An organization gets applications from all kinds of people at once, whereas an individual can only ever work at one org. It’s easier to discreetly contact most of the most relevant parties about some individual than it is to do the same with an organization.
I also think it’s fair to hold orgs that recruit within the EA or rationalist communities to slightly higher standards because they benefit directly from association with these communities.
That said, I agree with habryka (and others) that
I think if the accusations are very thoroughly falsified and shown to be highly deceptive in their presentation, I can also imagine some scenarios where it might make sense to stop anonymizing, though I think the bar for that does seem pretty high.
I agree in general, but think the force of this is weaker in this specific instance because NonLinear seems like a really small org. Most of the issues raised seem to be associated with in-person work and I would be surprised if NonLinear ever went above 10 in-person employees. So at most this seems like one order of magnitude in difference. Clearly the case is different for major corporations or orgs that directly interact with many more people.
Note that one of the reasons why I cared about getting this report out was that Nonlinear was getting more influential as a middleman in the AI Safety funding ecosystem, through which they affected many people’s lives and I think had influence beyond what a naive headcount would suggest. The Nonlinear network had many hundreds of applications.
As a personal example, I also think Lightcone, given that its at the center of a bunch of funding stuff, and infrastructure work, should also be subject to greater scrutiny than specific individuals, given the number of individuals that are affected by our work. And we are about the same size as Nonlinear, I think.
An organization gets applications from all kinds of people at once, whereas an individual can only ever work at one org. It’s easier to discreetly contact most of the most relevant parties about some individual than it is to do the same with an organization.
I also think it’s fair to hold orgs that recruit within the EA or rationalist communities to slightly higher standards because they benefit directly from association with these communities.
That said, I agree with habryka (and others) that
I agree in general, but think the force of this is weaker in this specific instance because NonLinear seems like a really small org. Most of the issues raised seem to be associated with in-person work and I would be surprised if NonLinear ever went above 10 in-person employees. So at most this seems like one order of magnitude in difference. Clearly the case is different for major corporations or orgs that directly interact with many more people.
Note that one of the reasons why I cared about getting this report out was that Nonlinear was getting more influential as a middleman in the AI Safety funding ecosystem, through which they affected many people’s lives and I think had influence beyond what a naive headcount would suggest. The Nonlinear network had many hundreds of applications.
As a personal example, I also think Lightcone, given that its at the center of a bunch of funding stuff, and infrastructure work, should also be subject to greater scrutiny than specific individuals, given the number of individuals that are affected by our work. And we are about the same size as Nonlinear, I think.