We shared a 2000 word high-level summary of all important claims made in the original post, as far as I can tell. I sadly can’t share it in-full here because a bunch of the information would be deanonymizing, but I would be happy to set up a call and show you the email, or answer any specific questions you have about what evidence was shared.
Here is an overview including a bunch of quotes of what we sent Nonlinear then (and if you think this is important I can also fully remove all deanonymizing information from the email, which would take me on the order of an hour or two, and share it with you):
Basic information about when Nonlinear was founded and who worked there during the relevant period
Basic details about when Alice and Chloe worked there
That Chloe’s salary was verbally agreed to be $75k/year, with $1k/month in stipend and the rest in food/board/travel, which ultimately (according to Chloe and Alice) did not actually add up to $75k/year
That Alice joined as the sole person in the incubation program, and that she received no salary for the first months of traveling with Nonlinear
That Alice often had less than $1000 in her bank account and would often rack up substantial expenses in reimbursements, and that at the end of her employment Nonlinear owed her multiple thousands of dollars
There were no written specifications of how healthcare and covered medical bills would work
The story with Emerson and Adorian Deck and how it seemed very adversarial
Other rumors about Emerson doing questionably legal things in order to intimidate people he was in conflict with
As I understand it they were considered to have the lowest monetary value of time in the house, and consequently were given a lot of the menial tasks around the house.
“They also reported being strongly discouraged from spending time away from the Nonlinear house (e.g. living in a separate AirBnb) and with people that you folks didn’t consider valuable/worthwhile. They both reported very strong senses of social and financial dependence while working with you.”
“During her time at Nonlinear, [Alice] quit being a vegan. This was during a time when she caught Covid, and was unable to get enough vegan food to eat for ~2 days.
“You asked [Chloe] to do a lot of driving regularly for her job, but she didn’t know how to drive. You gave her driving lessons (I believe that was from Drew), and then encouraged her to drive without a license for 1-2 months. She eventually was freaked out about this and stopped and regrets doing it, and thinks that she would not have done so if she wasn’t in such an otherwise isolating and dependent environment.”
“There was a long period of difficult relations with [Alice] and Kat, and some conflict regarding monogamy/polyamory, that disrupted working together quite a bit.”
“Relatedly, as [Alice] was returning from Mexico, Kat made a request for her to bring back several drugs over the border, some recreational, some for productivity.”
“Both [Alice] and [Chloe] reported feeling really hurt by their time at Nonlinear, and taking some months to recover before they could go back to work.”
“[Alice] reports a lot of effusive positive emotions from you, including various familial and sometimes romantic feelings of love, yet also felt threatened in various ways about her career and that she was in some pretty difficult financial circumstances as a result of working for you. These things seem pretty incongruent to me and potentially quite manipulative.”
“I’m not sure how to quickly summarize this. It seems to me they had a lot of strongly negative experiences or made decisions they regret that you (their employers and managers and the majority of their social environment) have some substantial responsibility for, in setting up this environment.”
“A number of people I spoke to were concerned about retaliation from you if they shared their experiences with me, and initially only did so under condition of strict confidentiality, which I was willing to offer because I had a bunch of warning flags raised from various people I trust who reached out to me and also from the financial situation Kat reported when we spoke at Lightcone.”
“[Alice] showed me some texts from Kat that offered support with “basic survival stuff” like housing, if Alice would “commit to not saying bad things about us to them”. This sort of behavior makes it very hard for me to trust impressions I get about your team — if people with negative information are being given strong reasons to keep it quiet, then I can’t find out about negative information about you, and I have a lot of uncertainty about how much I don’t know. A sense that people were scared to share negative info, and concerns about covering-up negative info, are the main reason I’m trying to find out what happened with [Alice] and [Chloe] and others as much as I am.
“[Alice] also showed me texts from Kat saying that [Alice] was saying bad things about you behind your back, and said that if you did the same to her her career in EA “would be over in a few Dm’s”. I’m interested to know what the content of those hypothetical DM’s would be. To be clear this definitely reads to me as a veiled threat.
I’m confused by the heavy disagree-voting on this comment. Are people saying with their votes that this does not actually cover all the important claims in the post? If someone who disagree-voted (or otherwise disagrees) wanted to comment I’d find that illuminating!
One of habryka’s other comments in this thread suggests that someone (or some small group of people, or some single person with sockpuppets) is downvoting literally everything habryka posts in this thread.
It would be nice if there were some way for someone with no conflict of interest to investigate that...
We shared a 2000 word high-level summary of all important claims made in the original post, as far as I can tell. I sadly can’t share it in-full here because a bunch of the information would be deanonymizing, but I would be happy to set up a call and show you the email, or answer any specific questions you have about what evidence was shared.
Here is an overview including a bunch of quotes of what we sent Nonlinear then (and if you think this is important I can also fully remove all deanonymizing information from the email, which would take me on the order of an hour or two, and share it with you):
Basic information about when Nonlinear was founded and who worked there during the relevant period
Basic details about when Alice and Chloe worked there
That Chloe’s salary was verbally agreed to be $75k/year, with $1k/month in stipend and the rest in food/board/travel, which ultimately (according to Chloe and Alice) did not actually add up to $75k/year
That Alice joined as the sole person in the incubation program, and that she received no salary for the first months of traveling with Nonlinear
That Alice often had less than $1000 in her bank account and would often rack up substantial expenses in reimbursements, and that at the end of her employment Nonlinear owed her multiple thousands of dollars
There were no written specifications of how healthcare and covered medical bills would work
The story with Emerson and Adorian Deck and how it seemed very adversarial
Other rumors about Emerson doing questionably legal things in order to intimidate people he was in conflict with
As I understand it they were considered to have the lowest monetary value of time in the house, and consequently were given a lot of the menial tasks around the house.
“They also reported being strongly discouraged from spending time away from the Nonlinear house (e.g. living in a separate AirBnb) and with people that you folks didn’t consider valuable/worthwhile. They both reported very strong senses of social and financial dependence while working with you.”
“During her time at Nonlinear, [Alice] quit being a vegan. This was during a time when she caught Covid, and was unable to get enough vegan food to eat for ~2 days.
“You asked [Chloe] to do a lot of driving regularly for her job, but she didn’t know how to drive. You gave her driving lessons (I believe that was from Drew), and then encouraged her to drive without a license for 1-2 months. She eventually was freaked out about this and stopped and regrets doing it, and thinks that she would not have done so if she wasn’t in such an otherwise isolating and dependent environment.”
“There was a long period of difficult relations with [Alice] and Kat, and some conflict regarding monogamy/polyamory, that disrupted working together quite a bit.”
“Relatedly, as [Alice] was returning from Mexico, Kat made a request for her to bring back several drugs over the border, some recreational, some for productivity.”
“Both [Alice] and [Chloe] reported feeling really hurt by their time at Nonlinear, and taking some months to recover before they could go back to work.”
“[Alice] reports a lot of effusive positive emotions from you, including various familial and sometimes romantic feelings of love, yet also felt threatened in various ways about her career and that she was in some pretty difficult financial circumstances as a result of working for you. These things seem pretty incongruent to me and potentially quite manipulative.”
“I’m not sure how to quickly summarize this. It seems to me they had a lot of strongly negative experiences or made decisions they regret that you (their employers and managers and the majority of their social environment) have some substantial responsibility for, in setting up this environment.”
“A number of people I spoke to were concerned about retaliation from you if they shared their experiences with me, and initially only did so under condition of strict confidentiality, which I was willing to offer because I had a bunch of warning flags raised from various people I trust who reached out to me and also from the financial situation Kat reported when we spoke at Lightcone.”
“[Alice] showed me some texts from Kat that offered support with “basic survival stuff” like housing, if Alice would “commit to not saying bad things about us to them”. This sort of behavior makes it very hard for me to trust impressions I get about your team — if people with negative information are being given strong reasons to keep it quiet, then I can’t find out about negative information about you, and I have a lot of uncertainty about how much I don’t know. A sense that people were scared to share negative info, and concerns about covering-up negative info, are the main reason I’m trying to find out what happened with [Alice] and [Chloe] and others as much as I am.
“[Alice] also showed me texts from Kat saying that [Alice] was saying bad things about you behind your back, and said that if you did the same to her her career in EA “would be over in a few Dm’s”. I’m interested to know what the content of those hypothetical DM’s would be. To be clear this definitely reads to me as a veiled threat.
I’m confused by the heavy disagree-voting on this comment. Are people saying with their votes that this does not actually cover all the important claims in the post? If someone who disagree-voted (or otherwise disagrees) wanted to comment I’d find that illuminating!
One of habryka’s other comments in this thread suggests that someone (or some small group of people, or some single person with sockpuppets) is downvoting literally everything habryka posts in this thread.
It would be nice if there were some way for someone with no conflict of interest to investigate that...