I responded to your EA forum comments much earlier in the day, but my responses are still stuck in the mod filter, so I might repeat myself a bit here. I’m not part of EA, but I’ve been around the rationalist sphere for a long while and I have more experience than most here with investigative journalism–adjacent work.
You regularly mention hundreds of hours of work, a deadline you had to meet, the inconvenience you would have faced upon delaying, and the chance that you might have chosen not to publish at all had you delayed.
That’s all very well and good, but honestly doesn’t sway the needle for me at all in terms of your duty in the situation. Self-imposed deadlines are not an excuse to avoid hearing out one party to a conflict you’re publishing.
In those hundreds of hours, so far as I can tell, you spent a grand total of three gathering one side of the story—the side of a group Ben’s post was explicitly adversarial towards and explicitly aimed at destroying the reputation of. When they told him they were compiling a detailed list of evidence to respond to some of his claims, you guys flatly refused to investigate further or delay your self-imposed deadline. I cover a story like this almost every week for the podcast I work for, and I put more time into gathering opposing stories than that.
I believe you when you say that (almost) all evidence Ben was given made it into the post. I emphatically disagree that holding a firm publication deadline was reasonable when you were being warned of evidence that would materially contradict many claims within your post. When the reputation of someone within their own community is at stake, you want to dot every i and cross every t, and spending hundreds of hours over the course of several months collecting accusations and a single-digit number in a week collecting rebuttals, up to and including making significant corrections on the final day and rejecting other significant corrections as being too late to add, does not meet that standard.
Trying someone in the court of public opinion can be as serious a matter as trying them in the court of law, and while you say the goal of the post was not to judge, that is both hard to square with lines like “I expect that if Nonlinear does more hiring in the EA ecosystem it is more-likely-than-not to chew up and spit out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world” and hard to square with the duty you take on by electing to publish an exposé about someone. You have to play the role of judge in an article like that, and you are not fulfilling your duty by circulating allegations without putting in sufficient due diligence.
In those hundreds of hours, so far as I can tell, you spent a grand total of three gathering one side of the story—the side of a group Ben’s post was explicitly adversarial towards and explicitly aimed at destroying the reputation of.
Look, man, what do you want us to do. We talked to dozens of other people working at the organization, extensively cross-checked the stories they told us, and also did extensive independent research to figure out what happened. Also, our sources were terrified of retribution and did not want to be exposed to the leadership.
We talked to them multiple times, for many hours, though yeah, we weren’t able to show them everything we were planning to publish. What is the threshold of hours of engagement where it’s OK to publish such an article according to your perspective?
This is all totally standard stuff when you do investigative reporting. Of course you don’t always give the organization you are reporting on full access to your article before you publish it. I wish people could reliably do that, but it’s genuinely hard with sources who are worried about retribution.
I encourage you to talk to any investigative reporter with experience in the field and ask them whether your demands here are at all realistic for anyone working in the space.
and spending hundreds of hours over the course of several months collecting accusations and a single-digit number in a week collecting rebuttals, up to and including making significant corrections on the final day
This is also really not an accurate summary. Most of the months were spent crossing the i’s and dotting the t’s. They were spent trying to find contradictory evidence, and they were also spent following up on concrete things that the Nonlinear leadership told us about.
I told you what I wanted you to do. You say it’s unrealistic, I say that I wouldn’t think to hold you to a standard I don’t hold myself to.
I’m a blogger and a podcast producer, not an investigative journalist, and I’m paid to focus on internet nonsense, not truly critical, world-saving stuff. But I do my fair share of investigative work. This article is one of my recent high-effort investigations, over someone getting punched on a beach after a long series of ugly subculture drama—a much lower-stakes sequence than the one you covered, but one no less personal or painful for the participants.
The “antagonists” were not particularly communicative, but I reached out to them multiple times, including right before publication, checking if I could ask questions and asking them to review my claims about them for accuracy. I went to the person closest to them who was informed on the situation and got as much information as I could from them. I spent hours talking with my primary sources, the victim and his boyfriend, and collecting as much hard evidence as possible. I spent a long time weighing which points were material and which would just serve to stir up and uncover old drama. Parties claimed I was making major material errors at several points during the process, and I dug into their claims as thoroughly as I could and asked for all available evidence to verify. Often, the disputes they claimed were material hinged on dissatisfaction with framing.
All sources were, mutually, worried about retribution and vitriol from the other parties involved. All sources were part of the same niche subculture spaces, all had interacted many times over the past half-decade, mostly unhappily, and all had complicated, ugly backstories.
I was not paid for this, except inasmuch as I’m paid a part-time monthly salary for podcast production work. I did it in my spare time while balancing a full law school schedule. I approached it with care, with seriousness, and with full understanding of the reputational effects I expected it to have and the evidence I had backing and justifying those effects. What I want you to do is exactly what I would do if I were assigned this task, given comparable timing and hour constraints. No more, no less.
There’s no threshold of hours of engagement. The test I am describing is this: are you receiving, or do you seem likely to receive, new material facts that contradict elements of your narrative? You were, up until two hours before publication, with a promise that there was more on the way. There is nothing unreasonable about saying publication should be delayed in that circumstance.
Anyway, look, I’m not an investigative reporter with experience in the field, much as I LARP as one online. That said, I’m on good personal terms with several and am happy to put my money where my mouth is and check with them. Let me know if the following is an appropriate summary or whether you’d make changes:
Say you were advising someone on a story they’d been working on for six months aimed at presenting an exposé of a group their sources were confident was doing harm. They’d contacted dozens of people, cross-checked stories, and did extensive independent research over the course of hundreds of hours, paying their key sources for the trouble. Their sources, who will be anonymous but realistically identifiable in the article, express serious concerns about retribution and request a precise, known-in-advance publication date. Towards the end, they contact the group in question, with their primary conversation lasting a few hours and coming less than a week before their scheduled publication date. The group claims that several points in their article are materially wrong and libelous and asks for another week to compile evidence to rebut those claims, growing increasingly frantic as the publication date approaches and escalating to a threat of a libel suit. On the last day before publication, they show a draft to another person close to the story, who makes at least one clear correction of material fact, then, with a couple of hours to go before the scheduled publication, provides evidence contradicting another of the article’s supporting claims.
Would you advise them to publish the article in its current form, make a last-minute edit to include the final piece of material evidence, wait another week to review the claimed rebuttal, or take some other course of action?
I like this summary, actually! Some small edits I would make:
On the last day before publication, they show a draft to another person close to the story, who makes at least one clear correction of material fact, then, with a couple of hours to go before the scheduled publication, provides evidence contradicting another of the article’s supporting claims.
This is currently inaccurate. Spencer did not point out a material inaccuracy. Here is the original quote that we showed Spencer:
This is all totally accurate. Spencer pointed out that a good chunk of the relevant review period was not the one in which Emerson was CEO, and so not all of these reviews must be of Emerson as CEO (which we did not claim, but I can see how someone might read it that way). So we edited it to be the following:
I think the previous reviews were relevant to the case at hand, and the evidence was accurate as presented (even if they were about the company that Emerson left behind, and not while he was there, though some of the reviews were about Emerson). We did nevertheless replace it with just reviews from the relevant time period, to make things more robust, but I do not consider the previous presentation inaccurate, and the pointer to the glassdoor page to still be relevant evidence (especially given the one review we quoted here, which mentions Spartz directly).
As such, it is not accurate to say that material inaccuracies were pointed out to us in the post.
Towards the end, they contact the group in question, with their primary conversation lasting a few hours and coming less than a week before their scheduled publication date.
This is also inaccurate in that we first talked to Nonlinear about the accusations many months before the publication date, when we weren’t sure yet whether we would publish anything on this topic. What is accurate is that we only informed Nonlinear that we are going to publish a post and informed them about the material facts.
Here is how I would currently phrase things, leaving most of your language intact:
Say you were advising someone on a story they’d been working on for six months aimed at presenting an exposé of a group their sources were confident was doing harm. They’d contacted dozens of people, cross-checked stories, and did extensive independent research over the course of hundreds of hours.
Their sources, who will be anonymous but realistically identifiable in the article, express serious concerns about retribution and request a known-in-advance publication date.
They have talked to the group they are investigating multiple times to gather evidence, but have not informed them that they are planning to release an exposé with the evidence they gathered. 7 days before their scheduled publication date they contact the group and inform them about their intent to publish and the key claims they are planning to include in their exposé.
The group claims that several points in their article are materially wrong and libelous and asks for another week to compile evidence to rebut those claims, growing increasingly frantic as the publication date approaches and escalating to a threat of a libel suit.
On the last day before publication, they show a draft to another person close to the story who points out a detail that does not directly contradict anything in the post, but seems indirectly implied to be false, which they correct in the final publication. Then with two hours to go before the scheduled publication, the same contact provides evidence against one of the statements made in the post, though also does not definitely disprove it.
Would you advise them to publish the article in its current form, or delay publication, despite the credible requests about the sources about retribution and the promise of the scheduled publication date?
If you would be up for sending something like this to someone who works in investigative journalism, I would actually appreciate it. Some things that seem relevant to clarify:
I would really like you to avoid framing the question too much. I think this is very easy among friends.
I think it would be good to differentiate “what he considers prudent for your own libel risk” from “what he considers his ethical responsibility”. I think it’s somewhat plausible (though not that likely) that he would be like “well, you really want to avoid a libel suit so you have to halt publication”, but I am more interested what he would consider ethical, ignoring self-interest (I think whether it was prudent to go ahead given libel risk is an interesting question, but not I hope to answer with this inquiry).
Thank you for offering to do this. I do find myself pretty interested in the answer. I don’t think an answer one way or another would totally flip me here, but I would definitely update somewhat.
It’s tempting to nitpick the edits a bit, but I think this is probably close enough to get good answers while being approximately satisfactory to both of us. I’ll let you know how it goes.
The above image contains the full text of my message, absent the rest of the copy-pasted hypo. I’ll note in the interests of broad fairness that other involved parties suggested edits, notably that the last-minute evidence was evidence indicating the key witness had lied and that “7 days” is longer than they had to respond to the material claims. I used none of their suggestions. I think the hypo could be a reasonable question across a somewhat broad range of specific factual emphases and think the framing as-is is sufficient to get good answers; in my messages, I did not alter the hypo from the words you chose.
I reached out to three journalists with long investigative track records and have two responses so far. It goes without saying that these are people I have close working relationships, regular communication, or other personal connections with, but I believe the framing and lack of context provided mean they are well-positioned to consider the question in the abstract and on the merits independent of any connections.
The first response (update: from Katie Herzog):
I would delay publication. I’m not sure about the specifics of libel law but putting myself in a publisher’s shoes, they do tend to not want to get sued and your first commitment, beyond getting the scoop or even stopping the hypothetical group from doing harm, should be towards accuracy.
The second (update: from Jesse Singal):
I think it depends a lot on the group’s ability to provide evidence the investigators’ claims are wrong. In a situation like that I would really press them on the specifics. They should be able to provide evidence fairly quickly. You don’t want a libel suit but you also don’t want to let them indefinitely delay the publication of an article that will be damaging to them. It is a tricky situation! I am not sure an investigative reporter would be able to help much more simply because what you’re providing is a pretty vague account, though I totally understand the reasons why that’s necessary.
UPDATE:
The third, from Helen Lewis:
This feels like a good example of why you shouldn’t over-promise to your sources—you want a cordial relationship with them but you need boundaries too. I can definitely see a situation where you would agree to give a source a heads up once you’d decided to publish — if it was a story where they’d recounted a violent incident or sexual assault, or if they needed notice to stay somewhere else or watch out for hacking attempts. But I would be very wary of agreeing in advance when I would publish an investigation—it isn’t done until it’s done.
In the end the story is going out under your name, and you will face the legal and ethical consequences, so you can’t publish until you’re satisfied. If the sources are desperate to make the information public, they can make a statement on social media. Working with a journalist involves a trade-off: in exchange for total control, you get greater credibility, plausible deniability and institutional legal protection. If I wasn’t happy with a story against a ticking clock, I wouldn’t be pressured into publication. That’s a huge risk of libelling the subjects of the piece and trashing your professional reputation.
On the request for more time for right to reply, that’s a judgement call—is this a fair period for the allegations involved, or time wasting? It’s not unknown for journalists to put in a right to reply on serious allegations, and the subject ask for more time, and then try to get ahead of the story by breaking it themselves (by denying it).
Hmm, the first one seems to be responding at the level of “here is how you don’t get sued”. Would be interested in a follow-up question asking what to do if you are not concerned about getting sued.
The second one makes sense. Would be happy to draft something with more detail as a response, so we can get something out of it.
I would change the text. He gave us less than 24 hours.
He sent us the draft in the middle of the night, filled with many accusations we hadn’t even heard of, on a day he knew we were traveling and wouldn’t be able to respond properly. He said he’d publish it that very day (aka <24 hours)
He ended up publishing it the next day at a time where we normally would have been asleep, except that we’d asked a friend to call us and wake us up if Ben was posting. We ended up having to respond to that post on a fraction of the sleep we usually get.
You could try to save he gave us 60 hours if you count from the time he spoke to us to the time he published. However, when we spoke to him, we thought he would wait to see our evidence. He also didn’t tell us many of the accusations he was going to publish, so I think this is an unfair characterization of the time they gave us
He did not promise to look at the evidence before publishing, so he was consistent in that regard, but we thought he would wait since he explicitly said in a follow up email: “FYI I did update from things you shared that Alice’s reports are less reliable than I had thought, and I do expect you’ll be able to show a bunch of the things you said.”
He did not wait to see the evidence. The evidence he’d already seen had, in his own words, made him realize that Alice was less reliable than he thought, and he knew we were sending him things like interview transcripts and screenshots providing concrete evidence that they’d told him falsehoods and misleading claims.
And he published anyways.
I think it would be good to share that with your journalist friends.
Here’s the relevant section explaining the whole timeline.
I’ve been trying to stay out of this, but I’m honestly shocked at this claim you’re making.
You say:
We talked to dozens of other people working at the organization, extensively cross-checked the stories they told us
But this is, just, wildly false? You did not speak to dozens of other people working at Nonlinear.
And Ben himself contradicts you. In Ben’s post, he says:
My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe).
Ben thinks we’ve only had 7 total team members, but we’ve actually had 21 - extremely far off.
If you “extensively cross-checked the stories,” how did Ben get such a basic number so wrong? And why are you under the impression that you had talked to dozens of employees if Ben did not?
The fact that you spent 1000 hours on this and got such key details this wrong is surprising to me.
Ok, but why is this a big deal? Aside from showing egregiously bad fact checking, a large portion of Ben’s post was trying to make the case that there is a pattern of Nonlinear “chewing up and spitting out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world.” It would significantly weaken your case if it were 2 out of 21 team members [1]were unhappy instead of 2 out of 7.
Not only that, but to my knowledge, Ben did not talk to a single employee or intern since Alice and Chloe to see if these patterns were, in fact, patterns.
Sorry, saying “worked at” is definitely not the right term, sorry about that.
We talked to dozens of people who have either worked at Nonlinear, otherwise worked with people currently at Nonlinear, or have substantially engaged with Nonlinear in a professional capacity and so seem like they are in a good position to judge what happened. “Worked at” is definitely the wrong word. I should have said something like “have worked with people at Nonlinear”.
I don’t particularly want to litigate the employee thing in this random thread. My best guess is Ben was talking about the number of employees during the specific stretch of months that the article was covering.
It is also inaccurate that only 2 employees we talked to had bad experiences. As Ben mentions multiple times in the post, many additional people we talked to had bad experiences (though generally of somewhat lesser magnitude).
I responded to your EA forum comments much earlier in the day, but my responses are still stuck in the mod filter, so I might repeat myself a bit here. I’m not part of EA, but I’ve been around the rationalist sphere for a long while and I have more experience than most here with investigative journalism–adjacent work.
You regularly mention hundreds of hours of work, a deadline you had to meet, the inconvenience you would have faced upon delaying, and the chance that you might have chosen not to publish at all had you delayed.
That’s all very well and good, but honestly doesn’t sway the needle for me at all in terms of your duty in the situation. Self-imposed deadlines are not an excuse to avoid hearing out one party to a conflict you’re publishing.
In those hundreds of hours, so far as I can tell, you spent a grand total of three gathering one side of the story—the side of a group Ben’s post was explicitly adversarial towards and explicitly aimed at destroying the reputation of. When they told him they were compiling a detailed list of evidence to respond to some of his claims, you guys flatly refused to investigate further or delay your self-imposed deadline. I cover a story like this almost every week for the podcast I work for, and I put more time into gathering opposing stories than that.
I believe you when you say that (almost) all evidence Ben was given made it into the post. I emphatically disagree that holding a firm publication deadline was reasonable when you were being warned of evidence that would materially contradict many claims within your post. When the reputation of someone within their own community is at stake, you want to dot every i and cross every t, and spending hundreds of hours over the course of several months collecting accusations and a single-digit number in a week collecting rebuttals, up to and including making significant corrections on the final day and rejecting other significant corrections as being too late to add, does not meet that standard.
Trying someone in the court of public opinion can be as serious a matter as trying them in the court of law, and while you say the goal of the post was not to judge, that is both hard to square with lines like “I expect that if Nonlinear does more hiring in the EA ecosystem it is more-likely-than-not to chew up and spit out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world” and hard to square with the duty you take on by electing to publish an exposé about someone. You have to play the role of judge in an article like that, and you are not fulfilling your duty by circulating allegations without putting in sufficient due diligence.
Look, man, what do you want us to do. We talked to dozens of other people working at the organization, extensively cross-checked the stories they told us, and also did extensive independent research to figure out what happened. Also, our sources were terrified of retribution and did not want to be exposed to the leadership.
We talked to them multiple times, for many hours, though yeah, we weren’t able to show them everything we were planning to publish. What is the threshold of hours of engagement where it’s OK to publish such an article according to your perspective?
This is all totally standard stuff when you do investigative reporting. Of course you don’t always give the organization you are reporting on full access to your article before you publish it. I wish people could reliably do that, but it’s genuinely hard with sources who are worried about retribution.
I encourage you to talk to any investigative reporter with experience in the field and ask them whether your demands here are at all realistic for anyone working in the space.
This is also really not an accurate summary. Most of the months were spent crossing the i’s and dotting the t’s. They were spent trying to find contradictory evidence, and they were also spent following up on concrete things that the Nonlinear leadership told us about.
I told you what I wanted you to do. You say it’s unrealistic, I say that I wouldn’t think to hold you to a standard I don’t hold myself to.
I’m a blogger and a podcast producer, not an investigative journalist, and I’m paid to focus on internet nonsense, not truly critical, world-saving stuff. But I do my fair share of investigative work. This article is one of my recent high-effort investigations, over someone getting punched on a beach after a long series of ugly subculture drama—a much lower-stakes sequence than the one you covered, but one no less personal or painful for the participants.
The “antagonists” were not particularly communicative, but I reached out to them multiple times, including right before publication, checking if I could ask questions and asking them to review my claims about them for accuracy. I went to the person closest to them who was informed on the situation and got as much information as I could from them. I spent hours talking with my primary sources, the victim and his boyfriend, and collecting as much hard evidence as possible. I spent a long time weighing which points were material and which would just serve to stir up and uncover old drama. Parties claimed I was making major material errors at several points during the process, and I dug into their claims as thoroughly as I could and asked for all available evidence to verify. Often, the disputes they claimed were material hinged on dissatisfaction with framing.
All sources were, mutually, worried about retribution and vitriol from the other parties involved. All sources were part of the same niche subculture spaces, all had interacted many times over the past half-decade, mostly unhappily, and all had complicated, ugly backstories.
I was not paid for this, except inasmuch as I’m paid a part-time monthly salary for podcast production work. I did it in my spare time while balancing a full law school schedule. I approached it with care, with seriousness, and with full understanding of the reputational effects I expected it to have and the evidence I had backing and justifying those effects. What I want you to do is exactly what I would do if I were assigned this task, given comparable timing and hour constraints. No more, no less.
There’s no threshold of hours of engagement. The test I am describing is this: are you receiving, or do you seem likely to receive, new material facts that contradict elements of your narrative? You were, up until two hours before publication, with a promise that there was more on the way. There is nothing unreasonable about saying publication should be delayed in that circumstance.
Anyway, look, I’m not an investigative reporter with experience in the field, much as I LARP as one online. That said, I’m on good personal terms with several and am happy to put my money where my mouth is and check with them. Let me know if the following is an appropriate summary or whether you’d make changes:
I like this summary, actually! Some small edits I would make:
This is currently inaccurate. Spencer did not point out a material inaccuracy. Here is the original quote that we showed Spencer:
This is all totally accurate. Spencer pointed out that a good chunk of the relevant review period was not the one in which Emerson was CEO, and so not all of these reviews must be of Emerson as CEO (which we did not claim, but I can see how someone might read it that way). So we edited it to be the following:
I think the previous reviews were relevant to the case at hand, and the evidence was accurate as presented (even if they were about the company that Emerson left behind, and not while he was there, though some of the reviews were about Emerson). We did nevertheless replace it with just reviews from the relevant time period, to make things more robust, but I do not consider the previous presentation inaccurate, and the pointer to the glassdoor page to still be relevant evidence (especially given the one review we quoted here, which mentions Spartz directly).
As such, it is not accurate to say that material inaccuracies were pointed out to us in the post.
This is also inaccurate in that we first talked to Nonlinear about the accusations many months before the publication date, when we weren’t sure yet whether we would publish anything on this topic. What is accurate is that we only informed Nonlinear that we are going to publish a post and informed them about the material facts.
Here is how I would currently phrase things, leaving most of your language intact:
If you would be up for sending something like this to someone who works in investigative journalism, I would actually appreciate it. Some things that seem relevant to clarify:
I would really like you to avoid framing the question too much. I think this is very easy among friends.
I think it would be good to differentiate “what he considers prudent for your own libel risk” from “what he considers his ethical responsibility”. I think it’s somewhat plausible (though not that likely) that he would be like “well, you really want to avoid a libel suit so you have to halt publication”, but I am more interested what he would consider ethical, ignoring self-interest (I think whether it was prudent to go ahead given libel risk is an interesting question, but not I hope to answer with this inquiry).
Thank you for offering to do this. I do find myself pretty interested in the answer. I don’t think an answer one way or another would totally flip me here, but I would definitely update somewhat.
It’s tempting to nitpick the edits a bit, but I think this is probably close enough to get good answers while being approximately satisfactory to both of us. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Thank you, I appreciate it!
The above image contains the full text of my message, absent the rest of the copy-pasted hypo. I’ll note in the interests of broad fairness that other involved parties suggested edits, notably that the last-minute evidence was evidence indicating the key witness had lied and that “7 days” is longer than they had to respond to the material claims. I used none of their suggestions. I think the hypo could be a reasonable question across a somewhat broad range of specific factual emphases and think the framing as-is is sufficient to get good answers; in my messages, I did not alter the hypo from the words you chose.
I reached out to three journalists with long investigative track records and have two responses so far. It goes without saying that these are people I have close working relationships, regular communication, or other personal connections with, but I believe the framing and lack of context provided mean they are well-positioned to consider the question in the abstract and on the merits independent of any connections.
The first response (update: from Katie Herzog):
The second (update: from Jesse Singal):
UPDATE:
The third, from Helen Lewis:
Thank you!
Hmm, the first one seems to be responding at the level of “here is how you don’t get sued”. Would be interested in a follow-up question asking what to do if you are not concerned about getting sued.
The second one makes sense. Would be happy to draft something with more detail as a response, so we can get something out of it.
I would change the text. He gave us less than 24 hours.
He sent us the draft in the middle of the night, filled with many accusations we hadn’t even heard of, on a day he knew we were traveling and wouldn’t be able to respond properly. He said he’d publish it that very day (aka <24 hours)
He ended up publishing it the next day at a time where we normally would have been asleep, except that we’d asked a friend to call us and wake us up if Ben was posting. We ended up having to respond to that post on a fraction of the sleep we usually get.
You could try to save he gave us 60 hours if you count from the time he spoke to us to the time he published. However, when we spoke to him, we thought he would wait to see our evidence. He also didn’t tell us many of the accusations he was going to publish, so I think this is an unfair characterization of the time they gave us
He did not promise to look at the evidence before publishing, so he was consistent in that regard, but we thought he would wait since he explicitly said in a follow up email: “FYI I did update from things you shared that Alice’s reports are less reliable than I had thought, and I do expect you’ll be able to show a bunch of the things you said.”
He did not wait to see the evidence. The evidence he’d already seen had, in his own words, made him realize that Alice was less reliable than he thought, and he knew we were sending him things like interview transcripts and screenshots providing concrete evidence that they’d told him falsehoods and misleading claims.
And he published anyways.
I think it would be good to share that with your journalist friends.
Here’s the relevant section explaining the whole timeline.
I’ve been trying to stay out of this, but I’m honestly shocked at this claim you’re making.
You say:
But this is, just, wildly false? You did not speak to dozens of other people working at Nonlinear.
And Ben himself contradicts you. In Ben’s post, he says:
Ben thinks we’ve only had 7 total team members, but we’ve actually had 21 - extremely far off.
If you “extensively cross-checked the stories,” how did Ben get such a basic number so wrong? And why are you under the impression that you had talked to dozens of employees if Ben did not?
The fact that you spent 1000 hours on this and got such key details this wrong is surprising to me.
Ok, but why is this a big deal? Aside from showing egregiously bad fact checking, a large portion of Ben’s post was trying to make the case that there is a pattern of Nonlinear “chewing up and spitting out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world.” It would significantly weaken your case if it were 2 out of 21 team members [1]were unhappy instead of 2 out of 7.
Not only that, but to my knowledge, Ben did not talk to a single employee or intern since Alice and Chloe to see if these patterns were, in fact, patterns.
This seems like poor truth-seeking to me.
edit: changed “employees” to “team members”
Sorry, saying “worked at” is definitely not the right term, sorry about that.
We talked to dozens of people who have either worked at Nonlinear, otherwise worked with people currently at Nonlinear, or have substantially engaged with Nonlinear in a professional capacity and so seem like they are in a good position to judge what happened. “Worked at” is definitely the wrong word. I should have said something like “have worked with people at Nonlinear”.
I don’t particularly want to litigate the employee thing in this random thread. My best guess is Ben was talking about the number of employees during the specific stretch of months that the article was covering.
It is also inaccurate that only 2 employees we talked to had bad experiences. As Ben mentions multiple times in the post, many additional people we talked to had bad experiences (though generally of somewhat lesser magnitude).