it's much less bad to ask your employees to do an illegal thing that lots of people do anyway, but I would recommend that employees still do not ask employees to do them. (Jaywalking would fit into this category, moving drugs illegally across borders and driving without a license in Puerto Rico would not).
I'll add the small caveat which is that doing illegal things where the org is liable but you personally aren't is sometimes ok. The example in my head is that supermarkets and restaurants in my country aren't allowed to open on some days because of mostly religious reasons, and some of them break the law and eat the fines. Of course, this doesn't extend to hurting any person, committing fraud, or anything actually bad basically.
I don't know if that is a great guideline. For example, should we feel obliged to condemn an EA animal welfare org if they ask their employees to violate ag-gag laws?
It seems to me that contextual information is more important than the mere fact of a law being violated. In the ag-gag example, that could be stuff like: Did the employee take the job knowing they would be asked to do this? Did their boss threaten serious retaliation if they didn't do it?
In general the law is not necessarily well-aligned with doing the most good, or even common sense. See https://www.econlib.org/three-felonies-a-day/
[EDIT: To clarify, it seems quite plausible to me that as a community we should update away from law-breaking on the current margin. But, I think this could in principle be taken too far. I also agree power dynamics are important.]
I think people are overcomplicating this. You should generally follow the law, but to shield against risks that you are being such a stickler in unreasonable ways (trying to avoid "3 felonies a day"), you can just imagine whether uninvolved peers hearing about your actions would think a situation is obviously okay. Some potential ways to think about such peer groups:
- What laws people in the country you live in think are absolutely normal and commonplace to break.
- For example, bribing police officers is generally illegal, but iiuc in some countries approximately everybody bribes police officers at traffic stops
- What laws people in your home country think is illegitimate and thus worth breaking
- For example some countries ban homosexuality, but your typical American would not consider it blameworthy to be gay.
- What laws other EAs (not affiliated in any way with your organization) think is okay to break.
- So far, candidates people gave include ag-gag laws and taking stimulants for undiagnosed ADHD.
- FWIW I'm not necessarily convinced that the majority of EAs agree here; I'd like to see polls.
- What laws your non-EA friends think is totally okay to break
- For example, most college-educated Mil
... (read more)Can you give a probability (conditional upon the world existing, humans being alive, etc) for the following statement
(if you don't like the operationalization of ethical philosophers as a stand-in for moral progress, I'm happy for you to come up with a better one).
___
Taken a step back, I do want to preserve the "philosophy club" aspect of EA[1]. I think certain EA (ethics) discussions, in their naïveté, willingness to think outside the box, follow arguments to their logical conclusions, high decoupling, are at its best quite valuable and insightful in discovering moral innovations and alternative empirical worldviews.
And often you need to think pretty radical ideas before coming up with fairly sensible solutions. For example, without Brian Tomasik's early work on Wild Animal Suffering, we would not have s... (read more)
I feel like my main actual position here is something like "just be cool bro" and you're like "what does 'being cool' actually mean? For that matter, what does 'bro' mean? Isn't that kinda sexist?" And I'm like "okay here's one operationalization of "being cool" And here's an operationalization of "bro" that doesn't have sexist connotations." and you're like "edge case 17 here, Steve Jobs was super cool despite wearing a black turtleneck for many years and believing in homeopathy" and my actual position is like "okay but does that even matter; like what's your Bayesian update for "asshole" vs "actually supercool on a deep level" on someone who consistently goes around saying that being cool is for scrubs, but okay, here's another careful attempt to define 'being cool' in a way that gets around that edge case" and you're like "edge case 31" and I'm like "okay I give up."
Like I'm often on the other side of "precision of language is important" but here I'm not even sure you believe that the disagreements are semantic. I feel like some people (fortunately a minority) in these parts think that social norms need to be given at the level of precision that's necessary to align an AGI, and I'm like, jesus fuck this is a good way to not have any norms at all.
How much do you think that Drew is implicated in this? This is something that is less clear to me from the post.
Disclaimer: I previously interned at Nonlinear.
Oops sorry I’m not really sure why I put his name there, edited to remove, sorry Drew!
Nitpick, but I don't think this is literally true and I don't think you literally believe it, fwiw. I think transporting lifesaving drugs is probably permissible and even ethically obligatory under some ethical frameworks, and I suspect if the two of us were to carefully dialogue about edge cases, we'd agree on the acceptability of situations much weaker than "literally necessary to save someone's life."
I think that you should add an edit removing Drew's name, for this reason if nothing else. (Happy to expand.) Thank you.
@Ben Pace Can you please add at the top of the post "Nonlinear disputes at least 85 of the claims in this post and intends to publish a detailed point-by-point response.
They also published this short update giving an example of the kind of evidence they plan to demonstrate."
We keep hearing from people who don't know this. Our comments get buried, so they think your summary at the bottom contains the entirety of our response, though it is just the tip of the iceberg. As a result, they think your post marks the end of the story, and not the opening chapter.
I look forward to reading your point-by-point response. I suspect you will convince me that some of the events described in this post were characterized inaccurately, in ways that are unflattering to Nonlinear. However, I think it is very unlikely you will convince me that Nonlinear didn't screw up in several big, important ways, causing significant harm in the process (for reasons along these lines).
I would thus strongly encourage you to also think about what mistakes Nonlinear made, and what things it is worth apologizing for. I think this would be very good for the community, since it would help us gain better insight into what went wrong here, and how to avoid similar situations going forward.
I've made an edit at the top.
I appreciate the overall style and tone of the piece. I believe Ben is trying to figure out what happened. With the material he had, he could easily write a much more damaging hit piece (as has been the case with some traditional investigative journalist in the past).
Important update. Kat has now made this post.
Some remarks from an old fogey:
1. There are a zillion shitty jobs out there, and there is nothing wrong with either advertizing or taking a shitty job so long as everyone is aware it is shitty and the terms are clear upfront.
Against Non-Linear: It is not clear that the interns/whatever were fully aware just how shitty the jobs would be upfront, and they were probably oversold on them. This was probably seen as good business strategy. It isn't.
Against Alice: Personally, I think these jobs would have red flags a mile away. I have known people who went to work for obvious MLMs, and I think it is ultimately the responsibility of the person signing the contract to read the fine print and be aware of what they are getting into. If you, as an organization, put out shitty terms, and someone agrees to that, it's not your fault for making a shitty offer. If you, as an employee, accept work without a clear contract.... Don't do that. Other people may try to exploit you, and the typical company WILL try to exploit you. That is what they do. Your only defense is to not accept it. If you accept that, you agreed to it so you have to live with the consequences.
Again, probably the shittiness of the... (read more)
Random anecadata on a very specific instance: I worked with Drew to make a Most Important Century writing prize. I enjoyed our conversations and we worked well together — Drew was nice and ambitious. I heard concerns about Nonlinear at this time, but never had anything suspect come up.
To put it more strongly: I would like to make clear that I have never heard any claims of improper conduct by Drew Spartz (in relation to the events discussed in this post or otherwise).
Thanks, I think taking the time to make this stronger phrasing publicly is quite valuable (and seems to match what everyone else is saying so far). It's important that we not engage in guilt-by-association.
Agreed. I would have wanted the post itself to make this more clear.
Repost from LW:
My understanding (definitely fallible, but I’ve been quite engaged in this case, and am one of the people Ben interviewed) has been that Alice and Chloe are not concerned about this, and in fact that they both wish to insulate Drew from any negative consequences. This seems to me like an informative and important consideration. (It also gives me reason to think that the benefits of gaining more information about this are less likely to be worth the costs.)
Appreciate you saying this, Michel. As you can imagine, it’s been rough. Perhaps accidentally, this post seems to often lump me in with situations I wasn’t really a part of.
I similarly had a positive experience with Drew creating The Econ Theory AI Alignment Prize. I was not prompted by anyone to comment on this.
I second this - I have met Drew at multiple conferences and my experiences with him have only been positive. He has always been very nice to talk to. I have also heard others in EA circles tell their anecdotes on him and nobody has anything bad to say whatsoever.
Both Kat and Emerson are claiming that there have been edits to this post.[1]
I wonder whether an appendix or summary of changes to important claims would be fair and appropriate, given the length of post and severity of allegations? It'd help readers keep up with these changes, and it is likely most time-efficient for the author making the edits to document these as they go along.
@Ben Pace
[Edit: Kat has since retracted her statement.]
I used a diff checker to find the differences between the current post and the original post. There seem to be two:
So it seems Kat's comment is wrong and Emerson's is misleading/wrong. They are free to point to another specific edit if it exists.
Update: Kat guesses she was thinking of changes from a near-final draft rather than changes from the first published version.
I felt strongly that I had to respond to this given my personal experience with Nonlinear (mostly Kat & Drew) were overall positive.
I do not have much knowledge about past Nonlinear employee experience (though we helped run a hiring search for them for an assistant as our first gig with HIRe - which they ended up not hiring for anyway in the end) - but I have a highly positive opinion with Kat and Drew. All my interactions with them have been incredibly positive personally and professionally. I have only met Emerson once so I have no opinion on him related to this post.
I’ve met Kat Woods while Nonlinear was running a search for someone to lead and incubate an EA recruiting agency. I joined and reached the final round (I recall being told there were 4 finalists) but unfortunately, I wasn’t selected as the top pick. Later on, Kat shared with me and the other 2 finalists that the incubatee changed their mind to focus on another career path. While disclosing that the original funding source might not be available, she encouraged us to try taking on this challenge as she believed we would be doing a lot of good in any case.
She also provided a small amount of seed funding for o... (read more)
I think it's useful to share positive experiences but I also want to note that in almost all cases of proven misconduct, you will be able to find people who had positive experiences in similar situations. People who behave very poorly are not behaving that poorly all the time.
Seems great! I am glad you had good interactions with them. They do seem overwhelmingly positive in their general demeanor, and high energy and excited about projects.
[Disclaimers: My wife Deena works with Kat as a business coach - see my wife's comment elsewhere on this post. I briefly met Kat and Emerson while visiting in Puerto Rico and had positive interactions with them. My personality is such that I have a very strong inclination to try to see the good in others, which I am aware can bias my views.]
A few random thoughts related to this post:
1. I appreciate the concerns over potential for personal retaliation, and the other factors mentioned by @Habryka and others for why it might be good to not delay this kind of post. I think those concerns and factors are serious and should definitely not be ignored. That said, I want to point out that there's a different type of retaliation in the other direction that posting this kind of thing without waiting for a response can cause: Reputational damage. As others have pointed out, many people seem to update more strongly on negative reports that come first and less on subsequent follow up rebuttals. If it turned out that the accusations are demonstrably false in critically important ways, then even if that comes to light later the reputational damage to Kat, Emerson, and Drew may now be irrevocable.
R... (read more)
A note on EA posts as (amateur) investigative journalism:
When passions are running high, it can be helpful to take a step back and assess what's going on here a little more objectively.
There are all different kinds of EA Forum posts that we evaluate using different criteria. Some posts announce new funding opportunities; we evaluate these in terms of brevity, clarity, relevance, and useful links for applicants. Some posts are introduce a new potential EA cause area; we evaluate them in terms of whether they make a good empirical case for the cause area being large-scope, neglected, and tractable. Some posts raise a theoretical issues in moral philosophy; we evaluate those in terms of technical philosophical criteria such as logical coherence.
This post by Ben Pace is very unusual, in that it's basically investigative journalism, reporting the alleged problems with one particular organization and two of its leaders. The author doesn't explicitly frame it this way, but in his discussion of how many people he talked to, how much time he spent working on it, and how important he believes the alleged problems are, it's clearly a sort of investigative journalism.
So, let's assess the post ... (read more)
The answer to many of your questions is no, I have little former professional experience at this sort of investigation! (I had also never run an office before Lightcone Office, never run a web forum before LessWrong, and never run a conference before EAGxOxford 2016.)
My general attitude to doing new projects that I think should be done and nobody else is doing them is captured in this quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky that I think about often:
PS for those folks who disagree-voted with my post:
My key takeaway was 'if we publish amateur investigative journalism in EA Forum, especially when there are very high stakes for the reputations of individuals and organizations, we should try to adhere, as closely as possible, to the standards of professional investigative journalism.'
Do you disagree with that conclusion?
Or with some other specific aspect of what I wrote?
Genuinely curious.
Let me justify my complete disagreement.
I read your comment as applying insanely high quality requirements to what's already an absolutely thankless task. The result of applying your standards would be that the OP would not get written. In a world where criticism is too expensive, it won't get produced. This is good if the criticism is substance-less, but bad if it's of substance.
Also, professional journalists are paid for their work. In case of posts like these, who is supposed to pay the wages and provide the manpower to fulfill requirements like "running it by legal"? Are we going to ask all EA organisations to pay into a whistleblower fund, or what?
Also, for many standards and codes of ethics, their main purpose is not to provide a public good, or to improve epistemics, but to protect the professionals themselves. (For example, I sure wish doctors would tell patients if any of their colleagues should be avoided, but this is just not done.) So unequivocally adhering to such professional standards is not the right goal to strive for.
I also read your comment as containing a bunch of leading questions that presupposed a negative conclusion. Over eight paragraphs of questions, you'r... (read more)
This seems worth considering. Or, considering how concentrated EA funding is anyway, having an independent org funded by EA funders fulfilling this role.
I disagree with that conclusion. For example, I think it's fine to investigate something and write up your conclusions without having training as an investigative journalist, even if your conclusions make someone else look bad.
If Ben wants to assume liability for libel lawsuits, I don't see why he should be prevented from doing so. In the domain of professional investigative journalism, I can see why a company would have this standard, since the company may not want to be held liable for things an individual journalist rashly said, but that strikes me as inapplicable in this case.
(Incidentally, it seems like this is probably a standard of professional investigative journalism that I don't think amateur investigative journalism should attempt to adhere to)
These seem like reasonable questions to ask. I whole-heartedly agree that such amateur journalists should only make payments that are appropriate and ethical - in fact, this strikes me as tautological.
I'm not exactly sure what this means, not being aware of what those standards are. It does strike me that IIUC those venues typically attempt to cover issues of national or international importance (or in the case of the NYT and WaPo, issues of importance to New York City or Washington, DC), and that's probably the wrong bar for importance for whether someone should publish something on the EA forum or LessWrong.
Anyway, hope these responses satisfy your curiosity!
I disagree-voted because:
To answer this question:
I had never heard Alice or Chloe's names before Kat told me them the first time. I have a fairly strong second-degree connection with Chloe. I had met Kat once before she visited the Lightcone Offices, having one ~20 min conversation with her at Palmcone, an event Lightcone ran in the Bahamas. I had never met Emerson or Drew. I interviewed many people, for most of them we'd never spoken before and for some of them we had a bit. A few of them had spent time at the Lightcone Offices. Wishing them all well, I wouldn't have described any of the interviewees as "my friend" before the call. Some chance I am forgetting someone here.
Also later on in the investigation I noticed that one friend of mine had been somewhat close to being hired at Nonlinear, and at the time I had given them some small recommendation to accept the job. I kind of wish I had done this in some valiant defense of my friend's honor and potential harm, but I have to say I basically didn't think about that aspect at all and had mostly forgotten that it happened.
Time and effort invested in writing a post have little bearing on the objectivity of the post, when it comes to adjudicating what's really true in 'he said/she said' (or 'she said/she said') cases.
If people have an agenda, they might invest large amounts of time and energy into writing something. But if they're not consciously following principles of objective reporting (eg as crystallized in the highest ideals of investigative journalism), what they write might be very unbalanced.
We are all familiar with many, many cases of this in partisan news media from the Left and the Right. Writers with an agenda routinely invest hundreds of hours into writing pieces that end up being very biased.
It reveals a lot that you 'suspect Nonlinear would have come out looking very bad regardless'. That suggests that Ben's initial framing of this narrative will, in fact, tend to overwhelm any counter-evidence that Nonlinear can offer -- and maybe he should have waited longer, and tried harder, to incorporate their counter-evidence before publishing this.
Note that I am NOT saying that Ben definitely had a hidden agenda, or definitely was biased, or was acting in bad faith. I'm simply saying that we, as outsiders, do not know the facts of the matter yet, and we should not confuse amount of time invested in writing something with the objectively of the result.
Thanks for this writeup, still undergoing various updates based on the info above and responses from Nonlinear.
One thing I do want to comment on is this:
I agree that it was a bad message to send. I agree that people shouldn't make it hard for others who have a stake in something to learn about bad behavior from others involved.
But I think it's actually a bit more complex if you consider the 0 privacy norms that might naturally follow from that, and I can kind of understand where Kat is (potentially) coming from in that message. This doesn't really apply if Nonlinear was actually being abusive, of course, only if they did things that most people would consider reasonable bu... (read more)
This is a short response while I write up something more substantial.
The true story is very different than the one you just read.
Ben Pace purposefully posted this without seeing our evidence first, which I believe is unethical and violates important epistemic norms.
He said “I don't believe I am beholden to give you time to prepare”
We told him we have incontrovertible proof that many of the important claims were false or extremely misleading. We told him that we were working full-time on gathering the evidence to send him.
We told him we needed a week to get it all together because there is a lot of it. Work contracts, receipts, chat histories, transcripts, etc.
Instead of waiting to see the evidence, he published. I feel like this indicates his lack of interest in truth.
He did this despite there being no time sensitivity to this question and working on it for months. Despite him saying that he would look at the evidence.
I’m having to deal with one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me. Somebody who I used to care about is telling lies about me to my professional and social community that make me seem like a monster. And I have clear evidence to show that they’re lies.
Please, if you’re reading this, before signal boosting, I beg you to please reserve judgment until we have had a chance to present our evidence.
A brief note on defamation law:
The whole point of having laws against defamation, whether libel (written defamation) or slander (spoken defamation), is to hold people to higher epistemic standards when they communicate very negative things about people or organizations -- especially negative things that would stick in the readers/listeners minds in ways that would be very hard for subsequent corrections or clarifications to counter-act.
Without making any comment about the accuracy or inaccuracy of this post, I would just point out that nobody in EA should be shocked that an organization (e.g. Nonlinear) that is being libeled (in its view) would threaten a libel suit to deter the false accusations (as they see them), to nudge the author(e.g. Ben Pace) towards making sure that their negative claims are factually correct and contextually fair.
That is the whole point and function of defamation law: to promote especially high standards of research, accuracy, and care when making severe negative comments. This helps promote better epistemics, when reputations are on the line. If we never use defamation law for its intended purpose, we're being very naive about the profound costs of... (read more)
Whatever its legitimate uses, defamation law is also an extremely useful cudgel that bad actors can, and very frequently do, use to protect their reputations from true accusations. The cost in money, time and risk of going through a defamation trial is such that threats of such can very easily intimidate would-be truth-tellers into silence, especially when the people making the threat have a history of retaliation. Making such threats even when the case for defamation seems highly dubious (as here), should shift us toward believing that we are in the defamation-as-unscrupulous-cudgel world, and update our beliefs about Nonlinear accordingly.
Whether or not we should be shocked epistemically that Nonlinear made such threats here, I claim that we should both condemn and punish them for doing so (within the extent of the law), and create a norm that you don't do that here. I claim this even if Nonlinear's upcoming rebuttal proves to be very convincing.
I don't want a community where we need extremely high burdens of proof to publish true bad things about people. That's bad for everyone (except the offenders), but especially for the vulnerable people who fall prey to the people doing the bad things because they happen not to have access to the relevant rumor mill. It's also toxic to our overall epistemics as a community, as it predictably and dramatically skews the available evidence we have to form opinions about people.
In the broader uncooperative world, you don't generally give organizations you're criticizing the opportunity to review a draft and prepare a response. When organizations granted this opportunity respond by threatening to sue, especially if they wouldn't actually sue but just would prefer it not be published, that pushes authors away from offering the courtesy.
I'll quote Emerson Spartz on this one:
I agree there are some circumstances under which libel suits are justified, but the net-effect on the availability of libel suits strikes me as extremely negative for communities like ours, and I think it's very reasonable to have very strong norms against threatening or going through with these kinds of suits. Just because an option is legally available, doesn't mean that a community has to be fine with that option being pursued.
This, in-particular, strikes me as completely unsupported. The law does not strike me as particularly well-calibrated about what promotes good communal epistemics, and I do not see how preventing negative evidence from being spread, which is usually the most undersupplied type of evidence already, helps "promote better epistemics". Naively the prior should be that when you suppress information, you worsen the accuracy of people's models of the world.
As a concrete illustration of this, libel law in the U.S. and the U.K. functio... (read more)
Per https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/proving-fault-actual-malice-and-negligence (h/t kave):
... (read more)It is indeed high stakes! But in my opinion they have opted in to this sort of accusation being openly stated. Many hundreds or even thousands of people have given their lives and efforts to causes and projects led by high-status people in EA, often on the grounds that it is "high trust" and the people are well-intentioned. Once you are taking those resources — for instance having a woman you talked to once at an EAG come and fly out and live with you and work for you while nomadically traveling and paying her next to nothing, or do the same via a short hiring process — then as soon as someone else in that group sees credible evidence that "Wait, these people look to me like they have taken advantage of this resource and really hurt some people and intimidated them into covering it up", then it behooves them to say so loud and clear!
Perhaps you do not believe this is true of EA circles, and as an older person in these circles that generally correlates (quite wisely) with being on the more hesitant side of giving your full life to whatever a person currently in EA leadership randomly thinks you should do. Nonetheless I think two younger people here have been eaten up and chewed out and I think it'll happen again, because of people resting on this inaccurately high level of trust. So I'll say it as loud as you like :)
To some extent, I agree with this, but I also think it overlooks an important component of how defamation law is used in practice — which is not to hold people to high epistemic norms but instead to scare them out of harming your reputation regardless of the truth. This is something folks who work on corporate campaigns for farmed animal welfare run into all the time. And, because our legal system is imperfect, it often works. Brian Martin has a good write-up on the flaws in our legal system that contribute to this:
... (read more)I want to point out that the existence of a libel law that is expensive to engage with, does practically nothing against the posting of anonymized callout posts. You can't sue someone you can't identify.
Love it or hate it: the more harshly libel law is enforced, the more I expect similar things to be handled through fully-anonymous or low-transparency channels, instead of high-transparency ones. And in aggregate, I expect an environment high on libel suits, to disincentivize transparent behavior or highly specific allegations (which risks de-anonymization) on the part of accusers, more strongly than it incentivizes epistemic carefulness.
This is one reason to be against encouraging highly litigious attitudes, that I haven't yet seen mentioned, so I thought I'd briefly put it out there.
I am not a lawyer but have read about defamation law and asked lawyers questions about it. I don't believe your description of defamation law is as clear cut as you're making it out to be.
The standard for fault in defamation cases involving private figures is that the defamer had to be "negligent." That is, they have to have failed to do something they were required to do. Negligence is a vague standard, and it is up to the jury to decide what that means. Framing the point of defamation law as "encourage very high epistemic standards" is just too strong a statement. A jury could interpret it that way, but a jury could interpret it as a much much lower standard.
Furthermore, in my view, basic elements of this post make it a weak case, regardless of whether the claims within it are true of false. Ben is not stating these claims as undisputed, unqualified facts. He is reporting information others have shared with him. It's only straightforward defamation if he is just making up what people said to him. It'd be more in the defamation camp if Ben himself was saying "Nonlinear mistreated me."
It seems absolutely inappropriate to me for Nonlinear to threaten to sue in this case. This is a tactic abusers use, and high-integrity people pursue it in much narrower cases.
No, a kneejerk threat of libel still seems to me really bad, whether it's legally permissable or not. Seems far worse epistemic damage than the thing it seeks to mitigate.
If people do this regularly I'd give to a legal defense fund for people to be able to post criticisms of org founders without fear.
If we aren't able to criticise non-profits without fear of libel then how exactly are we supposed to hold each other to account.
This seems particularly clear in the case of non-anonymous posts like Ben's. Ben posted a thing that risks damaging Nonlinear's reputation. In the process, he's put his own reputation at risk: Nonlinear can publicly respond with information that shows Ben was wrong (and perhaps negligent, unfair, etc.), causing us to put a lot less stock in Ben's word next time around.
Alice and Chloe are anonymous, but by having a named individual vouch for them to some degree, we create a situation where ordinary reputational costs can do a good job of incentivizing honesty on everyone's part.
To share some anecdotal data: I personally have had positive experiences doing regular coaching calls with Kat this year and feel that her input has been very helpful.
I would encourage us all to put off updating until we also get the second side of the story - that generally seems like good practice to me whenever it is possible.
Under all circumstances this is just a terrible day for EA. If the accusations are even half-accurate then I am appalled. If the accusations don't hold water, then I am also appalled.
I don't have an informed opinion as to whether it was correct to publish without waiting for Nonlinear to prepare a response. I'm leaning towards thinking it was the right decision given the supposed threatening behavior of nonlinear leadership.
With that said, I would encourage most readers to wait with making up their mind until Nonlinear has had a chance to leave a response. Save your sanity, block this thread from your browser, and come back in a few weeks once the dust has settled.
Witch hunts do happen among well-intentioned people. I have many more thoughts I want to share, but this is not the right time or place.
I don't really see the "terrible day for EA" part? Maybe you think Nonlinear is more integral to EA as a whole than I do. To me it seems like an allegation of bad behaviour on the part of a notable but relatively minor actor in the space, that doesn't seem to particularly reflect a broader pattern.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but FWIW I think Sam Bankman-Freid and Alameda would have been honestly described as "a notable but relatively minor actor in the space" during the many years when they were building their resource base, hiring, getting funds, and during which time people knew multiple serious accusations about him/them. I am here trying to execute an algorithm that catches bad actors before they become too powerful. I think Emerson is very ambitious and would like a powerful role in EA/X-risk/etc.
I agree with this, and think it could have been a terrible day for EA if stuff like this surfaced later in a world where Nonlinear had become more influential. But thankfully* we're not in that world.
(* Thankfully assuming the allegations are broadly true etc etc.)
I think that Ben probably should have waited the week.
At the same time, I'm still expecting to have a strongly negative opinion about Nonlinear's leadership's actions after seeing whatever they end up publishing.
Disclaimer: I formerly interned at Nonlinear.
Here is some additional possibly relevant information:
- There was a New Yorker profile on Emerson in 2014, when he was working at Dose. Now, that was 9 years ago, and I think these things often paint an inaccurate picture of a person (though Emerson's website does lead with "Named 'The Virologist' by The New Yorker, Emerson Spartz is one of the world's leading experts on internet virality ...", so I guess he does not think the article was too bad). At any rate, the profile paints the picture of someone who seems to prioritise other things over epistemics and a healthy information ecosystem.
- Nonlinear is or used to be a project of Spartz Philanthropies. According to the IRS website, Spartz Philanthropies had its 501(c)(3) status revoked in 2021 since it had not filed the necessary paperwork for three years straight. Now the Nonlinear website no longer mentions Spartz Philanthropies, and I am unsure whether Nonlinear is a tax-exempt nonprofit or what legal status it has. (ETA: Nonlinear, Inc. is a new 501(c)(3) -- see Drew's response below.)
- Back in 2021, Nonlinear launched its AI safety fund with an announcement post which got some pushback/skepticism in the comments section. Does anyon
... (read more)Happy to provide more context here.
Nonlinear, Inc is a 501c3. Spartz Philanthropies was an inactive entity that Emerson set up in 2018. We were initially planning on using it as the main entity for Nonlinear. We had filed an extension for the tax returns, but somehow the IRS missed the fact we filed it, which led to tax-exempt status being automatically revoked. Our accountant said you can appeal it and were very likely to win, since it was an error on their part, and we began the appeal, but it can take years. In the meantime, we were fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity. The IRS was taking too long to respond to the appeal, so I set up a new entity.
... (read more)Thanks! I've edited my original comment to point to your responses.
Does this mean that what used to be the AI safety fund is no longer focused on AI safety? I am asking because the list on the Nonlinear website seems to have mostly assorted EA meta type projects, and you mention a name change.
A lot of people have been angry about these texts made by Kat towards Alice:
> “Given your past behavior, your career in EA would be over in a few DMs, but we aren’t going to do that because we care about you”
> “We’re saying nice things about you publicly and expect you will do the same moving forward”
This sounds like a threat and it’s not how I would have worded it had I been in Kat’s shoes. However, I think it looks much more reasonable if you view it through the hypothesis that a) the bad things Alice is saying about Nonlinear are untrue and b) the bad things Kat has been holding off on saying about Alice are true. Basically, I think Kat’s position is that “If you [Alice] keep spreading lies about us, we will have to defend ourselves by countering with the truth, and unfortunately if these truths got out it would make you look bad (e.g. by painting you as dishonest). That’s why we’ve been trying to avoid going down this route, because we actually care about you and don’t want to hurt your reputation (so you can find jobs), so let’s both just say nice things about each other from now on and put this behind us.”. My sense is that Kat, out of fear that her reputation was... (read more)
I've already written a few comments on this post, but it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to/ought to say as my main response.
I heard rumors of some of this a while back. I'm disappointed to see that the claim about asking an intern to take on legal risk was in fact true. I'm also disappointed to see that there are more worrying allegations beyond those that I'd previously heard.
Despite my object-level position, on the meta-level I think it would likely have been better for Ben to have waited a week and I also don't find Elliot J Davies' use of the term brigading to be helpful as I have explained in previous comments.
Whilst we have this really bad situation in front of us, it's worth noting that the norms we create apply not only to this situation but to future ones as well. And even though I doubt I'll be persuaded by Nonlinear leadership's defense, I want them to have the opportunity to try[1].
I'm still really saddened by what seems to have happened here and I hope Alice and Chloe heal/have healed. It seems like Nonlinear leadership was comfortable taking absurd risks with what they asked them to do. It really shouldn't be at all surprising that it blew up in their fac... (read more)
RobertM and I are having a "dialogue"[1] on LessWrong with a lot of focus on whether it was appropriate for this to be posted when it was and with info collected so far (e.g. not waiting for Nonlinear response).
What is the optimal frontier for due diligence?
Just wanted to say (without commenting on the points in the dialogue) that I appreciate you and Robert having this discussion, and I think the fact you're having it is an example of good epistemics.
Influencing the creation of Professor Quirrel in HPMOR and being influenced by Professor Quirrel in HPMOR both seem to correlate with being a bad actor in EA - a potential red flag to watch out for.
Props to Ben for the investigation. And my thoughts go out to those who've been affected.
As a side-note, I am skeptical of the impact of Nonlinear's work so far in pure results terms. Their direct work seems pretty mediocre and easy, and the rest has just been throwing money at prizes that don't seem to have had much, if any, positive impact. I'd be curious how other people evaluate Nonlinear's work.
Personally I have also been skeptical of Nonlinear's work, BUT before anything else, I just want to say I have not carefully kept track of Nonlinear's work and this is a pretty uninformed vague impression.
I'm not skeptical because of the prizes specifically, I just think they had ideas that sounded not particularly fruitful, or more costly than they were worth. I do think that there was a lot of theoretical discussion around that type of prize setup before Nonlinear tried it, and I respect the ethos of just try-it-and-see-what-happens for something like that, with minimal downside risk. (Notably, if nobody claims the prize, the money isn't spent and can just be used for other work.) The best-sounding concepts in the world still have to be tested before we should build lots of infrastructure on them, so I see the prize stuff as a fairly inexpensive experiment, and I think often good coordinators are undervalued. My skepticism is more that despite Nonlinear's high profile as coordinators, I have no evidence of Nonlinear's impact, and I'm unconvinced that they've found good pressure points for coordination in general. I have also judged them more harshly for this than I otherwise would, due to what I perceive as a gimmicky and overconfident style to some of their written materials. This style unavoidably puts up my guard, but its influence on my assessment may be unfair of me!
I think overall this discussion probably isn't helped by criticism of their object-level work. I don't think their work being high-impact or low-impact would make these allegations unimportant, but I can see commenters and Nonlinear themselves feeling obliged to get sucked into it. I would rather keep that discussion to other, less fraught venues.
This account receives and posts comment requests from people who prefer to not post under their own account (see bio).
I do think it is particularly reasonable in this case given claims of Nonlinear staff being willing to retaliate, as well as an active threat to take legal action (though I am not speaking for the person I posted on behalf of, and other justifications for pseudonymous comments exist even where litigation is not a major concern). I will also say that I asked the commentor to ensure this is a comment that they are willing to endorse personally, just not associate with publicly.
I agree that not much justification was provided about the claim of mediocrity, and I also agree with Ben Millwood's comment that the object level discussion is likely of lower priority at this stage. This passed my vetting despite that in part because I saw this comment's value more as a discussion prompt ("I'd be curious how other people evaluate Nonlinear's work") that could bring out more information, which may have been helpful in getting a better overview of Nonlinear's practices or how their staff operated, or what it was like interacting with them (for good or bad), and thought this was ... (read more)
This was written after reading Chloe's update
Note: I'm trying to focus on "What are good practices for EAs who want to try weird things?" rather then "Should NL/Kat/Emerson be disbanded/reprimanded" until NL posts their rebuttal.
I'm feeling concerned about some specific stuff I'd put in the "working in unusual vistas" bucket. I feel weird because Nonlinear has listed "travel" as a perk on job listings, when it can easily be more of a burden, and looks like it is for certain members of their team (while others have more of the benefits and less of the costs). As someone who lived in East Asia for 7 months across as many different islands/regions, it is really hard to be productive and happy for me in that type of nomadic life. I think it's hard for most people. But the last ~year, seeing NL's (and Kat's[1]) positive posts I'd been rethinking that. Now, what I'm reading from Chloe is more in line with my memories of the hassle and why I recommend against it. So I think re: job listings:
- Necessary travel should not be listed as a job perk, but a key job trait with both pros and cons and emphasis on suitability for certain less than common personalities. And hirers for travelling positi
... (read more)This was written after reading Chloe's update
Note: I'm trying to focus on "What are good practices for people trying weird things?" rather then "Should NL/Kat/Emerson be disbanded/reprimanded" until NL posts their rebuttal.
I notice I'm feeling confused that I'm not reading the type of dialogue I tend to hear in EA/rationalist spaces. Weird arrangements def cut out normy safeguards, but I feel this community does actually have tools to mitigate harm that can come with trying those weird arrangements. I mean this separate from org operational norms like compensation clearly written and signed, and good accounting. For the day-to-day stuff, it's conversational norms that have evolved alongside the "trying of weird things", probably for good reason. Norms like frank-but-respectful communication that cuts through discomfort and COI anxieties rather than burying or amplifying them, and tries very hard to perspective-take, check in, and prioritize the other person's preferences.[1]
I think, eventually, the community could discuss questions like: "If any, what tools/communications norms can help mitigate risks of weird experiments" and "How can leaders who want to try weird arrangements ens... (read more)
Okay but, before I say, I'd like to clarify that I don't think I'd be perfect at this, which is one reason I'm not leading weird things. But I think if you are gonna make requests like that of employees you live or travel with, you basically have to be. (because it gets so much harder then, and this type of communication that makes weirdness safe is the leader's responsibility not the employee's).
Okay, at risk of sounding cringe, it's things like:
- Hi Chloe, some of us were talking about going to St. Barths for the day, would you like to come? As a separate question, would you be willing to help get things ready so we can make it happen before the ferry leaves at X, and possibly be available for some ops tasks throughout the day trip too? Before you answer: I realize it is your day off today, so I wonder if there is a good solution for that? My thought was maybe you can take your day off tomorrow and I pay you overtime to make up for the surprise? I don't know, does this appeal to you or what do you think?
- Hey Chloe, the group of us would really appreciate an Ops lead for today's trip. But before I ask, I want to clarify that there's no pressure at all. It's completely up to you
... (read more)I'd like to have a conversation that's broader than just this specific allegation. There are some claims that are uncontested here, but point to a work environment highly vulnerable to misconduct. Eg, living with your employees.
While this is not the norm for EA orgs, it seems like these dynamics are also not super rare. I expect all broad communities like EA will have some level of misconduct, but we should also strive to minimize it however possible.
So, is there anything EA as a whole can do to minimize things like this? I'd also be curious to know whether CEA knew about any of this (and I'd guess they did since even I -- who is not well-connected to Nonlinear -- heard whispers). And if so, what steps they took to mitigate this. Or do we think this is out of the jurisdiction of the CEA community health team?
Drew is a personal friend of mine, as is a nonlinear employee not mentioned in this post, so I am saddened to read this. I am waiting to see Nonlinear's response.
We fixed the results page on the poll so here they are.
Poll: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/nonlinear-and-community-norms
Results: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/nonlinear-and-community-norms/results
Surprisingly little agreement on this poll. Unlike most polls I post there is some chance of fake responses here. I dunno, but 154 is a lot of respondents.
A huge chunk of disagreements
Personally I think the answers to this question are pretty wild and deserve more scrutiny. Do 22% of us really think this?
Also a lot where people thought the question was misframed.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/cea/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/DpLdoLzsF4NCdkZ3i/clxkucccjhyj8buqjsj6)
When Kat and Joey Savoie worked together (and she was Katherine Savoie), I worked with them extensively. What's described above is in keeping with my experience of her, and him even more so. Joey was very like how Emerson is described.
I'm not surprised that people in the comments aren't recognising what's described as the very bad behaviour that it is, but that is a case of enormous blindness.
Have there been any updates from Nonlinear? Have they written a response?
They keep saying they're working on a response. It's probably around 500 pages by now.
Cross-posting Linda Linsefors' take from LessWrong:
... (read more)Duncan Sabien replies:
... (read more)Elizabeth van Nostrand replies:
Linda responds:
Poll: Was Emerson threatening legal action (suing for defamation) against Ben and his employer (Lightcone) for this being posted a good choice?
(agreevote if you think so, disagreevote if you don't, comment with your reasoning if you'd like)
I think this is unacceptable, and unless serious evidence appears that Ben behaved dishonestly
in a way nobody seems to currently be claiming(e.g. if he had personally doctored the texts from Kat to add incriminating phrases), I think filing this kind of lawsuit would be cause for the EA community to permanently cut all ties with Nonlinear and with Emerson in particular. I believe this even if it turns out Nonlinear has evidence that the main claims in the post are false.[Edit 12/15/23 -- Nonlinear's update makes stronger claims about Ben's actions than I'd seen anyone make when I wrote this, so I'm crossing out "in a way nobody seems to currently be claiming" because it's no longer accurate. So the applicability of this argument hinges a lot more on the "unless" clause now. ]
Reasoning: I think the question of whether Ben should have waited a week is difficult, and I have felt differently about it at different times over the past few days. But the question of whether the choice he made was justifiable is easy: the people he spoke to seem to be terrified of retaliation, and he has at least two strong pieces of direct evidence (Kat's text, Emerson's lawsuit threat)... (read more)
True! But for the record I definitely don't have remotely enough personal wealth to cover such a suit. So if libel suits are permissible then you may only hear about credible accusations from people on teams who are willing to back the financial cost, the number of which in my estimation is currently close to 1.
Added: I don't mean to be more pessimistic than is accurate. I am genuinely uncertain to what extent people will have my back if a lawsuit comes up (Manifold has it at 13%), and my uncertainty range does include "actually quite a lot of people are willing to spend their money to defend my and others' ability to openly share info like this".
Surely this would depend on what evidence is revealed in a week? It seems kind of strange to me to see how confident people are in their opinions without knowing what this evidence is (I say this as someone who has already stated that they don't see any way that Nonlinear leadership comes out of this looking good given what they have already admitted).
Disclaimer: I previously interned at Nonlinear. This comment previously said that I didn't have knowledge of what information Nonlinear is yet to release, but then I just realised that I actually do know a few things.
I don't think this is right -- whether it's okay to sue Ben surely depends on the information Ben had at the time of making his decision, not information he didn't have access to?
It doesn’t seem accurate to characterise Ben as not having access to information if they promise to send it over as soon as they can and a) they don’t unduly delay b) there is no urgent need to publish.
I guess I see Ben as making a bet that the yet-to-revealed information ends up being underwhelming and it feels to me that if he ends up being wrong then some of the downside should accrue to him.
That said, I would really rather not see anyone sue anyone here as it’d be rather damaging to the community.
At the same time, it feels a bit inconsistent to simultaneously be like “you can’t sue me, this is a high-trust community” and “I can’t be bothered waiting a week to see your evidence”. Part of the reason why this is a high-trust community is that people agree to reasonable requests when they are able to.
I would feel differently if Alice or Chloe had written the post themselves as they have direct experience of what happened, but as a third party, I think that Ben probably should have waited.
Before I agree-voted here, this comment had three disagree votes and no agree votes. Are the people who disagree-voted missing the fact that Ben had a 3h conversation with Emerson(? I think, otherwise Kat) about all the allegations? Surely, if you think something about Ben's summary of his findings is so massively wrong that it warrants a libel lawsuit threat, it would have come up in that 3h conversation. Besides, Ben's post already makes it clear that Emerson and Kat dispute Alice's judgment, so it's not like he's knowingly lying about things with intent to do harm (requirement for a libel lawsuit to be justified). Instead, he's just recounting things his sources said with some IMO pretty sane-seeming caveats about what seems more contentious or less contentious. Even if some of that turns out to be more misleading than the average reader would expect before Nonlinear provides more info from their side of things, that doesn't seem anywhere close to something that warrants this sort of escalation. So, I'm taken aback by what I perceive to be some community members being taken in by cheap tactics. To think that a lawsuit threat has even just a shred of legitimacy here strikes me as totally insane. That lawsuit threat is such an obvious red flag in my view.
Quick thing to re-emphasize. It was not saying we'd sue if they posted. It was saying if they posted without giving us a week to send them the evidence that we thought would largely update the post they wrote.
Ben's post has already been changed in many ways based on our conversation and the information we showed him on the call. It seems like basic truth-seeking behavior to hear the other side and see counter-evidence.
He sent us the draft on a day he knew we were traveling and had sketchy internet, and that one of our members was sick. He'd had months and hundreds of hours to gather evidence for and write a >10k word post and he gave us a day to respond on a day he knew we were unable to respond well.
We were traveling that entire day (which he knew) and when we asked why there was a rush, couldn't he wait a week for more information that might sizeably update him, he said he couldn't wait and wouldn't tell us why.
We were not asking him not to post. We were asking him to see our evidence before posting.
I think this is a really important distinction.
We were not suppressing evidence, but trying to share it.
And they were refusing to look at it and did not care at all about the effects this would have on our ability to do good in the future. And also despite the fact that after they posted and paid the ex-employees (before they saw our evidence), this would make it psychologically impossible for them to update.
I used a diff checker to find the differences between the current post and the original post. There seem to be two:
Your claim
seems false. Possibly I made a mistake, or Ben made edits and you saw them and then Ben reverted them—if so, I encourage you/anyone to point to another specific edit, possibly on other archive.org versions.
Update: Kat guesses she was thinking of changes from a near-final draft rather than changes from the first published version.
Those do seem like significant differences, and at least the 1st one is something that the Nonlinear team were asking to be corrected as very relevant to the sick Alice situation. It is an update for me that they were correct.
The line I'm referring to is "if published as is we intend to pursue legal action". That is consistent with being fine with him publishing at all, but not consistent with being fine if he decides to not change anything in the post after getting all the facts in a week.
Combining this line with the ones you mentioned gives the impression that the message you're trying to convey is 'what Ben has written is false and libellous, we have asked him to wait a week so he can correct his post before publishing, after getting all the facts. If he doesn't do both these things, we intend to sue', and I think it's reasonable for anyone to have interpreted it this way, even if that's not what you intended.
I made a little poll to try and figure out the cruxes here:
Normally you can swipe to vote but that seems to be broken. I'll try and fix it soon.
I'll post results as we get them.
https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/nonlinear-and-community-norms
The one I found most strange is the percentage of people who disagreed that it was okay for an EA org to break minor laws. I want to flag that animal orgs doing undercover operations receive no pushback from EA as far as I can see and that these are against the law. I can think of other things as well that the EA community condones or doesn't criticize. Not saying there isn't a difference what is described here and the ones I listed above but it is strange to see that view.
Woah, the vast majority of undercover investigations carried out by animal advocacy organizations are legal, which is why attempts to make them illegal (such as ag-gag laws in the U.S.) receive so much attention and pushback, with many either not passing or being overturned. I would greatly caution against even casually suggesting an organization is engaged in illegal activity. That said, as you're possibly getting at in your final sentence, there is a big difference between active, intentional civil disobedience as part of a strategic campaign effort and lax disregard for the law for personal convenience or gain.
It is entirely dependent on the type of investigation and the laws of the municipality. Regarding trespass, often investigators will be employed by the facility they are investigating and onsite as part of their employment, while documenting conditions on camera. Increasingly, drone footage is used.
I think it is dangerous and harmful to make a blanket and public statement accusing a large number of orgs/individuals of illegal activity.
I think an even more relevant question would be "Is it OK to order your employees to break laws, when their job description did not mention civil disobedience campaigns or give any other indication that they would be required to break laws as part of their job?"
I was also surprised by this, and I wonder how many people interpreted "It is acceptable for an EA org to break minor laws" as "It is acceptable for an EA org to break laws willy-nilly as long as it feels like the laws are 'minor'", rather than interpreting it as "It is acceptable for an EA org to break at least one minor law ever".
How easy is it to break literally zero laws? There are an awful lot of laws on the books in the US, many of which aren't enforced.
Regarding this part: "Third; the semi-employee was also asked to bring some productivity-related and recreational drugs over the border for us. In general we didn't push hard on this. For one, this is an activity she already did (with other drugs). For two, we thought it didn't need prescription in the country she was visiting, and when we found out otherwise, we dropped it. And for three, she used a bunch of our drugs herself, so it's not fair to say that this request was made entirely selfishly. I think this just seems like an extension of the sorts of a... (read more)
I have known Kat Woods for the past four years. Throughout this period, Kat has served multiple roles in my professional life—ranging from an enthusiastic cheerleader to a strategic brainstorming partner, and from a well-connected networker to an invaluable advisor. While I am not in a position to speak to the allegations mentioned previously, I can attest to the consistently exceptional nature of my personal experiences with Kat. She is a warm, empathetic, and supportive individual who is unwaveringly dedicated to making a lasting positive impact on the world.
For the sake of full transparency, could you kindly elucidate whether there exists any form of interdependency between yourself, Kat, or any other members of the Nonlinear? Moreover, it would be greatly appreciated if you could clarify whether you consider Kat a friend, as this could potentially introduce bias into your perspective. Lastly, have you been specifically requested by Kat or any other individual affiliated with the Nonlinear team to compose this particular comment?
Worst credible information about a charity that I would expect based on the following description (pulled from Google's generative AI summary: may or may not be accurate, but seemed like the best balance to me of engaging with some information quickly):
... (read more)I don't think that this is a good state of affairs. I think that the points I raise range from "this should be completely unacceptable" (4, 6) to "if this is the worst credible information that can be shared, the org is probably doing very well (3, 5)". This is not a description of an org that I would support! But if a friend told me they were doing good work there and they felt the problems were blown out of proportion or context by a hostile critic and a vengeful ex-employee with an axe to grind, I would take them seriously and not say "you have to leave immediately. I can cover two months salary for you while you find another job, but I believe that strongly that you should not work here."
As always, context is important: "the head of the org is a serial harasser with no effective checks" and "we fired someone when their subordinate came forward with a sexual harassment allegation that, after a one-week investigation, we validated and found credible: the victim is happily employed by us today" are very different states of affairs. If someone is sharing the worst credible information, then the difference between "we were slow to update on X" and "they knew X was false from t... (read more)
I have had the opportunity to engage with individuals from both sides of this narrative. In terms of the individuals who are wronged, I find no reason to doubt their accounts. During my conversation with one individual, it was apparent that they harbored a deep apprehension regarding the expression of their views regarding Nonlinear. To the best of my recollection, it appears that individuals affiliated with Nonlinear made efforts to influence the funding-related processes in which they were involved, or, perhaps, made implicit threats to tarnish their rep... (read more)
Do you have ways to substantiate these claims?
There's something darkly funny about the idea that one would need to "be a shark," "move fast and break things," threaten and coerce employees," ""crush enemies"...
All to... publish a podcast of already written articles? Do some career coaching?
I feel like this is a cheap shot, and don't like seeing it on the top of this discussion.
I think it can be easy to belittle the accomplishments of basically any org. Most startups seem very unimpressive when they're small.
A very quick review would show other initiatives they've worked on. Just go to their tag, for instance:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/nonlinear-fund
(All this isn't to say where I side on the broader discussion. I think the focus now should be on figuring out the key issues here, and I don't think comments like this help with that. I'm fine with comments like this in smaller channels or with way fewer upvotes, but feel very awkward seeing this on top.)
Have people seen this?
This was posted in the comments on Eliezer's FB profile.
I've known Kat Woods for as long as Eric Chisholm has. I first met Eric several years before either of us first got involved in the EA or rationality communities. I had a phone call with him a few hours ago letting him know that this screencap was up on this forum. He was displeased you didn't let him know yourself that you started this thread.
He is extremely busy for the rest of the month. He isn't on the EA Forum either. Otherwise, I don't speak for Eric. I've also made my own reply in the comment thread Eric started on Eliezer's Facebook post. I'm assuming you'll see the rest of that comment thread on Facebook too.
You can send me a private message to talk or ask me about whatever, or not, as you please. I don't know who you are.
For anyone else curious, here is a Google Doc I've started writing up about the origins of the EA and rationality groups in Vancouver.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p8MPC5j2aZrVX_ugBSHy8-N9HSHWiulR5GHJBfKhQe8/edit?usp=sharing
It appears that Nonlinear has reached out to several individuals, likely more than one, to request positive comments about their interactions. To maintain a balanced perspective and offer a more comprehensive view, it would be fair and valuable to share experiences from the other side of the spectrum. This would be especially beneficial for those who have only encountered positive interactions with Nonlinear and may benefit from a more well-rounded understanding.
Since Alice met Emerson at an EAG, I'd like to hear what the CEA's response to this is? I am curious how this sort of thing could be prevented in the future. Perhaps if someone who works for or owns a company meets someone they want to recruit from an EAG, there should be some protections for the young person attending the EAG (for ex- the company supplies the CEA with data about who they recruited, how much they plan to pay them, etc). I think young people attending an EAG would assume that the more senior people attending, who may be potential employers,... (read more)
I don't believe CEA actually has that many resources to deeply vet organizations.
If someone were interested in donating to them enough money for them to do more vetting, I wouldn't be surprised if they would do more.
I'd expect that the funders would have done more vetting. That said, some of the EA funders now are pretty time-constrained and don't do very deep vetting.
My guess is that this sort of thing could be prevented with increased vetting and mentorship/oversight. In some worlds, strong managers could find ways for Nonlinear to have done good work, while discouraging/preventing the bad parts of it.
But, this is pretty expensive, and I don't think there's a lot of enthusiasm/interest for expanding this area soon. In fairness, note that it is difficult to set up this infrastructure, and the results are often fairly amorphous (it's hard to detect problems that aren't happening) and long-term.
Part of the reason I think it was worth Ben/Lightcone prioritizing this investigation is as a retro-active version of "evaluations."
Like, it is pretty expensive to "vet" things.
But, if your org has practices that lead to people getting hurt (whether intentionally or not), and it's reasonably likely that those will eventually come to light, orgs are more likely to proactively put more effort into avoiding this sort of outcome.
Yea. I think CEA does much less vetting than something like this would require. Ben put in hundreds of hours in this case. Maybe CEA has 10-60 minutes to decide on each organization that joins? Most of the time simple questions like, “were they funded by ea donors, and can a few EAs vouch for them” satisfy.
I think Nonlinear would seem pretty competitive with a quick review (you notice they were funded by EAs, the team is EA centric, they do projects that are used by EAs)
Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining.
Are there any conferences (regardless of field) that do this?
I have no idea because I have never gone to a conference. I would expect that at most professional conferences the senior attendees who are offering careers (maybe universities or hospitals offering research positions) would have a minimum level of professionalism in the employment opportunity they are offering the junior attendees, but I genuinely have no idea how these things work! My concern really stems from meeting a lot of highly capable, excited, intelligent, young people at my university group, and wanting to make sure that they are protected! I hope that comes across in my question. I appreciate Catherine’s response though, and I do think this is harder to do in practice than I considered.
I’m on CEA’s Community Health and Special Projects team, and I sometimes contribute to EAG and EAGx event admissions and speaker decisions. I can understand your concern Lauren Maria. I’d really like for EA events to be places where attendees can have a high level of confidence in the other attendees (especially the attendees in positions of power). CEA does a small amount of vetting of speakers and organisations attending the career fairs. We also have our regular admissions process, where we sometimes choose to reject people from attending the conference if we have reasons to think their attendance would be bad for others (the most common reason is getting complaints of poor behaviour from members of the EA community). This hopefully reduces the risk, but people will still attend who could cause harm.
My main advice is to encourage community members to not implicitly trust others at EA events. Do your own due diligence, and talk it over with trusted friends, family, or mentors before making large decisions.
Also: "First; the formal employee drove without a license for 1-2 months in Puerto Rico. We taught her to drive, which she was excited about. You might think this is a substantial legal risk, but basically it isn't, as you can see here, the general range of fines for issues around not-having-a-license in Puerto Rico is in the range of $25 to $500, which just isn't that bad."
Nonlinear appears to grapple with discerning the confluence of legality, costs, and ethical considerations in this particular scenario. It may be tempting to view this action as be... (read more)
48 Laws of Power sounds like quite the red flag of a book! It's usually quite hard to know if someone begrudgingly takes on zero-sum worldviews for tactical reasons or if they're predisposed / looking for an excuse to be cunning, but an announcement like this (in the form of just being excited about this book) seems like a clear surrender of anyone's obligation to act cooperatively toward you.
48 Laws of Power, along with Robert Greene's other books, are fairly popular, especially around some entrepreneur / hustle culture circles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Greene_(American_author)
Many top books deal with controversial topics. For example, The Prince, or Lolita.
I'd be hesitant to update much on someone's reading choices like this.
This was twisted to make me seem like a villain. I recommended it as a book specifically to read to be able to defend against unethical people who use those tactics offensively - Defense Against the Dark Arts.
My comment was still when I was mid reading OP. Earlier in the essay there's an account of the Adorian Deck situation, then the excerpts from the book, which is as far as I got before I wrote this comment. Later in OP does the case for that Emerson is interested in literature like this for DADA reasons become clearer and defensible.
For commenting before I got to the end of the post, I apologize.
Thanks for updating this! This points at something that concerned me about the structure of the original post - Alice or Chloe accuse me of something, but (in the event it was actually covered in my one conversation with Ben) my response to it (or, rather, Ben's paraphrase) might only be included 8,000 words later, and still likely missing important context I would want to add.