Concretely, here’s what you should have done instead:
Pause. Wait. Delay. Completely halt publication of the post, against the direct promises you made to your sources, who have shown you credible evidence that they are worried about retaliation. Make your excuses, make your apologies, recognize that you are on the verge of publishing a partial narrative aimed at dealing serious reputational damage to someone in your sphere, and take a moment to absolutely ensure all the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed.
If you receive concrete evidence that you are about to publish a falsehood aimed at inflicting material harm on someone, your duty is simply not to do that. If you are scrambling on the last day to update clear material falsehoods in your post, as Spencer reports with the company reviews, something has failed in your fact-checking process, and you should grimace, take a deep breath, and pause publication until you have things figured out.
Of course Nonlinear was using aggressive tactics. There’s no truly returning from reputational damage inflicted by a post of that sort. Even if a response sways some people, it will at best always result in a sharp community divide, with people taking sides and landing with one adversarial party (you) or the other (them). I was unfamiliar with Nonlinear and Lightcone until these events, and don’t have any sort of personal stake in the fight other than a desire to see careful standards applied to investigative work. But it seems abundantly clear to me that proper caution was not taken in the publication of the original post, and the root of that seems to be an impression that it’s alright to publish material falsehoods if you update later, and that it’s more important to keep to a publication schedule than to ensure you’re presenting a complete picture. I emphatically disagree on both counts.
I think the approximate result of this tactic is that we would have never been able to publish such a post (because Nonlinear would have been capable of producing an infinite trickle of relevant-seeming evidence that requires extensive investigation to thoroughly debunk), and that our sources would have been heavily retaliated against and would have regretted talking to us in the first place.
You are free to argue that such posts should approximately never be written, and I am interested in that argument. But I think our willingness to pay to make any kind of investigation in this space happen, and the diligence with which we went about this, including on the dimension of gathering contradicting evidence, is a vast and far outlier for stuff like this.
If you want anyone to do this kind of thing, you need to be OK with a lower standard for information propagation. And maybe you just don’t want posts like this, that’s OK. I do think this kind of post is really important and crucial and I desperately wish there were more of them.
Nonlinear would have been capable of producing an infinite trickle of relevant-seeming evidence
It reads to me that NL was asking for a specific amount of time to provide you with evidence, and you could have prevented this turning into unbounded delay by saying something like “you’ve asked for a week to gather evidence, and we’ll consider evidence you provide by [168hr in the future]”.
our sources would have been heavily retaliated against
It reads to me that NL was asking for a specific amount of time to provide you with evidence, and you could have prevented this turning into unbounded delay by saying something like “you’ve asked for a week to gather evidence, and we’ll consider evidence you provide by [168hr in the future]”.
Yeah, I am sorry, I think I was exaggerating the alternative here.
I do think we kind of did this with our original email and set of calls to them, and then they asked us for an additional week, and we said no. I think it’s pretty plausible we should have waited an additional week, and I also felt really conflicted and sad about this at the time. I do think it’s not reasonable to treat declining a request for an additional week as some kind of major and extreme faux pas, especially given the threat of libel and other types of what still seem to me to be undue forms of pressure that were applied.
So in that week Nonlinear sends a giant pile of evidence, which I expect I would not have found very compelling (though I am sure it would have probably been capable of falsifying some relatively minor points).
I do think we kind of did this with our original email and set of calls to them, and then they asked us for an additional week, and we said no.
How much of the claims made in the post did you share with them in the original email (or soon after, if you want to start the “clock” then) vs later?
(It sounds to me like there were many claims they believed were false that weren’t shared with them until quite close to publication, which matters quite a bit for interpreting the request for a week to provide evidence)
((Your phrasing of “additional week” here and above is weird because it implies they had already had a week during which they knew the post’s claims and could be providing conflicting evidence, which I think you’re not claiming.))
We shared a 2000 word high-level summary of all important claims made in the original post, as far as I can tell. I sadly can’t share it in-full here because a bunch of the information would be deanonymizing, but I would be happy to set up a call and show you the email, or answer any specific questions you have about what evidence was shared.
Here is an overview including a bunch of quotes of what we sent Nonlinear then (and if you think this is important I can also fully remove all deanonymizing information from the email, which would take me on the order of an hour or two, and share it with you):
Basic information about when Nonlinear was founded and who worked there during the relevant period
Basic details about when Alice and Chloe worked there
That Chloe’s salary was verbally agreed to be $75k/year, with $1k/month in stipend and the rest in food/board/travel, which ultimately (according to Chloe and Alice) did not actually add up to $75k/year
That Alice joined as the sole person in the incubation program, and that she received no salary for the first months of traveling with Nonlinear
That Alice often had less than $1000 in her bank account and would often rack up substantial expenses in reimbursements, and that at the end of her employment Nonlinear owed her multiple thousands of dollars
There were no written specifications of how healthcare and covered medical bills would work
The story with Emerson and Adorian Deck and how it seemed very adversarial
Other rumors about Emerson doing questionably legal things in order to intimidate people he was in conflict with
As I understand it they were considered to have the lowest monetary value of time in the house, and consequently were given a lot of the menial tasks around the house.
“They also reported being strongly discouraged from spending time away from the Nonlinear house (e.g. living in a separate AirBnb) and with people that you folks didn’t consider valuable/worthwhile. They both reported very strong senses of social and financial dependence while working with you.”
“During her time at Nonlinear, [Alice] quit being a vegan. This was during a time when she caught Covid, and was unable to get enough vegan food to eat for ~2 days.
“You asked [Chloe] to do a lot of driving regularly for her job, but she didn’t know how to drive. You gave her driving lessons (I believe that was from Drew), and then encouraged her to drive without a license for 1-2 months. She eventually was freaked out about this and stopped and regrets doing it, and thinks that she would not have done so if she wasn’t in such an otherwise isolating and dependent environment.”
“There was a long period of difficult relations with [Alice] and Kat, and some conflict regarding monogamy/polyamory, that disrupted working together quite a bit.”
“Relatedly, as [Alice] was returning from Mexico, Kat made a request for her to bring back several drugs over the border, some recreational, some for productivity.”
“Both [Alice] and [Chloe] reported feeling really hurt by their time at Nonlinear, and taking some months to recover before they could go back to work.”
“[Alice] reports a lot of effusive positive emotions from you, including various familial and sometimes romantic feelings of love, yet also felt threatened in various ways about her career and that she was in some pretty difficult financial circumstances as a result of working for you. These things seem pretty incongruent to me and potentially quite manipulative.”
“I’m not sure how to quickly summarize this. It seems to me they had a lot of strongly negative experiences or made decisions they regret that you (their employers and managers and the majority of their social environment) have some substantial responsibility for, in setting up this environment.”
“A number of people I spoke to were concerned about retaliation from you if they shared their experiences with me, and initially only did so under condition of strict confidentiality, which I was willing to offer because I had a bunch of warning flags raised from various people I trust who reached out to me and also from the financial situation Kat reported when we spoke at Lightcone.”
“[Alice] showed me some texts from Kat that offered support with “basic survival stuff” like housing, if Alice would “commit to not saying bad things about us to them”. This sort of behavior makes it very hard for me to trust impressions I get about your team — if people with negative information are being given strong reasons to keep it quiet, then I can’t find out about negative information about you, and I have a lot of uncertainty about how much I don’t know. A sense that people were scared to share negative info, and concerns about covering-up negative info, are the main reason I’m trying to find out what happened with [Alice] and [Chloe] and others as much as I am.
“[Alice] also showed me texts from Kat saying that [Alice] was saying bad things about you behind your back, and said that if you did the same to her her career in EA “would be over in a few Dm’s”. I’m interested to know what the content of those hypothetical DM’s would be. To be clear this definitely reads to me as a veiled threat.
I’m confused by the heavy disagree-voting on this comment. Are people saying with their votes that this does not actually cover all the important claims in the post? If someone who disagree-voted (or otherwise disagrees) wanted to comment I’d find that illuminating!
One of habryka’s other comments in this thread suggests that someone (or some small group of people, or some single person with sockpuppets) is downvoting literally everything habryka posts in this thread.
It would be nice if there were some way for someone with no conflict of interest to investigate that...
Where are you getting the idea that Ben gave us a week? The draft was sent to us on the same day Ben said he was going to publish it. On a day Ben knew we were traveling and wouldn’t be able to respond properly (sketchy/no internet, chaos of traveling, etc).
We spoke to Ben 60 hours before he published, and he only told us a subset of all the accusations. A quick re-reading of the post and I found 14 allegations that were new that Ben hadn’t discussed on the call. And I only got a short way through re-reading the post (maybe a 20%?) because I find reading it extremely painful.
I posted an approximately full list of claims you were informed of 4 days before publishing.
Would you be able to highlight any important claims that were not included in that list of claims? It is totally possible there are some, but having cross-check the two, I can’t find any major ones.
I found 14 allegations that were new that Ben hadn’t discussed on the call. [in the first ~20%]
Were these fourteen included in the email Ben sent ~5d out (that Habryka summarizes here) and just not discussed on the call, or are you saying that the fourteen were first introduced to you with the final draft?
Concretely, here’s what you should have done instead:
Pause. Wait. Delay. Completely halt publication of the post, against the direct promises you made to your sources, who have shown you credible evidence that they are worried about retaliation. Make your excuses, make your apologies, recognize that you are on the verge of publishing a partial narrative aimed at dealing serious reputational damage to someone in your sphere, and take a moment to absolutely ensure all the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed.
If you receive concrete evidence that you are about to publish a falsehood aimed at inflicting material harm on someone, your duty is simply not to do that. If you are scrambling on the last day to update clear material falsehoods in your post, as Spencer reports with the company reviews, something has failed in your fact-checking process, and you should grimace, take a deep breath, and pause publication until you have things figured out.
Of course Nonlinear was using aggressive tactics. There’s no truly returning from reputational damage inflicted by a post of that sort. Even if a response sways some people, it will at best always result in a sharp community divide, with people taking sides and landing with one adversarial party (you) or the other (them). I was unfamiliar with Nonlinear and Lightcone until these events, and don’t have any sort of personal stake in the fight other than a desire to see careful standards applied to investigative work. But it seems abundantly clear to me that proper caution was not taken in the publication of the original post, and the root of that seems to be an impression that it’s alright to publish material falsehoods if you update later, and that it’s more important to keep to a publication schedule than to ensure you’re presenting a complete picture. I emphatically disagree on both counts.
I think the approximate result of this tactic is that we would have never been able to publish such a post (because Nonlinear would have been capable of producing an infinite trickle of relevant-seeming evidence that requires extensive investigation to thoroughly debunk), and that our sources would have been heavily retaliated against and would have regretted talking to us in the first place.
You are free to argue that such posts should approximately never be written, and I am interested in that argument. But I think our willingness to pay to make any kind of investigation in this space happen, and the diligence with which we went about this, including on the dimension of gathering contradicting evidence, is a vast and far outlier for stuff like this.
If you want anyone to do this kind of thing, you need to be OK with a lower standard for information propagation. And maybe you just don’t want posts like this, that’s OK. I do think this kind of post is really important and crucial and I desperately wish there were more of them.
It reads to me that NL was asking for a specific amount of time to provide you with evidence, and you could have prevented this turning into unbounded delay by saying something like “you’ve asked for a week to gather evidence, and we’ll consider evidence you provide by [168hr in the future]”.
Have you elaborated somewhere on this?
Yeah, I am sorry, I think I was exaggerating the alternative here.
I do think we kind of did this with our original email and set of calls to them, and then they asked us for an additional week, and we said no. I think it’s pretty plausible we should have waited an additional week, and I also felt really conflicted and sad about this at the time. I do think it’s not reasonable to treat declining a request for an additional week as some kind of major and extreme faux pas, especially given the threat of libel and other types of what still seem to me to be undue forms of pressure that were applied.
So in that week Nonlinear sends a giant pile of evidence, which I expect I would not have found very compelling (though I am sure it would have probably been capable of falsifying some relatively minor points).
How much of the claims made in the post did you share with them in the original email (or soon after, if you want to start the “clock” then) vs later?
(It sounds to me like there were many claims they believed were false that weren’t shared with them until quite close to publication, which matters quite a bit for interpreting the request for a week to provide evidence)
((Your phrasing of “additional week” here and above is weird because it implies they had already had a week during which they knew the post’s claims and could be providing conflicting evidence, which I think you’re not claiming.))
We shared a 2000 word high-level summary of all important claims made in the original post, as far as I can tell. I sadly can’t share it in-full here because a bunch of the information would be deanonymizing, but I would be happy to set up a call and show you the email, or answer any specific questions you have about what evidence was shared.
Here is an overview including a bunch of quotes of what we sent Nonlinear then (and if you think this is important I can also fully remove all deanonymizing information from the email, which would take me on the order of an hour or two, and share it with you):
Basic information about when Nonlinear was founded and who worked there during the relevant period
Basic details about when Alice and Chloe worked there
That Chloe’s salary was verbally agreed to be $75k/year, with $1k/month in stipend and the rest in food/board/travel, which ultimately (according to Chloe and Alice) did not actually add up to $75k/year
That Alice joined as the sole person in the incubation program, and that she received no salary for the first months of traveling with Nonlinear
That Alice often had less than $1000 in her bank account and would often rack up substantial expenses in reimbursements, and that at the end of her employment Nonlinear owed her multiple thousands of dollars
There were no written specifications of how healthcare and covered medical bills would work
The story with Emerson and Adorian Deck and how it seemed very adversarial
Other rumors about Emerson doing questionably legal things in order to intimidate people he was in conflict with
As I understand it they were considered to have the lowest monetary value of time in the house, and consequently were given a lot of the menial tasks around the house.
“They also reported being strongly discouraged from spending time away from the Nonlinear house (e.g. living in a separate AirBnb) and with people that you folks didn’t consider valuable/worthwhile. They both reported very strong senses of social and financial dependence while working with you.”
“During her time at Nonlinear, [Alice] quit being a vegan. This was during a time when she caught Covid, and was unable to get enough vegan food to eat for ~2 days.
“You asked [Chloe] to do a lot of driving regularly for her job, but she didn’t know how to drive. You gave her driving lessons (I believe that was from Drew), and then encouraged her to drive without a license for 1-2 months. She eventually was freaked out about this and stopped and regrets doing it, and thinks that she would not have done so if she wasn’t in such an otherwise isolating and dependent environment.”
“There was a long period of difficult relations with [Alice] and Kat, and some conflict regarding monogamy/polyamory, that disrupted working together quite a bit.”
“Relatedly, as [Alice] was returning from Mexico, Kat made a request for her to bring back several drugs over the border, some recreational, some for productivity.”
“Both [Alice] and [Chloe] reported feeling really hurt by their time at Nonlinear, and taking some months to recover before they could go back to work.”
“[Alice] reports a lot of effusive positive emotions from you, including various familial and sometimes romantic feelings of love, yet also felt threatened in various ways about her career and that she was in some pretty difficult financial circumstances as a result of working for you. These things seem pretty incongruent to me and potentially quite manipulative.”
“I’m not sure how to quickly summarize this. It seems to me they had a lot of strongly negative experiences or made decisions they regret that you (their employers and managers and the majority of their social environment) have some substantial responsibility for, in setting up this environment.”
“A number of people I spoke to were concerned about retaliation from you if they shared their experiences with me, and initially only did so under condition of strict confidentiality, which I was willing to offer because I had a bunch of warning flags raised from various people I trust who reached out to me and also from the financial situation Kat reported when we spoke at Lightcone.”
“[Alice] showed me some texts from Kat that offered support with “basic survival stuff” like housing, if Alice would “commit to not saying bad things about us to them”. This sort of behavior makes it very hard for me to trust impressions I get about your team — if people with negative information are being given strong reasons to keep it quiet, then I can’t find out about negative information about you, and I have a lot of uncertainty about how much I don’t know. A sense that people were scared to share negative info, and concerns about covering-up negative info, are the main reason I’m trying to find out what happened with [Alice] and [Chloe] and others as much as I am.
“[Alice] also showed me texts from Kat saying that [Alice] was saying bad things about you behind your back, and said that if you did the same to her her career in EA “would be over in a few Dm’s”. I’m interested to know what the content of those hypothetical DM’s would be. To be clear this definitely reads to me as a veiled threat.
I’m confused by the heavy disagree-voting on this comment. Are people saying with their votes that this does not actually cover all the important claims in the post? If someone who disagree-voted (or otherwise disagrees) wanted to comment I’d find that illuminating!
One of habryka’s other comments in this thread suggests that someone (or some small group of people, or some single person with sockpuppets) is downvoting literally everything habryka posts in this thread.
It would be nice if there were some way for someone with no conflict of interest to investigate that...
Where are you getting the idea that Ben gave us a week? The draft was sent to us on the same day Ben said he was going to publish it. On a day Ben knew we were traveling and wouldn’t be able to respond properly (sketchy/no internet, chaos of traveling, etc).
We spoke to Ben 60 hours before he published, and he only told us a subset of all the accusations. A quick re-reading of the post and I found 14 allegations that were new that Ben hadn’t discussed on the call. And I only got a short way through re-reading the post (maybe a 20%?) because I find reading it extremely painful.
I posted an approximately full list of claims you were informed of 4 days before publishing.
Would you be able to highlight any important claims that were not included in that list of claims? It is totally possible there are some, but having cross-check the two, I can’t find any major ones.
Were these fourteen included in the email Ben sent ~5d out (that Habryka summarizes here) and just not discussed on the call, or are you saying that the fourteen were first introduced to you with the final draft?
First introduced to me in the draft.
Thanks! If you were up for listing some of these fourteen I’d find it really helpful!