Can you say when you were made aware of Nate’s communication style? It sounds here like he didn’t tell you until after you’d started working together, but Jeremy’s comment seems to indicate that you all were informed beforehand?
I think I became most aware in December 2022, during our first set of in-person meetings. Vivek and Thomas Kwa had had more interaction with Nate before this and so might have known before me. I have some memory of things being a bit difficult before the December meetings, but I might have chalked this up to not being in-person, I don’t fully remember. It was after these meetings that we got the communication guide etc. Jeremy joined in May 2023, after the earlier members of the team knew about communication stuff and so I think we were able to tell him about various difficulties we’d had.
My negative-feeling meeting with Nate was in July 2022, after which I emailed something like “hey I didn’t consent to that and wouldn’t have agreed to talk if I knew ahead of time” and his reply included something like “sorry, I’ll at least make sure to forewarn future people first, even if they aren’t my formal collaborators; obvious in retrospect.”
Because a) July is well before December and b) the information you just provided, it seems like he does not reliably warn his collaborators.
As Nate clarified at the end of the dialogue, he apparently considered this collaboration to be a “sad/grudging shot” and that context explains “suboptimalities” of your working relationship. But from my limited information and impressions thus far, I don’t think that “neglecting to warn incoming junior researchers” falls under “reasonable suboptimality.” I could imagine him thinking, “hm they’re Vivek’s friends, and Vivek has talked to me, so he probably let them know already.” However, I’d personally consider this to be a serious lapse, given the potential for damage.
(But maybe there’s some more sympathetic perspective here which I’m missing..? I’m happy to update back upwards, given additional clarification or facts.)
Less “hm they’re Vivek’s friends”, more “they are expressly Vivek’s employees”. The working relationship that I attempted to set up was one where I worked directly with Vivek, and gave Vivek budget to hire other people to work with him.
If memory serves, I did go on a long walk with Vivek where I attempted to enumerate the ways that working with me might suck. As for the others, some relevant recollections:
I was originally not planning to have a working relationship with Vivek’s hires. (If memory serves, there were a few early hires that I didn’t have any working relationship with at any point during their tenure.) (If memory serves further, I explicitly registered pessimism, to Vivek, about me working with some of his hires.)
I was already explicitly relying on Vivek to do vetting and make whatever requests for privacy he wanted to, which my brian implicitly lumped in with “give caveats about what parts of the work might suck”.
The initial work patterns felt to me more like Vivek saying “can one of my hires join the call” than “would you like to also do research with my hires directly”, which didn’t trigger my “give caveats personally” event (in part because I was implicitly expecting Vivek to have given caveats).
I had already had technical-ish conversations with Thomas Kwa in March, and he was the first of Vivek’s employees to join calls with me, and so had him binned as already having a sense for my conversation-style; this coincidence further helped my brain fail the “warn Vivek’s employees personally” check.
“Vivek’s hires are on the call” escalated relatively smoothly to “we’re all in a room and I’m giving feedback on everyone’s work” across the course of months, and so there was no sharp boundary for a trigger.
Looking back, I think my error here was mostly in expecting-but-not-requesting-or-verifying that Vivek was giving appropiate caveats to his hires, which is silly in retrospect.
For clarity: I was not at any point like “oops I was supposed to warn all of Vivek’s hires”, though I was at some point (non-spontaneously; it was kinda obvious and others were noticing too; the primary impetus for this wasn’t stemming from me) like “here’s a Nate!culture communication handbook” (among other attempts, like sharing conversation models with mutual-friends who can communicate easily with both me and people-who-were-having-trouble-communicating-with-me, more at their request than at mine).
TurnTrout, if you’re comfortable sharing, I’d be curious to hear more about the nature of your interaction with Nate in July 2022.
Separately, my current read of this thread is something like “I wish it was easier for Nate to communicate with people, but it seems (at least to me) like the community is broadly aware that Nate can be difficult to communicate with & I think his reputation (at least in the AIS circles I’m in) already matches this. Also, it seems like he (at least sometimes) tries to be pretty clear/explicit in warning people about his communication/mentoring style.”
I do think the “giving up” vibe you mention in the original comment is tracking something real. I think the AIS field would benefit if Nate woke up one day and found ways to communicate with people that made them feel more heard/respected/validated and less dismissed/misunderstood/pained. I’m guessing Nate would agree with this, though, and I’m guessing he’s probably tried a lot of things and simply hasn’t found strategies that are effective (and that don’t trade off against other desireada, like honesty or Nate energy/motivation). I’m not sure though—I mostly believe this because other people have told it to me & because it seems like he put in a fair amount of effort/reflection in his communication guide.
I guess my TLDR is something like “I think you’re pointing at a real problem, and it would indeed be great if Nate were better at communicating, but I also feel like there’s something important about Nate’s perspective that feels missing here.”
it seems (at least to me) like the community is broadly aware that Nate can be difficult to communicate with & I think his reputation (at least in the AIS circles I’m in) already matches this. Also, it seems like he (at least sometimes) tries to be pretty clear/explicit in warning people about his communication/mentoring style.
I disagree on both points. I wasn’t aware before talking with him, and I’d been in alignment and around the Bay for years. Some of my MATS mentees had been totally unaware and were considering engaging with him about something. Peter wasn’t informed before starting a work relationship, and Nate didn’t tell Peter (and maybe Thomas either) before working with them.
I second this—I skimmed part of nate’s comms doc, but it’s unclear to me what turntrout is talking about unless he’s talking about “being blunt”—it sounds that overall there’s something other than bluntness going on, cuz I feel like we already know about bluntness / we’ve thought a lot about upsides and downsides of bluntness people before.
So, I don’t know what actually happened here. But I at least want to convey support for:
“There are ways of communicating other than being blunt that can… unsettlingly affect you [or, at least, some people], which are hard to explain, and their being hard to explain makes it psychologically harder to deal with because when you try to explain it or complain about it people are kinda dismissive.”
(I’m not expressing a strong opinion here about whether Nate should have done something different in this case, or what the best way for Turntrout, Vivek’s team, or others should relate to it. I’m just trying to hold space for “I think there’s a real thing people should be taking seriously as a possibility and not just rounding off to ‘Turntrout should have thicker skin’ or something)
I have some guesses about the details but they’re mostly informed by my interactions with people other than Nate, which give me sort of an existence proof, and I’m wary of speculating myself here without having actually had this sort of conversation with Nate.
There are ways of communicating other than being blunt that can… unsettlingly affect you
I really wish it were possible for this conversation to address what the affected people are coming in with. I suspect (from priors and the comments here) that there are social effects that are at core not located in either Nate or TurnTrout that result in this.
I might reply later, but I want to note that Nate’s comms doc doesn’t really track my (limited) experience of what it feels like to talk with Nate, and so (IMO) doesn’t make great sense as a baseline of “what happened?”.
Ah yeah. I’m a bit of a believer in “introspection preys upon those smart enough to think they can do it well but not smart enough to know they’ll be bad at it”[1], at least to a partial degree. So it wouldn’t shock me if a long document wouldn’t capture what matters.
Can you say when you were made aware of Nate’s communication style? It sounds here like he didn’t tell you until after you’d started working together, but Jeremy’s comment seems to indicate that you all were informed beforehand?
I think I became most aware in December 2022, during our first set of in-person meetings. Vivek and Thomas Kwa had had more interaction with Nate before this and so might have known before me. I have some memory of things being a bit difficult before the December meetings, but I might have chalked this up to not being in-person, I don’t fully remember.
It was after these meetings that we got the communication guide etc.
Jeremy joined in May 2023, after the earlier members of the team knew about communication stuff and so I think we were able to tell him about various difficulties we’d had.
My negative-feeling meeting with Nate was in July 2022, after which I emailed something like “hey I didn’t consent to that and wouldn’t have agreed to talk if I knew ahead of time” and his reply included something like “sorry, I’ll at least make sure to forewarn future people first, even if they aren’t my formal collaborators; obvious in retrospect.”
Because a) July is well before December and b) the information you just provided, it seems like he does not reliably warn his collaborators.
As Nate clarified at the end of the dialogue, he apparently considered this collaboration to be a “sad/grudging shot” and that context explains “suboptimalities” of your working relationship. But from my limited information and impressions thus far, I don’t think that “neglecting to warn incoming junior researchers” falls under “reasonable suboptimality.” I could imagine him thinking, “hm they’re Vivek’s friends, and Vivek has talked to me, so he probably let them know already.” However, I’d personally consider this to be a serious lapse, given the potential for damage.
(But maybe there’s some more sympathetic perspective here which I’m missing..? I’m happy to update back upwards, given additional clarification or facts.)
Less “hm they’re Vivek’s friends”, more “they are expressly Vivek’s employees”. The working relationship that I attempted to set up was one where I worked directly with Vivek, and gave Vivek budget to hire other people to work with him.
If memory serves, I did go on a long walk with Vivek where I attempted to enumerate the ways that working with me might suck. As for the others, some relevant recollections:
I was originally not planning to have a working relationship with Vivek’s hires. (If memory serves, there were a few early hires that I didn’t have any working relationship with at any point during their tenure.) (If memory serves further, I explicitly registered pessimism, to Vivek, about me working with some of his hires.)
I was already explicitly relying on Vivek to do vetting and make whatever requests for privacy he wanted to, which my brian implicitly lumped in with “give caveats about what parts of the work might suck”.
The initial work patterns felt to me more like Vivek saying “can one of my hires join the call” than “would you like to also do research with my hires directly”, which didn’t trigger my “give caveats personally” event (in part because I was implicitly expecting Vivek to have given caveats).
I had already had technical-ish conversations with Thomas Kwa in March, and he was the first of Vivek’s employees to join calls with me, and so had him binned as already having a sense for my conversation-style; this coincidence further helped my brain fail the “warn Vivek’s employees personally” check.
“Vivek’s hires are on the call” escalated relatively smoothly to “we’re all in a room and I’m giving feedback on everyone’s work” across the course of months, and so there was no sharp boundary for a trigger.
Looking back, I think my error here was mostly in expecting-but-not-requesting-or-verifying that Vivek was giving appropiate caveats to his hires, which is silly in retrospect.
For clarity: I was not at any point like “oops I was supposed to warn all of Vivek’s hires”, though I was at some point (non-spontaneously; it was kinda obvious and others were noticing too; the primary impetus for this wasn’t stemming from me) like “here’s a Nate!culture communication handbook” (among other attempts, like sharing conversation models with mutual-friends who can communicate easily with both me and people-who-were-having-trouble-communicating-with-me, more at their request than at mine).
TurnTrout, if you’re comfortable sharing, I’d be curious to hear more about the nature of your interaction with Nate in July 2022.
Separately, my current read of this thread is something like “I wish it was easier for Nate to communicate with people, but it seems (at least to me) like the community is broadly aware that Nate can be difficult to communicate with & I think his reputation (at least in the AIS circles I’m in) already matches this. Also, it seems like he (at least sometimes) tries to be pretty clear/explicit in warning people about his communication/mentoring style.”
I do think the “giving up” vibe you mention in the original comment is tracking something real. I think the AIS field would benefit if Nate woke up one day and found ways to communicate with people that made them feel more heard/respected/validated and less dismissed/misunderstood/pained. I’m guessing Nate would agree with this, though, and I’m guessing he’s probably tried a lot of things and simply hasn’t found strategies that are effective (and that don’t trade off against other desireada, like honesty or Nate energy/motivation). I’m not sure though—I mostly believe this because other people have told it to me & because it seems like he put in a fair amount of effort/reflection in his communication guide.
I guess my TLDR is something like “I think you’re pointing at a real problem, and it would indeed be great if Nate were better at communicating, but I also feel like there’s something important about Nate’s perspective that feels missing here.”
I disagree on both points. I wasn’t aware before talking with him, and I’d been in alignment and around the Bay for years. Some of my MATS mentees had been totally unaware and were considering engaging with him about something. Peter wasn’t informed before starting a work relationship, and Nate didn’t tell Peter (and maybe Thomas either) before working with them.
I second this—I skimmed part of nate’s comms doc, but it’s unclear to me what turntrout is talking about unless he’s talking about “being blunt”—it sounds that overall there’s something other than bluntness going on, cuz I feel like we already know about bluntness / we’ve thought a lot about upsides and downsides of bluntness people before.
So, I don’t know what actually happened here. But I at least want to convey support for:
“There are ways of communicating other than being blunt that can… unsettlingly affect you [or, at least, some people], which are hard to explain, and their being hard to explain makes it psychologically harder to deal with because when you try to explain it or complain about it people are kinda dismissive.”
(I’m not expressing a strong opinion here about whether Nate should have done something different in this case, or what the best way for Turntrout, Vivek’s team, or others should relate to it. I’m just trying to hold space for “I think there’s a real thing people should be taking seriously as a possibility and not just rounding off to ‘Turntrout should have thicker skin’ or something)
I have some guesses about the details but they’re mostly informed by my interactions with people other than Nate, which give me sort of an existence proof, and I’m wary of speculating myself here without having actually had this sort of conversation with Nate.
I really wish it were possible for this conversation to address what the affected people are coming in with. I suspect (from priors and the comments here) that there are social effects that are at core not located in either Nate or TurnTrout that result in this.
I might reply later, but I want to note that Nate’s comms doc doesn’t really track my (limited) experience of what it feels like to talk with Nate, and so (IMO) doesn’t make great sense as a baseline of “what happened?”.
Ah yeah. I’m a bit of a believer in “introspection preys upon those smart enough to think they can do it well but not smart enough to know they’ll be bad at it”[1], at least to a partial degree. So it wouldn’t shock me if a long document wouldn’t capture what matters.
epistemic status: in that sweet spot myself