On behalf of Chloe and in her own words, here’s a response that might illuminate some pieces that are not obvious from Ben’s post - as his post is relying on more factual and object-level evidence, rather than the whole narrative.

“Before Ben published, I found thinking about or discussing my experiences very painful, as well as scary - I was never sure with whom it was safe sharing any of this with. Now that it’s public, it feels like it’s in the past and I’m able to talk about it. Here are some of my experiences I think are relevant to understanding what went on. They’re harder to back up with chatlog or other written evidence - take them as you want, knowing these are stories more than clearly backed up by evidence. I think people should be able to make up their own opinion on this, and I believe they should have the appropriate information to do so.

I want to emphasize *just how much* the entire experience of working for Nonlinear was them creating all kinds of obstacles, and me being told that if I’m clever enough I can figure out how to do these tasks anyway. It’s not actually about whether I had a contract and a salary (even then, the issue wasn’t the amount or even the legality, it was that they’d be verbally unclear about what the compensation entailed, eg Emerson saying that since he bought me a laptop in January under the premise of “productivity tool”, that meant my January salary was actually higher than it would have been otherwise, even though it was never said that the laptop was considered as part of the compensation when we discussed it, and I had not initiated the purchase of it), or whether I was asked to do illegal things and what constitutes as okay illegal vs not okay illegal - it’s the fact that they threw some impossibly complex setup at us, told us we can have whatever we want, if we are clever enough with negotiating (by us I mostly mean me and Alice). And boy did we have to negotiate. I needed to run a medical errand for myself in Puerto Rico and the amount of negotiating I needed to do to get them to drive me to a different city that was a 30 min drive away was wild. I needed to go there three times, and I knew the answer of anyone driving me would be that it’s not worth their time, at the same time getting taxis was difficult while we were living in isolated mountain towns, and obviously it would have been easiest to have Drew or Emerson drive me. I looked up tourism things to do in that city, and tried to use things like “hey this city is the only one that has a store that sells Emerson’s favorite breakfast cereal and I could stock up for weeks if we could just get there somehow”. Also - this kind of going out of your way to get what you wanted or needed was rewarded with the Nonlinear team members giving you “points” or calling you a “negotiation genius”. 

Of course I was excited to learn how to drive - I could finally get my tasks done and take care of myself, and have a means to get away from the team when it became too much to be around them. And this is negotiating for just going to a city that’s a 30 minute drive away - three times. Imagine how much I had to negotiate to get someone to drive me to a grocery store to do weekly groceries, and then add to that salary or compensation package negotiations and negotiate whether I could be relieved from having to learn how to buy weed for Kat in every country we went to. I’m still not sure how to concisely describe the frame they prescribed to us (here’s a great post on frame control by Aella that seems relevant https://aella.substack.com/p/frame-control ), but most saliently it included the heavy pep talk of how we could negotiate anything we wanted if we were clever enough, and if we failed - it was implied that we simply weren’t good enough. People get prescribed an hourly rate, based on how much their time is worth at Nonlinear. On the stack of who has most value, it goes Emerson, Kat, Drew, Alice, Chloe. All this in the context where we were isolated, and our finances mostly controlled by Emerson. I’ll add a few stories from my perspective, of how this plays out in practice.

Note: These stories are roughly 2 to 3 months into my job, this means 2 to 3 months of needing to find clever solutions to problems that ought to be simple, as well as ongoing negotiations with members of the Nonlinear team, to get the basics of my job done.

 (⅙)”

…

“When we were flying to the Bahamas from St Martin, I was given a task of packing up all of Nonlinear’s things (mostly Kat & Emerson) into 5 suitcases. Emerson wanted the suitcases to be below the allowed limit if possible. I estimated that the physical weight of their items would exceed the weight limit of 5 suitcases. I packed and repacked the suitcases 5 to 6 times, after each time Emerson would check my work, say that the suitcases are too heavy, and teach me a new rule according to which to throw things out. Eventually I got it done to a level that Emerson was satisfied with. Him and Kat had been working outside the entire time.

In a previous packing scenario I had packed some things like charging cables and similar daily used items too fast, which Emerson did not appreciate, so this time I had left some everyday things around for him to use and grab as the last things. When I said we are packed and ready to go, he looked around the house and got angry at all the things that were lying around that he now had to pack himself - I remember him shouting in anger. I was packing up the cars and didn’t deal with him, just let him be mad in the house. This got Drew pretty frustrated as well, he had witnessed me repacking five bags 5-6 times and also tried to negotiate with Emerson about ditching some things that he refused to leave behind (we carried around 2 mountain bikes, and Emerson tasked me with packing in a beach chair as well). When we got into the car which was packed to the brim, Drew got to driving and as we drove out, he shouted really loudly out of anger. The anger was so real that I parsed it as him making a joke because I could not fathom how angry he was - my immediate response was to laugh. I quickly realized he was serious, I stopped and apologized, to which he responded with something like “no I am actually mad, and you should be too!” - related to how much we had to pack up. (2/6)“

…

“Kat had asked me to buy her a specific blonde hair coloring, at the time she told me it’s urgent since she had grown out her natural hair quite a lot. We were living in St Martin where they simply do not sell extreme blond coloring in the specific shade I needed to find, and Amazon does not deliver to St Martin. I also needed to grab this hair coloring while doing weekly groceries. One important guideline I needed to follow for groceries was that it had to be roughly a 10 min car trip but they were frequently disappointed if I didn’t get all their necessities shopped for from local stores so I naturally ventured further sometimes to make sure I got what they asked for.

I ended up spending hours looking for that blonde hair coloring in different stores, pharmacies, and beauty stores, across multiple weekly grocery trips. I kept Kat updated on this. Eventually I found the exact shade she asked for - Kat was happy to receive this but proceeded to not color her hair with it for another two weeks. Then we had to pack up to travel to the Bahamas. The packing was difficult (see previous paragraph) - we were struggling with throwing unnecessary things out. The hair color had seemed pretty important, and I thought Bahamas would also be a tricky place to buy that haircolor from, so I had packed it in. We get to the airport, waiting in the queue to check in the suitcases. Kat decides to open up the suitcases to see which last minute things we can throw out to make the suitcases lighter. She reaches for the hair color and happily throws it out. My self worth is in a place where I witness her doing this (she knows how much effort I put into finding this), and I don’t even think to say anything in protest - it just feels natural that my work hours are worth just this much. It’s depressing. (3/6)”

…

“There was a time during our stay at St Martin when I was overwhelmed from living and seeing only the same people every single day and needed a day off. Sometimes I’d become so overwhelmed I became really bad at formulating sentences and being in social contexts so I’d take a day off and go somewhere on the island where I could be on my own, away from the whole team - I’ve never before and after experienced an actual lack of being able to formulate sentences just from being around the same people for too long. This was one of these times. 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 (me and Kat would take off Tuesdays and Saturdays, these were sometimes called weekend or vacation days).

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. 

I didn’t have time to eat, had just woken up, and the actual task itself required to rally up 7 people and figure out their passport situation as well as if they want to join. St Barths means entering a different country, which meant that I needed to check in with the passport as well as covid requirements and whether all 7 people can actually join. I needed to quickly book some ferry tickets there and back for the day, rally the people to the cars and get to the ferry - all of this within less than an hour. We were late and annoyed the ferry employees - but this is one of the things generally ignored by the Nonlinear team, us being late but getting our way is a sign of our agency and how we aren’t NPCs that just follow the prescribed ferry times - they’re negotiable after all, if we can get away with getting to St Barths anyway.

I thought my work was done. We got to the island, my plan was to make the most of it and go on my own somewhere but Emerson says he wants an ATV to travel around with and without an ATV it’s a bit pointless. Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer. All ATVs have been rented out - it’s tourist season. I check back in, Emerson says I need to call all the places on the island and keep trying. I call all the places I can find, this is about 10 places (small island). No luck. Eventually Emerson agrees that using a moped will be okay, and that’s when I get relieved from my work tasks. 

I did describe this to Kat in my next meeting with her that it’s not okay for me to have to do work tasks while I’m on my weekends, and she agreed but we struggled to figure out a solution that would make sense. It remained more of a “let’s see how this plays out”. (4/6)”

…

“One of my tasks was to buy weed for Kat, in countries where weed is illegal. When I kept not doing it and saying that it was because I didn’t know how to buy weed, Kat wanted to sit me down and teach me how to do it. I refused and asked if I could just not do it. She kept insisting that I’m saying that because I’m being silly and worry too much and that buying weed is really easy, everybody does it. I wasn’t comfortable with it and insisted on not doing this task. She said we should talk about it when I’m feeling less emotional about it. We never got to that discussion because in the next meeting I had with her I quit my job. (⅚)”

…

“The aftermath of this experience lasted for several months. Working and living with Nonlinear had me forget who I was, and lose more self worth than I had ever lost in my life. I wasn’t able to read books anymore, nor keep my focus in meetings for longer than 2 minutes, I couldn’t process my own thoughts or anything that took more than a few minutes of paying attention. I was unable to work for a few months. I was scared to share my experiences, terrified that Emerson or Kat would retaliate. While working with them I had forgotten that I used to be excited for work, and getting new tasks would spark curiosity on how to solve them best, rather than feelings of overwhelm. I stopped going for runs and whenever I did exercise I wasn’t able to finish my routine - I thought it meant I was just weak. Emerson held such a strong grasp of financial control over me that I actually forgot that I had saved up money from my previous jobs, to the extent of not even checking my bank statements. I seriously considered leaving effective altruism, as well as AI safety, if it meant that I could get away from running into them, and get away from a tolerance towards such behavior towards people.

It’s really not about the actual contracts, salaries, illegal jobs. Even with these stories, I’m only able to tell some of them that I can wrap my head around. I spent months trying to figure out how to empathize with Kat and Emerson, how they’re able to do what they’ve done, to Alice, to others they claimed to care a lot about. How they can give so much love and support with one hand and say things that even if I’d try to model “what’s the worst possible thing someone could say”, I’d be surprised how far off my predictions would be. I think the reader should make up their own mind on this. Read what Nonlinear has to say. Read what Ben says, what these comments add to it.

People trying their best can sometimes look absolutely terrifying, but actions need to have consequences nonetheless. This isn’t an effect of weird living and working conditions either, I believe it goes deeper than that - I am still happy to hear that Nonlinear has since abandoned at least that part of their “experiment”. But Nonlinear also isn’t my idea of effective altruism or doing good better and I hope we can keep this community safer than it was for me and Alice, for all the current and new members to come along in the future. (6/6) ”

Ben Pace @ 2023-09-11T16:16 (+95)

I confirm that this is Chloe, who contacted me through our standard communication channels to say she was posting a comment today.

Joel Becker @ 2023-09-12T13:35 (+86)

Thank you very much for sharing, Chloe.

Ben, Kat, Emerson, and readers of the original post have all noticed that the nature of Ben's process leads to selection against positive observations about Nonlinear. I encourage readers to notice that the reverse might also be true. Examples of selection against negative information include:

1. Ben has reason to exclude stories that are less objective or have a less strong evidence base. The above comment is a concrete example of this.
   1. There's also something related here about the supposed unreliability of Alice as a source: Ben needs to include this to give a complete picture/because other people (in particular the Nonlinear co-founders) have said this. I strongly concur with Ben when he writes that he "found Alice very willing and ready to share primary sources [...] so I don’t believe her to be acting in bad faith." Personally, my impression is that people are making an incorrect inference about Alice from her characteristics (that are perhaps correlated with source-reliability in a large population, but aren't logically related, and aren't relevant in this case).
2. To the extent that you expect other people to have been silenced (e.g. via anticipated retaliation), you might expect not to hear relevant information from them.
3. To the extent that you expect Alice and Chloe to have had burnout-style experiences, you might expect not to read clarifications on or news about negative experiences.
   1. Until this post came out, this was true of ~everything in the post. 
   2. There is a reason the post was published 1.5 years after the relevant events took place -- people involved in the events really do not want to spend further mental effort on this.

RobBensinger @ 2023-09-12T22:05 (+82)

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!”.

[...]

She kept insisting that I’m saying that because I’m being silly and worry too much and that buying weed is really easy, everybody does it.

😬 There's a ton of awful stuff here, but these two parts really jumped out at me. Trying to push past someone's boundaries by imposing a narrative about the type of person they are ('but you're the type of person who loves doing X!' 'you're only saying no because you're the type of person who worries too much') is really unsettling behavior.

I'll flag that this is an old remembered anecdote, and those can be unreliable, and I haven't heard Emerson or Kat's version of events. But it updates me, because Chloe seems like a pretty good source and this puzzle piece seems congruent with the other puzzle pieces.

E.g., the vibe here matches something that creeped me out a lot about Kat's text message to Alice in the OP, which is the apparent attempt to corner/railroad Alice into agreement via a bunch of threats and strongly imposed frames, followed immediately by Kat repeatedly stating as fact that Alice will of course agree with Kat: "[we] expect you will do the same moving forward", "Sounds like you've come to the same conclusion", "It sounds like we're now on the same page about this".

Working and living with Nonlinear had me forget who I was, and lose more self worth than I had ever lost in my life. I wasn’t able to read books anymore, nor keep my focus in meetings for longer than 2 minutes, I couldn’t process my own thoughts or anything that took more than a few minutes of paying attention.

😢 Jesus.

bruce @ 2023-09-11T13:33 (+80)

This sounds like a terribly traumatic experience. I'm so sorry you went through this, and I hope you are in a better place and feel safer now.

Your self-worth is so, so much more than how well you can navigate what sounds like a manipulative, controlling, and abusive work environment.

 

spent months trying to figure out how to empathize with Kat and Emerson, how they’re able to do what they’ve done, to Alice, to others they claimed to care a lot about. How they can give so much love and support with one hand and say things that even if I’d try to model “what’s the worst possible thing someone could say”, I’d be surprised how far off my predictions would be.

It sounds like despite all of this, you've tried to be charitable to people who have treated you unfairly and poorly - while this speaks to your compassion, I know this line of thought can often lead to things that feel like you are gaslighting yourself, and I hope this isn't something that has caused you too much distress.

I also hope that Effective Altruism as a community becomes a safer space for people who join it aspiring to do good, and I'm grateful for your courage in sharing your experiences, despite it (very reasonably!) feeling painful and unsafe for you.^[1] All the best for whatever is next, and I hope you have access to enough support around you to help with recovering what you've lost.

 

============

[Meta: I'm aware that there will likely be claims around the accuracy of these stories, but I think it's important to acknowledge the potential difficulty of sharing experiences of this nature with a community that rates itself highly on truth-seeking, possibly acknowledging your own lived experience as "stories" accordingly; as well as the potential anguish it might be for these experiences to have been re-lived over the past year and possibly again in the near future, if/when these claims are dissected, questioned, and contested.]

1. ^{^}

   That being said, your experience would be no less valid had you chosen not to share these. And even though I'm cautiously optimistic that the EA community will benefit from you sharing these experiences, your work here is supererogatory, and improving Nonlinear's practices or the EA community's safety is not your burden to bear alone. In a different world it would have been totally reasonable for you to not have shared this, if that was what you needed to do for your own wellbeing. I guess this comment is more for past Chloes or other people with similar experiences who may have struggled with these kinds of decisions than it is for Chloe today, but thought it was worth mentioning.

Ivy Mazzola @ 2023-09-11T21:57 (+39)

Wow. Sincere apologies you went through that. Even if Kat and Emerson thought they were being reasonable (no comment), and/or even if bad instances were few and far between (no comment), such instances would affect me and most people I know very deeply. Probably including the multi-month hangover and residual pain today. And that matters, and is something we need managers/bosses/colleagues to consider. Even if it was only painful at the time, that would matter. Really sorry. 

P.S. I previously put a "changed my mind" react to this comment, but I really meant "brought new things to mind". Put them in other comments

Will Bradshaw @ 2023-09-11T12:19 (+38)

I hope this doesn't seem heartless, but: Given the degree of contested narratives in this affair, can someone not-anonymous with access to Chloe confirm that this account speaks for her?

(i think it probably does, to be clear, but also think it's worth checking)

Ben Pace @ 2023-09-11T16:17 (+36)

Confirmed, this is Chloe.

Guy Raveh @ 2023-09-11T13:51 (+8)

@Ben Pace 

Karthik Tadepalli @ 2023-09-11T11:50 (+14)

Thanks for sharing your story.

Chris Leong @ 2023-09-13T02:40 (+6)

I think it's brave for you to be coming forward and sharing your experiences. I'm really sorry this happened to you, but hopefully, we can learn from this as a community so that no one ends up in a situation like this again.

Zooming out from this particular case, I’m concerned that our community is both (1) extremely encouraging and tolerant of experimentation and poor, undefined boundaries and (2) very quick to point the finger when any experiment goes wrong. If we don’t want to have strict professional norms I think it’s unfair to put all the blame on failed experiments without updating the algorithm that allows people embark on these experiments with community approval.

To be perfectly clear, I think this community has poor professional boundaries and a poor understanding of why normie boundaries exist. I would like better boundaries all around. I don’t think we get better boundaries by acting like a failure like this is due to character or lack of integrity instead of bad engineering. If you wouldn’t have looked at it before it imploded and thought the engineering was bad, I think that’s the biggest thing that needs to change. I’m concerned that people still think that if you have good enough character (or are smart enough, etc), you don’t need good boundaries and systems.

Thanks for writing this post. It looks like it took a lot of effort that could have been spent on much more enjoyable activities, including your mainline work.

This isn’t a comment on the accuracy of the post (though it was a moderate update for me). I could imagine nonlinear providing compelling counter evidence over the next few days and I’d of course try to correct my beliefs in light of new evidence.

Posts like this one are a public good. I don’t think anyone is particularly incentivised to write them, and they seem pretty uncomfortable and effortful, but I believe they serve an important function in the community by helping to root out harmful actors and disincentivising harmful acts in the first place.

This situation reminded me of this post, EA's weirdness makes it unusually susceptible to bad behavior. Regardless of whether you believe Chloe and Alice's allegations (which I do), it's hard to imagine that most of these disputes would have arisen under more normal professional conditions (e.g., ones in which employees and employers don't live together, travel the world together, and become romantically entangled). A lot of the things that (no one is disputing) happened here are professionally weird; for example, these anecdotes from Ben's summary of Nonlinear's response (also the linked job ad):

• "Our intention wasn't just to have employees, but also to have members of our family unit who we traveled with and worked closely together with in having a strong positive impact in the world, and were very personally close with."
• "We wanted to give these employees a pretty standard amount of compensation, but also mostly not worry about negotiating minor financial details as we traveled the world. So we covered basic rent/groceries/travel for these people."
• "The formal employee drove without a license for 1-2 months in Puerto Rico. We taught her to drive, which she was excited about. You might think this is a substantial legal risk, but basically it isn't"
• "The semi-employee was also asked to bring some productivity-related and recreational drugs over the border for us. In general we didn't push hard on this."

I am reminded again that, while many professional norms are stupid, a lot of them exist for good reasons. Further, I think it's often pretty easy to disentangle the stupid professional norms from the reasonable professional norms by just thinking: "Are there good reasons this norm exists?" (E.g., "Is there a reason employees and employers shouldn't live together?" Yes: the power dynamics inherent to the employer/employee dynamic are at odds with healthy roommate dynamics, in which people generally shouldn't have lots of power over one another. "Is there a reason I should have to wear high heels to work in an office?" .... no.) Trying to make employees part of your family unit, not negotiating financial details with your employees, covering your employees' rent and groceries, and being in any way involved in your employees breaking the law are all behaviors that are at odds with standard professional practices, and there are very obviously good reasons for this.

My thoughts, for those who want them:

• I don't have much sympathy for those demanding a good reason why the post wasn't delayed. While I'm generally quite pro sharing posts with orgs, I think it's quite important that this doesn't give the org the right to delay or prevent the posting. This goes double given the belief of both the author and their witnesses that Nonlinear is not acting in good faith.
• There seem to be enough uncontested/incontestable claims made in this post for me to feel comfortable recommending that junior folks in the community stay away from Nonlinear. These include asking employees to carry out illegal actions they're not comfortable with, and fairly flagrantly threatening employees with retaliation for saying bad things about them (Kat's text screenshotted above is pretty blatant here).
• Less confidently, I would be fairly surprised if I come out of the other end of this, having seen Nonlinear's defence/evidence, and don't continue to see the expenses-plus-tiny-salary setup as manipulative and unhealthy.
• More confidently than anything on this list, Nonlinear's threatening to sue Lightcone for Ben's post is completely unacceptable, decreases my sympathy for them by about 98%, and strongly updates me in the direction that refusing to give in to their requested delay was the right decision. In my view, it is quite a strong update that the negative portrayal of Emerson Spartz in the OP is broadly correct. I don't think we as a community should tolerate this, and I applaud Lightcone for refusing to give in to such heavy-handed coercion.

I have no personal insight on Nonlinear, but I want to chime in to say that I've been in other communities/movements where I both witnessed and directly experienced the effects of defamation-focused civil litigation. It was devastating. And I think the majority of the plaintiffs, including those arguably in the right, ultimately regretted initiating litigation. I sincerely hope this does not occur in the EA community. And I hope that threats of litigation are also discontinued. There are alternatives that are dramatically less monetarily and time-intensive, and more likely to lead to productive outcomes. I think normalizing (threats of) defmation-focused civil litigation is extremely detrimental to community functioning and community health.

Some thoughts on the general discussion:

(1) some people are vouching for Kat's character. This is useful information, but it's important to note that behaving badly is very compatible with having many strengths, treating one's friends well, etc. Many people who have done terrible things are extremely charismatic and charming, and even well-meaning or altruistic. It's hard to think bad things about one's friends, but unfortunately it's something we all need to be open to. (I've definitely in the past not taken negative allegations against someone as seriously as I should have, because they were my friend).

(2) I think something odd about the comments claiming that this post is full of misinformation, is that they don't correct any of the misinformation. Like, I get that assembling receipts, evidence etc can take a while, and writing a full rebuttal of this would take a while. But if there are false claims in the post, pick one and say why it's false. 

This makes these interventions seem less sincere to me, because I think if someone posted a bunch of lies about me, in my first comments/reactions I would be less concerned about the meta appropriateness of the post having been posted, and more concerned to be like "this post says Basic Thing X but that's completely false, actually it was Y, and A, B and C can corroborate".  On the earlier post where an anonymous account accused Nonlinear of bad behaviour, Kat's responses actually made me update against her, because she immediately attacked the validity of even raising the critique and talked about the negative effects of gossip (on the meta level), rather than expressing concern about possible misunderstandings at NL (for example). For me, this is reminiscent of the abuse tactic DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender): these early comments meant that much of the conversation on this post has been about the appropriateness of Ben publishing it now, or the appropriateness of Emerson threatening to sue him, rather than the object-level 'hey apparently there are these people in our community who treated their employees really badly'.

I've confirmed with a commenter here, whom left a comment positive of non-linear, that they were asked to leave that comment by nonlinear. I think this is low-integrity behaviour on behalf of nonlinear, and an example of brigading. I would appreciate the forum team looking into this. 

Edit: I have been asked to clarify that they were encouraged to comment ’by nonlinear, rather than asked to comment positively (or anything in particular).

Hi all, I wanted to chime in because I have had conversations relevant to this post with just about all involved parties at various points. I've spoken to "Alice" (both while she worked at nonlinear and afterward), Kat (throughout the period when the events in the post were alleged to have happened and afterward), Emerson, Drew, and (recently) the author Ben, as well as, to a much lesser extent, "Chloe" (when she worked at nonlinear). I am (to my knowledge) on friendly terms with everyone mentioned (by name or pseudonym) in this post. I wish well for everyone involved. I also want the truth to be known, whatever the truth is.

I was sent a nearly final draft of this post yesterday (Wednesday), once by Ben and once by another person mentioned in the post.
 

I want to say that I find this post extremely strange for the following reasons:
 

(1) The nearly final draft of this post that I was given yesterday had factual inaccuracies that (in my opinion and based on my understanding of the facts) are very serious despite ~150 hours being spent on this investigation. This makes it harder for me to take at face value the parts of the post that I have no knowledge of.  Why am I, an outsider on this whole thing, finding serious errors in the final hours before publication? That's not to say everything in the post is inaccurate, just that I was disturbed to see serious inaccuracies, and I have no idea why nobody caught these (I really don't feel like I should be the one to correct mistakes, given my lack of involvement, but it feels important to me to comment here since I know there were inaccuracies in the piece, so here we are).
 

(2) Nonlinear reached out to me and told me they have proof that a bunch of claims in the post are completely false. They also said that in the past day or so (upon becoming aware of the contents of the post), they asked Ben to delay his publication of this post by one week so that they could gather their evidence and show it to Ben before he publishes it (to avoid having him publish false information). However, he refused to do so.
 

This really confuses me. Clearly, Ben spent a huge amount of time on this post (which has presumably involved weeks or months of research), so why not wait one additional week for Nonlinear to provide what they say is proof that his post contains substantial misinformation? Of course, if the evidence provided by nonlinear is weak, he should treat it as such, but if it is strong, it should also be treated as such. I struggle to wrap my head around the decision not to look at that evidence. I am also confused why Ben, despite spending a huge amount of time on this research, apparently didn't seek out this evidence from Nonlinear long ago.

To clarify: I think it’s very important in situations like this not to let the group being criticized have a way to delay publication indefinitely. If I were in Ben’s shoes, I believe what I would have done is say something like, “You have exactly one week to provide proof of any false claims in this post (and I’ll remove any claim you can prove is false) then I’m publishing the post no matter what at that time.” This is very similar to the policy we use for our Transparent Replications project (where we replicate psychology results of publications in top journals), and we have found it to work well. We give the original authors a specific window of time during which they can point out any errors we may have made (which is at least a week). This helps make sure our replications are accurate, fair, and correct, and yet the teams being replicated have no say over whether the replications are released (they always are released regardless of whether we get a response).
 

It seems to me that basic norms of good epistemics require that, on important topics, you look at all the evidence that can be easily acquired.
 

I also think that if you publish misinformation, you can't just undo it by updating the post later or issuing a correction. Sadly, that's not the way human minds/social information works. In other words, misinformation can't be jammed back into the bottle once it is released. I have seen numerous cases where misinformation is released only later to be retracted, in which the misinformation got way more attention than the retraction, and most people came away only with the misinformation. This seems to me to provide a strong additional reason why a small delay in the publication date appears well worth it (to me, as an outsider) to help avoid putting out a post with potentially substantial misinformation. I hope that the lesswrong/EA communities will look at all the evidence once it is released, which presumably will be in the next week or so, in order to come to a fair and accurate conclusion (based on all the evidence, whatever that accurate final conclusion turns out to be) and do better than these other cases I’ve witnessed where misinformation won the day.
 

Of course, I don't know Ben's reason for jumping to publish immediately, so I can't evaluate his reasons directly.
 

Disclaimer: I am friends with multiple people connected to this post.  As a reminder, I wish well for everyone involved, and I wish for the truth to be known, whatever that truth happens to be. I have acted (informally) as an advisor to nonlinear (without pay) - all that means, though, is that every so often, team members there will reach out to me to ask for my advice on things.

Note: I've updated this comment a few times to try to make my position clearer, to add some additional context, and to fix grammatical mistakes.

The vast majority of people should probably be withholding judgment and getting back to work for the next week until Nonlinear can respond.

I'm contributing to it now, but it's a bit of a shame that this post has 183 comments at the time of writing when the post is not even a day old and not being on the front page. EA seems drawn to drama and controversy and it would accomplish its goals much better if it were more able to focus on more substantive posts.

I’m one of the Community Liaisons for CEA’s Community Health and Special Projects team. The information shared in this post is very troubling. There is no room in our community for manipulative or intimidating behaviour.

We were familiar with many (but not all) of the concerns raised in Ben’s post based on our own investigation. We’re grateful to Ben for spending the time pursuing a more detailed picture, and grateful to those who supported Alice and Chloe during a very difficult time. 

We talked to several people currently or formerly involved in Nonlinear about these issues, and took some actions as a result of what we heard. We plan to continue working on this situation. 

From the comments on this post, I’m guessing that some readers are trying to work out whether Kat and Emerson’s intentions were bad. However, for some things, intentions might not be very decision-relevant. In my opinion, meta work like incubating new charities, advising inexperienced charity entrepreneurs, and influencing funding decisions should be done by people with particularly good judgement about how to run strong organisations, in addition to having admirable intentions. 

I’m looking forward to seeing what information Nonlinear shares in the coming weeks.  

Hello!

I’m Minh, Nonlinear intern from September 2022 to April 2023. The last time allegations of bad practices came up, I reiterated that I had a great time working at Nonlinear. Since this post is >10,000 words, I’m not able to address everything, both because:

1. I literally can’t write that much.
2. I can’t speak for interactions between Nonlinear and Alice/Chloe, because everything I’ve heard on this topic is secondhand.

I’m just sharing my own experience with Nonlinear, and interpreting specific claims made about Kat/Emerson’s character/interaction styles based on my time with Nonlinear. In fact, I’m largely assuming Alice and Chloe are telling the truth, and speaking in good faith.

Disclaimers

In the interest of transparency, I’d like to state:

1. I have never been approached in this investigation, nor was I aware of it. I find this odd, because … if you’re gonna interview dozens of people about a company’s unethical treatment of employees, why wouldn’t you ask the recent interns? Nonlinear doesn’t even have that many people to interview, and I was very easy to find/reach. So that’s … odd.
2. I was not asked to write this comment. I just felt like it. It’s been a while since I’ve written on the EA Forum. I generally don't write, unless I have a unique perspective on the topic.
3. My internship was unpaid, aside from reimbursements for costs. I honestly never prioritised asking for more pay, because I always valued asking for advice/networking more. I just found that more personally useful/advantageous for my circumstances - no near-term financial pressure, being from a non-EA hub and having to actively network very far in advance to get roles I want, compared to people from EA hubs. So it was unpaid, I just … didn’t really care.
4. [EDIT]: I’m addressing parts of the post that imply a pattern of behaviour. Maybe it’s unintentional, but this post references a lot of extra details that make the core claims feel much more believable as a pattern of behaviour. If this post was just about “Nonlinear abused this specific employee in this specific context”, that’s one thing. But this post says “Nonlinear abused employees, and they openly brag about how cutthroat/exploitative they are, and they tell employees their problems and time and personal life don’t really matter”. Hell, I’d be convinced.

 I don’t say bad things about you, you don’t say bad things about me.

I agree this can sound suspicious, but I’ve always had the same principle. I refrain from creating negative impressions of others, because I think everyone should have a chance to make 1 good first impression. I also think it’s subjectively easier to echo negative rumours than positive rumours. All this can add up to a very warped perception, if most of what you hear about a person is secondhand.
Of course, this doesn’t extend to possible harm/abuse, so don’t take any of this as me minimising/refuting Alice or Chloe’s experiences. And, as mentioned, I don’t like assuming ill
of others based purely on secondhand information.

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.

This is the one part I’m outright skeptical of. It sounds very out-of-character, to the point where I can’t foresee the Nonlinear team ever saying this. My experience with Kat, Drew or Emerson is that they love their families/partners a lot, and frequently communicate/visit. They are extremely intentional, scheduling in time to talk to loved ones every day. And if you think about it … why would someone visit a dozen countries a year, plus all the bureaucracy and hassle involved, if they didn’t like interacting with locals.
This daily pattern of behaviour would be really odd/suboptimal from a cold, logical, utility-maximising standpoint, as implied here.

Multiple people who worked with Kat reported that Kat had a pattern of enforcing arbitrary short deadlines on people in order to get them to make the decision she wants e.g. “I need a decision by the end of this call”, or (in an email to Alice) “This is urgent and important. There are people working on saving the world and we can’t let our issues hold them back from doing their work.” 

My Occam’s Razor read is that Kat is basically externalising her internal dialogue. Kat naturally tends to procrastinate, so she uses these strategies to get herself to do work, and that self pep-talk sounds really weird when she externalises it to others. I struggle with procrastination as someone with ADHD, so my internal dialogue sounds very similar, I just don’t use that phrasing when talking to others haha.

By the same reasoning, the employees reported that they were given 100% of the menial tasks around the house (cleaning, tidying, etc) due to their lower value of time to the company. For instance, if a cofounder spilled food in the kitchen, the employees would clean it up. This was generally reported as feeling very demeaning.

If it means anything, when I stayed with Kat and Emerson for around 2 weeks, I never experienced anything similar. Driving, dishwashing and laundry I was never asked to do, which somehow felt weird the other way, because I thought I was doing too little.

Other times when Alice would come to Kat with money troubles and asking for a pay rise, Alice reports that Kat would tell them that this was a psychological issue and that actually they had safety, for instance they could move back in with their parents, so they didn’t need to worry.

OK, I feel this is a misinterpretation. Kat said this to me, but I had a different interpretation. Basically, I was discussing my idea of “the deferred life plan”: that, in my experience, ambitious people who want to start/build/work on meaningful things have a tendency to rationalise not doing it by simply not thinking too hard about the details. 

[DISCLAIMER: Taken at face value, Kat’s response to Alice is an insensitive response to a subordinate saying they have money problems and need a pay rise. I’m suggesting that there might have been more context, based on Kat saying very similar things in a very different tone to me.]

I’m sure a lot of EAs have heard/believed some variation of “instead of trying to help the world/pursue meaningful things, you need to first go to a good college, get a good degree, build a good resume/CV, climb the corporate ladder, achieve financial independence and retire with a 3% rate of withdrawal and then do the thing you want”. My background is climate activism in Singapore, so that’s basically the only advice I’d ever heard.

I asked Kat for her opinion, because I knew she basically didn’t do any of that. She didn’t have a college degree, travelled a lot and spent years starting a nonprofit and living on very little. This topic is worth its own very long post, but essentially, she said “you need to break down and plan out exactly what your financial needs are, because intentionally maximising your runway gives you more room for risk tolerance”.

I think that makes sense. I think young EAs, and honestly, most young people, don’t confront themselves on what tradeoffs they need to have the life they want, purely out of discomfort. I’m a guy surrounded by guys from prestigious colleges, I feel all my peers just procrastinate pursuing things that matter to them by seeking high-status, high paying jobs. A lot of them have no goal of “if I make 75k a year for 3 years and rent with 3 roommates, I can pursue what I want for a decade at 25 years old”, even though that’s exactly the kind of calculation you need to … pursue meaningful things. And if you remove rent from the equation by living with parents, your risk tolerance goes way up.

Anyway, that’s my interpretation, based on hearing the exact same words from Kat, but extracting a very different meaning.

Re: Adversarial business practices

As for Emerson, he gives very transparent advice about how sharks operate, and how to survive them. He’s very perceptive (or at least, sounds perceptive) about adversarial strategies in high-growth, highly competitive spaces like online media and Web3, due to his 2 decades of experience in these fields.

Do I think Emerson can sound like a bad actor? Absolutely. It’s hard for a person to explain common manipulative strategies with sounding incredibly suspicious. However, for me, I spent the entire 2 weeks with him writing down notes on my laptop, notes I’ve found incredibly helpful as I’ve been scaling a generative AI startup for the past 4-5 months. Personally, I had to learn to deal with bad actors and adversarial business practices, either by being taught beforehand, or by experiencing it myself, and I vastly,vastly prefer being taught.

I have read the OP. I have skim read the replies. I'm afraid I am only making this one post because involvement with online debates is very draining for me.

My post is roughly structured along the lines of:

• My relationship to Kat
• My opinions about Kat's character
• My opinions about EA culture and risky weirdness
• My opinions about how we go about ensuring good practices in EA

Kat is a good friend, who I trust and think highly of. I have known her personally (rather than as a loose acquaintance, as I did for years prior) since summer 2017. I do not know Emerson or his brother from Adam.

I see somebody else was asked about declaring interests when they spoke positively about Kat. I have never been employed by Kat. Back in 2017, Charity Science had some legal and operational infrastructure (e.g. charity status, tax stuff) which was hard to arrange. And during that time, .impact - which later became Rethink Charity, collaborated with Charity Science in order to shelter under that charitable status in order to be able to hire people, legally process funds and so forth. So indirectly the entity that employed me was helped out by Charity Science.

However, I never collaborated in a work sense with Charity Science. Professionally I was employed by Tom Ash to do temporary project coordination on LEAN in 2015/16 while I was completing my PhD. In 2017, LEAN was incorporated into SHIC and rebranded as Rethink Charity, under Tee Barnett and Baxter Bullock. (For those of you who are new, Rethink Priorities incubated with Rethink Charity at it's inception before operational aspects were in place for it to separate, hence the similar name. .impact was also co-founded by Peter Hurford prior to his co-launch of RP). Tee and Baxter hired me as project manager for LEAN, which I did for a year and a few months, after which I product managed the first stages of the reboot of eahub.org. So basically... my opinions in this post are biased by my personal friendship with Kat, but not by any other aspects of my position.

When I met Kat she was working on/leading Charity Science: Health. We struck up a friendship and, over my 2 and a half years of living in Vancouver, we socialised regularly. Mostly one to one, going on hikes together. But also in group contexts, such as dinner parties. Since I left Canada (in August 2019) we have kept in touch through video calls every few months.

My assessment of Kat's character is that she is very moral and honest individual. I do not recognise any characterisation of her as manipulative or passive aggressive or threatening. Kat is direct. She is highly rational and principled. She is also a very creative, out of the box thinker who sees things through a completely unique lens which makes her very radical. She is extraordinarily committed and disciplined in adhering to her values and beliefs. I consider her to be a demonstrably objective and fair person. As the author mentioned, she is very positive and high energy. I have never met a more 'bubbly' person. Even during times when she has been going through really awful ordeals, she has always taken a more upbeat and optimistic outlook than others in her situation would have done. Like a lot of EAs, Kat feels deeply and is very impacted by her conscientious drive to do the right thing. I have seen her go through prolonged periods of turmoil and anxiety over a difficult decision where personal needs were in conflict with what she thought she ought to do. In my observation this has often led to extreme self-exploitation in terms of how hard she has worked, including when ill, because of her commitment to the cause she was working on and the people she was trying to help.

I find that Kat is slow to criticise or judge others. There have often been times where I have needed to encourage Kat to put her own needs first, to recognise them and to take less shit from other people around her.

Kat has, herself, endured living and working arrangements that I would see as inadvisable and unacceptable. This is important, because the stuff that Kat is being accused of inflicting on others is consistent with the choices and sacrifices that she imposes on herself. To give you an example, Kat is one of the people who really earned my respect for living an ascetic life in order to give her time and money to charitable causes. For many years (I don't know about now) she and Joey gave themselves incredibly low salaries which I would definitely not have made do with. Dig up old posts by Kat on this forum and you will see advice and write-ups on how to live on next to nothing while staying happy, because that is how she lived. They both treated their own time similarly.

When I was living in Vancouver, I lived in a shared house with some other EAs (including Tom Ash, Kieran Grieg, Mat Carpendale, Marylen Reid) who had been part of a shared working/living arrangement with Joey and Kat in the early days of Charity Science and of the Vancouver EA community. They described having taken over a set of apartments in a block of housing, and each thinking of a funny name for their apartments that symbolised something about them. The one Kat and Joey lived in was called 'the sweatshop' because of the insane hours they worked.

I know some former employees of Charity Science who had some grievances and criticisms of how the charity was run. I remember a lot of these were around the org's slightly blase attitude towards legalities. As with what I said two paragraphs back, my observation was that Kat and Joey took all the risks for themselves and their own wellbeing that they asked of others. So I think you might question those risks or judgement calls, but I am sceptical that anything Kat has asked her employees to do wasn't something that lines up entirely with what she puts herself through.

My overall interpretation of any 'weirdness' to do with issues such as casual contracts, terrible hours, unsafe working conditions, poor pay etc etc. is that I would not personally endorse nor work in that way. And I would personally be cautious towards an employer which had those views towards hours, pay, and legal irregularity.

I do not see Kat as at all unusual in this attitude towards risk and compliance with conventions compared to other EAs. In my experience A LOT of people in the EA and rationalist space have similar views and attitudes to a whole range of things.

In Vancouver, my sense of rationalists, and the EAs I lived with, is that people were quite keen to throw a lot of conventions and social norms in the dustbin as part of their interpretation of rationalism. This was pretty exasperating at times, but I do not put any of the individuals who I include in this generalisation into the category of 'bad actors' in my mind. Naive actors maybe... open minded to a fault? Socially blind? But each of them... people who are the first in line to live out the experiment that puts their rationalist beliefs to the test. I think that many people in this space have a poor grasp or appreciation of emotional and personal boundaries, but that this harms them as much as it harms others. A soft example of this in the shared house in Vancouver was when I walked into a room with a couple of my housemates and a large number of guests who were complete strangers. One of my housemates then turned to me and asked me on the spot to share the most embarrassing/irrational thing I had believed during my evangelical Christian childhood. While I understand the logic of why this kind of thing is a norm in rationalist communities, it was obviously hurtful and humiliating to me because a personally difficult time of my life was put under the spotlight in front of strangers, leading me to feel very unsafe. My housemate was doing something which they genuinely thought was promoting a good norm and a good culture, but in doing so they unintentionally hurt me. In my view many people in this thread are in that general category too, and it is somewhat of a spectrum.

You may or may not be able to tell from how I frame this, that I'm a somewhat more conservative (small c) person myself. For example, I think polyamory is a terrible idea 99.9999999% of the time and that it would probably require several significant phases of actual species evolution for that to change. I think recreational drug use is needlessly risky. I could not get far enough away from the 'cuddle piles' my housemates were keen on. I'm very picky about my living arrangements and food, and my performance on the OCEAN test is basically sky high conscientiousness and neuroticism, paired with introversion and low agreeability. For openness I'm very high on openness to ideas but not to experiences. All of this is to say that lots of things about how many EAs and rationalists lived and did business (including Kat) would be most definitely 'weird' in my books, and 'oh hell no' in terms of how far I'd engage.

I would also like to share that, despite the general views I've shared in this post, I actually did choose to work in an employment arrangement which was unorthodox when I was working for .impact under Tom Ash. When I initially worked for Tom on .impact, my pay was also very low. I was initially offered the LEAN project management job under some kind of set up where my accommodation and some food would be offered in Vancouver (living in the same house as Tom), to mitigate low pay. There was a contract (I'd never work without one), but there definitely were irregularities and short cuts that some might criticise. I am in no way mentioning this to shame or call out .impact, or Tom or any of it.

The point I'm trying to make is that if you start to go over all EAs and EA orgs with a microscope, you'll find a lot of people have coloured outside the lines at some point in the last 15 years without anything going amiss. If I did not like my low pay, I didn't have to take the job! If I didn't want to live in a house with Tom, I didn't have to. In fact, when Tee offered me a job on LEAN months after I stopped working for Tom, my first question was whether he could coordinate something similar to what I had been offered by Tom.. namely accommodation in a foreign country I quite fancied trying out, with housemates and a social network thrown in, in exchange for a modest salary. If Time magazine was doing a feature on my job I'm sure this would all have sounded twisted and wrong. And when I moved into that EA house people WERE weird did do things differently... sometimes involving substances and physical intimacy. But that was completely fine, because I simply didn't go along with the things I didn't like (for the record I like none of those things and gave them a grossed out facial suggestion when they were brought to my attention. Hopefully they have now forgiven me). Had I found it weird living with Tom who had previously employed me (by the time I moved there he was on the board of Rethink Charity but no longer directly working with me) I would have moved out.

Overall I think that unconventional working and living practices do come with high risks of misunderstandings. But they aren't enough in and of themselves to condemn people who run their lives and workplaces in this way, many of who do so because they sincerely think it is the best way to optimise the good. I also think that there is a level of responsibility on all sides in such an arrangement, which includes that of the employee to own their choices regarding what contracts they sign (or don't) and under what conditions they labour.

I don't know the ins and outs of how Kat and Non Linear employed people. For the record, I have heard about either Alice or Chloe once from Kat before, very briefly, aside from today.

Nevertheless, a lot of things are completely off to me about this whole thread.

I disagree with the suggestion that there was something sinister about a policy of 'we don't talk badly about you and you don't talk badly about us'. That is a rephrasing of a fairly standard social (and literal) contract which exists between the majority of people all around the world. As somebody who works for the government making policy, you bet I'd lose my job outright if I publicly criticised them. But I would also expect a variation of this from most employers.

On a personal and ethical level, I think it is completely unacceptable to slander or badmouth any person or organisation without first giving them a chance to resolve things and settle things privately. I have been on the receiving end, many times, of hurtful public confrontations from people who I thought I was on good terms with. In each case the first time I had any inkling at all something was amiss was when I was challenged in a public setting and completely blindsided. Those experiences were devastating and entirely unfair (none of them happened in EA... one of them was on a fan online community, and the others were at school and in my faculty while I was on my PhD. I feel pain and sorrow from these events to this day, and they have significantly affected my trust and sense of security in social environments.

Kat says that each of these things were true about how she learned about the grievances of 'Chloe' and 'Alice'. As I understand it, she also had no idea this post was coming from Ben before it was made, and was not given a fair chance to provide evidence to refute a lot of the accusations made. And even when she is able to disprove them, the shape of the accusation is now out there and will have consequences and live on in peoples' perceptions and memories.

To me, aside from how unfair and cruel I think this was to Kat, I am also very uneasy about the way the EA community seems to be approaching a lot of adjacent issues.

It seems to me that (gradually but most obviously) since FTX there was this switch to thinking that its somehow healthy or appropriate to launch a kind of autophagic self-immolation process whereby bits of the community launch toxic witchhunts against other bits. It's not healthy. It's not constructive. It's not effective, and to add insult to injury - it's not necessary.

I am completely for improving the practices, standards, conventions etc. in the EA community, but I am deeply disappointed that people think that a constructive way to do this is via call out culture. I had rather hoped that the one place on the internet I could trust people not to engage in pillory and vigilantism would be in EA! I use those words completely literally, not to be inflammatory. That is what I think this approach amounts to in practice.

All people, regardless of their position of power, privilege or status, deserve to be treated and considered innocent until proven guilty by some mechanism that is most certainly not Concerned Neighbour #5 or the equivalent. Of course we need a mechanism for people to challenge abuses of power or severe malpractice, but public speculation about specific people or organisations doesn't constitute a professional, fair or reliable vehicle for delivering that outcome.

This is aside from the fact that Kat and Non Linear are not all-powerful in this set up. Chloe, Alice and friends have intentionally or otherwise caused huge devastation to their reputation and wellbeing. And when I opened this thread, it jumped out as unfair that the two accusors were anonymised while Kat and Non Linear were not. I believe it is out of order for Kat's personal and professional reputation to be publicly attacked this way. This is not just because I believe that Kat is being mischaracterised. It is also a point of principle regardless of the particulars.

I also don't want to see any other orgs or EAs subject to this either, in the future.

"Going forward I think anyone who works with Kat Woods, Emerson Spartz, or Drew Spartz, should sign legal employment contracts, and make sure all financial agreements are written down in emails and messages that the employee has possession of. I think all people considering employment by the above people at any non-profits they run should take salaries where money is wired to their bank accounts, and not do unpaid work or work that is compensated by ways that don’t primarily include a salary being wired to their bank accounts."

To be fair, this should be a fairly universal assumption for any individual considering any employment arrangement. I don't think it is for me or for you or me to form opinions about what went down between Non Linear and it's employees, but if Non Linear employees didn't see to the above then I do think they exercised poor judgement.

I'll conclude by referring back to my paragraph where I reflected on common kinds of weirdness among EAs and rationalists. I do completely trust that Kat was honest, honourable and conscientious in all of her dealings with her employees. However, I see it as quite likely that she and multitudes of others in this community have approached things in an unorthodox way which we might describe as 'unwise'. But 'unwise' is a very far cry from the portrait painted in this thread, and the consequences of the maverick practices of many EAs and rationalists backfire on them just as they do on others. Conventions, regulations, codes of practice, norms... these are safety rails which live on because they produce good outcomes on average. I think many EAs and rationalists could learn from well honed systems in other industries and institutions. That's something this debacle really highlights. However, the same point applies to dealing with disagreements and accusations in a professional, fair and systemetised manner.

As I've been drafting this post for 4 hours and counting, this concludes my engagement with Internet drama for 2023.

Massive thanks to Ben for writing this report and to Alice and Chloe for sharing their stories. Both took immense bravery.

There's a lot of discussion on the meta-level on this post. I want to say that I believe Alice and Chloe. I currently want to keep my distance from Nonlinear, Kat and Emerson, and would caution others against funding or working with them. I don't want to be part of a community that condones this sort of thing. 

I’m not and never have been super-involved in this affair, but I reached out to the former employees following the earlier vague allegations against Nonlinear on the Forum, and after someone I know mentioned they’d heard bad things. It seemed important to know about this, because I had been a remote writing intern at Nonlinear, and Kat was still an occasional mentor to me (she’d message me with advice), and I didn’t want to support NL or promote them if it turned out that they had behaved badly.

Chloe and Alice’s stories had the ring of truth about them to me, and seemed consistent with my experiences with Emerson and Kat — albeit I didn’t know either of them that well and I didn’t have any strongly negative experiences with them. 

It seems relevant to mention that Chloe and Alice were initially reluctant to talk to me about any of this. This is inconsistent with the claim that they are eager to spread vicious lies about NL at any chance they get.

I’m glad this is out in the open: it felt unhygienic to have this situation where there were whisperings and rumours but no-one felt empowered to be specific about anything. 

 

We're coming up on two weeks now since this post was published, with no substantive response from Nonlinear (other than this). I think it would be good to get an explicit timeline from Nonlinear on when we can expect to see their promised response. It's reasonable to ask for folks to reserve judgement for a short time, but not indefinitely. @Kat Woods @Emerson Spartz 

Post on everybody who’s living together and dating each other and giving each other grants when?

Clarification: I’m just kind of surprised to see some of the things in this post portrayed as bad when they are very common in EA orgs, like living together and being open to unconventional and kind of unclear boundaries and pay arrangements and especially conflicts of interest from dating coworkers and bosses. I worry that things we’re all letting slide could be used to discredit anybody if the momentum turns against them.

As one of the people Ben interviewed: 

1. This post closely reflects my understanding of the situation. (EDIT: at this time, before engaging with Nonlinear reply myself.)
2. Whenever this post touches on something that I can independently corroborate (EDIT: small minority of claims), I believe it to be accurate. Whenever the post communicates something that both Ben and I have heard from Alice and Chloe (EDIT: large majority of claims), it tells their account faithfully.
3. I appreciate Ben’s emphasis on red lines and the experiences of Alice and Chloe. When he leaves out stories that I think we are both aware of, my guess is that he has done so because these stories aren’t super relevant to the case at hand or aren’t super objective/strongly evidenced. This makes me think more favourably of the rest of his write-up.

One example of the evidence we’re gathering

We are working hard on a point-by-point response to Ben’s article, but wanted to provide a quick example of the sort of evidence we are preparing to share:

Her claim:  “Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.” 

The truth (see screenshots below):

1. There was vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, mixed nuts, prunes, peanuts, tomatoes, cereal, oranges) which we offered to cook for her.
2. We were picking up vegan food for her.

Months later, after our relationship deteriorated, she went around telling many people that we starved her. She included details that depict us in a maximally damaging light - what could be more abusive than refusing to care for a sick girl, alone in a foreign country? And if someone told you that, you’d probably believe them, because who would make something like that up?

Evidence

• The screenshots below show Kat offering Alice the vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, cereal, etc), on the first day she was sick. Then, when she wasn’t interested in us bringing/preparing those, I told her to ask Drew to go pick up food, and Drew said yes. Kat also left the house and went and grabbed mashed potatoes for her nearby.
   

• See more screenshots here of Drew’s conversations with her. 

Initially, we heard she was telling people that she “didn’t eat for days,” but she seems to have adjusted her claim to “barely ate” for “2 days”.

It’s important to note that Alice didn’t lie about something small and unimportant. She accused of us a deeply unethical act - the kind that most people would hear and instantly think you must be a horrible human - and was caught lying.

We believe many people in EA heard this lie and updated unfavorably towards us. A single false rumor like this can unfairly damage someone’s ability to do good, and this is just one among many she told.

We have job contracts, interview recordings, receipts, chat histories, and more, which we are working full-time on preparing.

This claim was a few sentences in Ben’s article but took us hours to refute because we had to track down all of the conversations, make them readable, add context, anonymize people, check our facts, and write up an explanation that was rigorous and clear. Ben’s article is over 10,000 words and we’re working as fast as we can to respond to every point he made. 

Again, we are not asking for the community to believe us unconditionally. We want to show everybody all of the evidence and also take responsibility for the mistakes we made. 

We’re just asking that you not overupdate on hearing just one side, and keep an open mind for the evidence we’ll be sharing as soon as we can. 

Some thoughts:

• Vibewise, I find this unsurprising. I am not utterly shocked by any of the above and am not particularly surprised by much of it. Nonlinear does have a move fast and break things approach and I imagine they have patterns of behaviour that have predictably hurt people in the past. As evidence of this I made a market on it about it 8 months ago. 
• I like the nonlinear team personally and guess they do good/interesting work. I thought superlinear was a good test-case of bounty-based funding. I also use the Non-Linear library and find it valuable. I am confident that Kat, Emerson and Drew have good intentions on a deep level.
• The above statements can both be true. 
• Thanks Ben for doing this, I think it was brave and good
• I particularly like this advice "Going forward I think anyone who works with Kat Woods, Emerson Spartz, or Drew Spartz, should sign legal employment contracts, and make sure all financial agreements are written down in emails and messages that the employee has possession of. I think all people considering employment by the above people at any non-profits they run should take salaries where money is wired to their bank accounts, and not do unpaid work or work that is compensated by ways that don’t primarily include a salary being wired to their bank accounts." 
  • I think that EA is a very high trust ecosystem and I guess maybe Nonlinear shouldn't be given that trust. But after reading the above, it's up to you. I might advise the median EA not to work for them and I'd advise them not to hire people unless they are pretty hard-nosed though seemingly Kat has said she would change things anyway.
• I am pretty curious about @spencerg's statement that many simple errors were wrong with a recent draft this. That seems notable
• I think the key question here is "Will such events happen again and what is the acceptable threshold for that chance"
  • If Nonlinear were welcomed unambiguously back into the EA fold I don't think I'd be that confident that there wouldn't be more stories like this in the next year. Maybe 20% that there would be. 
  • I guess most people think that is above the acceptable tolerance.
  • I think it's above tolerance for me too. It seems much higher than any other org I can think of. Notably it seems very avoidable.
  • I guess I do think things trade off against one another and maybe I'd like a way for us to say "this org is really effective but we don't recommend most people work for them". This is the sort of stance many have towards non-safety AI work as a means to upskill
  • I think rather than this being seen as punishment it can be seen as acceptable boundary setting - communities are allowed to want people given status and others not. This action will lower Nonlinear's status and as a group we can choose to do that. Generally I think about things in terms of bad/unacceptable behaviour rather than bad people and I think a community gets to set the level of predictable bad behaviour it is exposed to. 
• What could Nonlinear do to convince me that they deserve the same levels of easy trust as other EA orgs? ^[1]
  • Provide evidence that this article is deeply flawed
  • Not threaten to sue Lightcone for publishing it
  • Acknowledge the patterns of behaviour that led to these outcomes and how they have changed - this would probably involve acknowledging that lots of these events took place
  • They could just decide that they don't want this - they want to work in a different way to how EA orgs tend to, and that's fine-adjacent, but then I would recommend they be treated differently too. I wonder sometimes whether it's good to have, say, rationalism as a space willing to deal with less standard norms. 
• In my opinion too much post-FTX discussion has focused on individual EA behaviour and too little on powerful EA behavior. I think the median EA trying to avoid downside risk is overrated. As one's influence grows the harm one does scales and it becomes better value to try to limit the bad and increase the good more. I am much more interested in a discussion of what Nonlinear should or shouldn't do than for Catherine Richardson from Putney to worry if she she is spending too much money on rent. 

1. ^{^}

   Note that again, I don't think they should close down, I'm just not sure they should be invited to present at EAGs, and I'd be happy for this to sit on a forum wiki page about them

Some confidentiality constraints have been lifted in the last few days, so I’m now able to share more information from the Community Health and Special Projects team to give people a sense of how this case went from our perspective, and how we think about these things. 
 

Previous updates:

• General statement
• An incomplete list of actions we’ve taken to reduce risk of other people ending up in similarly bad situations.

To give a picture of how things happened over time:

• Starting mid last year, our team heard about many of the concerns mentioned in this post.
• At the time of our initial conversations with former staff/associates of Nonlinear, they were understandably reluctant for us to do anything that would let on to Nonlinear that they were raising complaints. This limited our ability to hear Nonlinear’s side of the story, though members of our team did have some conversations with Kat that touched on some of these topics. It also meant that the former staff/associates did not give permission at that time for us to take some steps that we suggested. They also suggested some steps that we didn’t see as feasible for us. 
• At one point we discussed the possibility of the ex-staff writing a public post of some kind, but at that time they were understandably unwilling to do this. Our impression is that the impetus for that eventually coming together was Ben being willing to put in a lot of work.
• Over time, confidentiality became less of a constraint. The people raising the concerns became more willing to have information shared, and some people made public comments, meaning we were able to take some more actions without compromising confidentiality. We were then able to take some steps including what we describe here, and pointing various people to the publicly available claims, to reduce the risk of other people ending up in bad situations.
• We had been considering taking more steps when we heard Ben was working with theformer staff/associates on a public post. We felt that this public post might make some of those steps less necessary. We kept collecting information about Nonlinear, but did not do as much as we might have done had Ben not been working on this.
• We continued to track Nonlinear and were ready to prioritise the case more highly if it seemed that the risk to others in the community was rising. 

First; the formal employee drove without a license for 1-2 months in Puerto Rico. We taught her to drive, which she was excited about. You might think this is a substantial legal risk, but basically it isn't, as you can see here, the general range of fines for issues around not-having-a-license in Puerto Rico is in the range of $25 to $500, which just isn't that bad.

I have no knowledge specific to Puerto Rico, but my understanding is that by far the most important risk incurred when driving without a license is that an unlicensed driver will also almost certainly be uninsured or be in violation of the terms of their insurance such that their insurance will decline claims related to unlicensed driving they were doing, and therefore that an unlicensed driver would potentially be liable for extraordinary sums of money if they were to get into an accident for which they were at fault. Was this person insured? Did the car insurance policy allow unlicensed drivers? What would have happened if there had been an at-fault car accident with another driver?

So, Nonlinear-affiliated people are here in the comments disagreeing, promising proof that important claims in the post are false. I fully expect that Nonlinear's response, and much of the discussion, will be predictably shoved down the throat of my attention, so I'm not too worried about missing the rebuttals, if rebuttals are in fact coming.

But there's a hard-won lesson I've learned by digging into conflicts like this one, which I want to highlight, which I think makes this post valuable even if some of the stories turn out to be importantly false:

If a story is false, the fact that the story was told, and who told it, is valuable information. Sometimes it's significantly more valuable than if the story was true. You can't untangle a web of lies by trying to prevent anyone from saying things that have falsehoods embedded in them. You can untangle a web of lies by promoting a norm of maximizing the available information, including indirect information like who said what.

Think of the game Werewolf, as an analogy. Some moves are Villager strategies, and some moves are Werewolf strategies, in the sense that, if you notice someone using the strategy, you should make a Bayesian update in the direction of thinking the person using that strategy is a Villager or is a Werewolf.

On an earlier discussion of Nonlinear's practices, I wrote:

I worked closely with Kat for a year or so (2018-2019) when I was working at (and later leading) Charity Science Health. She's now a good friend.  

I considered Kat a good and ethical leader. I personally learned a lot from working with her. In her spending and life choices, she has shown a considerable moral courage: paying herself only $12K/year, dropping out of college because she didn't think it passed an impact cost-benefit test. Obviously that doesn't preclude the possibility that she has willfully done harmful things, but I think willfully bad behavior by Kat Woods is quite unlikely, a priori. 

I would also like to share my experience negotiating my salary with Kat when I first joined Charity Science Health, i.e., before we were friends. It was extremely positive. She was very committed to frugality, and she initially offered me the position of Associate Director at a salary of $25K/year, the bottom end of the advertised salary range. We exchanged several long emails discussing the tradeoffs in a higher or lower salary (team morale, risk of value drift, resources available for the core work, counterfactual use of funds, etc.). The correspondence felt like a genuine, collaborative search for the truth. I had concluded that I needed to make at least $45K/year to feel confident I was saving the minimum I would need in retirement, and in the end we agreed on $45K. Subsequently Kat sent me a contract for $50K, which I perceived as a goodwill gesture. My positive experience seems very different from what is reported here. 

(crossposted from LessWrong)

This is a pretty complex epistemic/social situation. I care a lot about our community having some kind of good process of aggregating information, allowing individuals to integrate it, and update, and decide what to do with it.

I think a lot of disagreements in the comments here and on LW stem from people having an implicit assumption that the conversation here is about "should [any particular person in this article] be socially punished?". In my preferred world, before you get to that phase there should be at least some period focused on "information aggregation and Original Seeing."

It's pretty tricky, since in the default, world, "social punishment?" is indeed the conversation people jump to. And in practice, it's hard to have words just focused on epistemic-evaluation without getting into judgment, or without speech acts being "moves" in a social conflict. 

But, I think it's useful to at least (individually) inhabit the frame of "what is true, here?" without asking questions like "what do those truths imply?".

With that in mind, some generally useful epistemic advice that I think is relevant here:

Try to have Multiple Hypotheses

It's useful to have at least two, and preferably three, hypotheses for what's going on in cases like this. (Or, generally whenever you're faced with a confusing situation where you're not sure what's true). If you only have one hypothesis, you may be tempted to shoehorn evidence into being evidence for/against that hypothesis, and you may be anchored on it.

If you have at least two hypotheses (and, like, "real ones", that both seem plausible to you), I find it easier to take in new bits of data, and then ask "okay, how would this fit into two different plausible scenarios"? which activates my "actually check" process.

I think three hypotheses is better than two because two can still end up in a "all the evidence ways in on a one-dimensional spectrum". Three hypotheses a) helps you do 'triangulation', and b) helps remind you to actually do the "what frame should I be having here? what are other additional hypotheses that I might not have thought of yet?"

Multiple things can be going on at once

If two people have a conflict, it could be the case that one person is at-fault, or both people are at-fault, or neither (i.e. it was a miscommunication or something). 

If one person does an action, it could be true, simultaneously, that:

• They are somewhat motivated by [Virtuous Motive A]
• They are somewhat motivated by [Suspicious Motive B]
• They are motivated by [Random Innocuous Motive C]

I once was arguing with someone, and they said "your body posture tells me you aren't even trying to listen to me or reason correctly, you're just trying to do a status monkey smackdown and put me in my place." And, I was like "what? No, I have good introspective access and I just checked whether I'm trying to make a reasoned argument. I can tell the difference between doing The Social Monkey thing and the "actually figure out the truth" thing."

What I later realized is that I was, like, 65% motivated by "actually wanna figure out the truth", and like 25% motivated by "socially punish this person" (which was a slightly different flavor of "socially punish" then, say, when I'm having a really tribally motivated facebook fight, so I didn't recognize it as easily).

Original Seeing vs Hypothesis Evaluation vs Judgment

OODA Loops include four steps: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

Often people skip over steps. They think they've already observed enough and don't bother looking for new observations. Or it doesn't even occur to them to do that explicitly. (I've noticed that I often skip to the orient step, where I figure out about "how do I organize my information? what sort of decision am I about to decide on?", and not actually do the observe step, where I'm purely focused on gaining raw data.

When you've already decided on a schema-for-thinking-about-a-problem, you're more likely to take new info that comes in and put it in a bucket you think you already understand.

Original Seeing is different from "organizing information".

They are both different from "evaluating which hypothesis is true"

They are both different from "deciding what to do, given Hypothesis A is true"

Which is in turn different from "actually taking actions, given that you've decided what to do."

I have a sort of idealistic dream that someday, a healthy rationalist/EA community could collectively be capable of raising hypotheses, without people anchoring on them, and people share information in a way you robustly trust won't get automatically leveraged into a conflict/political move. I don't think we're close enough to that world to advocate for it in-the-moment, but I do think it's still good practice for people individually to be spending at least some of their time in node the OODA loop, and tracking which node they're currently focusing on.

Based only on the allegations which Nonlinear admits to, which I think we can assume are 100% true, I would:

a) very strongly discourage anyone from working for Emerson Spartz and Kat Woods. 

and 

b) very strongly encourage CEA and other EA orgs to distance themselves from Nonlinear.

"First; the formal employee drove without a license for 1-2 months in Puerto Rico. We taught her to drive, which she was excited about. You might think this is a substantial legal risk, but basically it isn't, as you can see here, the general range of fines for issues around not-having-a-license in Puerto Rico is in the range of $25 to $500, which just isn't that bad."

This is illegal. Employers should not be asking employees to do things which are illegal, even if the punishment is a small fine.

"Third; the semi-employee was also asked to bring some productivity-related and recreational drugs over the border for us. In general we didn't push hard on this. For one, this is an activity she already did (with other drugs). For two, we thought it didn't need prescription in the country she was visiting, and when we found out otherwise, we dropped it. And for three, she used a bunch of our drugs herself, so it's not fair to say that this request was made entirely selfishly. I think this just seems like an extension of the sorts of actions she's generally open to."

Employers should not be asking "semi-employees" to transport illegal drugs, regardless of context.

Saying you're "saving the world" does not give you a free pass to ask your employees to break the law.

I really want to emphasise, particularly to younger EAs and EAs in college who want to work for EA orgs, that it is not normal for employers to ask you to do illegal things and you will almost certainly be able to very easily find impactful work with employers who are better than this.

Also, please do not work for employers who want you to live with them and be "a part of their family" - this situation is very unusual for a good reason and leaves you at very high risk of exploitation, abuse and mistreatment.

Part of being successful when running any organisation is being a good employer so you can hire and retain the best talent. Asking your employees to do illegal things is preposterously stupid and means you are an exceptionally bad employer, and means your organisation is probably not going to do a very good job of saving the world. This kind of behaviour also puts EA's reputation at risk and makes you a massive liability to the rest of us. Please do not do this.

@Ben Pace  Can you please add at the top of the post "Nonlinear disputes at least 85 of the claims in this post and intends to publish a detailed point-by-point response.

They also published this short update giving an example of the kind of evidence they plan to demonstrate."

We keep hearing from people who don't know this. Our comments get buried, so they think your summary at the bottom contains the entirety of our response, though it is just the tip of the iceberg. As a result, they think your post marks the end of the story, and not the opening chapter.

I appreciate the overall style and tone of the piece. I believe Ben is trying to figure out what happened. With the material he had, he could easily write a much more damaging hit piece (as has been the case with some traditional investigative journalist in the past).

Some remarks from an old fogey:

1. There are a zillion shitty jobs out there, and there is nothing wrong with either advertizing or taking a shitty job so long as everyone is aware it is shitty and the terms are clear upfront.

Against Non-Linear: It is not clear that the interns/whatever were fully aware just how shitty the jobs would be upfront, and they were probably oversold on them. This was probably seen as good business strategy. It isn't.

Against Alice: Personally, I think these jobs would have red flags a mile away. I have known people who went to work for obvious MLMs, and I think it is ultimately the responsibility of the person signing the contract to read the fine print and be aware of what they are getting into. If you, as an organization, put out shitty terms, and someone agrees to that, it's not your fault for making a shitty offer. If you, as an employee, accept work without a clear contract.... Don't do that. Other people may try to exploit you, and the typical company WILL try to exploit you. That is what they do. Your only defense is to not accept it. If you accept that, you agreed to it so you have to live with the consequences.

Again, probably the shittiness of the job was somewhat covered up. To the extent to which that is the case, beyond ordinary marketing, that's on Non-Linear. Personally, I think these jobs would be incredibly obviously shitty. And merely advertizing or filling a shitty job is not a crime.

2. Every organization eventually has someone who distorts the truth and could be a future disgruntled employee.

This point is not against Non-Linear or against Alice.

Rather, we should be careful of the low bar Ben set for publicizing this.

I agree that this would be more of a scandal if Non-Linear were bigger, and it's great to catch this before then, for many reasons.

But if you hire enough people, you will eventually run into someone who distorts the truth. We may all have different base rates for this. On the one hand, it could be seen as costly to complain. On the other hand, work generally kind of sucks - that's why you have to be paid to do it. (If your work doesn't suck, consider yourself very lucky.) So people often end up in tension with their employers.

So whatever epistemic standards we set need to account for the fact that, given enough time, there will be a motivated disgruntled employee in every EA organization. The trick is how you can distinguish between the organizations that are generally rotten and the ones with a disgruntled employee or two. And I'm not sure Ben's post really gets at this. The talk about setting a low bar is concerning because I don't need an alarm that goes off whenever there is a story, because that will be every organization given enough time. I need an alarm that can distinguish between the signal and the noise. I care about the false negatives and the false positives.

Personally, I don't find myself updating on the information in Ben's post, and I had not previously heard of any issues with Non-Linear. I don't find myself updating simply because the set-up was so obviously shitty that I'm not surprised. The founders are so clearly obsessed with themselves and brag about how little they pay people for outsourced work - how could it be a good place to work, even before getting to the shared living situation?

Shitty jobs are shitty. Water is wet. I don't blame Non-Linear for advertizing shitty jobs (so long as they weren't misleading about it). I think it's a shame that young people sometimes have poor awareness regarding shitty jobs, but I don't blame Alice for not realizing. I find it hard to blame either party here for acting in their own self-interest, but practically speaking Non-Linear should have advertized the jobs more to people for whom it would be a legitimate step up, rather than people who would only work there if they were confused about its shittiness.

Both Kat and Emerson are claiming that there have been edits to this post.^[1]

I wonder whether an appendix or summary of changes to important claims would be fair and appropriate, given the length of post and severity of allegations? It'd help readers keep up with these changes, and it is likely most time-efficient for the author making the edits to document these as they go along.

@Ben Pace 

[Edit: Kat has since retracted her statement.]

1. ^{^}

   his original post (he's quietly redacted a lot of points since publishing) had a lot of falsehoods that he knew were not true. He has since removed some of them after the fact, but those have still been causing us damage.

    

   Ben has also been quietly fixing errors in the post, which I appreciate, but people are going around right now attacking us for things that Ben got wrong, because how would they know he quietly changed the post? 

   This is why every time newspapers get caught making a mistake they issue a public retraction the next day to let everyone know. I believe Ben should make these retractions more visible

Random anecadata on a very specific instance: I worked with Drew to make a Most Important Century writing prize. I enjoyed our conversations and we worked well together — Drew was nice and ambitious. I heard concerns about Nonlinear at this time, but never had anything suspect come up.

I felt strongly that I had to respond to this given my personal experience with Nonlinear (mostly Kat & Drew) were overall positive.

I do not have much knowledge about past Nonlinear employee experience (though we helped run a hiring search for them for an assistant as our first gig with HIRe - which they ended up not hiring for anyway in the end) - but I have a highly positive opinion with Kat and Drew. All my interactions with them have been incredibly positive personally and professionally. I have only met Emerson once so I have no opinion on him related to this post.

I’ve met Kat Woods while Nonlinear was running a search for someone to lead and incubate an EA recruiting agency. I joined and reached the final round (I recall being told there were 4 finalists) but unfortunately, I wasn’t selected as the top pick. Later on, Kat shared with me and the other 2 finalists that the incubatee changed their mind to focus on another career path. While disclosing that the original funding source might not be available, she encouraged us to try taking on this challenge as she believed we would be doing a lot of good in any case. 

She also provided a small amount of seed funding for our time. Seeing as we were in a good position to explore doing work to help EA orgs, the other finalists and myself joined forces to what became High Impact Recruitment (HIRe).

While there was a lower level of infrastructure support in Nonlinear than I expected as an incubator (e.g. legal support, software, fundraising support, etc. - I have provided this feedback to Kat as well for improvement), Kat has always been a great brainstorming partner, grant application reviewer, and coach - which were instrumental in our initial work. Nonlinear also provided the initial funds enough for us co-founders to be able to work together while doing proper fundraising. As we got enough resources to run the org on our own, our interactions with Nonlinear reduced.

After several months of doing the recruiting agency work together, the HIRe founders parted ways for other opportunities just before the FTX fiasco. But during the entire time, Nonlinear has been nothing but positive, taking time to catch up with every few weeks as well as get together in EA conferences. In no way were we forced to do anything, and were independent in running the project. There were also no manipulations and confusion regarding “ownership”, etc. as we were encouraged by Kat that it was ours to run (even with some disagreements with her advice.)

[Note that before we decided to take on the recruiting agency work, Kat did not have to spend time and energy encouraging us and at any point could have moved on without much issue as there were no contracts signed (not saying this is a good thing - it would have been better if there were as these are baseline practices). While there was no paperwork and proper governance provided (we were generally quite experienced and entrepreneurial so we didn’t really need that much hand holding) - I can vouch that there was no manipulation, lying, of any kind. Discussions have been genuine and positive.]

Personally, she was able to persuade me to go all in using my time and skills to support EA orgs (which still drives me today). And while that alone isn't necessarily great moral reasoning - taken with all our interactions, results in my positive assessment of her character.

[Disclaimers: My wife Deena works with Kat as a business coach - see my wife's comment elsewhere on this post. I briefly met Kat and Emerson while visiting in Puerto Rico and had positive interactions with them. My personality is such that I have a very strong inclination to try to see the good in others, which I am aware can bias my views.]

A few random thoughts related to this post:

1. I appreciate the concerns over potential for personal retaliation, and the other factors mentioned by @Habryka and others for why it might be good to not delay this kind of post. I think those concerns and factors are serious and should definitely not be ignored. That said, I want to point out that there's a different type of retaliation in the other direction that posting this kind of thing without waiting for a response can cause: Reputational damage. As others have pointed out, many people seem to update more strongly on negative reports that come first and less on subsequent follow up rebuttals. If it turned out that the accusations are demonstrably false in critically important ways, then even if that comes to light later the reputational damage to Kat, Emerson, and Drew may now be irrevocable.

Reputation is important almost everywhere, but in my anecdotal experience reputation seems to be even more important in EA than in many other spheres. Many people in EA seem to have a very strong in-group bias towards favoring other "EAs" and it has long seemed to me that (for example) getting a grant from an EA organization often feels to be even more about having strong EA personal connections than for other places. (This is not to say that personal connections aren't important for securing other types of grants or deals or the like, and it's definitely not to say that getting an EA grant is only or even mostly about having strong EA connections. But from my own personal experience and from talking to quite a few others both in and out of EA, this is definitely how it feels to me. Note that I have received multiple EA grants in the past, and I have helped other people apply to and receive substantial EA grants.) I really don't like this sort of dynamic and I've low-key complained about it for a long time - it feels unprofessional and raises all sorts of in-group bias flags. And I think a lot of EA orgs feel like they've gotten somewhat better about this over time. But I think it is still a factor.

Additionally, it sometimes feels to me that EA Forum dynamics tend to lead to very strongly upvoting posts and comments that are critical of people or organizations, especially if they're more "centrally connected" in EA, while ignoring or even downvoting posts and comments in the other direction. I am not sure why the dynamic feels like this, and maybe I'm wrong about it really being a thing at all. Regardless, I strongly suspect that any subsequent rebuttal by Nonlinear would receive significantly fewer views and upvotes, even if the rebuttal were actually very strong.

Because of all this, I think that the potential for reputational harm towards Kat, Emerson, and Drew may be even greater than if this were in the business world or some other community. Even if they somehow provide unambiguous evidence that refutes almost everything in this post, I would not be terribly surprised if their potential to get EA funding going forward or to collaborate with EA orgs was permanently ended. In other words, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if this post spelled the end of their "EA careers" even if the central claims all turned out to be false. My best guess is that this is not the most likely scenario, and that if they provide sufficiently good evidence then they'll be most likely "restored" in the EA community for the most part, but I think there's a significant chance (say 1%-10%) that this is basically the end of their EA careers regardless of the actual truth of the matter.

Does any of this outweigh the factors mentioned by @Habryka? I don't know. But I just wanted to point out a possible factor in the other direction that we may want to consider, particularly if we want to set norms for how to deal with other such situations going forward.

2. I don't have any experience with libel law or anything of the sort, but my impression is that suing for slander over this kind of piece is very much within the range of normal responses in the business world, even if in the EA world it is basically unheard of. So if your frame of reference is the world outside of EA then suing seems at least like a reasonable response, while if your frame of reference is the EA community then maybe it doesn't. I'll let others weigh in on whether my impressions on this are correct, but I didn't notice others bring this up so I figured I'd mention it.

3. My general perspective on these kinds of things is that... well, people are complicated. We humans often seem to have this tendency to want our heroes to be perfect and our villains to be horrible. If we like someone we want to think they could never do anything really bad, and unless presented with extremely strong evidence to the contrary we'll look for excuses for their behavior so that it matches our pictures of them as "good people". And if we decide that they did do something bad, then we label them as "bad people" and retroactively reject everything about them. And if that's hard to do we suffer from cognitive dissonance. (Cf. halo effect.)

But the reality, at least in my opinion, is that things are more complicated. It's not just that there are shades of grey, it's that people can simultaneously be really good people in some ways and really bad people in other ways. Unfortunately, it's not at all a contradiction for someone to be a genuinely kind, caring, supportive, and absolutely wonderful person towards most of the people in their life, while simultaneously being a sexual predator or committing terrible crimes.

I'm not saying that any of the people mentioned in this post necessarily did anything wrong at all. My point here is mostly just to point out something that may be obvious to almost all of us, but which feels potentially relevant and probably bears repeating in any case. Personally I suspect that everybody involved was acting in what they perceived to be good faith and are / were genuinely trying to do the right thing, just that they're looking at the situation through lenses based on very different perspectives and experiences and so coming to very different conclusions. (But see my disclaimer at the beginning of this comment about my personality bias coloring my own perspective.)

Important update. Kat has now made this post.

A note on EA posts as (amateur) investigative journalism:

When passions are running high, it can be helpful to take a step back and assess what's going on here a little more objectively.

There are all different kinds of EA Forum posts that we evaluate using different criteria. Some posts announce new funding opportunities; we evaluate these in terms of brevity, clarity, relevance, and useful links for applicants. Some posts are introduce a new potential EA cause area; we evaluate them in terms of whether they make a good empirical case for the cause area being large-scope, neglected, and tractable. Some posts raise a theoretical issues in moral philosophy; we evaluate those in terms of technical philosophical criteria such as logical coherence.

This post by Ben Pace is very unusual, in that it's basically investigative journalism, reporting the alleged problems with one particular organization and two of its leaders. The author doesn't explicitly frame it this way, but in his discussion of how many people he talked to, how much time he spent working on it, and how important he believes the alleged problems are, it's clearly a sort of investigative journalism.

So, let's assess the post by the usual standards of investigative journalism. I don't offer any answers to the questions below, but I'd like to raise some issues that might help us evaluate how good the post is, if taken seriously as a work of investigative journalism. 

Does the author have any training, experience, or accountability as an investigative journalist, so they can avoid the most common pitfalls, in terms of journalist ethics, due diligence, appropriate degrees of skepticism about what sources say, etc?

Did the author have any appropriate oversight, in terms of an editor ensuring that they were fair and balanced, or a fact-checking team that reached out independently to verify empirical claims, quotes, and background context? Did they 'run it by legal', in terms of checking for potential libel issues?

Does the author have any personal relationship to any of their key sources? Any personal or professional conflicts of interest? Any personal agenda? Was their payment of money to anonymous sources appropriate and ethical?

Were the anonymous sources credible? Did they have any personal or professional incentives to make false allegations? Are they mentally healthy, stable, and responsible? Does the author have significant experience judging the relative merits of contradictory claims by different sources with different degrees of credibility and conflicts of interest?

Did the author give the key targets of their negative coverage sufficient time and opportunity to respond to their allegations, and were their responses fully incorporated into the resulting piece, such that the overall content and tone of the coverage was fair and balanced?

Does the piece offer a coherent narrative that's clearly organized according to a timeline of events, interactions, claims, counter-claims, and outcomes? Does the piece show 'scope-sensitivity' in accurately judging the relative badness of different actions by different people and organizations, in terms of which things are actually trivial, which may have been unethical but not illegal, and which would be prosecutable in a court of law? 

Does the piece conform to accepted journalist standards in terms of truth, balance, open-mindedness, context-sensitivity, newsworthiness, credibility of sources, and avoidance of libel? (Or is it a biased article that presupposed its negative conclusions, aka a 'hit piece', 'takedown', or 'hatchet job').

Would this post meet the standards of investigative journalism that's typically published in mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Economist?

I don't know the answers to some of these, although I have personal hunches about others. But that's not what's important here. 

What's important is that if we publish amateur investigative journalism in EA Forum, especially when there are very high stakes for the reputations of individuals and organizations, we should try to adhere, as closely as possible, to the standards of professional investigative journalism. Why? Because professional journalists have learned, from centuries of copious, bitter, hard-won experience, that it's very hard to maintain good epistemic standards when writing these kinds of pieces, it's very tempting to buy into the narratives of certain sources and informants, it's very hard to course-correct when contradictory information comes to light, and it's very important to be professionally accountable for truth and balance.

Thanks for this writeup, still undergoing various updates based on the info above and responses from Nonlinear.

One thing I do want to comment on is this:

(Personal aside: Regarding the texts from Kat Woods shown above — I have to say, if you want to be allies with me, you must not write texts like these. A lot of bad behavior can be learned from, fixed, and forgiven, but if you take actions to prevent me from being able to learn that the bad behavior is even going on, then I have to always be worried that something far worse is happening that I’m not aware of, and indeed I have been quite shocked to discover how bad people’s experiences were working for Nonlinear.)

I agree that it was a bad message to send. I agree that people shouldn't make it hard for others who have a stake in something to learn about bad behavior from others involved.

But I think it's actually a bit more complex if you consider the 0 privacy norms that might naturally follow from that, and I can kind of understand where Kat is (potentially) coming from in that message. This doesn't really apply if Nonlinear was actually being abusive, of course, only if they did things that most people would consider reasonable but which felt unfair to the recipient.

What I mean is basically that it can be tough to know how to act around people who might start shit-talking your organization when them doing so would be defecting on a peace treaty at best, and abusing good-will at worst. And it's actually generally hard to know if they're cognizant of that, in my experience.

This is totally independent of who's "right" or "wrong," and I have 0 personal knowledge of the Nonlinear stuff. But there are some people who have been to summer camps that we've had the opportunity to put on blast about antisocial things they've done that got them removed from the ecosystem, but we try to be careful to only do that when it's *really* egregious, and so often chose not to because it would have felt like too much of an escalation for something that was contained and private...

...but if they were to shit-talk the camps or how they were treated, that would feel pretty bad from my end in the "Well, fuck, I guess this is what we get for being compassionate" sense.

Many people may think it would be a better world if they imagine everyone's antisocial acts being immediately widely publicized, but in reality what I think would result is a default stance of "All organizations try to ruin people's reputations if they believe they did something even slightly antisocial so that they can't harm their reputation by telling biased stories about them first," and I think most people would actually find themselves unhappy with that world. (I'm not actually sure about that, though it seems safer to err on the side of caution.)

It can sound sinister or be a bad power dynamic from an organization to an individual, but if an individual genuinely doesn't seem to realize that the thing holding the org back isn't primarily a mutual worry of negative reputation harm but something like compassion and general decency norms, it might feel necessary to make that explicit... though of course making it explicit comes off as a threat, which is worse in many ways even if it could have been implicitly understood that the threat of reputation harm existed just from the fact that the organization no longer wants you to work with them.

There are good reasons historically why public bias is in the favor of individuals speaking out against organizations, but I think most people who have worked in organizations know what a headache it can be to deal with the occasional incredibly unreasonable person (again, not saying that's the case here, just speaking in general), and how hard it is to determine how much to communicate to the outside world when you do encounter someone you think is worse than just a "bad fit." I think it's hard to set a policy for that which is fair to everyone, and am generally unsure about what the best thing to do in such cases is.

This is a short response while I write up something more substantial. 

The true story is very different than the one you just read. 

Ben Pace purposefully posted this without seeing our evidence first, which I believe is unethical and violates important epistemic norms. 

He said “I don't believe I am beholden to give you time to prepare” 

We told him we have incontrovertible proof that many of the important claims were false or extremely misleading. We told him that we were working full-time on gathering the evidence to send him. 

We told him we needed a week to get it all together because there is a lot of it. Work contracts, receipts, chat histories, transcripts, etc.

Instead of waiting to see the evidence, he published. I feel like this indicates his lack of interest in truth.

He did this despite there being no time sensitivity to this question and working on it for months. Despite him saying that he would look at the evidence. 

I’m having to deal with one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me. Somebody who I used to care about is telling lies about me to my professional and social community that make me seem like a monster. And I have clear evidence to show that they’re lies.

Please, if you’re reading this, before signal boosting, I beg you to please reserve judgment until we have had a chance to present our evidence.

A brief note on defamation law:

The whole point of having laws against defamation, whether libel (written defamation) or slander (spoken defamation), is to hold people to higher epistemic standards when they communicate very negative things about people or organizations -- especially negative things that would stick in the readers/listeners minds in ways that would be very hard for subsequent corrections or clarifications to counter-act.

Without making any comment about the accuracy or inaccuracy of this post, I would just point out that nobody in EA should be shocked that an organization (e.g. Nonlinear) that is being libeled (in its view) would threaten a libel suit to deter the false accusations (as they see them), to nudge the author(e.g. Ben Pace) towards making sure that their negative claims are factually correct and contextually fair. 

That is the whole point and function of defamation law: to promote especially high standards of research, accuracy, and care when making severe negative comments. This helps promote better epistemics, when reputations are on the line. If we never use defamation law for its intended purpose, we're being very naive about the profound costs of libel and slander to those who might be falsely accused. 

EA Forum is a very active public forum, where accusations can have very high stakes for those who have devoted their lives to EA. We should not expect that EA Forum should be completely insulated from defamation law, or that posts here should be immune to libel suits. Again, the whole point of libel suits is to encourage very high epistemic standards when people are making career-ruining and organization-ruining claims.

To share some anecdotal data: I personally have had positive experiences doing regular coaching calls with Kat this year and feel that her input has been very helpful. 

I would encourage us all to put off updating until we also get the second side of the story - that generally seems like good practice to me whenever it is possible.

Under all circumstances this is just a terrible day for EA. If the accusations are even half-accurate then I am appalled. If the accusations don't hold water, then I am also appalled.

I don't have an informed opinion as to whether it was correct to publish without waiting for Nonlinear to prepare a response. I'm leaning towards thinking it was the right decision given the supposed threatening behavior of nonlinear leadership.

With that said, I would encourage most readers to wait with making up their mind until Nonlinear has had a chance to leave a response. Save your sanity, block this thread from your browser, and come back in a few weeks once the dust has settled.

Witch hunts do happen among well-intentioned people. I have many more thoughts I want to share, but this is not the right time or place.

Here is some additional possibly relevant information:

• There was a New Yorker profile on Emerson in 2014, when he was working at Dose. Now, that was 9 years ago, and I think these things often paint an inaccurate picture of a person (though Emerson's website does lead with "Named 'The Virologist' by The New Yorker, Emerson Spartz is one of the world's leading experts on internet virality ...", so I guess he does not think the article was too bad). At any rate, the profile paints the picture of someone who seems to prioritise other things over epistemics and a healthy information ecosystem.
• Nonlinear is or used to be a project of Spartz Philanthropies. According to the IRS website, Spartz Philanthropies had its 501(c)(3) status revoked in 2021 since it had not filed the necessary paperwork for three years straight. Now the Nonlinear website no longer mentions Spartz Philanthropies, and I am unsure whether Nonlinear is a tax-exempt nonprofit or what legal status it has. (ETA: Nonlinear, Inc. is a new 501(c)(3) -- see Drew's response below.)
• Back in 2021, Nonlinear launched its AI safety fund with an announcement post which got some pushback/skepticism in the comments section. Does anyone know whether this fund has made any grants or seeded any new organisations? I have not managed to find any information about it on the Nonlinear website. (ETA: See Drew's response below.)

I've already written a few comments on this post, but it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to/ought to say as my main response.

I heard rumors of some of this a while back. I'm disappointed to see that the claim about asking an intern to take on legal risk was in fact true. I'm also disappointed to see that there are more worrying allegations beyond those that I'd previously heard.

Despite my object-level position, on the meta-level I think it would likely have been better for Ben to have waited a week and I also don't find Elliot J Davies' use of the term brigading to be helpful as I have explained in previous comments.

Whilst we have this really bad situation in front of us, it's worth noting that the norms we create apply not only to this situation but to future ones as well. And even though I doubt I'll be persuaded by Nonlinear leadership's defense, I want them to have the opportunity to try^[1].

I'm still really saddened by what seems to have happened here and I hope Alice and Chloe heal/have healed. It seems like Nonlinear leadership was comfortable taking absurd risks with what they asked them to do. It really shouldn't be at all surprising that it blew up in their face, but, it easily could have ended much worse and I'm really thankful for Alice and Chloe's sake that this didn't happen.

Disclaimer: I was previously an intern at Nonlinear.

1. ^{^}

   My expectation is that their defense will convince me that things are less bad than indicated by this post, but still really bad.

RobertM and I are having a "dialogue"^[1] on LessWrong with a lot of focus on whether it was appropriate for this to be posted when it was and with info collected so far (e.g. not waiting for Nonlinear response).

What is the optimal frontier for due diligence?
 

A lot of people have been angry about these texts made by Kat towards Alice: 

> “Given your past behavior, your career in EA would be over in a few DMs, but we aren’t going to do that because we care about you”
> “We’re saying nice things about you publicly and expect you will do the same moving forward”

This sounds like a threat and it’s not how I would have worded it had I been in Kat’s shoes. However, I think it looks much more reasonable if you view it through the hypothesis that a) the bad things Alice is saying about Nonlinear are untrue and b) the bad things Kat has been holding off on saying about Alice are true. Basically, I think Kat’s position is that “If you [Alice] keep spreading lies about us, we will have to defend ourselves by countering with the truth, and unfortunately if these truths got out it would make you look bad (e.g. by painting you as dishonest). That’s why we’ve been trying to avoid going down this route, because we actually care about you and don’t want to hurt your reputation (so you can find jobs), so let’s both just say nice things about each other from now on and put this behind us.”. My sense is that Kat, out of fear that her reputation was being badly and unfairly damaged, emphasized the part where bad things happen to Alice in an attempt to get her to stop spreading misinformation. Again, while this isn’t how I’d have worded those messages, given this context I think it’s much more understandable than it might first seem.

Disclaimer: I'm friends with Kat and know some of her side of the story.

Influencing the creation of Professor Quirrel in HPMOR and being influenced by Professor Quirrel in HPMOR both seem to correlate with being a bad actor in EA - a potential red flag to watch out for. 

Props to Ben for the investigation. And my thoughts go out to those who've been affected.
As a side-note, I am skeptical of the impact of Nonlinear's work so far in pure results terms. Their direct work seems pretty mediocre and easy, and the rest has just been throwing money at prizes that don't seem to have had much, if any, positive impact. I'd be curious how other people evaluate Nonlinear's work.

This was written after reading Chloe's update

Note: I'm trying to focus on "What are good practices for EAs who want to try weird things?" rather then "Should NL/Kat/Emerson be disbanded/reprimanded" until NL posts their rebuttal.

I'm feeling concerned about some specific stuff I'd put in the "working in unusual vistas" bucket. I feel weird because Nonlinear has listed "travel" as a perk on job listings, when it can easily be more of a burden, and looks like it is for certain members of their team (while others have more of the benefits and less of the costs). As someone who lived in East Asia for 7 months across as many different islands/regions, it is really hard to be productive and happy for me in that type of nomadic life. I think it's hard for most people. But the last ~year, seeing NL's (and Kat's^[1]) positive posts I'd been rethinking that. Now, what I'm reading from Chloe is more in line with my memories of the hassle and why I recommend against it. So I think re: job listings:

• Necessary travel should not be listed as a job perk, but a key job trait with both pros and cons and emphasis on suitability for certain less than common personalities. And hirers for travelling positions should try really hard to sort out the people who won't like it.
• It should be made clear how much of an assistant's job description is literally "dealing with the hassles of travel and working abroad for the team". To their credit, the NonLinear job listings do address this, but it is at the bottom and general. I mean it should be semi-granular on the listing, like "~10 hours/week", because I think the amount it was for Chloe (sounds substantial) might have been a surprise and added to reasonable resentment and trapped and useless feelings. 
• I also think "helping your boss with their personal tasks" should be discussed more granularly (maybe it was in interviews IDK, but seems good to get specific early and in writing)
• I additionally suspect (with low confidence because I don't know what's normal in business/nonprofits) that for personal tasks, accounting and pay source should be different for those hours, maybe.

1. ^{^}

   Less relevantly, I have seen Kat promote working abroad and nomadic living as seemingly a really good solution to EAs who follow her on Facebook or her blog. I feel weird that I have not seen Kat post a cons list for travel, but this is a footnote because I also think it isn't generally her responsibility in her personal social media to talk about more than what she is excited about. It is everyone's responsibility to do their own research/not be easily influenced by what they see on social media. But personally, I think in future if I see someone recommend EAs try nomadic living/work in remote vistas, I will ask revealing questions (like "Do you have an assistant whose job it is to make this easier for you?") even though it might feel rude.

This was written after reading Chloe's update

Note: I'm trying to focus on "What are good practices for people trying weird things?" rather then "Should NL/Kat/Emerson be disbanded/reprimanded" until NL posts their rebuttal.

I notice I'm feeling confused that I'm not reading the type of dialogue I tend to hear in EA/rationalist spaces. Weird arrangements def cut out normy safeguards, but I feel this community does actually have tools to mitigate harm that can come with trying those weird arrangements. I mean this separate from org operational norms like compensation clearly written and signed, and good accounting. For the day-to-day stuff, it's conversational norms that have evolved alongside the "trying of weird things", probably for good reason. Norms like frank-but-respectful communication that cuts through discomfort and COI anxieties rather than burying or amplifying them, and tries very hard to perspective-take, check in, and prioritize the other person's preferences.^[1]

I think, eventually, the community could discuss questions like: "If any, what tools/communications norms can help mitigate risks of weird experiments" and "How can leaders who want to try weird arrangements ensure that they are personally ready to navigate a day-to-day landscape which is highly likely to feel destabilizing at times if they communicate poorly? How can CEA and funders ensure the leaders are right in their self assessments here?"

1. ^{^}

   Example: In Emerson's shoes, if I hoped for Chloe's help with the St. Barths trip, I can think of ~4 ways he could have approached that differently, guided by rat/EA socialization and processes, that would have been way preferable, even very good on net for Chloe. I can respond with a list if people don't get what I mean.

I'd like to have a conversation that's broader than just this specific allegation. There are some claims that are uncontested here, but point to a work environment highly vulnerable to misconduct. Eg, living with your employees. 

While this is not the norm for EA orgs, it seems like these dynamics are also not super rare. I expect all broad communities like EA will have some level of misconduct, but we should also strive to minimize it however possible. 

So, is there anything EA as a whole can do to minimize things like this? I'd also be curious to know whether CEA knew about any of this (and I'd guess they did since even I -- who is not well-connected to Nonlinear -- heard whispers). And if so, what steps they took to mitigate this. Or do we think this is out of the jurisdiction of the CEA community health team?

Drew is a personal friend of mine, as is a nonlinear employee not mentioned in this post, so I am saddened to read this. I am waiting to see Nonlinear's response. 

We fixed the results page on the poll so here they are.

Poll: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/nonlinear-and-community-norms

Results: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/nonlinear-and-community-norms/results

Surprisingly little agreement on this poll. Unlike most polls I post there is some chance of fake responses here. I dunno, but 154 is a lot of respondents.

A huge chunk of disagreements 

Personally I think the answers to this question are pretty wild and deserve more scrutiny. Do 22% of us really think this? 

Also a lot where people thought the question was misframed.

When Kat and Joey Savoie worked together (and she was Katherine Savoie), I worked with them extensively. What's described above is in keeping with my experience of her, and him even more so. Joey was very like how Emerson is described.

I'm not surprised that people in the comments aren't recognising what's described as the very bad behaviour that it is, but that is a case of enormous blindness.

Cross-posting Linda Linsefors' take from LessWrong:

I have worked without legal contracts for people in EA I trust, and it has worked well.

Even if all the accusation of Nonlinear is true, I still have pretty high trust for people in EA or LW circles, such that I would probably agree to work with no formal contract again.

The reason I trust people in my ingroup is that if either of us screw over the other person, I expect the victim to tell their friends, which would ruin the reputation of the wrongdoer. For this reason both people have strong incentive to act in good faith. On top of that I'm wiling to take some risk to skip the paper work.

When I was a teenager I worked a bit under legally very sketch circumstances. They would send me to work in some warehouse for a few days, and draw up the contract for that work afterwards. Including me falsifying the date for my signature. This is not something I would have agreed to with a stranger, but the owner of my company was a friend of my parents, and I trusted my parents to slander them appropriately if they screwed me over. 

I think my point is that this is not something very uncommon, because doing everything by the book is so much overhead, and sometimes not worth it.

It think being able to leverage reputation based and/or ingroup based trust is immensely powerful, and not something we should give up on.

For this reason, I think the most serious sin committed by Nonlinear, is their alleged attempt of silencing critics. 
Update to clarify: This is based on the fact that people have been scared of criticising Nonlinear. Not based on any specific wording of any specific message.
Update: On reflection, I'm not sure if this is the worst part (if all accusations are true). But it's pretty high on the list.

I don't think making sure that no EA every give paid work to another EA, with out a formal contract, will help much. The most vulnerable people are those new to the movement, which are exactly the people who will not know what the EA norms are anyway. An abusive org can still recruit people with out contracts and just tell them this is normal. 

I think a better defence mechanism is to track who is trust worthy or not, by making sure information like this comes out. And it's not like having a formal contract prevents all kinds of abuse.

Update based on responses to this comment: I do think having a written agreement, even just an informal expression of intentions, is almost always strictly superior to not having anything written down. When writing this I comment I was thinking in terms of formal contract vs informal agreement, which is not the same as verbal vs written. 

Have there been any updates from Nonlinear? Have they written a response?

Poll: Was Emerson threatening legal action (suing for defamation) against Ben and his employer (Lightcone) for this being posted a good choice?

(agreevote if you think so, disagreevote if you don't, comment with your reasoning if you'd like)

ColinAitken @ 2023-09-10T16:51 (+67)

I think this is unacceptable, and unless serious evidence appears that Ben behaved dishonestly in a way nobody seems to currently be claiming (e.g. if he had personally doctored the texts from Kat to add incriminating phrases), I think filing this kind of lawsuit would be cause for the EA community to permanently cut all ties with Nonlinear and with Emerson in particular. I believe this even if  it turns out Nonlinear has evidence that the main claims in the post are false. 

[Edit 12/15/23 -- Nonlinear's update makes stronger claims about Ben's actions than I'd seen anyone make when I wrote this, so I'm crossing out "in a way nobody seems to currently be claiming" because it's no longer accurate. So the applicability of this argument hinges a lot more on the "unless" clause now. ] 

Reasoning: I think the question of whether Ben should have waited a week is difficult, and I have felt differently about it at different times over the past few days. But the question of whether the choice he made was justifiable is easy: the people he spoke to seem to be terrified of retaliation, and he has at least two strong pieces of direct evidence (Kat's text, Emerson's lawsuit threat) and several pieces of indirect evidence (Emerson's stories about behavior that while legal strike me as highly unethical, Kat offering a very vulnerable Alice housing only under the condition that she not say mean things about Nonlinear, some of the Glassdoor comments) that these fears of retaliation are well-founded. The fear of that Emerson or Nonlinear might retaliate in some way in the intervening week to stop the post from being posted seems very reasonable to me, and acting on this fear is justifiable even if it overall turned out to be the wrong choice.

Even if you think Ben made the wrong decision (I currently think maybe he did?), the question is not whether he was correct but whether his choice was so unacceptable that it's appropriate to respond in a way that has a high risk of direct financially ruining him (defamation lawsuits are notoriously a tool used by abusers to silence their critics because the costs of defense are so high, and based on Emerson's business experience I am unwilling to believe he doesn't know this.) It clearly wasn't, and I think it's imperative we make clear that using expensive lawsuits to win arguments is utterly unacceptable in a community like this one.

D0TheMath @ 2023-09-10T19:31 (+2)

I think Habryka has mentioned that Lightcone could withstand a defamation suit, so there’s not a high chance of financially ruining him. I am tentatively in agreement otherwise though.

Ben Pace @ 2023-09-11T00:04 (+27)

True! But for the record I definitely don't have remotely enough personal wealth to cover such a suit. So if libel suits are permissible then you may only hear about credible accusations from people on teams who are willing to back the financial cost, the number of which in my estimation is currently close to 1.

Added: I don't mean to be more pessimistic than is accurate. I am genuinely uncertain to what extent people will have my back if a lawsuit comes up (Manifold has it at 13%), and my uncertainty range does include "actually quite a lot of people are willing to spend their money to defend my and others' ability to openly share info like this".

Chris Leong @ 2023-09-10T03:46 (+23)

Surely this would depend on what evidence is revealed in a week? It seems kind of strange to me to see how confident people are in their opinions without knowing what this evidence is (I say this as someone who has already stated that they don't see any way that Nonlinear leadership comes out of this looking good given what they have already admitted).

Disclaimer: I previously interned at Nonlinear. This comment previously said that I didn't have knowledge of what information Nonlinear is yet to release, but then I just realised that I actually do know a few things.

ColinAitken @ 2023-09-10T17:32 (+13)

I don't think this is right -- whether it's okay to sue Ben surely depends on the information Ben had at the time of making his decision, not information he didn't have access to?

Chris Leong @ 2023-09-11T02:28 (+17)

It doesn’t seem accurate to characterise Ben as not having access to information if they promise to send it over as soon as they can and a) they don’t unduly delay b) there is no urgent need to publish.

I guess I see Ben as making a bet that the yet-to-revealed information ends up being underwhelming and it feels to me that if he ends up being wrong then some of the downside should accrue to him.

That said, I would really rather not see anyone sue anyone here as it’d be rather damaging to the community.

At the same time, it feels a bit inconsistent to simultaneously be like “you can’t sue me, this is a high-trust community” and “I can’t be bothered waiting a week to see your evidence”. Part of the reason why this is a high-trust community is that people agree to reasonable requests when they are able to.

I would feel differently if Alice or Chloe had written the post themselves as they have direct experience of what happened, but as a third party, I think that Ben probably should have waited.

Lukas_Gloor @ 2023-09-10T22:50 (+16)

Before I agree-voted here, this comment had three disagree votes and no agree votes. Are the people who disagree-voted missing the fact that Ben had a 3h conversation with Emerson(? I think, otherwise Kat) about all the allegations? Surely, if you think something about Ben's summary of his findings is so massively wrong that it warrants a libel lawsuit threat, it would have come up in that 3h conversation. Besides, Ben's post already makes it clear that Emerson and Kat dispute Alice's judgment, so it's not like he's knowingly lying about things with intent to do harm (requirement for a libel lawsuit to be justified). Instead, he's just recounting things his sources said with some IMO pretty sane-seeming caveats about what seems more contentious or less contentious. Even if some of that turns out to be more misleading than the average reader would expect before Nonlinear provides more info from their side of things, that doesn't seem anywhere close to something that warrants this sort of escalation. So, I'm taken aback by what I perceive to be some community members being taken in by cheap tactics. To think that a lawsuit threat has even just a shred of legitimacy here strikes me as totally insane. That lawsuit threat is such an obvious red flag in my view.

Kat Woods @ 2023-09-09T14:00 (+15)

Quick thing to re-emphasize. It was not saying we'd sue if they posted. It was saying if they posted without giving us a week to send them the evidence that we thought would largely update the post they wrote. 

Ben's post has already been changed in many ways based on our conversation and the information we showed him on the call. It seems like basic truth-seeking behavior to hear the other side and see counter-evidence. 

He sent us the draft on a day he knew we were traveling and had sketchy internet, and that one of our members was sick. He'd had months and hundreds of hours to gather evidence for and write a >10k word post and he gave us a day to respond on a day he knew we were unable to respond well. 

We were traveling that entire day (which he knew) and when we asked why there was a rush, couldn't he wait a week for more information that might sizeably update him, he said he couldn't wait and wouldn't tell us why. 

We were not asking him not to post. We were asking him to see our evidence before posting. 

I think this is a really important distinction. 

We were not suppressing evidence, but trying to share it. 

And they were refusing to look at it and did not care at all about the effects this would have on our ability to do good in the future. And also despite the fact that after they posted and paid the ex-employees (before they saw our evidence), this would make it psychologically impossible for them to update. 

Zach Stein-Perlman @ 2023-09-09T17:35 (+32)

I used a diff checker to find the differences between the current post and the original post. There seem to be two:

1. "Alice worked there from November 2021 to June 2022" became "Alice travelled with Nonlinear from November 2021 to June 2022 and started working for the org from around February" 
2. "using Lightcone funds" became "using personal funds"

Your claim

Importantly, his original post (he's quietly redacted a lot of points since publishing) had a lot of falsehoods that he knew were not true. He has since removed some of them after the fact, but those have still been causing us damage.

seems false. Possibly I made a mistake, or Ben made edits and you saw them and then Ben reverted them—if so, I encourage you/anyone to point to another specific edit, possibly on other archive.org versions.

---

Update: Kat guesses she was thinking of changes from a near-final draft rather than changes from the first published version.

Rebecca @ 2023-09-09T20:56 (+10)

Those do seem like significant differences, and at least the 1st one is something that the Nonlinear team were asking to be corrected as very relevant to the sick Alice situation. It is an update for me that they were correct.

Rebecca @ 2023-09-09T14:27 (+7)

The email is contradictory as to whether the desire to sue is based on the content of the post or the duration before posting, with I belief the former appearing first in the email.

Kat Woods @ 2023-09-09T14:45 (+7)

We tried to make it crystal clear that it was about seeing the evidence first, rather than posting at all. 

Here's the full email. 

"Importantly, we are not asking Ben to not publish, just to give until the end of next week to gather and share the evidence we have."

Rebecca @ 2023-09-09T16:35 (+27)

The line I'm referring to is "if published as is we intend to pursue legal action". That is consistent with being fine with him publishing at all, but not consistent with being fine if he decides to not change anything in the post after getting all the facts in a week.

 Combining this line with the ones you mentioned gives the impression that the message you're trying to convey is 'what Ben has written is false and libellous, we have asked him to wait a week so he can correct his post before publishing, after getting all the facts. If he doesn't do both these things, we intend to sue', and I think it's reasonable for anyone to have interpreted it this way, even if that's not what you intended.

Tristan Williams @ 2023-09-09T13:24 (+9)

As has been said elsewhere by William Bradshaw, this threat makes me a lot (perhaps even something near his 98%) less likely to sympathize and want to support them with where they're at.

Oliver seems to be handling the threat super well, but as he mentions, those who made this complaint likely don't have the resources to fend off such an attack, seeming to prove Ben's point that he had to do it, because how could anyone expect them to if Emerson is still willing to lash out and attack a respected EA org?

But I'm also biased perhaps, because I agree with Rockwell's plea that we don't turn into a group that uses litigation to settle our differences. Prove Ben was wrong and said this to hurt Nonlinear in a forum post, or in argument, and I'll happily come to your cause. Use the money that you have to sue him and Lightcone "to the maximum legal amount" and you've given me nearly no pathway to believe in you or your cause.

Geoffrey Miller does point out that the law exists to keep good norms around sharing negative information widely, but I'm apt to agree with Oliver that this more often likely has a chilling effect, and that those norms should be incorporated at the level of the community, in the court of EA public opinion.

One thing I'm confused about: Emerson is the one making threats, so how do I update on the rest of the Nonlinear team? The negative view is that they are moving in different ways in lockstep, hoping if they attack the issue from all sides (from being nice to threatening legal action) it will be more likely to go away. The charitable view is that both Drew and Kat have gotten involved with someone who has some deep personal issues, but who likely has done much positive and good in their lives and has played a big part of it for awhile now, thus wanting to support him is a behavior any good family would undertake, working privately to reign in the more negative outbursts.

Will Bradshaw @ 2023-09-09T15:16 (+6)

One thing I'm confused about: Emerson is the one making threats, so how do I update on the rest of the Nonlinear team?

I was also uncertain about this, but Kat's comment above seems to indicate (though not outright say) that she supports the threat to sue.

Tristan Williams @ 2023-09-16T21:33 (+7)

Yeah I agree. One update for me: Ben's new post seems to imply that Drew is not implicated in most of this, and that seems in line with some of the comments, so I'm really tentative in updating at all on him and where he's at.

I made a little poll to try and figure out the cruxes here:

Normally you can swipe to vote but that seems to be broken. I'll try and fix it soon. 

I'll post results as we get them.

https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/nonlinear-and-community-norms 

Regarding this part: "Third; the semi-employee was also asked to bring some productivity-related and recreational drugs over the border for us. In general we didn't push hard on this. For one, this is an activity she already did (with other drugs). For two, we thought it didn't need prescription in the country she was visiting, and when we found out otherwise, we dropped it. And for three, she used a bunch of our drugs herself, so it's not fair to say that this request was made entirely selfishly. I think this just seems like an extension of the sorts of actions she's generally open to." 

Has Nonlinear has just openly admitted to providing drugs to an employee and requesting them to procure recreational substances? This situation reveals several complex aspects: the cohabitation of employees, a romantic relationship between the owner's sibling and an employee, and the alleged distribution of recreational drugs to the workforce. We need clarity on the specific substances involved, such as cannabis or hashish, and the countries where employees were tasked with transporting these drugs. Understanding the legal context in these countries is crucial.

We must consider though, how our actions reflect our community to the young people who trust us to make a positive impact globally. Even if one believes in the decriminalization of all drugs and has well-argued views, providing recreational drugs to employees raises ethical concerns. Moreover, the practice of employees dispensing medication, especially when not a matter of life or death, warrants scrutiny.

It's puzzling that there seems to be a lack of acknowledgment regarding the ethical boundaries crossed in this situation within the context of workplace ethics.

I have known Kat Woods for the past four years. Throughout this period, Kat has served multiple roles in my professional life—ranging from an enthusiastic cheerleader to a strategic brainstorming partner, and from a well-connected networker to an invaluable advisor. While I am not in a position to speak to the allegations mentioned previously, I can attest to the consistently exceptional nature of my personal experiences with Kat. She is a warm, empathetic, and supportive individual who is unwaveringly dedicated to making a lasting positive impact on the world.

Worst credible information about a charity that I would expect based on the following description (pulled from Google's generative AI summary: may or may not be accurate, but seemed like the best balance to me of engaging with some information quickly):

Nonlinear is an organization that funds and researches AI safety interventions. They also offer an incubation program that provides seed funding and mentorship. The Nonlinear Library is a podcast that uses text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and EA communities into audio.

The Nonlinear Fund is an organization that aims to research, fund, and seed AI safety interventions. Their incubation program provides seed funding and mentorship. The seed funding is for a year's salary, but you can also use it for other things, such as hiring other people.

The Nonlinear Library is a podcast that uses text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and EA communities into audio. You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

I am not describing a charity with ideal management practices, but envisioning one with 25 employees, active for 5 years, and which has poor but not shockingly or offensively bad governance by the standards of EA orgs. Someplace where I wouldn't be worried if a friend worked there, but I would sympathetically listen to their complaints and consider them not the best use of my marginal dollar.

1. Credible accusations of sexual harassment by at least one current or former employee
2. One or more incidents of notable financial mismanagement
3. Promised use of donor funds that did not materialize into a finished project (less than 10% of one year's annual budget in scope)
4. Credible evidence of evading employment or tax law in some way that, when framed by a hostile observer, looks "pretty bad": I do not expect sweatshops, but encouraging employees to violate the terms of visas or preferentially hiring donors in a way that can be made to sound scary.
5. Multiple stories of funding going to friends and personal contacts rather than "objectively better" candidates who did not have personal contacts.
6. Credible evidence that a moderately important claim they fundraised on continued to be propagated after it stopped being true or the evidence for it was much weaker than previously thought. 

Maybe I am excessively cynical about what bad things happen at small charities, but this feels like a reasonable list to me. There may be other events of similar badness.

I have had the opportunity to engage with individuals from both sides of this narrative. In terms of the individuals who are wronged, I find no reason to doubt their accounts. During my conversation with one individual, it was apparent that they harbored a deep apprehension regarding the expression of their views regarding Nonlinear. To the best of my recollection, it appears that individuals affiliated with Nonlinear made efforts to influence the funding-related processes in which they were involved, or, perhaps, made implicit threats to tarnish their reputation. There were reports of the spreading of damaging rumors by Nonlinear about this person among individuals of influence who were pertinent to their career.

Additionally, I had an encounter with a member of the Nonlinear team, and the interaction left a markedly negative impression on me. Their conduct oscillated between affectionate overtures and profoundly manipulative behavior, which gave rise to an unsettling sensation. As a mature individual, I do not easily succumb to fear or intimidation, but there was a discernible disconcerting quality in our discourse, particularly in their openness about using people for personal gain.

While I acknowledge that my impressions are inherently subjective, the depictions outlined in this article appear to closely correspond with my own experiences on both the side of the alleged victims and the accused.

I possess some additional information; however, I am currently inclined to maintain my anonymity. This inclination is driven by Emerson's efforts to employ legal threats in an attempt to intimidate the author.

There's something darkly funny about the idea that one would need to "be a shark," "move fast and break things," threaten and coerce employees," ""crush enemies"...

All to... publish a podcast of already written articles? Do some career coaching?

Have people seen this?

This was posted in the comments on Eliezer's FB profile.