Epistemic Status, this whole thing exhausts me but I think Nonlinear do get to ask me to take seriously this evidence. I would really like to be able to edit this as people respond, but y’all hate that, so I dunno. But I will probably change my mind on at least1point (80%) and clarify at least 3 if we have a big discussion (90%)
Tl;dr
Edit I didn’t update much from the original piece and so I didn’t update much on this one either. I think this makes my views quite weird tbh.
Nonlinear was likely a hard-mode place to work but I’m not sure that’s awful
Nonlinear seem to move pretty quickly from collaborate mode to conflict mode. Quicker than I do, at least
CEA, LessWrong and funders get to decide who they let in and who they don’t. A boundary against behaviour like this for a org to be represented at EAG doesn’t seem crazy to me.
This evidence updates me a little
That nonlinear are less “a bit dishonest” and more “technically honest, but very hard to negotiate with”
The suing thing looks even worse than I thought, given how I don’t think that relevant info is deeply wrong. (edit—to me, threats of legal action are a huge escalation, but others less so)
That Pace could should have given more time as a show of good faith, but frankly, I don’t think it would have worked and I don’t know when the suing threat came. Once that was out, I probably endorse publishing
Takes that matter to me from the original post:
Are Nonlinear controlling, particularly frame controlling?
Are Nonlinear accurate in their speech—when they say they’ll do something, will they do it?
Will Nonlinear use threats to get what they want?
Meta takes that actually matter to me
Did Ben Pace do a fair job here?
Evidence and counter evidence on those takes
Frame control
Evidence that I care about
The stories from Chloe and Alice painted a picture of Non-Linear. A close, ambitious, high-stress, often renegotiated environment.
Others agreed with this, and those that had a rosy view of Non-Linear didn’t seem to push against this narrative
My view on finishing the first article
I am not sure this amounts to frame control. I said a similar thing at the time. But I do think that many people might not want to work with Non-Linear and Non-Linear should be careful who they hire.
Nonlinear should have a reputation for being high stress, tough and not for everyone. Nonlinear shouldn’t have a reputation for being a safe place for people who don’t know themselves really well to work.
Evidence from this new article
I don’t see a lot of it. In fact it sort of seems to make it even more likely to me.
When the response to a complaint about being exhausted and working on a weekend, seemingly involuntarily, Is this, I see a lot about boundaries—Note the Non Linear team have written this, not Chloe “My boss offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean island St. Barths, which required one hour of work to arrange the boat and ATV rentals (for me to enjoy too). But it was one hour on a weekend, so I complained, and it never happened again.”
I agree that this isn’t the worst thing, but I can imagine that Chloe felt pushed into doing work she didn’t want to do and that everything was up for negotiation. Seems very plausible
Even now, small details from the original account have been elided, this from Chloe, “We had guests over and the team with the guests had decided in the morning that it’s a good vacation day for going to St Barths. I laid low because I thought since I’m also on a weekend day, it would not be mine to organize”
“Emerson approaches me to ask if I can set up the trip. I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself. He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”. I don’t know how to respond nor how to get out of it, I don’t feel like I have the energy to negotiate with him so I start work, hoping that if I get it done quickly, I can have the rest of the day for myself. ”
Yes, I would not work here. Sounds exhausting. But she had agreed and was paid. I employ people and if I felt like I were pushing someone to this extent, I would feel uncomfortable. But adults do get to choose where they work.
But we also get to choose who we recommend. I think I’d make caveats before recommending Nonlinear, but that also doesn’t mean I think they have been unacceptable. Feels like we need some new categories here. I would call them a medium to hard difficulty company, not for players new to the game.
I don’t really care that Alice seemingly lies a lot. Chloe’s account seems solid and when we get to the nitty gritty I always seem to find this same thing—events where I wouldn’t want to be Alice or Chloe
My current views
I think I think that Nonlinear was not a criminal or awful place, but it asked a lot of people and those people, given time and space to reflect, might have left earlier than they did. I guess it’s great for some and terrible for others.
Nonlinear have some duty to ensure that people who will hate it don’t get employed by them.
They seem to agree:
“Nevertheless, some things we are doing differently are:
Not living with employees & all employees being remote.
Not using that compensation structure again.
Hiring assistants who’ve already been assistants, so they know they like it.”
Accuracy
Evidence from the original piece
Some anecdotes about Emerson being calculating, deceptive
My views on finishing the article
It maybe updated me a little on them behaving badly
I already thought Nonlinear were willing to solve problems in whatever way seemed best to them. And I don’t always know that I think that’s bad. I like there being different approaches. But communities can decide that something is too far for them.
I am not sure that I would advise people employ Nonlinear unless they want this kind of problem solving.
I find the Emerson was intimidating in business deals a pretty weak update because it’s like 3rd hand at this point. Hard to know what happened
Evidence from the new piece
Seems that some of the anecdotes about Emmerson were informed by bits that were taken out. Not sure how to feel about this. Clearly those examples weren’t loadbearing for Pace, but I guess I update back a bit
The pay stuff does seem pretty inaccurate. Saying [these things were equivalent to $70k] doesn’t mean you paid someone $70k and a lot of the discussion is about control.
Likewise it’s starting to look like [you can pay yourself what you want] never meant the person had control over the money. And that’s a big difference.
My current views
I wouldn’t be super surprised by some bad behavior and dishonesty and I don’t think Nonlinear are at my “top tier honest accurate” standard. Probably they aren’t at my “normy person” standard either. More like my “interesting wheeler dearler, be careful but not actively hostile” standard.
As someone who likes freedom to act, I can imagine the costs of this reputation to them. But I don’t see a lot against it. And sometimes you want a hard knuckle problem solver.
Threats
Evidence from the original piece
Nonlinear threatened to sue
Kat’s messages
My views on finishing
Yeah that’s kind of threatening and bullying
Evidence from the new piece
It does seem pretty plausible that Alice does this a lot (60%?)
If I’d read that article and felt as Nonlinear feel I probably would expect huge damage. But, as above, I don’t really feel that Pace has been hugely wrong so far on key elements. So I think the suing was too far.
My views
I agree that there should be a way to push back, but the pushback has to actually be relevant to the disagreements at hand. Since I don’t believe Nonlinear are the worst, just kind of hard-mode employers, a lot of this pushback feels unnecessary.
I have had people say saddening things about me. I’ve been in the headspace where I was hurt and annoyed about what someone was saying about me and wanted to confront them.
I don’t endorse saying things like “companies do not hire people who speak ill of their previous employer” (link). It is possibly true, but it is just so, I dunno, off. Whine to your friends, talk to the LessWrong/Community Health team. At the point where I am trying to do lessons about who to talk to to someone who is upset with me, I find that’s a huge red flag and these days I talk to my therapist and I kvetch to my close largely non-EA/rationalist friends. A lot. I want to be credibly not-lashing-out in such situations. This doesn’t look like that.
I think the suing suggestions moves this really adversarially. It’s such a huge gamble and I don’t think they had the cards to back the bet. I think it should still be seen as a big negative against Nonlinear, I guess worse now, even.
Ben Pace
Evidence from the original piece
He had put it up giving Nonlinear a couple of days to respond
Spencer said there were some big issues
My views after the first piece
I empathised with Pace, especially given the suing threats. If someone is threatening me, I can see the temptation to push that beyond my control to back down on
Evidence from the new piece
Here are the most substantive disagreements, in my view:
Alice as a bad actor
Pace does make clear that Alice is sometimes dishonest.
Nonlinear gestures at a set of stories that paint alice as doing this all the time.
I dunno. I guess I think Alice can behave pretty badly and so can Nonlinear. The question is whether she lies about stuff that matters.
Housing
Pace: “Everyone lived in the same house. Emerson and Kat would share a room, and the others would make do with what else was available, often sharing bedrooms.”
I guess that when they travelled the world, where most of the stories come from, they did live apart from others, but yeah, a bit
Family
Pace: “Alice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/visitors that Nonlinear invited. Alice and Chloe report this made them very socially dependent on Kat/Emerson/Drew and otherwise very isolated.”
Both stories can be true. Again I can imagine that sometime Nonlinear too pains to really care about the needs of employees and sometimes they didn’t. I guess I’d have liked the addional context here, though Pace made clear that he was only providingthe worst stories
My views after the second piece
Yeah maybe Ben could have given them a week, but I don’t see that my views have changed much and it does seem like Nonlinear would try all sorts of shenanigans in that week.
The threatening to sue also would make me want to publish quickly also, (edit but it’s less clear to me that I endorse this)
Nonlinear spent 3 months writing a response which has not moved me much, so I don’t know how a week would have helped.
Ben seemed to do a fine job. This does seem like info that should have been out in the open. Perhaps people are over updating on it, but I guess I think that’s on people. I never thought Nonlinear deserved to be shut down and I still don’t
(edit If you read it and thought that Nonlinear were the worst then maybe you have more of a grievance against Pace, but equally that seems bad on your part)
Summary of response
I continue to think that Nonlinear is a hard place for many people to work. I update a little away from Nonlinear being a bit dishonest to them being technically honest, but misleading, but not such that I’d never work with them (though I’d give caveats to others). I move a little towards thinking Pace should have given more time, but only a little.
My key takeaway here is that much of this damage seemed done already. By how they responded to this and my own experiences, I believe that there was a tax on discussing issues about Nonlinear. This isn’t unique to Nonlinear, there are others who I think behave badly but about who it is costly to share info. I am sure others think I behave badly, people have told me they think I suppress bad info about me. It’s a hard problem. I think Pace’s original article was less bad than many options. I hope funders still feel able to fund Nonlinear if Nonlinear will do work they want done in a way they are happy with.
I don’t think there was much trust between Nonlinear and Pace, Alice, Chloe and others. Seems this was always gonna be hard to resolve, I guess I push that fault more on Nonlinear, but I’m pretty uncertain. 60% maybe?
What next
My general view is that people should get the reputations they deserve and if they want different reputations they should credibly change. Personally, Nonlinear’s reputation as a non-standard move fast and break things org seems pretty reasonable. Also their new reputation as only techinically honest and overly threatening also seems fair. To change that I guess they might want to apologise for the threat to sue, acknowledge ways in which staff weren’t making choices that enlightened versions of them would have and talk about how they will do things differently or how these things didn’t happen.
Other notes
The fact that their response is so long and doesn’t seem to focus on cruxes is also a sort of broad problem here. it suggests Nonlinear don’t really understand Pace or me (not that they should, but they really haven’t convinced me). I don’t have much hope for resolution.
I don’t respond to a lot of the other stuff here because I don’t think it’s relevant.
You can read my comments at the time, I don’t think I considered Nonlinear as cruel or abusive. I guess that I might describe the worst of their behaviour like that, maybe, but people behave within broad ranges.
Ah perhaps I misunderstood you then—it sounds like this quote was specifically your own takeaway from reading Ben’s original article, rather than a characterization of the article itself. It’s possible that I’m seeing your position a bit better now—previously I thought you largely agreed with Ben’s article, but on another reread of your comment it seems that you generally hold significantly more moderate view on Nonlinear. (Although your other comment implies that you do believe “Ben’s account holds up”, so I remain confused.)
Well I guess I can only talk about my takeaways from Ben’s article. Like who gets to say what Ben’s article really means? I think probably you should see my reading as pretty different to the median reading. I think I can justify that but if I had realised how differently you all read the article I would have said sooner.
FWIW I think my main takeaway here is that if you update at all on any point of untrustworthiness of the original sources, that update should propagate toward the rest of the points.
I think most brains are bad at this, naturally, and it’s just a hard thing to do without effort, which is why things like Gish gallops and character assassinations work even when debunked.
My secondary takeaway is that people should not update as hard as they do on people threatening to “retaliate” against social harm done to them unless the claims are very obviously true or the “retaliation” is very obviously false. If we don’t know if they’re true or not, then what the accuser feels is “retribution” will be felt by the accused as “justice,” and I think that both are natural feelings most people would have, but most people have not been publicly pilloried and so cannot connect as easily with the empathy for that position.
There’s a lot in here but I was immediately confused by “Nonlinear seem to move pretty quickly from collaborate mode to conflict mode. Quicker than I do, at least”. My understanding is that they were hearing about their ex-employees saying damaging untrue things for over a year but chose not to retaliate partly because they didn’t want to hurt their ex-employees’ reputations, until Ben forced their hand with his deliberately one-sided “Sharing Information” post. That sounds fairly (some might say overly) collaborative to me.
Edit: Here by “retaliate” I mean defending themselves in the way they did with this post, which does have the side effect of harming Alice and Chloe’s reputations. Even then, they purposefuly decided not to de-anonymize their employees, and have a section on how they don’t consider them to have had ill intentions.
What is the best example of an untrue thing that Ben said? Perhaps I struggle because I took it literally when Pace said that Alice was a bit unreliable.
Just to clarify, I was specifically referring to untrue things that the employees said, not Ben (and likewise retaliation against the employees, not against Ben).
If the line you’re taking is that “Ben technically only relayed information given to him by Alice, while admitting that she might be unreliable”, I don’t think that’s very tenable. Publishing like that is implicitly an endorsement, and unlike you I suspect most people ignored the disclaimer, because it would be strange for someone to publish such damaging things that they actually weren’t sure were true. This comment I made on Ben’s original post also touches on this.
Ben definitely did pretty extensive due-diligence for all claims from Alice that made it into the post, to the degree to which it was possible to do what without engaging even more extensively with Nonlinear itself, which was hard because of the preferences of many of our sources (and like, I think for the sake of calibrating people on the reliability of sources, I think it is better practice to include statements and counter-statements in a post like this, since it puts what people said on the record, which then allows people to judge other things that person has said).
I think what is bugging me about this whole situation is that there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism of accountability for the (allegedly) false and/or highly misleading claims made by Alice. You seem to be saying something like, “we didn’t make false and/or highly misleading claims, we just repeated the false and/or highly misleading claims that Alice told us, then we said that Alice was maybe unreliable,” as if this somehow makes the responsibility (legal, ethical, or otherwise) to tell the truth disappear.
“Eventually, after getting to talk with Alice and Chloe, it seemed to me Alice and Chloe would be satisfied to share a post containing accusations that were received as credible. They expected that the default trajectory, if someone wrote up a post, was that the community wouldn’t take any serious action, that Nonlinear would be angry for “bad-mouthing” them, and quietly retaliate against them (by, for instance, reaching out to their employer and recommending firing them, and confidentially sharing very negative stories). They wanted to be confident that any accusations made would be strong enough that people wouldn’t just shrug and move on with their lives. If that happened, the main effect would be to hurt them further and drive them out of the ecosystem.
It seemed to me that I could not personally vouch for any of the claims (at the time), but also that if I did vouch for them, then people would take them seriously. I didn’t know either Alice or Chloe before, and I didn’t know Nonlinear, so I needed to do a relatively effortful investigation to get a better picture of what Nonlinear was like, in order to share the accusations that I had heard.”
It’s not 100% clear, but it seems like Ben is saying that he does (at the time he wrote that post) vouch for the claims of Alice that he included in his post. If Ben did vouch for those claims, and those claims were wrong, and those wrong claims caused large amounts of damage to Nonlinear, and Ben thinks that any retaliation against Alice is unacceptable, then that leaves Ben Pace and Lightcone ultimately responsible does it not?
I think there is totally some shared responsibility for any claims that Ben endorsed, and I also think the post could have done a better job at making many things more explicit quotes, so that they would seem less endorsed, where Ben’s ability to independently verify them was limited.
I don’t think any retaliation against Alice is unacceptable. I think if Alice did indeed make important accusatory claims that were inaccurate, she should face some consequences. I think Ben and Lightcone should also lose points for anything that seems endorsed in the post, or does not have an explicit disclaimer right next to the relevant piece of text, that is verified to be false.
We’re working on some comments and posts that engage with that question more thoroughly, and I expect we will take responsibility for some errors here. I also still believe that the overall standard of care and attention in this investigation was really very high, and I expect won’t be met by future investigations by different people. Some errors are unavoidable given the time available to do this, and the complexity of the situation.
In as much as Ben’s central claims in the post are falsified, then I think that would be pretty massive and would make me think we made a much bigger mistake, but that seems quite unlikely to me at this point (though more of that in future comments).
I think if Alice did indeed make important accusatory claims that were inaccurate, she should face some consequences.
What sort of consequences are you thinking could apply, given that she made these accusations pseudonymously and I assume doxxing and libel suits are off limits?
I don’t know, and agree it’s messy, but also it doesn’t seem hopeless.
I think there will be some degree to which clearly demonstrating that false accusations were made will ripple out into the social graph naturally (even with the anonymization), and will have consequences. I also think there are some ways to privately reach out to some smaller subset of people who might have a particularly good reason to know about this.
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 think there will be some degree to which clearly demonstrating that false accusations were made will ripple out into the social graph naturally (even with the anonymization), and will have consequences. I also think there are some ways to privately reach out to some smaller subset of people who might have a particularly good reason to know about this.
If this is an acceptable resolution, why didn’t you just let the problems with NonLinear ripply out into the social graph naturally?
I think that’s a good question, and indeed I think that should be the default thing that happens!
In this case we decided to do something different because we received a lot of evidence that Nonlinear was actively suppressing negative information about them. As Ben’s post states, the primary reason we got involved with this was that we heard Nonlinear was actively pressuring past employees to not say bad things about them, and many employees we talked to fely very scared of retribution if they told anyone about this, even privately, as long as it could somehow get back to Nonlinear:
Most importantly to me, I especially [wanted to write this post] because it seems to me that Nonlinear has tried to prevent this negative information from being shared
For me the moment I decided that it would be good for us to dedicate substantial time to this was when I saw the “your career in EA could be over in a few messages” screenshot messages. I think if someone starts sending messages like this, different systems need to kick in to preserve healthy information flow.
(In case people are confused about the vote totals here and in other parts of the thread, practically all my comments on this post regardless of content, have been getting downvoted shortly after posting with a total downvote strength of 10, usually split over 2-3 votes. I also think there is a lot of legitimate voting in this thread, but I am pretty sure in this specific pattern.)
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.
Ok, so it sounds like a crux for you is that Ben in fact had high confidence in what he was relaying from Alice being true. In a dispute like this I don’t think you can do very good due diligence when avoiding the people who are most likely to have counter-evidence; even if it is well-intentioned, it’s a sort of conscious confirmation bias. Ben sort of admits to using poor epistemics in his disclaimer (at the top of his original post) about how to update from reading his post, but doesn’t seem to update much on this himself (?), which seems like an error to me particularly when the stakes are this high. Perhaps it’s unnecessary, but I will also point out that deliberately using poor epistemics feels pretty contrary to the spirit of rationality, which for good reason has fought for truth and against poor epistemics.
(I further argue against the premise of the disclaimer and Ben posting without hearing both sides here).
I’m not really sure what we’re arguing at this point. My initial reply was about how collaborative Nonlinear had been, which I don’t think you’ve addressed and isn’t particularly related to whether Ben said true things. I’d also add that in my view Ben posting without getting Nonlinear’s side of the story was itself pretty uncollaborative, and so the “retaliation” against him (in the form of criticizing him for the way he wrote his post) to me seems entirely justified.
Thinking about this more, my guess is that by “uncollaborative” you were specifically referring to Nonlinear’s threat to file for libel against Ben. I agree you could call it that, but I don’t see it as disproportionate given the adversarial nature of Ben’s investigation and the massive cost it has had on Nonlinear. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on this point.
Ok, so I’m guessing your position is that a) you, having read Nonlinear’s reply, continue to believe that most of what Ben relayed from Alice was true, and b) if a few things turn out to be untrue it’s not a big deal because it doesn’t change the overall story, and in any case Ben admitted that Alice might be unreliable.
I’m not entirely sure how you weigh (a) and (b) but it makes more sense to me if your crux is (a), that most of Alice’s claims are true. For that, I’m not sure where to start; as far as I’ve seen they all seem to be false. I guess we could start with the claims about not being paid, e.g. from Ben’s high level overview:
Salary negotiations were consistently a major stressor for Alice’s entire time at Nonlinear. Over her time there she spent through all of her financial runway, and spent a significant portion of her last few months there financially in the red (having more bills and medical expenses than the money in her bank account) in part due to waiting on salary payments from Nonlinear. She eventually quit due to a combination of running exceedingly low on personal funds and wanting financial independence from Nonlinear, and as she quit she gave Nonlinear (on their request) full ownership of the organization that she had otherwise finished incubating.
Nonlinear has several rows in their overview table which contradict this account:
Alice “wasn’t getting paid” only due to her own rather strange mistakes, such as not logging her expenses or not checking her own bank account to see that the money was actually there.
Alice eventually got to choose her own salary.
Alice claimed to be making significant income from her side business.
Alice had much less involvement and ownership of “the organization” than she claimed, and was repeatedly informed of this (this section of the appendix is relevant).
Ben also admits that “[Alice] also had a substantial number of emergency health issues covered [by Nonlinear]”.
We could also talk about Alice’s accusations of not being fed vegan food or being forced to travel with illegal drugs. I’m not sure if this is what you meant by “grievous error” though—please let me know if I’m barking up the wrong tree.
Alice “wasn’t getting paid” only due to her own rather strange mistakes, such as not logging her expenses or not checking her own bank account to see that the money was actually there.
Alice eventually got to choose her own salary.
Alice claimed to be making significant income from her side business.
I would currently like to register (before people assume the above is true) that I am quite confident that the three claims in this quote are inaccurate (based on both existing evidence and more recent evidence that I was shown).
I expect Ben will elaborate on this in his fuller response, but it seemed good to clarify this, and set expectations about which claims I am pretty sure will be falsified.
We have very compelling evidence of the first being false. I would also absolutely dispute the second. Alice has told Nonlinear that if she worked on her Amazon business full-time, she would make $3000/mo, which seems right though maybe a bit optimistic to me (but of course she wasn’t working on it full-time while she was working for Nonlinear).
That to me fully explains the screenshot that Nonlinear posted[1], which is the only direct evidence presented, and indeed seems more consistent with what Emerson is saying (why would he be referring to a total net-income of $3k/mo otherwise, if at this point Alice was already working for Nonlinear and so presumably was now making at least $4k/mo and more like $7k-9k/mo if you count benefits).
This text was sent on November 4th, almost a month before she arrived to come travel with us (not to work for us).
Emerson is not referring to her saying she would make $3000 a month if she worked full-time on her Amazon business. The context of the conversation is she’s trying to figure out whether she should spend an additional $90 to visit her family before joining us, and Emerson is replying saying “If you make $3k a month [$90] is very little money”, so he’s telling her she should spend the $90 to spend time with family. Directly going against the “keeping her isolated from family” story and also supporting (albeit not conclusively proving) that Alice had told him she made $3k per month with her business.
Sure! I could have checked the date, but in that case this evidence also doesn’t support your case here.
If indeed she was making $3000/mo at that point in time (which, to be clear, I don’t think you’ve demonstrated), working on it with much more of her time than she would while she was working at Nonlinear, wouldn’t this be basically confirmation that she wasn’t going to make $3000/mo while working with Nonlinear, given that she was spending much less time on it?
The relevant claim at hand is whether she ever made $3000/mo at the same time as she was working with you at Nonlinear (and you heavily implied that that is what she claimed here). I would be quite surprised if Alice ever claimed this was the case to you.
this seems like a comment that it seems reasonable to disagree with (e.g. think that habryka is wrong and subsequent evidence will not show what he predicts it will show) but it seems straightforwardly good epistemics to make clear predictions about which claims will and won’t be falsified in the upcoming post, so I’m not sure why this comment is as being downvoted more than disagree voted (or downvoted at all).
am I confused about what karma vs agreement voting is supposed to signify?
Approximately all my comments on this thread have been downvoted like this, as soon as they were posted. There are definitely some people with strong feelings downvoting a lot of things on this post very quickly, though most comments end up clawing themselves back into positive karma after a few hours.
continue to believe that most of what Ben relayed from Alice was true
I can believe she is being precise without conveying an accurate picture. I am not sure that I ever thought that alice’s account was the most accurate version of events.
Epistemic Status, this whole thing exhausts me but I think Nonlinear do get to ask me to take seriously this evidence. I would really like to be able to edit this as people respond, but y’all hate that, so I dunno. But I will probably change my mind on at least1point (80%) and clarify at least 3 if we have a big discussion (90%)
Tl;dr
Edit I didn’t update much from the original piece and so I didn’t update much on this one either. I think this makes my views quite weird tbh.
Nonlinear was likely a hard-mode place to work but I’m not sure that’s awful
Nonlinear seem to move pretty quickly from collaborate mode to conflict mode. Quicker than I do, at leastCEA, LessWrong and funders get to decide who they let in and who they don’t. A boundary against behaviour like this for a org to be represented at EAG doesn’t seem crazy to me.
This evidence updates me a little
That nonlinear are less “a bit dishonest” and more “technically honest, but very hard to negotiate with”
The suing thing looks even worse than I thought, given how I don’t think that relevant info is deeply wrong. (edit—to me, threats of legal action are a huge escalation, but others less so)That Pace
couldshould have given more timeas a show of good faith,but frankly, I don’t think it would have worked and I don’t know when the suing threat came. Once that was out, I probably endorse publishingTakes that matter to me from the original post:
Are Nonlinear controlling, particularly frame controlling?
Are Nonlinear accurate in their speech—when they say they’ll do something, will they do it?
Will Nonlinear use threats to get what they want?
Meta takes that actually matter to me
Did Ben Pace do a fair job here?
Evidence and counter evidence on those takes
Frame control
Evidence that I care about
The stories from Chloe and Alice painted a picture of Non-Linear. A close, ambitious, high-stress, often renegotiated environment.
Others agreed with this, and those that had a rosy view of Non-Linear didn’t seem to push against this narrative
My view on finishing the first article
I am not sure this amounts to frame control. I said a similar thing at the time. But I do think that many people might not want to work with Non-Linear and Non-Linear should be careful who they hire.
Nonlinear should have a reputation for being high stress, tough and not for everyone. Nonlinear shouldn’t have a reputation for being a safe place for people who don’t know themselves really well to work.
Evidence from this new article
I don’t see a lot of it. In fact it sort of seems to make it even more likely to me.
When the response to a complaint about being exhausted and working on a weekend, seemingly involuntarily, Is this, I see a lot about boundaries—Note the Non Linear team have written this, not Chloe
“My boss offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean island St. Barths, which required one hour of work to arrange the boat and ATV rentals (for me to enjoy too). But it was one hour on a weekend, so I complained, and it never happened again.”
I agree that this isn’t the worst thing, but I can imagine that Chloe felt pushed into doing work she didn’t want to do and that everything was up for negotiation. Seems very plausible
Even now, small details from the original account have been elided, this from Chloe, “We had guests over and the team with the guests had decided in the morning that it’s a good vacation day for going to St Barths. I laid low because I thought since I’m also on a weekend day, it would not be mine to organize”
“Emerson approaches me to ask if I can set up the trip. I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself. He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”. I don’t know how to respond nor how to get out of it, I don’t feel like I have the energy to negotiate with him so I start work, hoping that if I get it done quickly, I can have the rest of the day for myself. ”
Yes, I would not work here. Sounds exhausting. But she had agreed and was paid. I employ people and if I felt like I were pushing someone to this extent, I would feel uncomfortable. But adults do get to choose where they work.
But we also get to choose who we recommend. I think I’d make caveats before recommending Nonlinear, but that also doesn’t mean I think they have been unacceptable. Feels like we need some new categories here. I would call them a medium to hard difficulty company, not for players new to the game.
I don’t really care that Alice seemingly lies a lot. Chloe’s account seems solid and when we get to the nitty gritty I always seem to find this same thing—events where I wouldn’t want to be Alice or Chloe
My current views
I think I think that Nonlinear was not a criminal or awful place, but it asked a lot of people and those people, given time and space to reflect, might have left earlier than they did. I guess it’s great for some and terrible for others.
Nonlinear have some duty to ensure that people who will hate it don’t get employed by them.
They seem to agree:
“Nevertheless, some things we are doing differently are:
Not living with employees & all employees being remote.
Not using that compensation structure again.
Hiring assistants who’ve already been assistants, so they know they like it.”
Accuracy
Evidence from the original piece
Some anecdotes about Emerson being calculating, deceptive
My views on finishing the article
It maybe updated me a little on them behaving badly
I already thought Nonlinear were willing to solve problems in whatever way seemed best to them. And I don’t always know that I think that’s bad. I like there being different approaches. But communities can decide that something is too far for them.
I am not sure that I would advise people employ Nonlinear unless they want this kind of problem solving.
I find the Emerson was intimidating in business deals a pretty weak update because it’s like 3rd hand at this point. Hard to know what happened
Evidence from the new piece
Seems that some of the anecdotes about Emmerson were informed by bits that were taken out. Not sure how to feel about this. Clearly those examples weren’t loadbearing for Pace, but I guess I update back a bit
The pay stuff does seem pretty inaccurate. Saying [these things were equivalent to $70k] doesn’t mean you paid someone $70k and a lot of the discussion is about control.
Likewise it’s starting to look like [you can pay yourself what you want] never meant the person had control over the money. And that’s a big difference.
My current views
I wouldn’t be super surprised by some bad behavior and dishonesty and I don’t think Nonlinear are at my “top tier honest accurate” standard. Probably they aren’t at my “normy person” standard either. More like my “interesting wheeler dearler, be careful but not actively hostile” standard.
As someone who likes freedom to act, I can imagine the costs of this reputation to them. But I don’t see a lot against it. And sometimes you want a hard knuckle problem solver.
Threats
Evidence from the original piece
Nonlinear threatened to sue
Kat’s messages
My views on finishing
Yeah that’s kind of threatening and bullying
Evidence from the new piece
It does seem pretty plausible that Alice does this a lot (60%?)
If I’d read that article and felt as Nonlinear feel I probably would expect huge damage. But, as above, I don’t really feel that Pace has been hugely wrong so far on key elements. So I think the suing was too far.
My views
I agree that there should be a way to push back, but the pushback has to actually be relevant to the disagreements at hand. Since I don’t believe Nonlinear are the worst, just kind of hard-mode employers, a lot of this pushback feels unnecessary.
I have had people say saddening things about me. I’ve been in the headspace where I was hurt and annoyed about what someone was saying about me and wanted to confront them.
I don’t endorse saying things like “companies do not hire people who speak ill of their previous employer” (link). It is possibly true, but it is just so, I dunno, off. Whine to your friends, talk to the LessWrong/Community Health team. At the point where I am trying to do lessons about who to talk to to someone who is upset with me, I find that’s a huge red flag and these days I talk to my therapist and I kvetch to my close largely non-EA/rationalist friends. A lot. I want to be credibly not-lashing-out in such situations. This doesn’t look like that.
I think the suing suggestions moves this really adversarially. It’s such a huge gamble and I don’t think they had the cards to back the bet. I think it should still be seen as a big negative against Nonlinear, I guess worse now, even.
Ben Pace
Evidence from the original piece
He had put it up giving Nonlinear a couple of days to respond
Spencer said there were some big issues
My views after the first piece
I empathised with Pace, especially given the suing threats. If someone is threatening me, I can see the temptation to push that beyond my control to back down on
Evidence from the new piece
Here are the most substantive disagreements, in my view:
Alice as a bad actor
Pace does make clear that Alice is sometimes dishonest.
Nonlinear gestures at a set of stories that paint alice as doing this all the time.
I dunno. I guess I think Alice can behave pretty badly and so can Nonlinear. The question is whether she lies about stuff that matters.
Housing
Pace: “Everyone lived in the same house. Emerson and Kat would share a room, and the others would make do with what else was available, often sharing bedrooms.”
Nonlinear “Strange, false accusation: Alice spent 2 of the 4 months living/working apart (dozens of EAs can verify she lived/worked in the FTX condos, which we did not live at)”
I guess that when they travelled the world, where most of the stories come from, they did live apart from others, but yeah, a bit
Family
Pace: “Alice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/visitors that Nonlinear invited. Alice and Chloe report this made them very socially dependent on Kat/Emerson/Drew and otherwise very isolated.”
Nonlinear: “Bizarre, false accusation given that Alice spent 1 of the 4 months with her family Kat encouraged her to set up regular calls with her family, and she did.”
Both stories can be true. Again I can imagine that sometime Nonlinear too pains to really care about the needs of employees and sometimes they didn’t. I guess I’d have liked the addional context here, though Pace made clear that he was only providingthe worst stories
My views after the second piece
Yeah maybe Ben could have given them a week,
but I don’t see that my views have changed much and it does seem like Nonlinear would try all sorts of shenanigans in that week.The threatening to sue also would make me want to publish quickly also, (edit but it’s less clear to me that I endorse this)
Nonlinear spent 3 months writing a response which has not moved me much, so I don’t know how a week would have helped.
Ben seemed to do a fine job. This does seem like info that should have been out in the open. Perhaps people are over updating on it, but I guess I think that’s on people. I never thought Nonlinear deserved to be shut down and I still don’t
(edit If you read it and thought that Nonlinear were the worst then maybe you have more of a grievance against Pace, but equally that seems bad on your part)
Summary of response
I continue to think that Nonlinear is a hard place for many people to work. I update a little away from Nonlinear being a bit dishonest to them being technically honest, but misleading, but not such that I’d never work with them (though I’d give caveats to others). I move a little towards thinking Pace should have given more time,
but only a little.My key takeaway here is that much of this damage seemed done already. By how they responded to this and my own experiences, I believe that there was a tax on discussing issues about Nonlinear. This isn’t unique to Nonlinear, there are others who I think behave badly but about who it is costly to share info. I am sure others think I behave badly, people have told me they think I suppress bad info about me. It’s a hard problem. I think Pace’s original article was less bad than many options. I hope funders still feel able to fund Nonlinear if Nonlinear will do work they want done in a way they are happy with.
I don’t think there was much trust between Nonlinear and Pace, Alice, Chloe and others. Seems this was always gonna be hard to resolve, I guess I push that fault more on Nonlinear, but I’m pretty uncertain. 60% maybe?
What next
My general view is that people should get the reputations they deserve and if they want different reputations they should credibly change. Personally, Nonlinear’s reputation as a non-standard move fast and break things org seems pretty reasonable. Also their new reputation as only techinically honest and overly threatening also seems fair. To change that I guess they might want to apologise for the threat to sue, acknowledge ways in which staff weren’t making choices that enlightened versions of them would have and talk about how they will do things differently or how these things didn’t happen.
Other notes
The fact that their response is so long and doesn’t seem to focus on cruxes is also a sort of broad problem here. it suggests Nonlinear don’t really understand Pace or me (not that they should, but they really haven’t convinced me). I don’t have much hope for resolution.
I don’t respond to a lot of the other stuff here because I don’t think it’s relevant.
Just read your comment again and there were a few things that I felt strong disagreement toward. One was you saying that
This feels like a pretty big euphemism for Ben’s piece, which paints Nonlinear as cruel and abusive.
You can read my comments at the time, I don’t think I considered Nonlinear as cruel or abusive. I guess that I might describe the worst of their behaviour like that, maybe, but people behave within broad ranges.
Ah perhaps I misunderstood you then—it sounds like this quote was specifically your own takeaway from reading Ben’s original article, rather than a characterization of the article itself. It’s possible that I’m seeing your position a bit better now—previously I thought you largely agreed with Ben’s article, but on another reread of your comment it seems that you generally hold significantly more moderate view on Nonlinear. (Although your other comment implies that you do believe “Ben’s account holds up”, so I remain confused.)
Well I guess I can only talk about my takeaways from Ben’s article. Like who gets to say what Ben’s article really means? I think probably you should see my reading as pretty different to the median reading. I think I can justify that but if I had realised how differently you all read the article I would have said sooner.
FWIW I think my main takeaway here is that if you update at all on any point of untrustworthiness of the original sources, that update should propagate toward the rest of the points.
I think most brains are bad at this, naturally, and it’s just a hard thing to do without effort, which is why things like Gish gallops and character assassinations work even when debunked.
My secondary takeaway is that people should not update as hard as they do on people threatening to “retaliate” against social harm done to them unless the claims are very obviously true or the “retaliation” is very obviously false. If we don’t know if they’re true or not, then what the accuser feels is “retribution” will be felt by the accused as “justice,” and I think that both are natural feelings most people would have, but most people have not been publicly pilloried and so cannot connect as easily with the empathy for that position.
There’s a lot in here but I was immediately confused by “Nonlinear seem to move pretty quickly from collaborate mode to conflict mode. Quicker than I do, at least”. My understanding is that they were hearing about their ex-employees saying damaging untrue things for over a year but chose not to retaliate partly because they didn’t want to hurt their ex-employees’ reputations, until Ben forced their hand with his deliberately one-sided “Sharing Information” post. That sounds fairly (some might say overly) collaborative to me.
Edit: Here by “retaliate” I mean defending themselves in the way they did with this post, which does have the side effect of harming Alice and Chloe’s reputations. Even then, they purposefuly decided not to de-anonymize their employees, and have a section on how they don’t consider them to have had ill intentions.
What is the best example of an untrue thing that Ben said? Perhaps I struggle because I took it literally when Pace said that Alice was a bit unreliable.
Just to clarify, I was specifically referring to untrue things that the employees said, not Ben (and likewise retaliation against the employees, not against Ben).
If the line you’re taking is that “Ben technically only relayed information given to him by Alice, while admitting that she might be unreliable”, I don’t think that’s very tenable. Publishing like that is implicitly an endorsement, and unlike you I suspect most people ignored the disclaimer, because it would be strange for someone to publish such damaging things that they actually weren’t sure were true. This comment I made on Ben’s original post also touches on this.
Ben definitely did pretty extensive due-diligence for all claims from Alice that made it into the post, to the degree to which it was possible to do what without engaging even more extensively with Nonlinear itself, which was hard because of the preferences of many of our sources (and like, I think for the sake of calibrating people on the reliability of sources, I think it is better practice to include statements and counter-statements in a post like this, since it puts what people said on the record, which then allows people to judge other things that person has said).
I think what is bugging me about this whole situation is that there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism of accountability for the (allegedly) false and/or highly misleading claims made by Alice. You seem to be saying something like, “we didn’t make false and/or highly misleading claims, we just repeated the false and/or highly misleading claims that Alice told us, then we said that Alice was maybe unreliable,” as if this somehow makes the responsibility (legal, ethical, or otherwise) to tell the truth disappear.
Here is what Ben said in his post, Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation:
It’s not 100% clear, but it seems like Ben is saying that he does (at the time he wrote that post) vouch for the claims of Alice that he included in his post. If Ben did vouch for those claims, and those claims were wrong, and those wrong claims caused large amounts of damage to Nonlinear, and Ben thinks that any retaliation against Alice is unacceptable, then that leaves Ben Pace and Lightcone ultimately responsible does it not?
I think there is totally some shared responsibility for any claims that Ben endorsed, and I also think the post could have done a better job at making many things more explicit quotes, so that they would seem less endorsed, where Ben’s ability to independently verify them was limited.
I don’t think any retaliation against Alice is unacceptable. I think if Alice did indeed make important accusatory claims that were inaccurate, she should face some consequences. I think Ben and Lightcone should also lose points for anything that seems endorsed in the post, or does not have an explicit disclaimer right next to the relevant piece of text, that is verified to be false.
We’re working on some comments and posts that engage with that question more thoroughly, and I expect we will take responsibility for some errors here. I also still believe that the overall standard of care and attention in this investigation was really very high, and I expect won’t be met by future investigations by different people. Some errors are unavoidable given the time available to do this, and the complexity of the situation.
In as much as Ben’s central claims in the post are falsified, then I think that would be pretty massive and would make me think we made a much bigger mistake, but that seems quite unlikely to me at this point (though more of that in future comments).
What sort of consequences are you thinking could apply, given that she made these accusations pseudonymously and I assume doxxing and libel suits are off limits?
I don’t know, and agree it’s messy, but also it doesn’t seem hopeless.
I think there will be some degree to which clearly demonstrating that false accusations were made will ripple out into the social graph naturally (even with the anonymization), and will have consequences. I also think there are some ways to privately reach out to some smaller subset of people who might have a particularly good reason to know about this.
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.
If this is an acceptable resolution, why didn’t you just let the problems with NonLinear ripply out into the social graph naturally?
I think that’s a good question, and indeed I think that should be the default thing that happens!
In this case we decided to do something different because we received a lot of evidence that Nonlinear was actively suppressing negative information about them. As Ben’s post states, the primary reason we got involved with this was that we heard Nonlinear was actively pressuring past employees to not say bad things about them, and many employees we talked to fely very scared of retribution if they told anyone about this, even privately, as long as it could somehow get back to Nonlinear:
For me the moment I decided that it would be good for us to dedicate substantial time to this was when I saw the “your career in EA could be over in a few messages” screenshot messages. I think if someone starts sending messages like this, different systems need to kick in to preserve healthy information flow.
(In case people are confused about the vote totals here and in other parts of the thread, practically all my comments on this post regardless of content, have been getting downvoted shortly after posting with a total downvote strength of 10, usually split over 2-3 votes. I also think there is a lot of legitimate voting in this thread, but I am pretty sure in this specific pattern.)
This matches my experience too. When I initially made pretty milquetoast criticisms here all of my comments went down by ~10.
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.
Ok, so it sounds like a crux for you is that Ben in fact had high confidence in what he was relaying from Alice being true. In a dispute like this I don’t think you can do very good due diligence when avoiding the people who are most likely to have counter-evidence; even if it is well-intentioned, it’s a sort of conscious confirmation bias. Ben sort of admits to using poor epistemics in his disclaimer (at the top of his original post) about how to update from reading his post, but doesn’t seem to update much on this himself (?), which seems like an error to me particularly when the stakes are this high. Perhaps it’s unnecessary, but I will also point out that deliberately using poor epistemics feels pretty contrary to the spirit of rationality, which for good reason has fought for truth and against poor epistemics.
(I further argue against the premise of the disclaimer and Ben posting without hearing both sides here).
No I’m not saying that.
I am saying about halfway between that and “Ben’s account holds up”.
What specifically is the most grievous error here.
I’m not really sure what we’re arguing at this point. My initial reply was about how collaborative Nonlinear had been, which I don’t think you’ve addressed and isn’t particularly related to whether Ben said true things. I’d also add that in my view Ben posting without getting Nonlinear’s side of the story was itself pretty uncollaborative, and so the “retaliation” against him (in the form of criticizing him for the way he wrote his post) to me seems entirely justified.
Thinking about this more, my guess is that by “uncollaborative” you were specifically referring to Nonlinear’s threat to file for libel against Ben. I agree you could call it that, but I don’t see it as disproportionate given the adversarial nature of Ben’s investigation and the massive cost it has had on Nonlinear. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on this point.
Ok, so I’m guessing your position is that a) you, having read Nonlinear’s reply, continue to believe that most of what Ben relayed from Alice was true, and b) if a few things turn out to be untrue it’s not a big deal because it doesn’t change the overall story, and in any case Ben admitted that Alice might be unreliable.
I’m not entirely sure how you weigh (a) and (b) but it makes more sense to me if your crux is (a), that most of Alice’s claims are true. For that, I’m not sure where to start; as far as I’ve seen they all seem to be false. I guess we could start with the claims about not being paid, e.g. from Ben’s high level overview:
Nonlinear has several rows in their overview table which contradict this account:
Alice “wasn’t getting paid” only due to her own rather strange mistakes, such as not logging her expenses or not checking her own bank account to see that the money was actually there.
Alice eventually got to choose her own salary.
Alice claimed to be making significant income from her side business.
Alice had much less involvement and ownership of “the organization” than she claimed, and was repeatedly informed of this (this section of the appendix is relevant).
Ben also admits that “[Alice] also had a substantial number of emergency health issues covered [by Nonlinear]”.
We could also talk about Alice’s accusations of not being fed vegan food or being forced to travel with illegal drugs. I’m not sure if this is what you meant by “grievous error” though—please let me know if I’m barking up the wrong tree.
I would currently like to register (before people assume the above is true) that I am quite confident that the three claims in this quote are inaccurate (based on both existing evidence and more recent evidence that I was shown).
I expect Ben will elaborate on this in his fuller response, but it seemed good to clarify this, and set expectations about which claims I am pretty sure will be falsified.
To clarify further, my read of things is that you think the inaccurate claim would be
Alice was in fact making significant income from her side business.
but that you wouldn’t dispute
Alice claimed to NL that she was making significant income from her side business.
Is that right? Or do you additionally think the second is inaccurate?
We have very compelling evidence of the first being false. I would also absolutely dispute the second. Alice has told Nonlinear that if she worked on her Amazon business full-time, she would make $3000/mo, which seems right though maybe a bit optimistic to me (but of course she wasn’t working on it full-time while she was working for Nonlinear).
That to me fully explains the screenshot that Nonlinear posted[1], which is the only direct evidence presented, and indeed seems more consistent with what Emerson is saying (why would he be referring to a total net-income of $3k/mo otherwise, if at this point Alice was already working for Nonlinear and so presumably was now making at least $4k/mo and more like $7k-9k/mo if you count benefits).
This text was sent on November 4th, almost a month before she arrived to come travel with us (not to work for us).
Emerson is not referring to her saying she would make $3000 a month if she worked full-time on her Amazon business. The context of the conversation is she’s trying to figure out whether she should spend an additional $90 to visit her family before joining us, and Emerson is replying saying “If you make $3k a month [$90] is very little money”, so he’s telling her she should spend the $90 to spend time with family. Directly going against the “keeping her isolated from family” story and also supporting (albeit not conclusively proving) that Alice had told him she made $3k per month with her business.
Sure! I could have checked the date, but in that case this evidence also doesn’t support your case here.
If indeed she was making $3000/mo at that point in time (which, to be clear, I don’t think you’ve demonstrated), working on it with much more of her time than she would while she was working at Nonlinear, wouldn’t this be basically confirmation that she wasn’t going to make $3000/mo while working with Nonlinear, given that she was spending much less time on it?
The relevant claim at hand is whether she ever made $3000/mo at the same time as she was working with you at Nonlinear (and you heavily implied that that is what she claimed here). I would be quite surprised if Alice ever claimed this was the case to you.
this seems like a comment that it seems reasonable to disagree with (e.g. think that habryka is wrong and subsequent evidence will not show what he predicts it will show) but it seems straightforwardly good epistemics to make clear predictions about which claims will and won’t be falsified in the upcoming post, so I’m not sure why this comment is as being downvoted more than disagree voted (or downvoted at all).
am I confused about what karma vs agreement voting is supposed to signify?
Approximately all my comments on this thread have been downvoted like this, as soon as they were posted. There are definitely some people with strong feelings downvoting a lot of things on this post very quickly, though most comments end up clawing themselves back into positive karma after a few hours.
I can believe she is being precise without conveying an accurate picture. I am not sure that I ever thought that alice’s account was the most accurate version of events.