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.
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.