I agree NL chose a bad strategy, but I also think you mischaracterize it? Instead of making a long list of claims they were asserting were false (without documentation) they picked one relatively serious accusation and responded to it in detail with screenshots.
I supposed one’s perspective depends on how you see the relative seriousness of accusations. From my perspective, to be isolated from friends and family is a huge red flag, but not being given vegan food is… an asshole move, certainly, but… as I am not a vegan myself, I see it as nothing too serious, also because it was only one day.
It’s like, if someone accused me of “arson, murder, and jaywalking”, and I focused my entire defense on why what I did does not qualify as jaywalking… even if I made my case successfully, it would probably seem quite weird. (But if instead I said that the supposedly murdered person is actually alive, just give me some time to call them...)
I think the accusation around food was much more serious than Jaywalking. Ben’s post had:
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
I understood this to be claiming, some explicitly and some implicitly, that:
Alice was dependent on NL for food because she had covid.
NL would not provide her with food compatible with her dietary restrictions.
After two days she had eaten whatever small amount food was available that met her dietary restrictions, NL was still not providing her with acceptable food, so she decided to compromise her ethics in the name of not starving.
Now, the full picture ended up being pretty different from this (and also very messy and still disputed) but I don’t think it’s surprising that as stated many people took this as a serious accusation, and I don’t think it was trivial or otherwise a bad choice for NL to rebut.
(Repeating, though, that I don’t think chosing to spend their time rebutting a single claim in detail was a good strategy, and instead would have rather seen them say which claims they objected to up front. And I’m frustrated with myself that I didn’t suggest this at the time.)
I also think this accusation was relatively serious to me.
I do not think it was among the very most serious accusations in the post, but I think it was a valid one to reply to. I also found the response that Kat wrote pretty compelling, and think it meaningfully affected my interpretation of the situation (I still assign some probability that Ben or Alice will have some good explanation of the situation that flips my understanding of the facts around, which has happened a few times in this whole situation, but I think that relies on trust in those parties that I don’t think should be shared by others on this forum, and I think given the evidence provided, I think it’s very reasonable for an observer to consider that accusation confidently false and relatively serious)
(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.
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.
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 possibility that you’re trying to “get your story straight.” ie that you’re taking the time now to hurriedly go through and check which facts you and others will be able to prove or disprove, so that you know which things you can safely lie or exagerate about, or what narrative paints you in the best light while still being consistent with the legible facts.
“We chose this example not because it’s the most important (although it certainly paints us in a very negative and misleading light) but simply because it was the fastest claim to explain where we had extremely clear evidence without having to add a lot of context, explanation, find more evidence, etc.
We have job contracts, interview recordings, receipts, chat histories, and more, which we are working full-time on preparing.
This claim was a few sentences in Ben’s article but took us hours to refute because we had to track down all of the conversations, make them readable, add context, anonymize people, check our facts, and write up an explanation that was rigorous and clear. Ben’s article is over 10,000 words and we’re working as fast as we can to respond to every point he made.
Again, we are not asking for the community to believe us unconditionally. We want to show everybody all of the evidence and also take responsibility for the mistakes we made.”
As for the “isolated” claim, we showed that this did not happen. Alice lived/worked apart from us for 50% of the time. Chloe’s boyfriend was invited to travel with us 40% of the time. We encouraged them to have regular calls with friends and family when they weren’t visiting. We have the invite policy where it says they’re encouraged to invite friends and family (and they followed up on this, like with Chloe’s boyfriend).
I agree NL chose a bad strategy, but I also think you mischaracterize it? Instead of making a long list of claims they were asserting were false (without documentation) they picked one relatively serious accusation and responded to it in detail with screenshots.
I supposed one’s perspective depends on how you see the relative seriousness of accusations. From my perspective, to be isolated from friends and family is a huge red flag, but not being given vegan food is… an asshole move, certainly, but… as I am not a vegan myself, I see it as nothing too serious, also because it was only one day.
It’s like, if someone accused me of “arson, murder, and jaywalking”, and I focused my entire defense on why what I did does not qualify as jaywalking… even if I made my case successfully, it would probably seem quite weird. (But if instead I said that the supposedly murdered person is actually alive, just give me some time to call them...)
I think the accusation around food was much more serious than Jaywalking. Ben’s post had:
I understood this to be claiming, some explicitly and some implicitly, that:
Alice was dependent on NL for food because she had covid.
NL would not provide her with food compatible with her dietary restrictions.
After two days she had eaten whatever small amount food was available that met her dietary restrictions, NL was still not providing her with acceptable food, so she decided to compromise her ethics in the name of not starving.
Now, the full picture ended up being pretty different from this (and also very messy and still disputed) but I don’t think it’s surprising that as stated many people took this as a serious accusation, and I don’t think it was trivial or otherwise a bad choice for NL to rebut.
(Repeating, though, that I don’t think chosing to spend their time rebutting a single claim in detail was a good strategy, and instead would have rather seen them say which claims they objected to up front. And I’m frustrated with myself that I didn’t suggest this at the time.)
I also think this accusation was relatively serious to me.
I do not think it was among the very most serious accusations in the post, but I think it was a valid one to reply to. I also found the response that Kat wrote pretty compelling, and think it meaningfully affected my interpretation of the situation (I still assign some probability that Ben or Alice will have some good explanation of the situation that flips my understanding of the facts around, which has happened a few times in this whole situation, but I think that relies on trust in those parties that I don’t think should be shared by others on this forum, and I think given the evidence provided, I think it’s very reasonable for an observer to consider that accusation confidently false and relatively serious)
Many people did push for this at the time:
And:
Agreed! What I was trying to say is that I additionally feel badly for not having called for this.
I had thought people did push them for this?
We said this in our post about the vegan food:
“We chose this example not because it’s the most important (although it certainly paints us in a very negative and misleading light) but simply because it was the fastest claim to explain where we had extremely clear evidence without having to add a lot of context, explanation, find more evidence, etc.
We have job contracts, interview recordings, receipts, chat histories, and more, which we are working full-time on preparing.
This claim was a few sentences in Ben’s article but took us hours to refute because we had to track down all of the conversations, make them readable, add context, anonymize people, check our facts, and write up an explanation that was rigorous and clear. Ben’s article is over 10,000 words and we’re working as fast as we can to respond to every point he made.
Again, we are not asking for the community to believe us unconditionally. We want to show everybody all of the evidence and also take responsibility for the mistakes we made.”
As for the “isolated” claim, we showed that this did not happen. Alice lived/worked apart from us for 50% of the time. Chloe’s boyfriend was invited to travel with us 40% of the time. We encouraged them to have regular calls with friends and family when they weren’t visiting. We have the invite policy where it says they’re encouraged to invite friends and family (and they followed up on this, like with Chloe’s boyfriend).