Forest Duck
Comments2
I want to push back on this framing, and I think it shows a lack of empathy with the position Nonlinear have been put in. (Though I do agree with your dislike of many of the stylistic choices made in this post)
This post is 15K words, and does a mix of attacking the credibility of Ben, Alice and Chloe and disputing the claims with evidence. The linked doc is 58K words, and seems predominantly about collecting an exhaustive array of evidence. Nonlinear have clearly put in a *lot* of work to the linked doc, and try hard to dispute the evidence. So it seems to me that your complaint is really about what aspects Nonlinear chose to make prominent in this post, which in my opinion is a strategic question about how to write a good post, plus some emotional baggage from Nonlinear feeling aggrieved about this whole thing.
From Nonlinear's perspective (not necessarily mine, to be clear), they have two disgruntled ex-employees who had a bad time, told a bunch of lies about them, and got an incredibly popular and widely read EA Forum post about it. This has destroyed their reputation in EA, and been catastrophic to the org, in a way that they consider ill-deserved. They want to write a post to clear their name. They were very emotionally hurt by this, and extremely reasonably! "Alice, Ben, and Chloe hurt me (Kat) so much I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and I cried more than any other time in my life. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t type responses to comments."
Zooming out a bit, it seems like we could live in three worlds:
A) Nonlinear did terrible things and were abusive towards Alice and Chloe. Ben's post was basically true
B) Nonlinear fucked up a fair bit, Ben's post was sketchy in various ways, no parties look great
C) Nonlinear acted pretty reasonably/understandably throughout, Ben's post was full of false accusations
Nonlinear seem to be arguing we're in a mix of B and C, and mostly C (their reflections section seems to be buried [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P4iLZPrQt-dxl9njvz1EvnB8qOBt11DVmtn8PHwFyPw/edit#heading=h.orqsey1n2itd)). I think that if we live in world C (and to a lesser degree B) then attacking the credibility of your critics is pretty reasonable?
If we live in world C then Ben's post was a gish gallop of many terrible sounding and hard to refute allegations, which gives super bad vibes, and even if they can address 90% of them, people will still care about the final 10%, *and* likely still have the bad vibes of first reading Ben's post and initially making up their mind's against Nonlinear. Plus, idk, most people won't read exhaustive evidence (I expect few readers of this post are reading the long attached doc!) Attacking the credibility of your attackers seems one of the few ways of getting out of that. I further think that, if the list of false allegations Nonlinear gives are truly false, Alice and Chloe really aren't that credible, made some extremely serious and false allegations, and their overall credibility is a really important part of evaluating this story! And justifies a pretty forceful attack on them.
If we live in world C then "I don't see many places where you admit to making mistakes and it doesn't seem like you're willing to take ownership of this situation at all." doesn't really make sense.
Of course, if we live in world A, then Nonlinear are getting rightfully criticised and are fighting dirty against whistleblowers. And their 58K word doc is a gish gallop of their own. It's a complex situation! But I can totally see where they're coming from.
(CoI: Kat is a friend of mine, and I received money in the past from Nonlinear's productivity fund, but no one asked me to write this. I made an alt for this because, given the level of NonLinear hate going around, I feel vaguely uncomfortable about being seen publicly defending them)
This seems inconsistent with the post - they give a list of various ways they tried to work to change it in the "Evidence of caring" section. This seemed like a pretty central part of the post to me and I'm confused by how you missed it (unless your comment was LLM written, which I would consider poor form -- you do have 5 em-dashes after all)
He didn't succeed at changing their behavior, but (assuming they made a sincere effort) I consider that more about ability than intent. I'm not trying to minimise this: the impact on others remains serious regardless of intent, and I think asking him to leave community spaces to minimize harm to others is reasonable. But I think this is still an important difference, especially when passing moral judgement on him.
My impression from the post is that he intends to continue not going to EA events, even after the ban. If true, this actually seems like a pretty good strategy for minimizing future harm done within the EA community, and better than him rejoining events and trying harder to fix his behavior.
On the outside view, I predict that if someone tries to fix a problem with their behavior and self describes as "as careful as I could be" but fails to avoid future incidents, then no matter how hard they try/what approach they adopt, their next attempt has a decent chance to fail. So from a harm minimisation perspective, removing themselves from situations where they could cause harm seems better. Suggesting that he just try harder without additional specifics, seems like it will increase the expected number of women harmed, which I consider irresponsible advice. The top priority is harm minimisation, not about getting him to accept personal responsibility.
This doesn't address the risk of causing harm in their other social contexts, but that feels harder to judge without more information. I think the EA community has a uniquely strong mix of social and professional contexts that can be particularly hard to navigate well, especially EAGs. I can totally believe there are people whose behaviour causes harm in EA circles who are fine elsewhere.