Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation

By Ben Pace @ 2023-09-15T22:31 (+202)

Over the past seven months, I've been working part-time on an investigation of Nonlinear, culminating in last week's post. As I'm wrapping up this project, I want to share my personal perspective, and share some final thoughts.

This post mostly has some thoughts and context that didn't fit into the previous post. I also wish to accurately set expectations that I'm not working on this investigation any more.

Why I Got Into Doing an Investigation

From literally the very first day, my goal has been to openly share some credible allegations I had heard, so as to contribute to a communal epistemic accounting. 

On the Tuesday of the week Kat Woods first visited (March 7th), someone in the office contacted me with concerns about their presence (the second person in good standing to do so). I replied proposing to post the following one-paragraph draft in a public Lightcone Offices slack channel.

I have heard anonymized reports from prior employees that they felt very much taken advantage of while working at Nonlinear under Kat. I can't vouch for them personally, I don't know the people, but I take them pretty seriously and think it's more likely than not that something seriously bad happened. I don't think uncheckable anonymized reports should be sufficient to boot someone from community spaces, especially when they've invested a bunch into this ecosystem and seems to me to plausibly be doing pretty good work, so I'm still inviting them here, but I would feel bad not warning people that working with them might go pretty badly.

(Note that I don't think the above is a great message, nonetheless I'm sharing it here as info about my thinking at the time.)

That would not have represented any particular vendetta against Nonlinear. It would not have been an especially unusual act, or even much of a call out. Rather it was intended as the kind of normal sharing of information that I would expect from any member of an epistemic community that is trying to collectively figure out what's true.

But the person who shared the concerns with me recommended that I not post that, because it could trigger severe repercussions for Alice and Chloe. They responded as follows.

Person A: I'm trying to formulate my thoughts on this, but something about this makes me very uncomfortable.

...

Person A: In the time that I have been involved in EA spaces I have gotten the sense that unless abuse is extremely public and well documented nothing much gets done about it. I understand the "innocent until proven guilty" mentality, and I'm not disagreeing with that, but the result of this is a strong bias toward letting the perpetrators of abuse off the hook, and continue to take advantage of what should be safe spaces. I don't think that we should condemn people on the basis of hearsay, but I think we have a responsibility to counteract this bias in every other way possible. It is very scary to be a victim, when the perpetrator has status and influence and can so easily destroy your career and reputation (especially given that they have directly threatened one of my friends with this).

Could you please not speak to Kat directly? One of my friends is very worried about direct reprisal.

BP: I'm afraid I can't do that, insofar as I'm considering uninviting her, I want to talk to her and give her a space to say her piece to me. Also I already brought up these concerns with her when I told her she was invited.

I am not going to name you or anyone else who raised concerns to me, and I don't plan to give any info that isn't essentially already in the EA Forum thread. I don't know who the people are who are starting this info.

This first instance is an example of a generalized dynamic. At virtually every step of this process, I wanted to share, publicly, what information I had, but there kept being (in my opinion, legitimate) reasons why I couldn't.

(I've added a few more example chat logs in the footnotes here^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]}.)

Eventually, after getting to talk with Alice and Chloe, it seemed to me Alice and Chloe would be satisfied to share a post containing accusations that were received as credible. They expected that the default trajectory, if someone wrote up a post, was that the community wouldn't take any serious action, that Nonlinear would be angry for "bad-mouthing" them, and quietly retaliate against them (by, for instance, reaching out to their employer and recommending firing them, and confidentially sharing very negative stories). They wanted to be confident that any accusations made would be strong enough that people wouldn't just shrug and move on with their lives. If that happened, the main effect would be to hurt them further and drive them out of the ecosystem.

It seemed to me that I could not personally vouch for any of the claims (at the time), but also that if I did vouch for them, then people would take them seriously. I didn't know either Alice or Chloe before, and I didn't know Nonlinear, so I needed to do a relatively effortful investigation to get a better picture of what Nonlinear was like, in order to share the accusations that I had heard.

I did not work on this post because it was easy. I worked on it because I thought it would be easy. I kept wanting to just share what I'd learned. I ended up spending about ~320 hours (two months of work), over the span of six calendar months, to get to a place where I was personally confident of the basic dynamics (even though I expect I have some of the details wrong), and that Alice and Chloe felt comfortable with my publishing.

On June 15th I completed the first draft of the post, which I'd roughly say had ~40% overlap in terms of content with the final post. On Wednesday August 30th, after several more edits, I received private written consent from both Alice and Chloe to publish. A week later I published.

I worked on this for far too long. Had I been correctly calibrated about how much work this was at the beginning, I likely wouldn't have pursued it. But once I got started I couldn't see a way to share what I knew without finishing, and I didn't want to let down Alice and Chloe.

My goal here was not to punish Nonlinear, per se. My goal was to get to the point where the accusations I'd found credible could be discussed, openly, at all. 

When I saw on Monday that Chloe had decided to write a comment on the post, I felt a sense of "Ah, the job is done." That's all I wanted. For both sides to be able to share their perspective openly without getting dismissed, and for others to be able to come to their own conclusions.

I have no plans to do more investigations of this sort. I am not investigating Nonlinear further. If someone else wants to pick it up, well, now you know a lot of what I know!

Please don't think that because I took the time to follow up on these accusations on this occasion, that there is "a lifeguard on duty", that either bad behavior or info suppression will be reliably noticed or called out. We've shut down the Lightcone Offices, I've no plans to do this again, and don't particularly want to.

My sense is that there are a good number more injustices and predators in the EA ecosystem, most of which do not look exactly like this case. But it is not my job to uncover them and I am not making it my job. If you want to have an immune system that ferrets out bad behavior, you'll have to take responsibility for building that.

Assorted Closing Thoughts

Some final thoughts about Nonlinear

• I’ve still got a lot of genuine uncertainty about who did what and how responsible the core Nonlinear team are for all the horrible experiences Alice and Chloe had. I just wanted to get it out into a state where Nonlinear weren't in a position to just attack their former employees' characters and push the post away. I hope for Nonlinear's sakes that they are able to show that they're not as culpable for the harms as it seems. I’ve had to work pretty hard to be confident that the harms won't be inappropriately pushed under the rug.
• For the record, a bunch of the stuff that Nonlinear tried, if they were to apologize for, seems forgivable to me, and not obviously norm-violating ex ante. Traveling around the world in a small group sounds fun (though after seeing how it went down here I'd now be much more worried about it). I have been very financially dependent on my cofounder in the past, and worked without a legal structure. I think it's generally quite hard to have a personal assistant that actual solves your personal problems and stays out of your way where there isn't a bunch of friction and a bit of a strange power dynamic. I think all of these things went quite badly wrong here and I think they should've tried to make that up to the ex-employees, but I don't think these things should never be tried again (though not all at once), and that if they had made it up to them that would've been okay.
• The primary thing that really isn't okay according to my ethical norms, is silencing and intimidating people who were harmed and who disagree with you about why. That's why I tried so hard to communicate Alice and Chloe's perspective here, so that won't happen.
• In general, I think it's fine for teams to try really weird things. But I think Nonlinear in particular needs to credibly signal that, if someone works with them and feels burned afterward, or get into some other conflict, they will be free to share openly that they feel that way and why, without fearing retaliation professionally or otherwise.
• (Also everyone involved should write things down more! I think things go better when people jot down verbal agreements in writing. Makes it much easier months later to check in on what expectations were set.)
• To be clear I think there’s a good chance that Kat and Emerson are very straightforwardly responsible for basically all the messed up things that happened here, and their best response is to stop trying to manage people, admit to themselves that they have major character flaws that are not easily patched, and focus on projects that don’t involve having much power over other people or paying people tiny-or-no-salaries. And most people's best response is to keep a safe distance from them.
• Kat and Emerson seem to me to be in denial. Most of their comments seem to me to have been sustaining a narrative that this is all just malicious lies from Alice and Chloe. At no point in either conversation that I had with them did I feel that they could see the harms I was worried about. I hope they can see now. Then they can actually respond to that, and grow/change.
• By default, when ex-employees criticize an organization, I don't think the ex-employees have a right to anonymity. However in this instance my opinion is that Kat and Emerson have erred way too high on the side of signaling that they will be retributive, and I think if they want to be trusted around this ecosystem in future years right now they clearly should avoid actions that seem obviously retributive. As I said, the personal costs of working at Nonlinear have haunted Alice and Chloe for 1.5 years, and I would consider it an exceedingly inappropriate escalation for Nonlinear to dox them in response to my post, even if they have valid criticisms.
• Sometimes I'm concerned that I portrayed Nonlinear in an overly unpleasant light, given that I don't know a lot of details and am painting a broad picture. Sometimes I re-read my many interview notes and remember pretty concerning things I didn't include (due to reasons like privacy (on all sides) or because it's from a 3rd hand report), and I start forming a hunch that if all was revealed their actions would turn out to have been much worse than what I display in the post. (What I'm saying is that I have a lot of uncertainty still in both directions.)

Some final thoughts about this investigation

• One of the hard things for me was being respectful of Alice and Chloe whilst also trying to work with them on something I knew was painful for them. My relationship to them in this whole thing has felt pretty confusing to me. From one perspective I'm just a stranger showing up in their life repeatedly interviewing them about terrible things that happened to them and saying I'm gonna try to do something about it. I was generally pretty confused about the boundaries of what sort of input from them made sense to ask for — is it appropriate to ask them to spend much time searching through texts and emails to answer some questions about what happened? I'll admit to also having some concerns about them not being the best at asserting their boundaries. I moved more slowly and carefully on that account. My guess is that had I got it all done much faster, this could have been much more painful during the process but overall they’d get past it faster and that would’ve been better for them. It would also have increased the risk of them regretting ever talking to me, which I was pretty worried about. I'm pretty sure I made some notable mistake here but I still don't know what precisely I wish I'd done differently.
• One guess is that I should've said something like "I am willing to spend N hours working with you to make a serious case here, and if I believe it, then I'll publish it, and if I don't believe it at that point I'm going to move on" and then have them decide how much effort they wanted to put into that, and if it wasn't worth it, move on. But man, it felt wrong to have serious and credible accusations and not be able to let other people know. I didn't really feel I could let it go.
• New people have started giving me more surprising information about Kat/Emerson that suggests other bad situations have occurred, but I'm not doing this job any more. And anyway, I think my last post gives people most of what they need to know.
• Another sign to me that it was right for me to do this, was that many of the people I interviewed said things like "I have felt ethical concerns about Nonlinear but I didn't know what to do about them" and reported feeling relieved that they could share their thoughts with someone (me).
• Generally, everyone who I spoke with, or got references from, seemed honest and open. But, of course, it may eventually come out that there is someone who I was mistaken to put my trust in.
• In my last post, I advised people not to bother Alice and Chloe about this situation. I would like to revise this to say that, while I wouldn't want people to bother them about their experiences with Nonlinear, I’ll say I think it’d be pretty nice for people who are friendly with them to send them messages of warmth and friendship and support. I got a fair few of them when I wrote the post and that was helpful for me (sorry I didn't reply to most of them).

On the CEA Community Health Team (and the EA ecosystem in general)

• [Edit: Oops, I've edited the first few bullets out, I'll check some things privately and come back to edit this in the next couple days. I think it'll probably be fine, but worth checking. Sorry for the confusion, I'll leave a comment saying so when I've returned them.]
• I think the CEA Community Health team is much more like an institutionalized whisper network than it is like the police, where lots of people will quietly give it sensitive information, but it mostly isn't in a position to use it, and on the rare occasions that it does it's not via an accountable and inspectable procedure. I think that everyone should be very clear that CEA Community Health basically doesn't police the EA ecosystem, in the sense of reliably investigating and prosecuting credible accusations of wrongdoing or injustice. There are a swath of well-intentioned people in the EA ecosystem, but I think it's pretty clear there is no reliable justice system for when things go wrong.
• Relatedly, four interviewees who gave me some pretty helpful info would only talk to me on the condition that I not share my info with the CEA Community Health team. They didn't trust (what I'm calling) the "institutionalized whisper network" to respect them, and some expected that it would hurt their ability to get funding to share any info.
• My current impression is that many people in the EA ecosystem feel a false sense of safety from the existence of CEA Community Health, hoping that it will pursue justice for them, when (to a first approximation) it will not. While I respect many people on the team and consider some of them friends, my current sense is that the world would probably be better if the CEA Community Health team was disbanded and it was transparent that there is little-to-no institutional protection from bullies in the EA ecosystem, and more people do not get burned by assuming or hoping that it will play that role.

Going forward, for me, personally

I’m basically finished winding down my investigator sub-process, and plan to get back to other work starting Monday. 

As I mentioned above, I have had a few calls with other people about some strongly negative experiences with some of the relevant Nonlinear team. I don’t plan to investigate those stories or any of the other people in them, though it did give me some more bayesian evidence about some of the dynamics I'd written about being accurate.

Perhaps Kat and Emerson will be able to provide helpful evidence that changes how their time with Alice and Chloe reflects on them. I hope so. But either way it’s a part of their reputation now, and that seems right to me.

If Nonlinear writes up their account of things, or a critique of my post, I'll probably read it, but I'm not committing to any substantial engagement.

I don't really want to do more of this kind of work. Our civilization is hurtling toward extinction by building increasingly capable, general, and unalignable ML systems, and I hope to do something about that. Still, I'm open to trades, and my guess is that if you wanted to pay Lightcone around $800k/year, it would be worth it to continue having someone (e.g. me) do this kind of work full-time. I guess if anyone thinks that that's a good trade, they should email me.

Right now, I'm getting back to working on LessWrong.com, after a long detour into office spaces in Berkeley, hotel renovations, and a little investigative work.

1. ^{^}

   Meta: The footnote editor kept crashing due to length, so I've included 5 chat logs spread over 9 footnotes.

   March 7th 

   Person A: I just wanted to flag a concern I have about some of guests currently at Lightcone. Yesterday and today I saw both Drew Spartz and Kat Woods using the Lightcone spaces, and this worries me a lot. Their company Nonlinear has a history of illegal and unethical behavior, where they will attract young and naive people to come work for them, and subject them to inhumane working conditions when they arrive, fail to pay them what was promised, and ask them to do illegal things as a part of their internship. I personally know two people who went through this, and they are scared to speak out due to the threat of reprisal, specifically by Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz. Someone took initiative and posted this comment to the EA Forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L4S2NCysoJxgCBuB6/?commentId=5P75dFuKLo894MQFf

   From my friends who worked there, I know that the abuse went far beyond what is detailed in this comment.I'm worried about them being here. I'm worried that more people will have the experiences that my friends had. I'm worried about not taking seriously the damage that bad actors can do (especially given everything that has happened in the last 6 months in EA). I know this is not a lot to go on, but I would not have been happy with myself if I didn't say something.

   Thanks, [name]
    

   BP: Pretty reasonable! I was planning to post publicly about this in one of the slack channels that I'd heard this, to let other people know too.

   My current plan is to say something like

   > "I have heard anonymized reports from prior employees that they felt very much taken advantage of while working at Nonlinear under Kat. I can't vouch for them personally, I don't know the people, but I take them pretty seriously and think it's more likely than not that something seriously bad happened. I don't think uncheckable anonymized reports should be sufficient to boot someone from community spaces, especially when they've invested a bunch into this ecosystem and seems to me to plausibly be doing pretty good work, so I'm still inviting them here, but I would feel bad not warning people that working with them might go pretty badly."

   Person A: I'm trying to formulate my thoughts on this, but something about this makes me very uncomfortable.

2. ^{^}

   BP: Yeah, interested in hearing more.

   Can also hop on an audio call if that's easier to talk on!

   Am interested what to you seems bad about it, e.g.:

   1) Giving up too much info about the people reporting on Kat
   2) I'm making the wrong call given the info I have
   3) I'm being overly aggressive to Kat by talking about this openly

   (I think prolly I will/would actually chat with Kat first, to get her take, before posting.)

   Person A: In the time that I have been involved in EA spaces I have gotten the sense that unless abuse is extremely public and well documented nothing much gets done about it. I understand the "innocent until proven guilty" mentality, and I'm not disagreeing with that, but the result of this is a strong bias toward letting the perpetrators of abuse off the hook, and continue to take advantage of what should be safe spaces. I don't think that we should condemn people on the basis of hearsay, but I think we have a responsibility to counteract this bias in every other way possible. It is very scary to be a victim, when the perpetrator has status and influence and can so easily destroy your career and reputation (especially given that they have directly threatened one of my friends with this).

   Could you please not speak to Kat directly? One of my friends is very worried about direct reprisal.

3. ^{^}

   BP: I'm afraid I can't do that, insofar as I'm considering uninviting her, I want to talk to her and give her a space to say her piece to me. Also I already brought up these concerns with her when I told her she was invited.

   I am not going to name you or anyone else who raised concerns to me, and I don't plan to give any info that isn't essentially already in the EA Forum thread. I don't know who the people are who are starting this info.

4. ^{^}

   March 10th 

   BP: Babble of next steps:

   • Post in the announcements channel that I'm disinviting Non-Linear from Lightcone and other spaces that we'll be hosting, and that I'm happy to chat about why, and give some basic reasoning in the slack.
     • [redacted]
     • Mention that there's confidential info here but that I'm happy to be pinged about this to give more specific takes if someone needs to make a decision.
     • Maybe share some probabilities of mine on certain statements, to give a shape of my views.
   • Chat with Emerson to hear his side of the story.
     • Honestly confused about what questions to ask given confidentiality, that could give them a fair shake.
   • Maybe later see if any of the employees are open to me saying certain things with slightly more info, such as there being multiple employees who are no longer willing to speak with Nonlinear and who consider their time there to be quite traumatic, and also to explain the compensation setup and general working dynamics.

5. ^{^}

   Person B: Please don’t do anything without consulting me / the people who’s experiences reported

   [One of them] tells me that writing and sharing that causes her to relive it all, feel paralyzed, and unable to sleep. [The other of them] reported worse

   BP: Not planning to do anything right now.

   Person B: I think having read their docs, it’d be good for you to chat before making any public statement and before offering to share info downstream of the docs with other people

   BP: Definitely down to chat with either of them (or indeed any former employees).

   Person B: [Chloe] and [Alice] are at the stage of having Lightcone/CEA health do investigation but not necessarily want all the details spread widely publicly (might eventually be okay with that, but I think they need to prepare themselves)

   Person C: a not-great-but-okay option is to just have a call with Emerson similar to with Kat, i.e. "I've heard some concerning things [cite public comments], do you want to talk about Nonlinear's employment practices from your perspective."

6. ^{^}

   BP: Yeah, I guess that's the default.

   Person B: I think this situation is a case where we ought to figure out how to work with victims/survivors who are kind of traumatized

   And figure out how to get justice in a way that doesn’t punish (cause harm to them) them for speaking up in a way that just makes other people wary of speaking up

   I think part of that is being careful with how you use information they provide, not sharing it in ways the victims might feel really uncomfortable with. Yes, hella annoying. But they’ve already been so reluctant and scared.

   BP: I think the problem is that the thing has gotten sufficiently bad that the former employees are both (a) very hurt and (b) want to not have the bad things that happened to them widely known or discussed.

   Person B: I think they’re open it to eventually. They considered just making a public post. It’s more that I think we ought to check with them on how the info gets used

   I think what they really don’t want is to be taken by surprise.

   BP: When you f*ck up hard enough that the other party won't openly talk about what happened, it gets much harder to sort things out.

7. ^{^}

   April 3rd 

   BP: Current plan I'm thinking about:

   —Talk with both about a whistleblower payout of [redacted range]

   —Then do some standard investigating, talk to both sides, check the facts, talk to more interns / former employees, etc

   —Then publish my takeaways along with statements from all involved

8. ^{^}

   April 12th 

   This day there was a thread on LW about Nonlinear.

   BP: I was thinking of writing this:

   > It is not clear to me that Nonlinear's work has been executed especially poorly; the audio library seems worthwhile, and I would be quite interested to know how many and which projects were funded through the Emergency Fund project.

   > That said, I've chatted with a number of former staff/interns about their experiences for about 10 hours, and I would strongly advise future employees to agree on salary and financial agreements ahead of time, in written contract, and not do any work for free. It also seems to me that Nonlinear hasn't been very competent at managing the legal details of running a non-profit (and indeed lost their non-profit status at some point in the last few years due to not filing basic paperwork), and I would be concerned about them managing the finances of other prizes if the money was actually handed to Nonlinear at any point.

   Person B: I think that comment is tantamount to publishing conclusions of your investigation before you actually publish your conclusions. Also I predict that it will attract a lot more attention than you are maybe thinking. I’d hold off, but perhaps try to be quick about, getting your actually verdict.

9. ^{^}

   April 16th 

   BP: My guess is that this isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be. I think the single goal is to make it so that

   1) [Chloe] and [Alice] are open that they had a strongly negative experience with Nonlinear and are critical of it, with a bunch of details public

   2) Nonlinear is not in a position to retaliate in an underhanded way

   I think that's my main proposal, is that I get a basic public statement from them that addresses the overall details, and that I can check-in with Nonlinear about. Just get it to be out in the open.