My intent was not to make you feel bad. I apologize for that, and am saddened by it.
(I’d love to say “and I’ve identified the source of the problem and successfully addressed it”, but I don’t think I have! I do think I’ve gotten a little better at avoiding this sort of thing with time and practice. I’ve also cut down significantly on the number of reports that I have.)
For whatever it’s worth: I don’t recall wanting you to quit (as opposed to improve). I don’t recall feeling ill will towards you personally. I do not now think poorly of you personally on account of your efforts on the MIRI ops team.
As to the question of how these reports hit my ear: they sound to me like accurate recountings of real situations (in particular, I recall the bike pump one, and suspect that the others were also real events).
They also trigger a bunch of defensiveness in me. I think your descriptions are accurate, but that they’re missing various bits of context.
The fact that there was other context doesn’t make your experience any less shitty! I reiterate that I would have preferred it be not-at-all shitty.
Speaking from my sense of defensiveness, and adding in some of that additional context for the case that I remember clearly:
If memory serves: in that era, the ops team was experimenting with trying to make everyone’s lives easier by doing all sorts of extra stuff (I think they were even trying to figure out if they could do laundry), as seemed like a fine experiment to try.
In particular, I wasn’t going around being like “and also pump my bike tires up”; rather, the ops team was soliciting a bunch of little task items.
If memory serves: during that experiment, I was struggling a bunch with being told that things would be done by times, and then them not being done by those times (as is significantly worse than being told that those things won’t be done at all—I can do it myself, and will do it myself, if I’m not told that somebody else is about to do it!)
If memory serves: yep, it was pretty frustrating to blow a tire on a bike during a commute after being told that my bike tires were going to be inflated, both on account of the danger and on account of then having to walk the rest of the commute, buy a new tire, swap the tire out, etc.
My recollection of the thought that ran through my mind when you were like “Well I couldn’t figure out how to use a bike pump” was that this was some sideways attempt at begging pardon, without actually saying “oops” first, nor trying the obvious-to-me steps like “watch a youtube video” or “ask your manager if he knows how to inflate a bike tire”, nor noticing that the entire hypothesized time-save of somebody else inflating bike tires is wiped out by me having to give tutorials on it.
Was saying “well then learn!” and leaving a good solution, by my lights? Nope! Would I have been living up to my conversational ideals (significantly) better, if I’d said something like “Sorry, I don’t have capacity for this conversation, please have it with your manager instead” in a gentle tone? Yep!
I do have some general sense here that those aren’t emotionally realistic options for people with my emotional makeup.
I aspire to those sorts of reactions, and I sometimes even achieve them, now that I’m a handful of years older and have more practice and experience. But… still speaking from a place of defensiveness, I have a sense that there’s some sort of trap for people with my emotional makeup here. If you stay and try to express yourself despite experiencing strong feelings of frustration, you’re “almost yelling”. If you leave because you’re feeling a bunch of frustration and people say they don’t like talking to you while you’re feeling a bunch of frustration, you’re “storming out”.
Perhaps I’m missing some obvious third alternative here, that can be practically run while experiencing a bunch of frustration or exasperation. (If you know of one, I’d love to hear it.)
None of this is to say that your experience wasn’t shitty! I again apologize for that (with the caveat that I still don’t feel like I see practical changes to make to myself, beyond the only-partially-successful changes I’ve already made).
For the record, I 100% endorse you leaving an employment situation where you felt uncomfortable and bad (and agree with you that this is the labor market working-as-intended, and agree with you that me causing a decent fraction of employees to have a shitty time is an extra cost for me to pay when acting as an employer).
I’m not asking anyone to modify their personality at all. I mainly wish I had been warned about what was in store for me when I joined MIRI, and I want such warnings to be a visible part of Nate’s reputation.
I feel some pressure to match Nate’s conciliatory tone, but something feels incongruous about it. I’m concerned that people will read Nate’s calm, kindly replies and come away with the wrong idea of how he presented himself at MIRI.
I find Nate’s additional context to be, well…missing some important context. See below...
More context and recollections
It’s true that I didn’t report directly to Nate, and there could be a reasonable expectation that I refrain from bothering him without at least talking to my manager first. My memory is that this was a practical emergence, and not an explicit rule. Regardless, it seemed that Nate was sort of having it both ways, because he did in fact sometimes directly ask me questions (while quite angry), for example why we had ordered lunch from a restaurant he didn’t like, or where the soy sauce was. I now have to wonder what would have happened if I had refused to answer those angrily posed questions on the grounds that I didn’t report directly to him. My guess is that I probably would have lost the job shortly thereafter (and been happier for having held my boundaries—such a story would have been the labor market functioning even more efficiently).
I told the story about how he got very angry when I didn’t inflate his tires properly and one went flat during his commute. He added mitigating context claiming that he was rushed and sweaty having just replaced the tire, and then felt his own (implicit) boundaries violated by my approach.
Well, my memory is that I had his tire professionally replaced. Maybe I misremember that detail. But I am quite sure I took his bike to the shop for some kind of repair in the immediate wake of the flat tire. After that, I messaged him to let him know the repairs were finished and his bike was back on the office bike rack, ready to use. It wasn’t necessary to send him that message, but I wanted to do the small professional courtesy as a gesture of respect and de-escalation. I regret that, because he didn’t reply at all.
In the next day or so, we ended up taking the elevator at the same time. We stood in cold silence. I got no signal that he felt anything other than annoyance and disregard. I would have accepted an apology or just some kind of thawing, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to risk initiating another conversation he didn’t want. When he says he has no recollection of wanting me to quit (as opposed to improve), I feel frustrated because I think this will give people a distorted mental image of what his outward demeanor was like.
Alternate timelines that I would have preferred
Nate says he feels trapped:
I have a sense that there’s some sort of trap for people with my emotional makeup here. If you stay and try to express yourself despite experiencing strong feelings of frustration, you’re “almost yelling”. If you leave because you’re feeling a bunch of frustration and people say they don’t like talking to you while you’re feeling a bunch of frustration, you’re “storming out”.
Perhaps I’m missing some obvious third alternative here, that can be practically run while experiencing a bunch of frustration or exasperation. (If you know of one, I’d love to hear it.)
Here are six alternatives, ranked by my preference. I personally think none of them seem impossible and all of them are reasonable to expect from an agentic, cooperative EA leader. Each scenario is meant to be imagined independently of the others.
In 2014 Nate writes his blog and crafts his public image in such a way that by the time I am recruited to work for MIRI, I have gotten a full and realistic sense of his emotional build, and quickly decline the job offer from MIRI (or at least bargain for modifications to the job description). This probably would have required placing several prominent disclaimers throughout the blog, as well as changing the tone and implication of many of the posts. Nate accepts the reputational costs that this modified narrative requires.
MIRI makes sure their ops recruitment checklist includes giving explicit warnings about Nate’s emotions, and I quickly decline the job offer with no hard feelings. This one seems the most realistic to me.
Nate firms up the organizational separation. Before having any angry outbursts, it is made highly explicit that I should not bring up e.g. bike tire questions with Nate, and furthermore that Nate should not e.g. ask me to explain perceived lunch errors. Those things are to be resolved with my manager first if possible. I am warned that he may not be able to calmly tolerate violations of these boundaries. It is acknowledged that this is kind of weird, but MIRI is a weird org trying to save the world.
If he had done this, I probably would have felt uneasy, still lost some respect for him, and told some friends about it. I probably still would have wanted to quit, and felt some mild skepticism toward the org ever after. But I would have felt much better about it, and I wouldn’t feel the need now to warn people that Nate was given unadvertised exemptions from social norms.
During the bike pump incident, Nate incurs an extra 30 seconds of wasted time, and hopefully no permanent emotional damage, in order to pad the angry interruption (“Learn!”) with a few extra syllables. Not even especially polite syllables, just enough to signal that he knows about and complies with the shared burden of emotional regulation. Something like, “Okay, I’m going cut you off right there–all I’m going to say is that I’m really unhappy and can’t deal with this right now. You should talk about this with your manager.”
Not long after the bike pump incident, Nate and I end up taking the elevator at the same time. He takes the opportunity to give at least a perfunctory apology and explain why he snapped. I get the sense that he genuinely regrets not establishing boundaries sooner. I also get the sense that he does not actively want me to quit (presuming that is actually true).
Nate doesn’t initiate any apologies, but he does send some kind of signal that things won’t go wrong if I ever try to bring it up again. He does not continue signaling a hair trigger while walking around the office. When I message him to let him know that the bike is back, he replies with something at least as cordial as “ok good to know”.
So I don’t think there’s any reasonable sense in which Nate was “trapped”.
What I want right now
I’m not especially bidding for him to change his emotional habits. In fact, I don’t really want much of anything from Nate himself.
When I called up my former trainee the other day, I did not say, “I’m sorry Nate was angry and toxic to you.” Rather, I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t make absolutely sure you knew what you were getting into. I’m sorry for not giving you the thorough disclaimer that I wish someone had given me.”
What I do really want is for Nate’s reputation to catch up to his behavior. I think this is already happening to some extent, and the community is appropriately deducting some prestige and bargaining power.
Some people I respect have already told me that they now think significantly differently about Nate, which I think is right and proper, as well as being some relief to me personally.
Looking Forward
I hope that if there is any more that ought to be revealed, that it is. I hope that bright-eyed young people entering the scene will be warned about him as thoroughly as I was warned about Eliezer (or more). I also hope that Nate does not suffer any unfair or unreasonable consequences[1]–I admit that I would feel some momentary satisfaction from that sort of thing, but it wouldn’t be worth diluting the valid complaints. Humans have an intrinsic drive for scapegoating, or so I have heard, and that’s the kind of overindulgence that is not affordable in the fight for the future.
I look forward to less often hearing Nate’s persona invoked, with no caveats, as an exemplar of agency and self-understanding. He has some notable virtues, and has done things worthy of commendation, but I hope that the halo effect around him substantially diminishes.
This risks derailment, but I hope that some new AI notkilleveryoneism researchers manage to loosen Nate’s monopoly on his niche at MIRI. By that I mean that it would be cool if, by some miracle, Eliezer found enough energy that he could invest some of it in a few final, dignified hail-mary apprenticeships. Instead of hearing that Eliezer and Nate said something, I hope I get to hear that The Cool New Eliezer-Approved AI notkilleveryoneism Team said something. I’m not holding my breath but that’s my hope.
I have some skepticism toward all of Nate’s self-reports, including the ones about his recent improvements. I am generally pessimistic about adults changing very much, especially when they are in their thirties or older. But...if Nate beats the odds in a hard-to-fake way, I will be duly surprised and impressed.
More miscellaneous notes
(Misc but still important)
I feel some pressure right now to match Nate’s conciliatory tone–pressure to realize that Nate was just a cooperative guy all along who honestly wanted the best and fell short of his own values. I also feel an opposite desire to shout, “No! He’s predictably performing gentleness now that he’s at a disadvantage! Onlookers will overweight this and walk away with the wrong overall impression!!!” I endorse voicing that feeling. I find Nate’s replies here just a bit too slippery, and I urge people to treat this as an occasion where actions speak louder than words. Questioning people’s motives is often considered bad form, so I will simply say that I believe that Nate is not outright lying about his thoughts or feelings, but also that Sarah Constantin’s Player vs Character model is weighing on my mind.
I want it to be known that during Nate’s outbursts, I was unsure about where his actual limits were. I obviously never worried that he would, like, punch me or something, since that’s quite illegal. But let me put it this way: If Rob had started shouting at me, I would have been utterly shocked, whereas if Nate had done that, I would have been merely surprised. Regardless of what Nate claims about his internal states, I think it’s not a coincidence that my uncertainty about potential escalation was so large, and that I was stressed into doing more emotional labor than I signed on for. To say that differently: I think it’s not a coincidence that his actions reliably gave him the benefits of brinkmanship. I find it entirely plausible that if Nate’s incentives had been different, then his emotional impulses would have adapted. But again, I would have been fine with just being forewarned during recruitment.
There were other highly regarded researchers at MIRI whose lunch orders I messed up, and who are not known for empathy or people skills, but who reliably managed to express mild disappointment instead of hangry hostility.
Nate said: ”My recollection of the thought that ran through my mind when you were like ‘Well I couldn’t figure out how to use a bike pump’ was that this was some sideways attempt at begging pardon, without actually saying ‘oops’ first, nor trying the obvious-to-me steps like ‘watch a youtube video’ or ‘ask your manager if he knows how to inflate a bike tire’[...]”
Nate has a point here—it’s entirely plausible that the particular bike-related anger could have been resolved on my end the way he suggests. But I also find it entirely plausible that the difficulty could have persisted even after some googling and YouTubing, and I have to wonder what would have happened in that case. If I had managed to say the word “YouTube” early enough in that interaction, would Nate have let me finish my sentence? Well, that’s possible, and there are other possibilities too. So maybe Nate feels like he was tracking things cleanly enough that no one would trigger his rage unless they definitely had a serious lapse in their responsibilities (which is what most people think of themselves). But personally I still doubt that.
“[...] the entire hypothesized time-save of somebody else inflating bike tires is wiped out by me having to give tutorials on it.” This seems like an overstatement and I want to defend my common sense. I continue to think that the trouble I was having with the pressure-checking might possibly have been entirely solved by having me come watch him do it once.
The quotation, “Well, I couldn’t figure out how to use a bike pump” is a misrepresentation of what happened, and I’m disappointed to find myself defending against it. I had owned and maintained multiple bikes without running into this problem. Different equipment sometimes has subtleties. I still don’t know what was going wrong, and indeed it might have been a silly error on my part, but I claim that I was not as stupid, incompetent, or lazy as Nate makes me sound here.
It’s very dramatic, but I have to say I understand why TurnTrout said he would burn 10% of his liquidity in exchange for never having a certain conversation with Nate. My own experiences with angry Nate were weirdly unsettling. Again, I’ve endured objectively harsher treatment from superiors and customers in previous jobs, but those didn’t feel as bad. I think the difference had something to do with everyone I respected praising him, nuancing away his flaws, leaving me wondering what the hell was going on.
Alex Turner (TurnTrout) is my friend, we regularly talk and hang out and get food. In real life I think Alex frequently shows more pro-sociality and self-control than I do. When I think of Alex taking that kind of psychic damage from Nate, I feel…just…intolerably scandalized, and need to do deliberate mental tricks to shake it off. (EDIT: I no longer feel intolerably scandalized. That’s because I have since had multiple, separate, surprisingly heated and frustrating in-person arguments with Alex, of a sort that never happen with my other friends. It’s still entirely plausible that Nate spontaneously lost his temper at Alex with very little provocation, but I now have some decent credence that Alex significantly contributed to the escalation. I feel obligated to add this minor change here, out of fairness to Nate and respect for truthseeking. My overall stance remains unchanged: Nate has a history of especially bad anger management, multiple friends of mine have been on the receiving end of it, his years of public image-crafting and blogging about his own self-understanding flagrantly omitted it, and while it’s not a crime to have anger problems, it’s definitely good that MIRI adopted a policy of specifically warning new recruits about it.)
Some positivity
I’m really happy overall with the replies I received from everyone. I expected to encounter a lot more resistance and skepticism, and I wouldn’t have blamed people for it. I have no regrets about anything I wrote. Without identifying anyone, let me say I’m also happy with what people have told me in private. It’s quite nice to have it confirmed that I’m not crazy and that I’ve helped make things better. And to those of you who have taken decisive actions: I honestly consider you to be heroes.
Even though it comes quite late, I’m glad to hear that there is some kind of effort being made to give people the warning I wish I had received. It’s maybe also good that Nate stopped being the executive director.
I sat on my complaints for 5+ years. But then last week, Alex Turner said the bravest public and true thing about Nate I had yet seen: that people are failing to enforce norms on him. Shortly thereafter, I overheard some people I respect having an actually nuanced conversation about it, not just the spurious, unbalanced “nuance” that had been protecting the status quo for years. Alex’s lonely dissent and the reverberations it caused inspired me to break my silence. Hero.
My experiences elsewhere in the ecosystem have been much better. I’ve been at my current job for over 18 months, and have witnessed none of the problems that Nate had while I was at MIRI. My coworkers clearly put in the effort every day to cooperate, and I feel good about the future of the org.
Some Links
Here are some links that have affected how I think about human affairs in general, especially interpersonal drama. If anyone finds my takes here to be too cynical, then these links will at least show where I picked up a lot of that cynicism. (However, I also fully agree with the cynical about cynicism post.)
[1] It was pointed out to me that no one hopes for unfair or unreasonable consequences, so my words here are vague. Yeah okay. People can debate what’s fair and reasonable, and I may join the debate or not.
Oct 11 & 12 EDITS: Restructured some sentences, swapped out some words, and added a whole bullet point to the Misc section. Oct 3, 2024: Updated the final misc note to include the possibility that Turntrout was significantly at fault.
I do have some general sense here that those aren’t emotionally realistic options for people with my emotional makeup.
Here’s my take: From the inside, Nate feels like he is incapable of not becoming very frustrated, even angry. In a sense this is true. But this state of affairs is in fact a consequence of Nate not being subject to the same rules as everybody else.
I think I know what it’s like, to an extent — I’ve had anger issues since I was born, and despite speaking openly about it to many people, I’ve never met anyone who’s been able to really understand the feeling of being overwhelmed with rage (especially not as an adult). That feeling can be very hard to control.
However, I am constantly aware that having an angry outburst is massively socially unacceptable, to the point where if I let such things happen regularly I would lose my job / my standing in the community / all my friends / everyone close to me. This creates an extremely strong incentive for me to self-regulate at least my outward reactions, even when it’s really hard. But because Nate is so high-status, he is allowed to make such outbursts without being faced with losing his job, his standing in the community, or his friends. This means he is insufficiently incentivized to self-regulate, and thus has been unable to learn.
I think it’s cool that you’re engaging with criticism and acknowledging the harm that happened as a result of your struggles.
And, to cut to the painful part, that’s about the only positive thing that I (random person on the internet) have to say about what you just wrote.
In particular, you sound (and sorry if I’m making any wrong assumption here) extremely unwilling to entertain the idea that you were wrong, or that any potential improvement might need to come from you.
You say:
For whatever it’s worth: I don’t recall wanting you to quit (as opposed to improve).
But you don’t seem to consider the idea that maybe you were more in a position to improve than he was.
I don’t want to be overly harsh or judgmental. You (eventually) apologize and acknowledge your responsibility in employees having a shitty time, and it’s easy for an internet stranger to over-analyze everything you said.
But. I do feel confident that you’re expressing a lack of curiosity here. You’re assuming that there’s nothing you possibly have done to make Kurt’s experience better, and while you’re open to hearing if anyone presents you with a third option, you don’t seem to think seeking out a third option is a problem you should actively solve.
My recollection of the thought that ran through my mind when you were like “Well I couldn’t figure out how to use a bike pump” was that this was some sideways attempt at begging pardon, without actually saying “oops” first, nor trying the obvious-to-me steps like “watch a youtube video” or “ask your manager if he knows how to inflate a bike tire”, nor noticing that the entire hypothesized time-save of somebody else inflating bike tires is wiped out by me having to give tutorials on it.
Like, here… You get that you’re not really engaging with what Kurt is/was saying, right?
Kurt’s point is that your pump seemed harder to use than other bike pumps. If the issue is on the object level, valid answers could be asking what types of bike pumps he’s used to and where the discrepancy could come from, suggesting he buy a new pump, or if you’re feeling especially curious asking that he bring his own pump to work so you can compare the two; or maybe the issue could come not from the pump but from the tires, in which case you could consider changing them, etc.
If the issue is on the meta level and that you don’t want to spend time on these problems, a valid answer could be saying “Okay, what do you need to solve this problem without my input?”. Then it could be a discussion about discretionary budget, about the amount of initiative you expect him to have with his job, about asking why he didn’t feel comfortable making these buying decisions right away, etc.
Your only takeaway from this issue was “he was wrong and he could have obviously solved it watching a 5 minutes youtube tutorial, what would have been the most efficient way to communicate to him that he was wrong?”. At no point in this reply are you considering (out loud, at least) that hypothesis “maybe I was wrong and I missed something”.
Like, I get having a hot temper and saying things you regret because you don’t see any other answers in the moment. But part of the process is to communicate despite a hot temper is to be willing to admit you were wrong.
Perhaps I’m missing some obvious third alternative here, that can be practically run while experiencing a bunch of frustration or exasperation. (If you know of one, I’d love to hear it.)
The best life-hack I have is “Don’t be afraid to come back and restart the discussion once you feel less frustration or exasperation”.
Long-term, I’d recommend looking into Non-Violent Communication, if you haven’t already. There’s a lot of cruft in there, but in my experience the core insights work: express vulnerability, focus on communicating you needs and how you feel about things, avoid assigning blame, make negotiable requests, and go from there.
So for the bike tire thing the NVC version would be something like “I need to spend my time efficiently and not have to worry about logistics; when you tell me you’re having problems with the pump I feel stressed because I feel like I’m spending time I should spend on more important things. I need you to find a system where you can solve these problems without my input. What do you need to make that happen?”
I’ve been dating Nate for two years (tho wanna clarify we are not doing marriage-kids and we’re both actively looking for more serious other partners).
Nate is profoundly wonderful in many ways, like often surprises me in new ways of wonderfulness, and has raised my standards in partners. He’s deeply caring, attentive, competent, hilarious, and of course brilliant.
Also, many of the complaints about him in the comments resonate with my experience, particularly your description above. I often find that in disputes I feel dismissed, I perceive him as having a significant lack of curiosity about my worldview (and believe he’s explicitly said he’s not curious about perspectives he anticipates to have no value to him).
Iirc he’s explicitly said he doesn’t respect my thinking (edit: he clarifies he respects it in some areas but not others), and from my perspective this radiates off him whenever we fight. I often feel like I have trouble trusting my own mind, I doubt myself, and despite my best attempts I somehow come out of disputes thinking I must be the one who’s wrong. It’s weird to have a partner who’s so shockingly good in so many ways, yet we have maybe the worst fights I’ve ever experienced in romantic relationships. (Though he says other girls he’s dated don’t have this problem and I am unusual)
On one plus side, I’ve found him to be very good at installing concrete changes if you can articulate them to him. A few times I managed to have a specific request about how I’d like him to say things differently, and if he agrees to do so he updates fast, thoroughly, and permanently.
I feel conflicted about posting this here because ??? should this be personal/private ?? but I’m having some sort of massive relief and feeling like actually I’m not insane. And also I am invested in (though not hopeful about) something changing here cause it would be good for our relationship and I assume also MIRI, which I like and believe in.
(I talked to Nate before posting this comment and he was encouraging)
(To be clear: I think that at least one other of my past long-term/serious romantic partners would say “of all romantic conflicts, I felt shittiest during ours”. The thing that I don’t recall other long-term/serious romantic partners reporting is the sense of inability to trust their own mind or self during disputes. (It’s plausible to me that some have felt it and not told me.))
Chiming in to provide additional datapoints. (Apologies for this being quite late to the conversation; I frequent The Other Forum regularly, and LW much less so, and only recently read this post/comments.) My experience has been quite different to a lot of the experiences described here, and I was very surprised when reading.
I read all of the people who have had (very) negative experiences as being sincere and reporting events and emotions as they experienced them. I could feel what I perceived to be real distress and pain in a lot of the comments, and this was pretty saddening.
Note: I really don’t like posting personal information on the public internet, for both personal preference and professional reasons. (I felt sure I wanted to post this, though.)
Background: I dated Nate on-and-off for ~6 years (from 2016-2022). We’re now friends on good terms.
How I experienced Nate’s communication over the years:
During disputes, I felt Nate respected my views and my feelings. I felt Nate tried to communicate well with me (though of course this is often hard for both parties in the midst of a dispute and we both failed a bunch).
During disputes, and generally, I felt like Nate engaged with me as an equal. I don’t recall ever feeling dismissed in the ‘you’re not as smart as me’ vein (or any other vein).
It feels important to note that we never really had discussions about his work in the way a lot of people in the comments seemed to have had (where they had very bad experiences). We talked about our respective work a bunch, but the subject matter wasn’t technical (I don’t have a technical background).
I don’t recall Nate losing his cool/saying something mean, except for uncommon instances where I was very upset and was saying unkind things first (not my proudest moments!)
I ~never felt like Nate’s confidence/manner impacted my views in a way I don’t endorse or made me feel less sure of my own beliefs. Nate is certainly intense and confident-sounding, but for whatever reason, I don’t recall this in particular causing issues.
The ways in which our communication was bad felt to me more mundane and predictable as relationship-comms go (unclear communications around expectations, not recognising and addressing underlying issues/feelings quickly enough, etc). And none of this was the reason we ultimately parted ways.
Also, in my experience, Nate’s communication / handling of disputes has improved over time.
I don’t want to paint an overly rosy picture—our worst disputes were really not great (understatement to save me saying personal things), but for reasons basically unrelated to the themes of the comments here. Nate is flawed in loads of ways (I was always pretty icked-out at the reverence? people treated him with, like he was perfect or something); and though I haven’t had the experiences others here have had, I find him to be someone who wants to be better and knows he’s far from perfect.
In particular, you sound [...] extremely unwilling to entertain the idea that you were wrong, or that any potential improvement might need to come from you.
you don’t seem to consider the idea that maybe you were more in a position to improve than he was.
Perhaps you’re trying to point at something that I’m missing, but from my point of view, sentences like “I’d love to say “and I’ve identified the source of the problem and successfully addressed it”, but I don’t think I have” and “would I have been living up to my conversational ideals (significantly) better, if I’d said [...]” are intended indicators that I believe there’s significant room for me to improve, and that I have desire to improve.
At to be clear: I think that there is significant room for improvement for me here, and I desire to improve.
(And for the record: I have put a decent amount of effort towards improving, with some success.)
(And for the record: I don’t recall any instances of getting frustrated-in-the-way-that-turntrout-and-KurtB-are-recounting with Thomas Kwa, or any of Vivek’s team, as I think is a decent amount of evidence about those improvements, given how much time I spent working with them. (Which isn’t to say they didn’t have other discomforts!))
If the issue is on the meta level and that you don’t want to spend time on these problems, a valid answer could be saying “Okay, what do you need to solve this problem without my input?”. Then it could be a discussion about discretionary budget, about the amount of initiative you expect him to have with his job, about asking why he didn’t feel comfortable making these buying decisions right away, etc.
This reply wouldn’t have quite suited me, because Kurt didn’t report to me, and (if memory serves) we’d already been having some issues of the form “can you solve this by using your own initiative, or by spending modest amounts of money”. And (if memory serves) I had already tried to communicate that these weren’t the sorts of conversations I wanted to be having.
(I totally agree that his manager should have had a discussion about discretionary budget and initiative, and to probe why he didn’t feel comfortable making those buying decisions right away. He was not my direct report.)
Like, the context (if I recall correctly, which I might not at 6ish years remove) wasn’t that I called Kurt to ask him what had happened, nor that we were having some sort of general meeting in which he brought up this point. (Again: he didn’t report to me.) The context is that I was already late from walking my commute, sweaty from changing a bike tire, and Kurt came up and was like “Hey, sorry to hear your tire popped. I couldn’t figure out how to use your pump”, in a tone that parsed to me as someone begging pardon and indicating that he was about to ask me how to use one, a conversation that I did not want to be in at that moment and that seemed to me like a new instance of a repeating issue.
Your only takeaway from this issue was “he was wrong and he could have obviously solved it watching a 5 minutes youtube tutorial,
Nope!
I did (and still do) believe that this was an indication that Kurt wasn’t up to the challenge that the ops team was (at that time) undertaking, of seeing if they could make people’s lives easier by doing annoying little tasks for them.
It’s not obvious to me that he could have solved it with a 5 minute youtube tutorial; for all I know it would have taken him hours.
(Where the argument here is not “hours of his time are worth minutes of mine”; I don’t really think in those terms despite how everyone else seems to want to; I’d think more in terms of “training initiative” and “testing the hypothesis that the ops team can cheaply make people’s lives better by handling a bunch of annoying tasks (and, if so, getting a sense for how expensive it is so that we can decide whether it’s within budget)”.)
(Note that I would have considered it totally reasonable and fine for him to go to his manager and say “so, we’re not doing this, it’s too much effort and too low priority”, such that the ops team could tell me “X won’t be done” instead of falsely telling me “X will be done by time Y”, as I was eventually begging them to do.)
My takeaway wasn’t so much “he was wrong” as “something clearly wasn’t working about the requests that he use his own initative / money / his manager, as a resource while trying to help make people’s lives easier by doing a bunch of little tasks for them”. Which conclusion I still think I was licensed to draw, from that particular interaction.
what would have been the most efficient way to communicate to him that he was wrong?”
oh absolutely not, “well then learn!” is not a calculated “efficient” communication, it’s an exasperated outburst, of the sort that is unvirtuous by my conversational standards.
As stated, “Sorry, I don’t have capacity for this conversation, please have it with your manager instead” in a gentle tone would have lived up to my own conversational virtues significantly better.
At no point in this reply are you considering (out loud, at least) that hypothesis “maybe I was wrong and I missed something”.
I’m still not really considering this hypothesis (even internally).
This “X was wrong” concept isn’t even a recognizable concept in my native cognitive format. I readily believe things like “the exasperated outburst wasn’t kind” and “I would have lived up to my conversational virtues more if I had instead been kind” and “it’s worth changing my behavior to live up to those virtues better”. And I readily believe things like “if Kurt had taken initiative there, that would have been favorable evidence about his ability to fill the role he was hired for” and “the fact that Kurt came to me in that situation rather than taking initiative or going to his manager, despite previous attempts to cause him to take initiative and/or go through his manager, was evidence against his ability to fill the role he was hired for”.
Which you perhaps would parse as “Nate believed that both parties Were Wrong”, but that’s not the way that I dice things up, internally.
Perhaps I’m being dense, and some additional kernel of doubt is being asked of me here. If so, I’d appreciate attempts to spell it out like I’m a total idiot.
The best life-hack I have is “Don’t be afraid to come back and restart the discussion once you feel less frustration or exasperation”.
Thanks! “Circle back around after I’ve cooled down” is indeed one of the various techniques
that I have adopted (and that I file under partially-successful changes).
express vulnerability, focus on communicating you needs and how you feel about things, avoid assigning blame, make negotiable requests, and go from there.
Thanks again! (I have read that book, and made changes on account of it that I also file under partial-successes.)
So for the bike tire thing the NVC version would be something like “I need to spend my time efficiently and not have to worry about logistics; when you tell me you’re having problems with the pump I feel stressed because I feel like I’m spending time I should spend on more important things. I need you to find a system where you can solve these problems without my input. What do you need to make that happen?”
If memory serves, the NVC book contains a case where the author is like “You can use NVC even when you’re in a lot of emotional distress! For instance, one time when I was overwhelmed to the point of emotional outburst, I outburst “I am feeling pain!” and left the room, as was an instance of adhering to the NVC issues even in a context where emotions were running high”.
This feels more like the sort of thing that is emotionally-plausible to me in realtime when I am frustrated in that way. I agree that outbursts “I’m feeling frustrated” or “I’m feeling exasperated” would have been better outbursts than “Well then learn”, before exiting. That’s the sort of thing I manage to hit sometimes with partial success.
And, to be clear, I also aspire to higher-grade responses like a chill “hey man, sorry to interrupt (but I’m already late to a bunch of things today), is this a case where you should be using your own initiative and/or talking to your manager instead of me?”. And perhaps we’ll get there! And maybe further discussions like this one will help me gain new techniques towards that end, which I’d greatly appreciate.
So I’ve been thinking about this particular branch for a while and I think I have a slightly different diagnosis from PoignardAzur, which I think nearly lines up with yours but has an important difference. I think this is the important part:
I’m still not really considering this hypothesis (even internally).
This “X was wrong” concept isn’t even a recognizable concept in my native cognitive format.
...
Which you perhaps would parse as “Nate believed that both parties Were Wrong”, but that’s not the way that I dice things up, internally.
Even if you are not tracking who is Wrong is any particular interaction, if other people are tracking who is Wrong, that seems like an important thing for you to handle because it will be a large part of how they interpret communication from you. (For the bike pump example, the thing where you saw Kurt as “begging pardon” seems like evidence this was plausibly up for Kurt / you could have guessed this was up for Kurt in the moment.) One way to interpret the situation is:
Kurt: I am Wrong but would like to displace that to the bike pump
Nate: Rejected! >:[
Kurt: :(
I am imagining that you were not asking for this sort of situation (and would have been less interested in a “save your time” deal if “do emotional labor for people helping you” had explicitly been part of the deal), but my guess is attention to this sort of thing is the next place to look for attacking the source of the problem.
[Also, I’m not trying to confidently assert this is what was actually up for Kurt in the moment—instead I’m asking “if this story made me side with Kurt, why did that happen?”]
Perhaps I’m being dense, and some additional kernel of doubt is being asked of me here. If so, I’d appreciate attempts to spell it out like I’m a total idiot.
I don’t know if “dense” is the word I use, but yeah, I think you missed my point.
My ELI5 would be “You’re still assuming the problem was ‘Kurt didn’t know how to use a pump’ and not ‘there was something wrong with your pump’”.
I don’t want to speculate too much beyond that eg about the discretionary budget stuff.
Thanks again! (I have read that book, and made changes on account of it that I also file under partial-successes.)
The best life-hack I have is “Don’t be afraid to come back and restart the discussion once you feel less frustration or exasperation”.
I talked to Kurt in some detail. Nate never apologized or acknowledged the bike pump incident (until now). After that incident, Nate never came back and said e.g. “wow, I was really frustrated earlier, sorry for taking that out on you!” The next time Kurt was alone with him was in the elevator later that week, and there was a cold silence that neither of them broke.
Perhaps I’m missing some obvious third alternative here, that can be practically run while experiencing a bunch of frustration or exasperation. (If you know of one, I’d love to hear it.)
One alternative could be to regulate your emotionsso you don’t feel as intense frustration from a given epistemic position? I think this is what most people do.
I suspect that lines like this are giving people the impression that you [Nate] don’t think there are (realistic) things that you can improve, or that you’ve “given up”.
I do have some general sense here that those aren’t emotionally realistic options for people with my emotional makeup.
I have a sense that there’s some sort of trap for people with my emotional makeup here. If you stay and try to express yourself despite experiencing strong feelings of frustration, you’re “almost yelling”. If you leave because you’re feeling a bunch of frustration and people say they don’t like talking to you while you’re feeling a bunch of frustration, you’re “storming out”.
My understanding is that your perspective is something like “I feel like I recognize that there’s stuff I can do to improve, and I’ve tried to put a lot of energy into finding those improvements, and I’m pretty open to others suggesting specific things I could do. But a lot of things that other people think would be easy fixes actually don’t work or don’t work for someone with my emotional makeup (e.g., because they’re super costly or because I don’t end up being able to implement them well.)
Like, my guess is that some people are like “wait what, why is it costly or infeasible for you to just gently tell someone that you don’t have time/energy for a conversation and politely tell them to talk to their manager?”
And then their reaction is “oh, Nate must not care or must not be trying.” (Which, to be clear, I find to be a reasonable hypothesis. Or at least the continuous version, which is something like “hm, maybe Nate doesn’t care enough or isn’t trying as much as I think the community should expect people in his position to try” or something.)
And then your reaction is “gosh, I am trying, but people seem to systematically underestimate how costly/infeasible a lot of their suggestions are.”
I’m not really sure what to do about this, other than “maybe if this is acknowledged, it’ll lead to more a more constructive dialogue between you and those who want you or expect you to change.”
Insofar as you’re querying the near future: I’m not currently attempting work collaborations with any new folk, and so the matter is somewhat up in the air. (I recently asked Malo to consider a MIRI-policy of ensuring all new employees who might interact with me get some sort of list of warnings / disclaimers / affordances / notes.)
Insofar as you’re querying the recent past: There aren’t many recent cases to draw from. This comment has some words about how things went with Vivek’s hires. The other recent hires that I recall both (a) weren’t hired to do research with me, and (b) mentioned that they’d read my communication handbook (as includes the affordance-list and the failure-modes section, which I consider to be the critcial pieces of warning), which I considered sufficient. (But then I did have communication difficulties with one of them (of the “despair” variety), which updated me somewhat.)
Insofar as you’re querying about even light or tangential working relationships (like people asking my take on a whiteboard when I’m walking past), currently I don’t issue any warnings in those cases, and am not convinced that they’d be warranted.
To be clear: I’m not currently personally sold on the hypothesis that I owe people a bunch of warnings. I think of them as more of a sensible thing to do; it’d be lovely if everyone was building explicit models of their conversational failure-modes and proactively sharing them, and I’m a be-the-change-you-wanna-see-in-the-world sort of guy.
(Perhaps by the end of this whole conversation I will be sold on that hypothesis! I’ve updated in that direction over the past couple days.)
(To state the obvious: I endorse MIRI institutionally acting according to others’ conclusions on that matter rather than on mine, hence asking Malo to consider it independently.)
One frame I want to lay out is that it seems like you’re not accounting for the organizational cost of how you treat employees/collaborators. An executive director needing to mostly not talk to people, and shaping hiring around social pain tolerance, is a five alarm fire for organizations as small as MIRI. Based on the info here, my first thought is you should be in a different role, so that you have fewer interactions and less implied power. That requires someone to replace you as ED, and I don’t know if there are any options available, but at a minimum I think you/MIRI should be treating the status quo as potentially extremely costly, and taking steps to assess the total cost and potential fixes.
I could be wrong here, 98% of my information is from this post + comments, but I get the sense you/MIRI haven’t looked sufficiently hard to even assess what the costs are. It sounds like you have asked people, which is great and more than most orgs do, but I get the sense you haven’t grappled with the magnitude of the costs beyond the personal and social.
Nate stepped down as ED shortly after [edit: actually before] our project ended, the website just hasn’t been updated. I’m not sure what exactly the organizational structure is now, but you can probably message @lisathiergart for an update.
Thanks for saying so!
My intent was not to make you feel bad. I apologize for that, and am saddened by it.
(I’d love to say “and I’ve identified the source of the problem and successfully addressed it”, but I don’t think I have! I do think I’ve gotten a little better at avoiding this sort of thing with time and practice. I’ve also cut down significantly on the number of reports that I have.)
For whatever it’s worth: I don’t recall wanting you to quit (as opposed to improve). I don’t recall feeling ill will towards you personally. I do not now think poorly of you personally on account of your efforts on the MIRI ops team.
As to the question of how these reports hit my ear: they sound to me like accurate recountings of real situations (in particular, I recall the bike pump one, and suspect that the others were also real events).
They also trigger a bunch of defensiveness in me. I think your descriptions are accurate, but that they’re missing various bits of context.
The fact that there was other context doesn’t make your experience any less shitty! I reiterate that I would have preferred it be not-at-all shitty.
Speaking from my sense of defensiveness, and adding in some of that additional context for the case that I remember clearly:
If memory serves: in that era, the ops team was experimenting with trying to make everyone’s lives easier by doing all sorts of extra stuff (I think they were even trying to figure out if they could do laundry), as seemed like a fine experiment to try.
In particular, I wasn’t going around being like “and also pump my bike tires up”; rather, the ops team was soliciting a bunch of little task items.
If memory serves: during that experiment, I was struggling a bunch with being told that things would be done by times, and then them not being done by those times (as is significantly worse than being told that those things won’t be done at all—I can do it myself, and will do it myself, if I’m not told that somebody else is about to do it!)
If memory serves: yep, it was pretty frustrating to blow a tire on a bike during a commute after being told that my bike tires were going to be inflated, both on account of the danger and on account of then having to walk the rest of the commute, buy a new tire, swap the tire out, etc.
My recollection of the thought that ran through my mind when you were like “Well I couldn’t figure out how to use a bike pump” was that this was some sideways attempt at begging pardon, without actually saying “oops” first, nor trying the obvious-to-me steps like “watch a youtube video” or “ask your manager if he knows how to inflate a bike tire”, nor noticing that the entire hypothesized time-save of somebody else inflating bike tires is wiped out by me having to give tutorials on it.
Was saying “well then learn!” and leaving a good solution, by my lights? Nope! Would I have been living up to my conversational ideals (significantly) better, if I’d said something like “Sorry, I don’t have capacity for this conversation, please have it with your manager instead” in a gentle tone? Yep!
I do have some general sense here that those aren’t emotionally realistic options for people with my emotional makeup.
I aspire to those sorts of reactions, and I sometimes even achieve them, now that I’m a handful of years older and have more practice and experience. But… still speaking from a place of defensiveness, I have a sense that there’s some sort of trap for people with my emotional makeup here. If you stay and try to express yourself despite experiencing strong feelings of frustration, you’re “almost yelling”. If you leave because you’re feeling a bunch of frustration and people say they don’t like talking to you while you’re feeling a bunch of frustration, you’re “storming out”.
Perhaps I’m missing some obvious third alternative here, that can be practically run while experiencing a bunch of frustration or exasperation. (If you know of one, I’d love to hear it.)
None of this is to say that your experience wasn’t shitty! I again apologize for that (with the caveat that I still don’t feel like I see practical changes to make to myself, beyond the only-partially-successful changes I’ve already made).
For the record, I 100% endorse you leaving an employment situation where you felt uncomfortable and bad (and agree with you that this is the labor market working-as-intended, and agree with you that me causing a decent fraction of employees to have a shitty time is an extra cost for me to pay when acting as an employer).
I have some replies to Nate’s reply.
Overview:
I’m not asking anyone to modify their personality at all. I mainly wish I had been warned about what was in store for me when I joined MIRI, and I want such warnings to be a visible part of Nate’s reputation.
I feel some pressure to match Nate’s conciliatory tone, but something feels incongruous about it. I’m concerned that people will read Nate’s calm, kindly replies and come away with the wrong idea of how he presented himself at MIRI.
I find Nate’s additional context to be, well…missing some important context. See below...
More context and recollections
It’s true that I didn’t report directly to Nate, and there could be a reasonable expectation that I refrain from bothering him without at least talking to my manager first. My memory is that this was a practical emergence, and not an explicit rule. Regardless, it seemed that Nate was sort of having it both ways, because he did in fact sometimes directly ask me questions (while quite angry), for example why we had ordered lunch from a restaurant he didn’t like, or where the soy sauce was. I now have to wonder what would have happened if I had refused to answer those angrily posed questions on the grounds that I didn’t report directly to him. My guess is that I probably would have lost the job shortly thereafter (and been happier for having held my boundaries—such a story would have been the labor market functioning even more efficiently).
I told the story about how he got very angry when I didn’t inflate his tires properly and one went flat during his commute. He added mitigating context claiming that he was rushed and sweaty having just replaced the tire, and then felt his own (implicit) boundaries violated by my approach.
Well, my memory is that I had his tire professionally replaced. Maybe I misremember that detail. But I am quite sure I took his bike to the shop for some kind of repair in the immediate wake of the flat tire. After that, I messaged him to let him know the repairs were finished and his bike was back on the office bike rack, ready to use. It wasn’t necessary to send him that message, but I wanted to do the small professional courtesy as a gesture of respect and de-escalation. I regret that, because he didn’t reply at all.
In the next day or so, we ended up taking the elevator at the same time. We stood in cold silence. I got no signal that he felt anything other than annoyance and disregard. I would have accepted an apology or just some kind of thawing, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to risk initiating another conversation he didn’t want. When he says he has no recollection of wanting me to quit (as opposed to improve), I feel frustrated because I think this will give people a distorted mental image of what his outward demeanor was like.
Alternate timelines that I would have preferred
Nate says he feels trapped:
Here are six alternatives, ranked by my preference. I personally think none of them seem impossible and all of them are reasonable to expect from an agentic, cooperative EA leader. Each scenario is meant to be imagined independently of the others.
In 2014 Nate writes his blog and crafts his public image in such a way that by the time I am recruited to work for MIRI, I have gotten a full and realistic sense of his emotional build, and quickly decline the job offer from MIRI (or at least bargain for modifications to the job description). This probably would have required placing several prominent disclaimers throughout the blog, as well as changing the tone and implication of many of the posts. Nate accepts the reputational costs that this modified narrative requires.
MIRI makes sure their ops recruitment checklist includes giving explicit warnings about Nate’s emotions, and I quickly decline the job offer with no hard feelings. This one seems the most realistic to me.
Nate firms up the organizational separation. Before having any angry outbursts, it is made highly explicit that I should not bring up e.g. bike tire questions with Nate, and furthermore that Nate should not e.g. ask me to explain perceived lunch errors. Those things are to be resolved with my manager first if possible. I am warned that he may not be able to calmly tolerate violations of these boundaries. It is acknowledged that this is kind of weird, but MIRI is a weird org trying to save the world.
If he had done this, I probably would have felt uneasy, still lost some respect for him, and told some friends about it. I probably still would have wanted to quit, and felt some mild skepticism toward the org ever after. But I would have felt much better about it, and I wouldn’t feel the need now to warn people that Nate was given unadvertised exemptions from social norms.
During the bike pump incident, Nate incurs an extra 30 seconds of wasted time, and hopefully no permanent emotional damage, in order to pad the angry interruption (“Learn!”) with a few extra syllables. Not even especially polite syllables, just enough to signal that he knows about and complies with the shared burden of emotional regulation. Something like, “Okay, I’m going cut you off right there–all I’m going to say is that I’m really unhappy and can’t deal with this right now. You should talk about this with your manager.”
Not long after the bike pump incident, Nate and I end up taking the elevator at the same time. He takes the opportunity to give at least a perfunctory apology and explain why he snapped. I get the sense that he genuinely regrets not establishing boundaries sooner. I also get the sense that he does not actively want me to quit (presuming that is actually true).
Nate doesn’t initiate any apologies, but he does send some kind of signal that things won’t go wrong if I ever try to bring it up again. He does not continue signaling a hair trigger while walking around the office. When I message him to let him know that the bike is back, he replies with something at least as cordial as “ok good to know”.
So I don’t think there’s any reasonable sense in which Nate was “trapped”.
What I want right now
I’m not especially bidding for him to change his emotional habits. In fact, I don’t really want much of anything from Nate himself.
When I called up my former trainee the other day, I did not say, “I’m sorry Nate was angry and toxic to you.” Rather, I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t make absolutely sure you knew what you were getting into. I’m sorry for not giving you the thorough disclaimer that I wish someone had given me.”
What I do really want is for Nate’s reputation to catch up to his behavior. I think this is already happening to some extent, and the community is appropriately deducting some prestige and bargaining power.
Some people I respect have already told me that they now think significantly differently about Nate, which I think is right and proper, as well as being some relief to me personally.
Looking Forward
I hope that if there is any more that ought to be revealed, that it is. I hope that bright-eyed young people entering the scene will be warned about him as thoroughly as I was warned about Eliezer (or more). I also hope that Nate does not suffer any unfair or unreasonable consequences[1]–I admit that I would feel some momentary satisfaction from that sort of thing, but it wouldn’t be worth diluting the valid complaints. Humans have an intrinsic drive for scapegoating, or so I have heard, and that’s the kind of overindulgence that is not affordable in the fight for the future.
I look forward to less often hearing Nate’s persona invoked, with no caveats, as an exemplar of agency and self-understanding. He has some notable virtues, and has done things worthy of commendation, but I hope that the halo effect around him substantially diminishes.
This risks derailment, but I hope that some new AI notkilleveryoneism researchers manage to loosen Nate’s monopoly on his niche at MIRI. By that I mean that it would be cool if, by some miracle, Eliezer found enough energy that he could invest some of it in a few final, dignified hail-mary apprenticeships. Instead of hearing that Eliezer and Nate said something, I hope I get to hear that The Cool New Eliezer-Approved AI notkilleveryoneism Team said something. I’m not holding my breath but that’s my hope.
I have some skepticism toward all of Nate’s self-reports, including the ones about his recent improvements. I am generally pessimistic about adults changing very much, especially when they are in their thirties or older. But...if Nate beats the odds in a hard-to-fake way, I will be duly surprised and impressed.
More miscellaneous notes
(Misc but still important)
I feel some pressure right now to match Nate’s conciliatory tone–pressure to realize that Nate was just a cooperative guy all along who honestly wanted the best and fell short of his own values. I also feel an opposite desire to shout, “No! He’s predictably performing gentleness now that he’s at a disadvantage! Onlookers will overweight this and walk away with the wrong overall impression!!!” I endorse voicing that feeling. I find Nate’s replies here just a bit too slippery, and I urge people to treat this as an occasion where actions speak louder than words. Questioning people’s motives is often considered bad form, so I will simply say that I believe that Nate is not outright lying about his thoughts or feelings, but also that Sarah Constantin’s Player vs Character model is weighing on my mind.
I want it to be known that during Nate’s outbursts, I was unsure about where his actual limits were. I obviously never worried that he would, like, punch me or something, since that’s quite illegal. But let me put it this way: If Rob had started shouting at me, I would have been utterly shocked, whereas if Nate had done that, I would have been merely surprised. Regardless of what Nate claims about his internal states, I think it’s not a coincidence that my uncertainty about potential escalation was so large, and that I was stressed into doing more emotional labor than I signed on for. To say that differently: I think it’s not a coincidence that his actions reliably gave him the benefits of brinkmanship. I find it entirely plausible that if Nate’s incentives had been different, then his emotional impulses would have adapted. But again, I would have been fine with just being forewarned during recruitment.
There were other highly regarded researchers at MIRI whose lunch orders I messed up, and who are not known for empathy or people skills, but who reliably managed to express mild disappointment instead of hangry hostility.
Nate said:
”My recollection of the thought that ran through my mind when you were like ‘Well I couldn’t figure out how to use a bike pump’ was that this was some sideways attempt at begging pardon, without actually saying ‘oops’ first, nor trying the obvious-to-me steps like ‘watch a youtube video’ or ‘ask your manager if he knows how to inflate a bike tire’[...]”
Nate has a point here—it’s entirely plausible that the particular bike-related anger could have been resolved on my end the way he suggests. But I also find it entirely plausible that the difficulty could have persisted even after some googling and YouTubing, and I have to wonder what would have happened in that case. If I had managed to say the word “YouTube” early enough in that interaction, would Nate have let me finish my sentence? Well, that’s possible, and there are other possibilities too. So maybe Nate feels like he was tracking things cleanly enough that no one would trigger his rage unless they definitely had a serious lapse in their responsibilities (which is what most people think of themselves). But personally I still doubt that.
“[...] the entire hypothesized time-save of somebody else inflating bike tires is wiped out by me having to give tutorials on it.” This seems like an overstatement and I want to defend my common sense. I continue to think that the trouble I was having with the pressure-checking might possibly have been entirely solved by having me come watch him do it once.
The quotation, “Well, I couldn’t figure out how to use a bike pump” is a misrepresentation of what happened, and I’m disappointed to find myself defending against it. I had owned and maintained multiple bikes without running into this problem. Different equipment sometimes has subtleties. I still don’t know what was going wrong, and indeed it might have been a silly error on my part, but I claim that I was not as stupid, incompetent, or lazy as Nate makes me sound here.
It’s very dramatic, but I have to say I understand why TurnTrout said he would burn 10% of his liquidity in exchange for never having a certain conversation with Nate. My own experiences with angry Nate were weirdly unsettling. Again, I’ve endured objectively harsher treatment from superiors and customers in previous jobs, but those didn’t feel as bad. I think the difference had something to do with everyone I respected praising him, nuancing away his flaws, leaving me wondering what the hell was going on.
Alex Turner (TurnTrout) is my friend, we regularly talk and hang out and get food. In real life I think Alex frequently shows more pro-sociality and self-control than I do. When I think of Alex taking that kind of psychic damage from Nate,
I feel…just…intolerably scandalized, and need to do deliberate mental tricks to shake it off. (EDIT: I no longer feel intolerably scandalized. That’s because I have since had multiple, separate, surprisingly heated and frustrating in-person arguments with Alex, of a sort that never happen with my other friends. It’s still entirely plausible that Nate spontaneously lost his temper at Alex with very little provocation, but I now have some decent credence that Alex significantly contributed to the escalation. I feel obligated to add this minor change here, out of fairness to Nate and respect for truthseeking. My overall stance remains unchanged: Nate has a history of especially bad anger management, multiple friends of mine have been on the receiving end of it, his years of public image-crafting and blogging about his own self-understanding flagrantly omitted it, and while it’s not a crime to have anger problems, it’s definitely good that MIRI adopted a policy of specifically warning new recruits about it.)Some positivity
I’m really happy overall with the replies I received from everyone. I expected to encounter a lot more resistance and skepticism, and I wouldn’t have blamed people for it. I have no regrets about anything I wrote. Without identifying anyone, let me say I’m also happy with what people have told me in private. It’s quite nice to have it confirmed that I’m not crazy and that I’ve helped make things better. And to those of you who have taken decisive actions: I honestly consider you to be heroes.
Even though it comes quite late, I’m glad to hear that there is some kind of effort being made to give people the warning I wish I had received. It’s maybe also good that Nate stopped being the executive director.
I sat on my complaints for 5+ years. But then last week, Alex Turner said the bravest public and true thing about Nate I had yet seen: that people are failing to enforce norms on him. Shortly thereafter, I overheard some people I respect having an actually nuanced conversation about it, not just the spurious, unbalanced “nuance” that had been protecting the status quo for years. Alex’s lonely dissent and the reverberations it caused inspired me to break my silence. Hero.
My experiences elsewhere in the ecosystem have been much better. I’ve been at my current job for over 18 months, and have witnessed none of the problems that Nate had while I was at MIRI. My coworkers clearly put in the effort every day to cooperate, and I feel good about the future of the org.
Some Links
Here are some links that have affected how I think about human affairs in general, especially interpersonal drama. If anyone finds my takes here to be too cynical, then these links will at least show where I picked up a lot of that cynicism. (However, I also fully agree with the cynical about cynicism post.)
Corrupted Hardware
Player vs Character
Algorithmic Intent
[1] It was pointed out to me that no one hopes for unfair or unreasonable consequences, so my words here are vague. Yeah okay. People can debate what’s fair and reasonable, and I may join the debate or not.
Oct 11 & 12 EDITS: Restructured some sentences, swapped out some words, and added a whole bullet point to the Misc section.
Oct 3, 2024: Updated the final misc note to include the possibility that Turntrout was significantly at fault.
Here’s my take: From the inside, Nate feels like he is incapable of not becoming very frustrated, even angry. In a sense this is true. But this state of affairs is in fact a consequence of Nate not being subject to the same rules as everybody else.
I think I know what it’s like, to an extent — I’ve had anger issues since I was born, and despite speaking openly about it to many people, I’ve never met anyone who’s been able to really understand the feeling of being overwhelmed with rage (especially not as an adult). That feeling can be very hard to control.
However, I am constantly aware that having an angry outburst is massively socially unacceptable, to the point where if I let such things happen regularly I would lose my job / my standing in the community / all my friends / everyone close to me. This creates an extremely strong incentive for me to self-regulate at least my outward reactions, even when it’s really hard. But because Nate is so high-status, he is allowed to make such outbursts without being faced with losing his job, his standing in the community, or his friends. This means he is insufficiently incentivized to self-regulate, and thus has been unable to learn.
I think it’s cool that you’re engaging with criticism and acknowledging the harm that happened as a result of your struggles.
And, to cut to the painful part, that’s about the only positive thing that I (random person on the internet) have to say about what you just wrote.
In particular, you sound (and sorry if I’m making any wrong assumption here) extremely unwilling to entertain the idea that you were wrong, or that any potential improvement might need to come from you.
You say:
But you don’t seem to consider the idea that maybe you were more in a position to improve than he was.
I don’t want to be overly harsh or judgmental. You (eventually) apologize and acknowledge your responsibility in employees having a shitty time, and it’s easy for an internet stranger to over-analyze everything you said.
But. I do feel confident that you’re expressing a lack of curiosity here. You’re assuming that there’s nothing you possibly have done to make Kurt’s experience better, and while you’re open to hearing if anyone presents you with a third option, you don’t seem to think seeking out a third option is a problem you should actively solve.
Like, here… You get that you’re not really engaging with what Kurt is/was saying, right?
Kurt’s point is that your pump seemed harder to use than other bike pumps. If the issue is on the object level, valid answers could be asking what types of bike pumps he’s used to and where the discrepancy could come from, suggesting he buy a new pump, or if you’re feeling especially curious asking that he bring his own pump to work so you can compare the two; or maybe the issue could come not from the pump but from the tires, in which case you could consider changing them, etc.
If the issue is on the meta level and that you don’t want to spend time on these problems, a valid answer could be saying “Okay, what do you need to solve this problem without my input?”. Then it could be a discussion about discretionary budget, about the amount of initiative you expect him to have with his job, about asking why he didn’t feel comfortable making these buying decisions right away, etc.
Your only takeaway from this issue was “he was wrong and he could have obviously solved it watching a 5 minutes youtube tutorial, what would have been the most efficient way to communicate to him that he was wrong?”. At no point in this reply are you considering (out loud, at least) that hypothesis “maybe I was wrong and I missed something”.
Like, I get having a hot temper and saying things you regret because you don’t see any other answers in the moment. But part of the process is to communicate despite a hot temper is to be willing to admit you were wrong.
The best life-hack I have is “Don’t be afraid to come back and restart the discussion once you feel less frustration or exasperation”.
Long-term, I’d recommend looking into Non-Violent Communication, if you haven’t already. There’s a lot of cruft in there, but in my experience the core insights work: express vulnerability, focus on communicating you needs and how you feel about things, avoid assigning blame, make negotiable requests, and go from there.
So for the bike tire thing the NVC version would be something like “I need to spend my time efficiently and not have to worry about logistics; when you tell me you’re having problems with the pump I feel stressed because I feel like I’m spending time I should spend on more important things. I need you to find a system where you can solve these problems without my input. What do you need to make that happen?”
I’ve been dating Nate for two years (tho wanna clarify we are not doing marriage-kids and we’re both actively looking for more serious other partners).
Nate is profoundly wonderful in many ways, like often surprises me in new ways of wonderfulness, and has raised my standards in partners. He’s deeply caring, attentive, competent, hilarious, and of course brilliant.
Also, many of the complaints about him in the comments resonate with my experience, particularly your description above. I often find that in disputes I feel dismissed, I perceive him as having a significant lack of curiosity about my worldview (and believe he’s explicitly said he’s not curious about perspectives he anticipates to have no value to him).
Iirc he’s explicitly said he doesn’t respect my thinking (edit: he clarifies he respects it in some areas but not others), and from my perspective this radiates off him whenever we fight. I often feel like I have trouble trusting my own mind, I doubt myself, and despite my best attempts I somehow come out of disputes thinking I must be the one who’s wrong. It’s weird to have a partner who’s so shockingly good in so many ways, yet we have maybe the worst fights I’ve ever experienced in romantic relationships. (Though he says other girls he’s dated don’t have this problem and I am unusual)
On one plus side, I’ve found him to be very good at installing concrete changes if you can articulate them to him. A few times I managed to have a specific request about how I’d like him to say things differently, and if he agrees to do so he updates fast, thoroughly, and permanently.
I feel conflicted about posting this here because ??? should this be personal/private ?? but I’m having some sort of massive relief and feeling like actually I’m not insane. And also I am invested in (though not hopeful about) something changing here cause it would be good for our relationship and I assume also MIRI, which I like and believe in.
(I talked to Nate before posting this comment and he was encouraging)
Thanks <3
(To be clear: I think that at least one other of my past long-term/serious romantic partners would say “of all romantic conflicts, I felt shittiest during ours”. The thing that I don’t recall other long-term/serious romantic partners reporting is the sense of inability to trust their own mind or self during disputes. (It’s plausible to me that some have felt it and not told me.))
Chiming in to provide additional datapoints. (Apologies for this being quite late to the conversation; I frequent The Other Forum regularly, and LW much less so, and only recently read this post/comments.) My experience has been quite different to a lot of the experiences described here, and I was very surprised when reading.
I read all of the people who have had (very) negative experiences as being sincere and reporting events and emotions as they experienced them. I could feel what I perceived to be real distress and pain in a lot of the comments, and this was pretty saddening.
Note: I really don’t like posting personal information on the public internet, for both personal preference and professional reasons. (I felt sure I wanted to post this, though.)
Background: I dated Nate on-and-off for ~6 years (from 2016-2022). We’re now friends on good terms.
How I experienced Nate’s communication over the years:
During disputes, I felt Nate respected my views and my feelings. I felt Nate tried to communicate well with me (though of course this is often hard for both parties in the midst of a dispute and we both failed a bunch).
During disputes, and generally, I felt like Nate engaged with me as an equal. I don’t recall ever feeling dismissed in the ‘you’re not as smart as me’ vein (or any other vein).
It feels important to note that we never really had discussions about his work in the way a lot of people in the comments seemed to have had (where they had very bad experiences). We talked about our respective work a bunch, but the subject matter wasn’t technical (I don’t have a technical background).
I don’t recall Nate losing his cool/saying something mean, except for uncommon instances where I was very upset and was saying unkind things first (not my proudest moments!)
I ~never felt like Nate’s confidence/manner impacted my views in a way I don’t endorse or made me feel less sure of my own beliefs. Nate is certainly intense and confident-sounding, but for whatever reason, I don’t recall this in particular causing issues.
The ways in which our communication was bad felt to me more mundane and predictable as relationship-comms go (unclear communications around expectations, not recognising and addressing underlying issues/feelings quickly enough, etc). And none of this was the reason we ultimately parted ways.
Also, in my experience, Nate’s communication / handling of disputes has improved over time.
I don’t want to paint an overly rosy picture—our worst disputes were really not great (understatement to save me saying personal things), but for reasons basically unrelated to the themes of the comments here. Nate is flawed in loads of ways (I was always pretty icked-out at the reverence? people treated him with, like he was perfect or something); and though I haven’t had the experiences others here have had, I find him to be someone who wants to be better and knows he’s far from perfect.
Perhaps you’re trying to point at something that I’m missing, but from my point of view, sentences like “I’d love to say “and I’ve identified the source of the problem and successfully addressed it”, but I don’t think I have” and “would I have been living up to my conversational ideals (significantly) better, if I’d said [...]” are intended indicators that I believe there’s significant room for me to improve, and that I have desire to improve.
At to be clear: I think that there is significant room for improvement for me here, and I desire to improve.
(And for the record: I have put a decent amount of effort towards improving, with some success.)
(And for the record: I don’t recall any instances of getting frustrated-in-the-way-that-turntrout-and-KurtB-are-recounting with Thomas Kwa, or any of Vivek’s team, as I think is a decent amount of evidence about those improvements, given how much time I spent working with them. (Which isn’t to say they didn’t have other discomforts!))
This reply wouldn’t have quite suited me, because Kurt didn’t report to me, and (if memory serves) we’d already been having some issues of the form “can you solve this by using your own initiative, or by spending modest amounts of money”. And (if memory serves) I had already tried to communicate that these weren’t the sorts of conversations I wanted to be having.
(I totally agree that his manager should have had a discussion about discretionary budget and initiative, and to probe why he didn’t feel comfortable making those buying decisions right away. He was not my direct report.)
Like, the context (if I recall correctly, which I might not at 6ish years remove) wasn’t that I called Kurt to ask him what had happened, nor that we were having some sort of general meeting in which he brought up this point. (Again: he didn’t report to me.) The context is that I was already late from walking my commute, sweaty from changing a bike tire, and Kurt came up and was like “Hey, sorry to hear your tire popped. I couldn’t figure out how to use your pump”, in a tone that parsed to me as someone begging pardon and indicating that he was about to ask me how to use one, a conversation that I did not want to be in at that moment and that seemed to me like a new instance of a repeating issue.
Nope!
I did (and still do) believe that this was an indication that Kurt wasn’t up to the challenge that the ops team was (at that time) undertaking, of seeing if they could make people’s lives easier by doing annoying little tasks for them.
It’s not obvious to me that he could have solved it with a 5 minute youtube tutorial; for all I know it would have taken him hours.
(Where the argument here is not “hours of his time are worth minutes of mine”; I don’t really think in those terms despite how everyone else seems to want to; I’d think more in terms of “training initiative” and “testing the hypothesis that the ops team can cheaply make people’s lives better by handling a bunch of annoying tasks (and, if so, getting a sense for how expensive it is so that we can decide whether it’s within budget)”.)
(Note that I would have considered it totally reasonable and fine for him to go to his manager and say “so, we’re not doing this, it’s too much effort and too low priority”, such that the ops team could tell me “X won’t be done” instead of falsely telling me “X will be done by time Y”, as I was eventually begging them to do.)
My takeaway wasn’t so much “he was wrong” as “something clearly wasn’t working about the requests that he use his own initative / money / his manager, as a resource while trying to help make people’s lives easier by doing a bunch of little tasks for them”. Which conclusion I still think I was licensed to draw, from that particular interaction.
oh absolutely not, “well then learn!” is not a calculated “efficient” communication, it’s an exasperated outburst, of the sort that is unvirtuous by my conversational standards.
As stated, “Sorry, I don’t have capacity for this conversation, please have it with your manager instead” in a gentle tone would have lived up to my own conversational virtues significantly better.
I’m still not really considering this hypothesis (even internally).
This “X was wrong” concept isn’t even a recognizable concept in my native cognitive format. I readily believe things like “the exasperated outburst wasn’t kind” and “I would have lived up to my conversational virtues more if I had instead been kind” and “it’s worth changing my behavior to live up to those virtues better”. And I readily believe things like “if Kurt had taken initiative there, that would have been favorable evidence about his ability to fill the role he was hired for” and “the fact that Kurt came to me in that situation rather than taking initiative or going to his manager, despite previous attempts to cause him to take initiative and/or go through his manager, was evidence against his ability to fill the role he was hired for”.
Which you perhaps would parse as “Nate believed that both parties Were Wrong”, but that’s not the way that I dice things up, internally.
Perhaps I’m being dense, and some additional kernel of doubt is being asked of me here. If so, I’d appreciate attempts to spell it out like I’m a total idiot.
Thanks! “Circle back around after I’ve cooled down” is indeed one of the various techniques that I have adopted (and that I file under partially-successful changes).
Thanks again! (I have read that book, and made changes on account of it that I also file under partial-successes.)
If memory serves, the NVC book contains a case where the author is like “You can use NVC even when you’re in a lot of emotional distress! For instance, one time when I was overwhelmed to the point of emotional outburst, I outburst “I am feeling pain!” and left the room, as was an instance of adhering to the NVC issues even in a context where emotions were running high”.
This feels more like the sort of thing that is emotionally-plausible to me in realtime when I am frustrated in that way. I agree that outbursts “I’m feeling frustrated” or “I’m feeling exasperated” would have been better outbursts than “Well then learn”, before exiting. That’s the sort of thing I manage to hit sometimes with partial success.
And, to be clear, I also aspire to higher-grade responses like a chill “hey man, sorry to interrupt (but I’m already late to a bunch of things today), is this a case where you should be using your own initiative and/or talking to your manager instead of me?”. And perhaps we’ll get there! And maybe further discussions like this one will help me gain new techniques towards that end, which I’d greatly appreciate.
So I’ve been thinking about this particular branch for a while and I think I have a slightly different diagnosis from PoignardAzur, which I think nearly lines up with yours but has an important difference. I think this is the important part:
Even if you are not tracking who is Wrong is any particular interaction, if other people are tracking who is Wrong, that seems like an important thing for you to handle because it will be a large part of how they interpret communication from you. (For the bike pump example, the thing where you saw Kurt as “begging pardon” seems like evidence this was plausibly up for Kurt / you could have guessed this was up for Kurt in the moment.) One way to interpret the situation is:
Kurt: I am Wrong but would like to displace that to the bike pump
Nate: Rejected! >:[
Kurt: :(
I am imagining that you were not asking for this sort of situation (and would have been less interested in a “save your time” deal if “do emotional labor for people helping you” had explicitly been part of the deal), but my guess is attention to this sort of thing is the next place to look for attacking the source of the problem.
[Also, I’m not trying to confidently assert this is what was actually up for Kurt in the moment—instead I’m asking “if this story made me side with Kurt, why did that happen?”]
I don’t know if “dense” is the word I use, but yeah, I think you missed my point.
My ELI5 would be “You’re still assuming the problem was ‘Kurt didn’t know how to use a pump’ and not ‘there was something wrong with your pump’”.
I don’t want to speculate too much beyond that eg about the discretionary budget stuff.
Happy to hear that!
(I had used that pump that very day, shortly before, to pump up the replacement tire.)
I talked to Kurt in some detail. Nate never apologized or acknowledged the bike pump incident (until now). After that incident, Nate never came back and said e.g. “wow, I was really frustrated earlier, sorry for taking that out on you!” The next time Kurt was alone with him was in the elevator later that week, and there was a cold silence that neither of them broke.
One alternative could be to regulate your emotions so you don’t feel as intense frustration from a given epistemic position? I think this is what most people do.
I suspect that lines like this are giving people the impression that you [Nate] don’t think there are (realistic) things that you can improve, or that you’ve “given up”.
My understanding is that your perspective is something like “I feel like I recognize that there’s stuff I can do to improve, and I’ve tried to put a lot of energy into finding those improvements, and I’m pretty open to others suggesting specific things I could do. But a lot of things that other people think would be easy fixes actually don’t work or don’t work for someone with my emotional makeup (e.g., because they’re super costly or because I don’t end up being able to implement them well.)
Like, my guess is that some people are like “wait what, why is it costly or infeasible for you to just gently tell someone that you don’t have time/energy for a conversation and politely tell them to talk to their manager?”
And then their reaction is “oh, Nate must not care or must not be trying.” (Which, to be clear, I find to be a reasonable hypothesis. Or at least the continuous version, which is something like “hm, maybe Nate doesn’t care enough or isn’t trying as much as I think the community should expect people in his position to try” or something.)
And then your reaction is “gosh, I am trying, but people seem to systematically underestimate how costly/infeasible a lot of their suggestions are.”
I’m not really sure what to do about this, other than “maybe if this is acknowledged, it’ll lead to more a more constructive dialogue between you and those who want you or expect you to change.”
How do you/MIRI communicate about working with you now?
Insofar as you’re querying the near future: I’m not currently attempting work collaborations with any new folk, and so the matter is somewhat up in the air. (I recently asked Malo to consider a MIRI-policy of ensuring all new employees who might interact with me get some sort of list of warnings / disclaimers / affordances / notes.)
Insofar as you’re querying the recent past: There aren’t many recent cases to draw from. This comment has some words about how things went with Vivek’s hires. The other recent hires that I recall both (a) weren’t hired to do research with me, and (b) mentioned that they’d read my communication handbook (as includes the affordance-list and the failure-modes section, which I consider to be the critcial pieces of warning), which I considered sufficient. (But then I did have communication difficulties with one of them (of the “despair” variety), which updated me somewhat.)
Insofar as you’re querying about even light or tangential working relationships (like people asking my take on a whiteboard when I’m walking past), currently I don’t issue any warnings in those cases, and am not convinced that they’d be warranted.
To be clear: I’m not currently personally sold on the hypothesis that I owe people a bunch of warnings. I think of them as more of a sensible thing to do; it’d be lovely if everyone was building explicit models of their conversational failure-modes and proactively sharing them, and I’m a be-the-change-you-wanna-see-in-the-world sort of guy.
(Perhaps by the end of this whole conversation I will be sold on that hypothesis! I’ve updated in that direction over the past couple days.)
(To state the obvious: I endorse MIRI institutionally acting according to others’ conclusions on that matter rather than on mine, hence asking Malo to consider it independently.)
One frame I want to lay out is that it seems like you’re not accounting for the organizational cost of how you treat employees/collaborators. An executive director needing to mostly not talk to people, and shaping hiring around social pain tolerance, is a five alarm fire for organizations as small as MIRI. Based on the info here, my first thought is you should be in a different role, so that you have fewer interactions and less implied power. That requires someone to replace you as ED, and I don’t know if there are any options available, but at a minimum I think you/MIRI should be treating the status quo as potentially extremely costly, and taking steps to assess the total cost and potential fixes.
I could be wrong here, 98% of my information is from this post + comments, but I get the sense you/MIRI haven’t looked sufficiently hard to even assess what the costs are. It sounds like you have asked people, which is great and more than most orgs do, but I get the sense you haven’t grappled with the magnitude of the costs beyond the personal and social.
Nate stepped down as ED shortly after [edit: actually before] our project ended, the website just hasn’t been updated. I’m not sure what exactly the organizational structure is now, but you can probably message @lisathiergart for an update.
Edit: there is now an announcement.