I have worked without legal contracts for people in EA I trust, and it has worked well.
Even if all the accusation of Nonlinear is true, I still have pretty high trust for people in EA or LW circles, such that I would probably agree to work with no formal contract again.
The reason I trust people in my ingroup is that if either of us screw over the other person, I expect the victim to tell their friends, which would ruin the reputation of the wrongdoer. For this reason both people have strong incentive to act in good faith. On top of that I’m wiling to take some risk to skip the paper work.
When I was a teenager I worked a bit under legally very sketch circumstances. They would send me to work in some warehouse for a few days, and draw up the contract for that work afterwards. Including me falsifying the date for my signature. This is not something I would have agreed to with a stranger, but the owner of my company was a friend of my parents, and I trusted my parents to slander them appropriately if they screwed me over.
I think my point is that this is not something very uncommon, because doing everything by the book is so much overhead, and sometimes not worth it.
It think being able to leverage reputation based and/or ingroup based trust is immensely powerful, and not something we should give up on.
For this reason, I think the most serious sin committed by Nonlinear, is their alleged attempt of silencing critics. Update to clarify: This is based on the fact that people have been scared of criticising Nonlinear. Not based on any specific wording of any specific message. Update: On reflection, I’m not sure if this is the worst part (if all accusations are true). But it’s pretty high on the list.
I don’t think making sure that no EA every give paid work to another EA, with out a formal contract, will help much. The most vulnerable people are those new to the movement, which are exactly the people who will not know what the EA norms are anyway. An abusive org can still recruit people with out contracts and just tell them this is normal.
I think a better defence mechanism is to track who is trust worthy or not, by making sure information like this comes out. And it’s not like having a formal contract prevents all kinds of abuse.
Update based on responses to this comment: I do think having a written agreement, even just an informal expression of intentions, is almost always strictly superior to not having anything written down. When writing this I comment I was thinking in terms of formal contract vs informal agreement, which is not the same as verbal vs written.
I don’t think making sure that no EA every give paid work to another EA, with out a formal contract, will help much
I feel like people are talking about written records like it’s a huge headache, but they don’t need to be. When freelancing I often negotiate verbally, then write an email with terms to the client., who can confirm or correct them. I don’t start work until they’ve confirmed acceptance of some set of terms. This has enough legal significance that it lowers my business insurance rates, and takes seconds if people are genuinely on the same page.
What my lawyer parent taught me was that contracts can’t prevent people from screwing you over. (which is impossible). At my scale and probably most cases described here, the purpose of a contract is to prevent misunderstandings between people of goodwill. And it’s so easy to do notably better than nonlinear did here.
This is a good point. I was thinking in terms of legal vs informal, not in terms of written vs verbal.
I agree that having something written down is basically always better. Both for clarity, as you say, and because peoples memories are not perfect. And it have the added bonus that if there is a conflict, you have something to refer back to.
(This is Duncan Sabien, logging in with the old Conor Moreton account b/c this feels important.)
While I think Linda’s experience is valid, and probably more representative than mine, I want to balance it by pointing out that I deeply, deeply, deeply regret taking a(n explicit, unambiguous, crystal clear) verbal agreement, and not having a signed contract, with an org pretty central to the EA and rationality communities. As a result of having the-kind-of-trust that Linda describes above, I got overtly fucked over to the tune of many thousands of dollars and many months of misery and confusion and alienation, and all of that would’ve been prevented by a simple written paragraph with two signatures at the bottom.
(Such a paragraph would’ve either prevented the agreement from being violated in the first place, or would at least have made the straightforward violation that occurred less of a thing that people could subsequently spin webs of fog and narrativemancy around, to my detriment.)
As for the bit about telling your friends and ruining the reputation of the wrongdoer … this option was largely NOT available to me, for fear-of-reprisal reasons as well as not wanting to fuck up the subsequent situation I found myself in, which was better, but fragile. To this day, I still do not feel like it’s safe to just be fully open and candid about the way I was treated, and how many norms of good conduct and fair dealings were broken in the process. The situation was eventually resolved to my satisfaction, but there were years of suffering in between.
If @Rob Bensinger does in fact cross-post Linda’s comment, I request he cross-posts this, too.
(I will probably not engage with responses because I’m still trying to avoid being here; dropping a comment feels less risky on that front than having a back-and-forth exchange.)
The contract is signed for when bad things and disagreements happen, not for when everything is going good. In my opinion “I had no contract and everything was good” is not as good example as “we didn’t have a contract, had major disagreement, and everything still worked out” would be.
Even though I hate bureaucracy and admin work and I prefer to skip as much as reasonable to move faster, my default is to have a written agreement, especially if working with a given person/org for the first time. Generally, the weaker party should have the final say on forgoing a contract. This is especially true the more complex and difficult situation is (eg. living/travelling together, being in romantic relationships).
I agree with the general view that both signing and not signing have prons and cons and sometimes it’s better to not sign and avoid the overhead.
I have worked without legal contracts for people in EA I trust, and it has worked well.
Even if all the accusation of Nonlinear is true, I still have pretty high trust for people in EA or LW circles, such that I would probably agree to work with no formal contract again.
The reason I trust people in my ingroup is that if either of us screw over the other person, I expect the victim to tell their friends, which would ruin the reputation of the wrongdoer. For this reason both people have strong incentive to act in good faith. On top of that I’m wiling to take some risk to skip the paper work.
When I was a teenager I worked a bit under legally very sketch circumstances. They would send me to work in some warehouse for a few days, and draw up the contract for that work afterwards. Including me falsifying the date for my signature. This is not something I would have agreed to with a stranger, but the owner of my company was a friend of my parents, and I trusted my parents to slander them appropriately if they screwed me over.
I think my point is that this is not something very uncommon, because doing everything by the book is so much overhead, and sometimes not worth it.
It think being able to leverage reputation based and/or ingroup based trust is immensely powerful, and not something we should give up on.
For this reason, I think the most serious sin committed by Nonlinear, is their alleged attempt of silencing critics.
Update to clarify: This is based on the fact that people have been scared of criticising Nonlinear. Not based on any specific wording of any specific message.
Update: On reflection, I’m not sure if this is the worst part (if all accusations are true). But it’s pretty high on the list.
I don’t think making sure that no EA every give paid work to another EA, with out a formal contract, will help much. The most vulnerable people are those new to the movement, which are exactly the people who will not know what the EA norms are anyway. An abusive org can still recruit people with out contracts and just tell them this is normal.
I think a better defence mechanism is to track who is trust worthy or not, by making sure information like this comes out. And it’s not like having a formal contract prevents all kinds of abuse.
Update based on responses to this comment: I do think having a written agreement, even just an informal expression of intentions, is almost always strictly superior to not having anything written down. When writing this I comment I was thinking in terms of formal contract vs informal agreement, which is not the same as verbal vs written.
I feel like people are talking about written records like it’s a huge headache, but they don’t need to be. When freelancing I often negotiate verbally, then write an email with terms to the client., who can confirm or correct them. I don’t start work until they’ve confirmed acceptance of some set of terms. This has enough legal significance that it lowers my business insurance rates, and takes seconds if people are genuinely on the same page.
What my lawyer parent taught me was that contracts can’t prevent people from screwing you over. (which is impossible). At my scale and probably most cases described here, the purpose of a contract is to prevent misunderstandings between people of goodwill. And it’s so easy to do notably better than nonlinear did here.
This is a good point. I was thinking in terms of legal vs informal, not in terms of written vs verbal.
I agree that having something written down is basically always better. Both for clarity, as you say, and because peoples memories are not perfect. And it have the added bonus that if there is a conflict, you have something to refer back to.
(This is Duncan Sabien, logging in with the old Conor Moreton account b/c this feels important.)
While I think Linda’s experience is valid, and probably more representative than mine, I want to balance it by pointing out that I deeply, deeply, deeply regret taking a(n explicit, unambiguous, crystal clear) verbal agreement, and not having a signed contract, with an org pretty central to the EA and rationality communities. As a result of having the-kind-of-trust that Linda describes above, I got overtly fucked over to the tune of many thousands of dollars and many months of misery and confusion and alienation, and all of that would’ve been prevented by a simple written paragraph with two signatures at the bottom.
(Such a paragraph would’ve either prevented the agreement from being violated in the first place, or would at least have made the straightforward violation that occurred less of a thing that people could subsequently spin webs of fog and narrativemancy around, to my detriment.)
As for the bit about telling your friends and ruining the reputation of the wrongdoer … this option was largely NOT available to me, for fear-of-reprisal reasons as well as not wanting to fuck up the subsequent situation I found myself in, which was better, but fragile. To this day, I still do not feel like it’s safe to just be fully open and candid about the way I was treated, and how many norms of good conduct and fair dealings were broken in the process. The situation was eventually resolved to my satisfaction, but there were years of suffering in between.
If @Rob Bensinger does in fact cross-post Linda’s comment, I request he cross-posts this, too.
(I will probably not engage with responses because I’m still trying to avoid being here; dropping a comment feels less risky on that front than having a back-and-forth exchange.)
I was going to ask if I could!
I understand if people don’t want to talk about it, but I do feel sad that there isn’t some kind of public accounting of what happened there.
(Well, I don’t concretely understand why people don’t want to talk about it, but I can think of possibilities!)
Thanks for adding your perspective.
I agree with this.
The contract is signed for when bad things and disagreements happen, not for when everything is going good. In my opinion “I had no contract and everything was good” is not as good example as “we didn’t have a contract, had major disagreement, and everything still worked out” would be.
Even though I hate bureaucracy and admin work and I prefer to skip as much as reasonable to move faster, my default is to have a written agreement, especially if working with a given person/org for the first time. Generally, the weaker party should have the final say on forgoing a contract. This is especially true the more complex and difficult situation is (eg. living/travelling together, being in romantic relationships).
I agree with the general view that both signing and not signing have prons and cons and sometimes it’s better to not sign and avoid the overhead.
Can I cross-post this to the EA Forum? (Or you can do it, if you prefer; but I think this is a really useful comment.)
I’m glad you liked it. You have my permission to cross post.