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.
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.