Hi, thanks for saying you liked the idea, and also appreciate the chance to clear up some things here. As a reminder, we’re not making funding decisions. We’re just helping funders and applicants find each other.
Some updates on that thread you might not have seen: the EA Forum moderators investigated and banned two users for creating ~8 fake sockpuppet accounts. This has possibly led to information cascades about things “lots of people are saying.”
Another thing you might not be aware of: the Glassdoor CEO rating of 0% was actually not Emerson (who left in early 2017), but his successor. Emerson’s reviews were actually above average for GlassDoor.
Regardless, I don’t think that this should matter anyway, because we’re just connecting folks with funders because we think it will help the ecosystem.
It’s unclear to me whether there’s a credible accusation against y’all. So, in the interest of wanting to not have to worry about such a thing when and if I apply to stuff through nonlinear -
What are your plans for how to remove yourself from the equation by nature of providing a mechanically checkable tool that does not permit you to intervene on who can apply to who? In general, that’s what I expect a good networking tool to do. I wouldn’t want uncertainty about the validity of the nonlinear group to compromise an application, especially if this is at risk of turning out to be another scam like FTX turned out to be; I imagine it’d be a smaller issue than that, but of course you wouldn’t want to promise it’s not a scam, as that promise is vacuous, adding no information to the external view of whether it is one. The only way to verify such a thing is to design for mechanistic auditability, that is to say, processes that do not have a step on which a shaky reputationed person can exert influence, such as an open source application tool.
With that in mind, I am in fact interested in applying to some sort of funding process. I just don’t want to be accepting unreasonable reputational risk by depending on a challenged reputation with no mechanistic safeguarding against the hypothesized behaviors represented by reputational concern
level. I’d ask others to do as much with any org I was at.
Thanks for the info about sockpuppeting, will edit my first comment accordingly.
Re: Glassdoor, the most devastating reviews were indeed after 2017, but it’s still the case that nobody rated the CEO above average among the ~30 people who worked in the Spartz era.
I went through and added up all of the reviews from when Emerson was in charge and the org averaged a 3.9 rating. You can check my math if you’d like (5+3+5+4+1+4+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+1+5+5+3+5+5+5+3+1+2+4+5+3+1)/27
Not diving into it super thoroughly, but when I google “what’s the average glassdoor rating”, the first three results I see are: 3.5, 3.3, and 3.3. So I think this counts as being above average on Glassdoor.
For the reviews of the CEO, it seems they added that feature after Emerson was CEO. There’s only one CEO approval rating before 2017. If however you read the qualitative reviews and look at the overall rating of the org, you’ll find it’s above average.
Just for the record, I currently believe this statement to be true, though not very confidently. It matches with what I heard about Dose from a bunch of different sources:
All of these super positive reviews are being commissioned by upper management. That is the first thing you should know about Spartz, and I think that gives a pretty good idea of the company’s priorities.
I don’t know the exact date that Emerson left, but there are really a lot of negative reviews right at the beginning of 2017, none of them mentioning a major restructuring. I think the highly negative glassdoor reviews are still a quite major warning flag, even if a lot of them happened after Emerson left (though it does definitely also matter that they were made after Emerson left)
Hi, thanks for saying you liked the idea, and also appreciate the chance to clear up some things here. As a reminder, we’re not making funding decisions. We’re just helping funders and applicants find each other.
Some updates on that thread you might not have seen: the EA Forum moderators investigated and banned two users for creating ~8 fake sockpuppet accounts. This has possibly led to information cascades about things “lots of people are saying.”
Another thing you might not be aware of: the Glassdoor CEO rating of 0% was actually not Emerson (who left in early 2017), but his successor. Emerson’s reviews were actually above average for GlassDoor.
Regardless, I don’t think that this should matter anyway, because we’re just connecting folks with funders because we think it will help the ecosystem.
It’s unclear to me whether there’s a credible accusation against y’all. So, in the interest of wanting to not have to worry about such a thing when and if I apply to stuff through nonlinear -
What are your plans for how to remove yourself from the equation by nature of providing a mechanically checkable tool that does not permit you to intervene on who can apply to who? In general, that’s what I expect a good networking tool to do. I wouldn’t want uncertainty about the validity of the nonlinear group to compromise an application, especially if this is at risk of turning out to be another scam like FTX turned out to be; I imagine it’d be a smaller issue than that, but of course you wouldn’t want to promise it’s not a scam, as that promise is vacuous, adding no information to the external view of whether it is one. The only way to verify such a thing is to design for mechanistic auditability, that is to say, processes that do not have a step on which a shaky reputationed person can exert influence, such as an open source application tool.
With that in mind, I am in fact interested in applying to some sort of funding process. I just don’t want to be accepting unreasonable reputational risk by depending on a challenged reputation with no mechanistic safeguarding against the hypothesized behaviors represented by reputational concern level. I’d ask others to do as much with any org I was at.
Thanks for the info about sockpuppeting, will edit my first comment accordingly.
Re: Glassdoor, the most devastating reviews were indeed after 2017, but it’s still the case that nobody rated the CEO above average among the ~30 people who worked in the Spartz era.
Thanks for updating! LessWrong at it’s best :)
I went through and added up all of the reviews from when Emerson was in charge and the org averaged a 3.9 rating. You can check my math if you’d like (5+3+5+4+1+4+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+1+5+5+3+5+5+5+3+1+2+4+5+3+1)/27
For reference, Meta has a 4 star rating on GlassDoor and has won one of their prizes for Best Place to Work for 12 years straight. (2022 (#47), 2021 (#11), 2020 (#23), 2019 (#7), 2018 (#1), 2017 (#2), 2016 (#5), 2015 (#13), 2014 (#5), 2013 (#1), 2012 (#3), 2011 (#1))
Not diving into it super thoroughly, but when I google “what’s the average glassdoor rating”, the first three results I see are: 3.5, 3.3, and 3.3. So I think this counts as being above average on Glassdoor.
For the reviews of the CEO, it seems they added that feature after Emerson was CEO. There’s only one CEO approval rating before 2017. If however you read the qualitative reviews and look at the overall rating of the org, you’ll find it’s above average.
Just for the record, I currently believe this statement to be true, though not very confidently. It matches with what I heard about Dose from a bunch of different sources:
I don’t know the exact date that Emerson left, but there are really a lot of negative reviews right at the beginning of 2017, none of them mentioning a major restructuring. I think the highly negative glassdoor reviews are still a quite major warning flag, even if a lot of them happened after Emerson left (though it does definitely also matter that they were made after Emerson left)