It should be noted that, as I was nominally Nate’s employee, it is consistent with standard business practices for him to prevent me from talking with people who might distract me from my work; this goes to show the continuity between “cults” and “normal corporations”.
This is very much not standard business practice. Working as an employee at four different “normal corporations” over thirteen years, I have never felt any pressure from my bosses (n=5) on who to talk to outside of work. And I’ve certainly been distracted at times!
Now that I’m a manager, I similarly would never consider this, even if I did think that one of my employees was being seriously distracted. If someone wasn’t getting their work done or was otherwise not performing well, we would certainly talk about that, but who their contacts are is absolutely no business of mine.
I never told Jessica not to talk to someone (or at the very least, I don’t recall it and highly doubt it). IIRC, in that time period, Jessica and one other researcher were regularly inviting Michael to the offices and talking to him at length during normal business hours. IIRC, the closest I came to “telling Jessica not to talk to someone” was expressing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. The surrounding context was that Jessica had suffered performance (or at least Nate-legible-performance) degredation in the previous months, and we were meeting more regularly in attempts to see if we could work something out, and (if memory serves) I expressed skepticism about whether lengthy talks with Michael (in the office, during normal business hours) would result in improvement along that axis. Even then, I am fairly confident that I hedged my skepticism with caveats of the form “I don’t think it’s a good idea, but it’s not my decision”.
A relevant fact is that at MIRI we didn’t have set office hours (at least not that I remember), and Michael Vassar came to the office sometimes during the day. So one could argue that he was talking to people during work hours. (Still, I think the conversations we were having were positive for being able to think more clearly about AI alignment and related topics.) Also it seems somewhat likely that Nate was discouraging Michael from talking with me in general, not just during weekdays/daytime.
This is very much not standard business practice. Working as an employee at four different “normal corporations” over thirteen years, I have never felt any pressure from my bosses (n=5) on who to talk to outside of work. And I’ve certainly been distracted at times!
Now that I’m a manager, I similarly would never consider this, even if I did think that one of my employees was being seriously distracted. If someone wasn’t getting their work done or was otherwise not performing well, we would certainly talk about that, but who their contacts are is absolutely no business of mine.
I never told Jessica not to talk to someone (or at the very least, I don’t recall it and highly doubt it). IIRC, in that time period, Jessica and one other researcher were regularly inviting Michael to the offices and talking to him at length during normal business hours. IIRC, the closest I came to “telling Jessica not to talk to someone” was expressing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. The surrounding context was that Jessica had suffered performance (or at least Nate-legible-performance) degredation in the previous months, and we were meeting more regularly in attempts to see if we could work something out, and (if memory serves) I expressed skepticism about whether lengthy talks with Michael (in the office, during normal business hours) would result in improvement along that axis. Even then, I am fairly confident that I hedged my skepticism with caveats of the form “I don’t think it’s a good idea, but it’s not my decision”.
Thanks for the correction.
A relevant fact is that at MIRI we didn’t have set office hours (at least not that I remember), and Michael Vassar came to the office sometimes during the day. So one could argue that he was talking to people during work hours. (Still, I think the conversations we were having were positive for being able to think more clearly about AI alignment and related topics.) Also it seems somewhat likely that Nate was discouraging Michael from talking with me in general, not just during weekdays/daytime.
I’ll edit the post to make these things clearer.