Brief update: I am still in the process of reading this. At this point I have given the post itself a once-over, and begun to read it more slowly (and looking through the appendices as they're linked).

I think any and all primary sources that Kat provides are good (such as the page of records of transactions). I am also grateful that they have not deanonymized Alice and Chloe.

I plan to compare the things that this post says directly against specific claims in mine, and acknowledge anything where I was factually inaccurate. I also plan to do a pass where I figure out which claims of mine this post responds to and which it doesn’t, and I want to reflect on the new info that’s been entered into evidence and how it relates to the overall picture. 

It probably goes without saying that I (and everyone reading) want to believe true things and not false things about this situation. If I made inaccurate statements I would like to know that and correct them.

As I wrote in my follow-up post, I am not intending to continue spear-heading an investigation into Nonlinear. However this post makes some accusations of wrongdoing on my part, which I intend to respond to, and of course for that it is relevant whether the things I said are actually true.

I hope to write a response sometime this week, but I am not committing to any deadlines.

Not sure if it’s worth mentioning, but I hope that people reading this are aware of what Kat writes at the bottom of the appendices:

A quick note on how we use quotation marks: we sometimes use them for direct quotes and sometimes use them to paraphrase. If you want to find out if they’re a direct quote, just ctrl-f in the original post and see if it is or not.

Many of the things that are quotes next to my name are not things I said and not things that I would endorse, and I believe the same is true of many sentences in quotation marks attributed to Alice/Chloe.

I read this post and about half of the appendix.

(1) I updated significantly in the direction of "Nonlinear leadership has a better case for themselves than I initially thought" and "it seems likely to me that the initial post indeed was somewhat careless with fact-checking."

(I'm still confused about some of the fact-checking claims, especially the specific degree to which Emerson flagged early on that there were dozens of extreme falsehoods, or whether this only happened when Ben said that he was about to publish the post. Is it maybe possible that Emerson's initial reply had little else besides "Some points still require clarification," and Emerson only later conveyed how strongly he disagreed with the overall summary once he realized that Ben was basically set on publishing on a 2h notice? If so, that's very different from Ben being told in the very first email reply that Nonlinear's stance on this is basically "good summary, but also dozens of claims are completely false and we can document that." That's such a stark difference, so it feels to me like there was miscommunication going on.)

At the same time:

(2) I still find Chloe's broad perspective credible and concerning (in a "this is difficult work environment with definite potential for toxicity" rather than "this is outright abusive on all reasonable definitions of the word"). The replies by Nonlinear leadership didn't change my initial opinion here by too much because there are features of how Kat and Emerson are presenting their side of things that make me think "ah, I see it: not surprised Chloe felt negative emotions about her perceived standing in relation to them." (Admittedly, I think if I applied more charitable priors here, I could see alternative explanations like "the negative features I believe I see here are best explained by Kat and Emerson feeling hurt and upset by things Chloe said, so they come across as defensive and one-sided in return, but they'd be better able to see and re-state Chloe's perspective if they were more distanced from the events, and may have been better at seeing Chloe's perspective earlier, before they all had a falling out.")

To elaborate on (1):

• If Nonlinear's description of Alice is even halfway accurate, then I feel like Ben should have decided not to air any of her claims altogether, and only gone with Chloe as the single source. This would have made clear that the picture is one of mostly just one person. This would probably have changed the forcefulness of the post by quite a bit, which would've been less immediately condemning towards Nonlinear (making the resulting discussion fairer).
• I also thought some of the replies Nonlinear gave towards Chloe seemed more persuasive than I would've expected. (At the same time, I think many of their replies seemed roughly what I would have expected, and in fact seem arguably revealing to me in some ways – see my point below on "(2)." [I guess the people who disagree with me will think I'm still influenced by the priors I've formed from the previous discussion, and that it's hard to be objective after having initially formed a negative-leaning view.])

To elaborate on (2)

• I didn't like the repeated mentions of phrases like "this would have been your dream day!" or "to many [...], this would have been their dream job!." Sure, I get where this is coming from: Contrasted with accusations of not feeding people well or not paying them enough money, it makes sense to highlight that the role had lots of perks. At the same time, the lengths to which they went to highlight this, and the talk about hanging out with other high-status community heroes, gave me too much of a feeling that they almost expected Chloe and Alice to feel indebted towards them. I can see how this attitude would lead to difficult dynamics in a setting where you're co-living and forming "what-can-feel-like-friendships" with people you also expect to do all sorts of tasks for you.
• Relatedly, it's begging the question to self-describe your group with "Your group has a really optimistic and warm vibe. There’s this sense in the group that anything is possible if you are just creative, brave, and never give up. It feels really empowering and inspiring." It's fair if Kat or Emerson perceived their group that way, but, evidently, Chloe felt very different about it. So, it feels like it's not hearing her perspective when they describe things like that. This is a strange disconnect. (As another commenter pointed out, there's a similar disconnect with posting the pictures of social fun and tropic scenery, without at least pointing out that it's not actually what most of the discussion was about. I get the desire to share pictures, fwiw, but I think this could've been embedded with a framing that acknowledges the disconnect issue.) (Also relatedly: On "warm vibes," I'm remembering some of the screenshots in the food-ordering discussion made me feel like "I can see why Chloe wouldn't necessarily feel like they're being super warm towards her." Not in a way that's too bad or anything, but, Idk, something about how much value is put on productivity and the ability to negotiate, as opposed to, e.g., going out of one's way to make sure Chloe feels comfortable voicing whenever she struggles with something or needs something when she's sick or feeling low. [I'm not claiming that all employers need to be particularly warm or proactive about encouraging their employees to become better at asking for their basic needs to be met; I'm just pointing out that it's problematic if there's a mismatch between self-perceived warmth vibes and actual effect one has on others, combined with risky work setups like isolated travels and co-working with people who do tasks for you, and blurring potential-for-friendship and professional interactions.]) Overall, there just feels like too little engagement with the possibility that Chloe's experience was maybe predictable and not out of the ordinary, i.e., that Chloe wasn't entitled or disgruntled to react the way she did.
• I thought some of the short-summary replies to Chloe seemed uncharitable to the point of being mean. For instance, this part: "CHLOE: I had unclear work boundaries and was pressured into working on a weekend (implies this was a regular occurrence). NONLINEAR: "My boss offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean island St. Barths, which required one hour of work to arrange the boat and ATV rentals (for me to enjoy too). But it was one hour on a weekend, so I complained, and it never happened again." I remember reading Chloe's account of this incident and it felt very different to me. When I read Chloe's account, I could easily see where she was coming from. I admit that it's okay to use hyperbole in a summary. Maybe they thought it's okay because everyone can see that this is meant somewhat hyperbolically. However, the following is a case where it's more unambiguously mean-spirited rather than just hyperbolic: "Complex situations she herself cites: ordering a taxi, asking for a ride, packing suitcases. [...] This is some of the best public evidence of her being mentally unwell. These are not overwhelming tasks for most people." I feel like this is very unfair. Having read Chloe's descriptions, I'd say it fails to engage with what makes these things complicated (people having various strong preferences about specifics related to the tasks, and you have juggle all of them and make everyone happy, while taking care of other constraints + brain fog from having worked too much before the weekend you're supposed to have off).
• "So how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?" Maybe this is a minor point, but I don't like this style of "writing things as though it's now conclusively established that Ben and Chloe were in the wrong, so we can move on to lessons learned given that specific conclusion." It feels premature. I also didn't like this part: "I wish I could think that Alice, Ben, and Chloe were villains." Ben and Chloe get tainted by association with Alice. The points made by Nonlinear against Alice are way more concerning-if-true than the points made against Chloe or Ben. (I'm not sure about the degree to which they are contested because some of it goes well beyond earlier things that were said about Alice, and people who know more context about Alice, which doesn't describe me at all, haven't had the chance to comment on this.)
• Overall, I thought it's simply implausible that the most Nonlinear leadership could come up with in terms of "things we could've done differently" (see their appendix on this) is stuff like "Emerson shouldn't have snapped at Chloe during that one stressful day" or "we shouldn't have have lived together with employees who weren't previously assistants because, apparently, such employees cannot handle it and will think we're friends." (I'm being admittedly a bit unfair/hyperbolic here; also, note that there were like two or three other short items.) To be more fair, I realize that when you're faced with lots of false accusations (and I agree many of the claims now seem dubious to me and probably uncalled for!), it's understandable to focus mostly on defending yourself and on highlighting how outrageous everything is. However, I think there are several reasons to also focus a lot on what one could've done better. One: I think there's almost always something one can learn from conflicts, even if one is genuinely 98% percent in the right and dealing with a person who has an unhealthy relationship to their own negative emotions that turn them into a wrecking ball of toxicity. Secondly, it's sometimes hard to be right about things like that, so one kind of has a duty, when "fighting back," to make sure one isn't the one "in the wrong" rationalizing one's negative perspective of the other party. Thirdly, and very related to the previous point, I feel like pointing out what one could've done differently is some of the more reliable types of evidence one can readily give in favor of not being someone who looks at things in a one-sided and distorted fashion. So, even if this is just about making sure one's defense is credible, it's strategically smart to inspect and point out what didn't go well. Lastly, I noticed that the post and appendix by Nonlinear is quite well-written in terms of persuasive rhetoric across a number of dimensions, which makes me think that them not including a more comprehensive takeaways/"lessons learned" section is unlikely to be a simple strategic mistake (not realizing that this sort of thing is something that readers in the audience would look out for). Instead, it feels like maybe more a genuine display of their belief that they're close to infallible. If this is the case, it's easy to see why this attitude increases the potential for things to not go well interpersonally.

Even though many the things in my elaboration of "(2)" are negative about Nonlinear, I want to emphasize again that this post made me update positively about them and that I think it's unfortunate how the initial presentation and resulting discussion was too one-sided. I appreciate the length of this post; it must have been very stressful and anxiety-inducing to feel compelled to write it. (I'm overall inclined to think that it was positive for them/their reputation to write it.)

I'm a professional nanny and I've also held household management positions. I just want to respond to one specific thing here that I have knowledge about.

It is upsetting to see a "lesson learned" as only hiring people with experience as an assistant, because a professional assistant would absolutely not work with that compensation structure.

It is absolutely the standard in professional assistant type jobs that when traveling with the family, that your travel expenses are NOT part of your compensation.

When traveling for work (including for families that travel for extensive periods of time) the standard for professionals is:

• Airfare, non-shared lodgings (your own room) and food are all covered by your family and NOT deducted from your pay. Ditto any expenses that are required for work such as taxis, tickets to places you are working at. etc.

-Your work hours start when you arrive at the airport.(Yes, you charge for travel time)

• You charge your full, standard hourly rate for all hours worked.

• You ALSO charge a per diem because you are leaving the comfort of being in your own home / being away from friends and pets and your life.

• You are ONLY expected to work for the hours that are pre-arranged that you are on the clock. (You may be OFFERED but not demanded to work more hours.)

• If you are expected to be available outside of pre scheduled hours then you charge an "on call" rate for any hours they want you generally available for them.

• If these hours add up to more than 45 hours/week, you charge your overtime rate.

For a professional to take three job as described they would have to pay six figures (NOT INCLUDING travel, room, board, related travel expenses). "Getting to travel to exotic locales" might be a perk, but it is NOT compensation.

The people who will NOT require this are: young people too inexperienced to know better, exploited immigrants, and poor non-professionals taking the job out of desperation.

(ETA There is some wiggle room here. Like maybe you charge your per diem rate for travel time instead of your hourly (are the kids with you when you are traveling?), or if your job is ALWAYS traveling you probably don't have a per diem, etc.

Also, I want to note that it is VERY COMMON for non-evil well-meaning people to not realize this. )

I closely read the whole post and considered it carefully. I'm struggling to sum up my reaction to this 15,000-word piece in way that's concise and clear.

At a high level:

Even if most of what Kat says is factually true, this post still gives me really bad vibes and makes me think poorly of Nonlinear.

Let me quickly try to list some of the reasons why (if anyone wants me to elaborate or substantiate any of these, please reply and ask):

• Confusion, conflation, and prevarication between intent and impact.
• Related to the above, the self-licensing, i.e. we are generally good people and generally do good things, so we don't need to critically self-reflect on particular questionable actions we took.
• The varyingly insensitive, inflammatory, and sensationalist use of the Holocaust poem (truly offensive) and the terms "lynching" (also offensive) and "witch-burning".
• Conflation between being depressed and being delusional.
• Glib dismissal of other people's feelings and experiences.
• The ridiculous use of "photographic evidence", which feels manipulative and/or delusional to me.
• Seeming to have generally benighted views on trauma, abuse, power dynamics, boundaries, mental health, "victimhood", resilience, narcissism, DARVO, what status means for accusations of bad behaviour, culture wars, sexism/misogyny, sexual violence, etc.^[1]
• The hollow-sounding professions of empathy and good will toward Alice, Chloe, and Ben while attempting to maximally character assassinate them, threatening to de-anonymize Alice and Chloe, and retaliating against Ben.
• Retaliating against Ben. 
• General lack of self-awareness and self-reflection; engaging in a heroes/villains or angels/demons framing while paying lip service to not doing that.
• Insensitively and unnecessarily bringing up Kathy Forth as an argumentation pawn and not showing concern for (or mentioning) the fact that she died by suicide.
• Grandstanding about truth-seeking, scout mindset, and rationality.
• Suspicious deflection away from the matter at hand to to "the world's problems". 
• Arguing that Ben's investigation was a waste of time and (therefore) money.
• Implying (or seeming to) that the fate of EA may hang in the balance over this issue.
• Diagnosing people's concern about Nonlinear as an overreaction to FTX/Alameda and Sam Bankman-Fried.

1. ^{^}

   Random fun fact: I am quoted in The Coddling of the American Mind and Jonathan Haidt sent me a signed copy, which was very nice of him to do. Still, I find the book pretty cringe. It's not that he doesn't have a point... But, anyway, that's a topic for another post.

I drew a random number for spot checking the short summary table. (I don't think spot checking will do justice here, but I'd like to start with something concrete.)

Chloe claimed: they told me not to spend time with my romantic partner 

- Also a strange, false accusation: we invited her boyfriend to live with us for 2 of the 5 months. We even covered his rent and groceries.

- We were just about to invite him to travel with us indefinitely because it would make Chloe happy, but then Chloe quit.

Evidence/read more

This seems to be about this paragraph from the original post:

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.

There aren't any other details in the original post specifically from Chloe or specifically about her partner, including in the comment in Chloe's words below the post. The only specific detail about romantic partners I see in the original post is about Alice, and it plausibly fits the "romantic partners" piece of this summary. ("Alice was polyamorous, and she and Drew entered into a casual romantic relationship. Kat previously had a polyamorous marriage that ended in divorce, and is now monogamously partnered with Emerson. Kat reportedly told Alice that she didn't mind polyamory "on the other side of the world”, but couldn't stand it right next to her, and probably either Alice would need to become monogamous or Alice should leave the organization.")

Both links in the summary table go to the same place, which says:

Chloe says: “They told me not to spend time with my boyfriend so I was kept socially dependent”, yet we invited her boyfriend to live with us (rent-free) for 2 of the 5 months, discrediting her as a reliable source of truth

False, Questionable, or Misleading Claim: Alice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families, romantic partners…

The Other Side: Simply a sad, unbelievable lie given how easily refutable it is. 

In direct contradiction to this, Chloe’s boyfriend traveled with us 40% of the time! (~2 of the 5 months she was with us) We thought he was wonderful, had high potential, and we even considered inviting him to join us indefinitely! Emerson also helped her boyfriend financially for part of the time by not charging him for rent/groceries

[cropped phone screenshots of text conversations from February and May 2022, respectively, with the description "LEFT: Kat and Emerson discuss whether they should let Chloe’s boyfriend stay with them longer. They’re leaning towards yes. Bear in mind, this is while Chloe’s boyfriend is already staying with us. She’s distracted and not getting much work done but we were happy to see her happy! RIGHT: Kat encourages Chloe to see her boyfriend in person, which she’s held off on because she got Covid."]

Kat regularly helped Chloe figure out ways to feel more connected to her boyfriend while they were long distance, such as encouraging her to have more frequent and longer calls.

Also note that dozens of EAs traveled with us and Emerson generously never charged anyone. He just wanted the highest quality people exchanging ideas to maximize impact in beautiful places.

As far as I can tell, "They told me not to spend time with my boyfriend so I was kept socially dependent" is not a direct quote or paraphrase. (Maybe I'd use ~tildes~ for a device like this.) Rather, it picks out one possible contributor to Ben's summary paragraph.

Taking the screenshots at face value, they establish that as of February, Kat and Emerson thought Chloe's boyfriend might have high enough potential for an extended invite (Emerson: "i'm open to it" "he seems eager to help build shit"), and as of May, Kat was not telling Chloe not to spend time with him. (Chloe was with Nonlinear from January to July.)

From my perspective, this is between "not responsive to the complaint" and "evidence for the spirit of the complaint". It seems an overreach to call "They told me not to spend time with my boyfriend..." a "sad, unbelievable lie" "discrediting [Chloe] as a reliable source of truth" when it is not something anyone has cited Chloe as saying. It seems incorrect to describe "advised not to spend time with 'low value people'" as in "direct contradiction" with any of this, which instead seems to affirm that traveling with Nonlinear was conditioned on "high potential" or being among the "highest quality people". Finally, having initially considered inviting Chloe's boyfriend to travel with them would still be entirely consistent with later deciding not to; encouraging a visit in May would still be consistent with an overall expectation that Chloe not spend too much time with her boyfriend in general for reasons related to his perceived "quality".

Edit: the summary table also says “We were just about to invite him to travel with us indefinitely because it would make Chloe happy, but then Chloe quit [in July].” This would fit with not inviting him in February and later being reluctant for “quality” reasons.

To recap, I thought Ben’s original post was unfair even if he happened to be right about Nonlinear because of how chilling it is for everyone else to know they could be on blast if they try to do anything. It sounded like NL made mistakes, but they sounded like very typical mistakes of EA/rationalists when they try out new or unusual social arrangements. Since the attitude around me if you don’t like contracts you entered is generally “tough shit, get more agency”, I was surprised at the responses saying Alice and Chloe should have been protected from an arrangement they willing entered (that almost anyone but EAs/rationalists would have told them was a bad idea). It made me think Ben/Lightcone had a double standard toward an org they already didn’t like because of Emerson talking about Machiavellian strategies and marketing.

Idk if Emerson talking about libel was premature. Many have taken it as an obvious escalation, but it seems like he called it exactly right because NL’s reputation is all but destroyed. Maybe if he hadn’t said that Ben would have waited for their response before publishing, and it would have been better. I think it’s naive and irresponsible for Ben/Lightcone to act like a post like Ben’s was all-in-the-family or something and Emerson was the one getting too real. These forums are NL’s constituency. Damaging their reputation in EA is damaging the main reputation that matters.

I did think the original post was witch-hunty. Even if it was all true and balanced (just not able to share smoking guns) re:NL, the effect on readers is to communicate that smallish infractions will out you as not good enough or reveal your unacceptable character. I’m starting a new org and it terrified me that my inevitable mistakes would be unacceptable.“No mistakes allowed” seems like the worst norm imaginable for a community like ours. It actually is okay to make mistakes with org structure and employer-employee relationships and try again.

Guy Raveh @ 2023-12-16T07:00 (+13)

Since the attitude around me if you don’t like contracts you entered is generally “tough shit, get more agency”, I was surprised at the responses saying Alice and Chloe should have been protected from an arrangement they willing entered

Where is "around you" where this is the norm? FWIW I think it's a terrible one.

Holly_Elmore @ 2023-12-18T23:39 (+22)

Rationality/the Bay. I heard it the most regarding polyamory. The good version of it is "people have the freedom to agree to things that could be bad for them or that might turn out bad for the average person".

Guy Raveh @ 2023-12-19T08:07 (+3)

Reflecting a bit, I'll admit that I liked it as a norm in my department in uni ("You want to take a class but don't have the prerequisites? No problem, it's your responsibility to understand, not ours"), but still think it has no place in broader society - and in personal and romantic relationships in particular.

DPiepgrass @ 2023-12-15T18:18 (+8)

because of how chilling it is for everyone else to know they could be on blast if they try to do anything.

In part based on Ben's followup (which indicated a high level of care) and based on concerning aspects of this post discussed in other comments here, I'm persuaded that Ben's original post was sufficiently fair (if one keeps in mind the disclaimer that the post was "not from a search to give a balanced picture"), and that most EA orgs don't need to be afraid of unusual social arrangements as long as they're written down and expectations are made clear.

(Edit: the discussion between spencerg and Habryka makes me think Ben's writeup not only could have, but should have, been worded more carefully. Still, I agree with the above paragraph.)

Habryka @ 2023-12-13T22:15 (+3)

FWIW, my model is also that the original post was received in a too witch-hunty manner, but also I don't have any great ideas how to share the evidence to all the relevant parties without causing too much of a witch-hunt. I think all the specific statements that Ben made in his post were pretty well-calibrated (and still seem mostly right to me after reading through the evidence), so it's not like the post called for a witch-hunt.

I've been thinking about whether there is some kind of informal court or arbitration system that would allow the social pressure here to be less driven by people trying to individually enact social enforcement, but by something that has more deliberation and moderation built-in, but I don't yet have a blueprint for something that could work and also wouldn't take thousands of hours.

If you have any concrete suggestions or edits for Ben's post on what he could have done to make the effects be less witch-hunty, then I would be curious about that (though, to be clear, my overall assessment continues to be that working with Nonlinear is a bad idea, they should not have tables at EAG, should not receive central EA Funding, and young EAs should be reliable warned before engaging with them more, but like, not more than that. I don't want people to try to actively harm Kat or Emerson, and I think it's fine for them to work among themselves, build up an independent reputation and work on stuff they care about, and in as much as that happened, I am sad)

spencerg @ 2023-12-14T02:21 (+86)

I’m surprised to hear you say this Habryka: “I think all the specific statements that Ben made in his post were pretty well-calibrated (and still seem mostly right to me after reading through the evidence)”

Do you think Ben was well calibrated/right when he made, for instance, these claims which Nonlinear has provided counter evidence for?

“She [Alice] 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. Alice eventually gave in and ate non-vegan food in the house” (from my reading of the evidence this is not close to accurate, and I believe Ben had access to the counter evidence at the time when he published)

“Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free” (from my reading of the evidence Nonlinear provided, it seems Alice was asked to buy ADHD medicine that they believed was legal to buy where she was, and then they told her never mind when she said it required a prescription)

“After being hired and flying out, Chloe was informed that on a daily basis their job would involve driving e.g. to get groceries when they were in different countries.” (my understanding from what I read was that she was told she could take taxis paid for by nonlinear, and it was more like twice per week not daily)

“In summary Alice spent a lot of her last 2 months with less than €1000 in her bank account, sometimes having to phone Emerson for immediate transfers to be able to cover medical costs when she was visiting doctors. At the time of her quitting she had €700 in her account, which was not enough to cover her bills at the end of the month, and left her quite scared. ” (my understanding is that, according to nonlinear, this was not accurate)

“Afterwards, I wrote up a paraphrase of their responses. I shared it with Emerson and he replied that it was a “Good summary!”” [implying that Emerson was saying his characterization was accurate] (my understanding was that part of Emerson’s message was not mentioned, and that Emerson believed Ben’s summary had serious inaccuracies)

Habryka @ 2023-12-14T04:05 (+12)

Do you think Ben was well calibrated/right when he made, for instance, these claims which Nonlinear has provided counter evidence for?

Yes, indeed I think in all of these quotes Ben basically said pretty reasonable things that still seem reasonably accurate to me even after reading the whole appendix that Nonlinear provided.

---

She [Alice] 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. Alice eventually gave in and ate non-vegan food in the house” 

You start with the one that I do think I made the biggest update on, though I also think most of the relevant evidence here was shared back during the original discussion. I am still kind of confused what happened here, and am hoping to dig into it, but I agree that there are some updates for me (and I assume others) here, and I currently think Alice's summary is overall pretty misleading. 

To be clear, in the quoted section Ben is summarizing what Alice told him, and Ben's original post also directly includes this summary from Kat: 

Second; the semi-employee said that she wasn't supported in getting vegan food when she was sick with Covid, and this is why she stopped being vegan. This seems also straightforwardly inaccurate, we brought her potatoes, vegan burgers, and had vegan food in the house. We had been advising her to 80/20 being a vegan and this probably also weighed on her decision.

I think with both of these being listed, I am reasonably happy with the presentation and am glad that we included both sides on this. 

You also say: 

(from my reading of the evidence this is not close to accurate, and I believe Ben had access to the counter evidence at the time when he published)

This is inaccurate. I don't think there is any evidence that Ben had access to that doesn't seem well-summarized by the two sections above. We had a direct report from Alice, which is accurately summarized in the first quote above, and an attempted rebuttal from Kat, which is accurately summarized in the second quote above. We did not have any screenshots or additional evidence that didn't make it into the post.

---

“Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free” 

Yep, this still seems accurate to me. As Kat has documented herself she asked Alice to bring Schedule 2 drugs across borders without prescription (whether you need a prescription in the country you buy it is irrelevant, what matters is whether you have one in the country you arrive in), something that can have quite substantial legal consequences (I almost certainly would feel pretty uncomfortable asking my employee to bring prescription medications across borders without appropriate prescription). 

I also currently still think that requests for other more recreational drugs were made, and I don't consider the evidence to have debunked that, and wouldn't have phrased the original very differently based on the evidence provided (I am hoping to find more concrete evidence for requests for recreational drugs, though it's hard since as I understand these requests were verbal, if made at all).

Again, the original post also contains this summary of Kat's position: 

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.

This seems like a pretty good summary of what Nonlinear's current position is, and so I feel pretty good about the details given here. 

---

After being hired and flying out, Chloe was informed that on a daily basis their job would involve driving e.g. to get groceries when they were in different countries.

I don't see any direct evidence for the daily vs. weekly claim, but I did update a bit on this dimension based on Kat directly claiming otherwise. My current best guess is that it was still multiple times a week, but not daily.

I do currently continue to believe that Chloe was pressured into driving without a license, and felt pressured to learn how to drive in the first place as part of her job. This kind of stuff is hard to arbitrate, and I don't consider the evidence provided in the Nonlinear appendix here very compelling (it's mostly just Kat asserting that she didn't pressure her).

I currently feel a bit sad about the "daily" here, but would write roughly the same thing replacing it with "multiple times a week".

In her comment, Chloe also explicitly says that getting taxis was hard, and often asking other people to drive her was the only option she saw, making me skeptical that the errands that she was expected to perform as part of her job were actually easily achievable via taxis:

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

---

“In summary Alice spent a lot of her last 2 months with less than €1000 in her bank account, sometimes having to phone Emerson for immediate transfers to be able to cover medical costs when she was visiting doctors. At the time of her quitting she had €700 in her account, which was not enough to cover her bills at the end of the month, and left her quite scared. ”

I don't currently see anything inaccurate in this paragraph. 

I do think it's currently sad that Ben's post didn't also mention Alice's company, though my understanding is that she had made hard commitments to herself and her family to never withdraw any funds from that until it was properly self-sustaining, and had communicated those commitments to Kat and Emerson. It is still true that she did not have that money in her bank account in a direct way, and that she really didn't want to withdraw that money for pretty reasonable reasons. I also think Nonlinear's summary of Alice making $3000/mo from this company is inaccurate and off by a factor of 4x or 5x. My understanding is that Alice made less than $10k from this company throughout its whole existence (which is not very surprising, making money with that kind of company is very hard, especially if you are only spending a single day a week on it).

Nonlinear talks about the outstanding reimbursements, which Ben also directly included:

Though to be clear she was paid back ~€2900 of her outstanding salary by Nonlinear within a week, in part due to her strongly requesting it.

The "in part due to her strongly requesting it" part currently feels unclear to me, and I would probably say something slightly different given my current epistemic state. I genuinely believe that Alice was afraid and concerned that Nonlinear would withhold the €2900 from her, and it is clearly the case that she racked up $3000 worth of reimbursements on a $1000 dollar salary, which is pretty scary. The central point for this inclusion was to demonstrate the financial dependence. Saying instead "After she left she was paid back ~$3000 of outstanding reimbursements, which she was concerned Nonlinear might withhold from her or dispute being legitimate, which did help her financial situation" seems like it gets the same point across and captures my current epistemic state better.

I think it would have been better to say that she was paid back $3000 in outstanding reimbursements instead of salary, but I don't think it makes a huge difference.

---

Afterwards, I wrote up a paraphrase of their responses. I shared it with Emerson and he replied that it was a “Good summary!”

Yeah, I think it was a bad move to not include the follow-up of "some points still require clarification", but to be clear, I did totally interpret Emerson's email as saying it was basically a good summary. I think it's still bad to not have included the next sentence, and I was glad that it was corrected in the comments at the time (and I also somewhat think Ben should have updated the post to clarify that point so the correction is more easily visible). 

For context, here is Emerson's message: 

Given the agreement-votes on this comment at the time, other people seemed to agree with me that summarizing the above as just a "Good Summary" was a kind of understandable mistake to make, and that this email did not successfully convey that Emerson disagreed with the points in the summary as provided, 

---

Overall, yeah, given the messiness of a situation like this, I still feel quite good about basically all the quotes that you highlighted. I have now read the whole appendix to this post, spending over 10 hours going through it, and I can't find any clear rebuttal to almost any of what I consider the core claims in Ben's post. 

Again, I do think someone might point out some inferences together with evidence in the appendix that might make me think some of the information that we quoted from sources is inaccurate. Both memory is fallible, and I also totally think that both Chloe and Alice had strong feelings here that might have clouded their judgement and memory. But as it stands, having spent a lot of time, I overall genuinely expected Nonlinear to be able to present more counter-evidence than Nonlinear was actually capable of providing, and currently think that any aggregate statements Ben made about probabilities he assigns to various behaviors, and the epistemic statuses he attached to statements made by Alice and Chloe, to still be quite well-calibrated and to capture the situation quite well.

It has still been less than a week, and the appendix is really massive, so if someone has clear rebuttals of things Ben said in the post, especially things that are not quotes or paraphrasings of Alice, but things that Ben directly claimed were true or where he expressed his epistemic state, I would be very interested in that. I have found a bit, but overall not very much.

spencerg @ 2023-12-14T05:41 (+86)

You say: "This is inaccurate. I don't think there is any evidence that Ben had access to that doesn't seem well-summarized by the two sections above. We had a direct report from Alice, which is accurately summarized in the first quote above, and an attempted rebuttal from Kat, which is accurately summarized in the second quote above. We did not have any screenshots or additional evidence that didn't make it into the post."

Actually, you are mistaken, Ben did have screenshots. I think you just didn't know that he had them. I can send you proof that he had them via DM if you like.

Regarding this: "As Kat has documented herself, she asked Alice to bring Schedule 2 drugs across borders without prescription (whether you need a prescription in the country you buy it is irrelevant, what matters is whether you have one in the country you arrive in), something that can have quite substantial legal consequences (I almost certainly would feel pretty uncomfortable asking my employee to bring prescription medications across borders without appropriate prescription)."

It sounds like you're saying this paragraph by Ben: 

"Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free”

is an accurate characterization of this sentiment: she was asked to pick up ADHD medicine in a place where it was believed not to require a prescription, and bring it back to a place where it does require a prescription, but then was told not to worry about it when it was found that it does require a prescription where she was going to pick it up.

To me, the former does a really bad job of capturing the latter, sounding WAY worse ethically. But I'd be curious to know if others agree with me or if they think that Ben's paragraph captured this in a fair way.

On most of the other points I mentioned, it seems you feel that Ben made mistakes or ommisions, which I agree with:

"I currently feel a bit sad about the "daily" here, but would write roughly the same thing replacing it with "multiple times a week"."

"I do think it's currently sad that Ben's post didn't also mention Alice's company"

"Yeah, I think it was a bad move to not include the follow-up of "some points still require clarification""

On the taxi situation, I can't speak to what it is like to get taxis in all the areas they lived, though this is one of those things Ben could have checked rather easily by asking where they were that she couldn't get cabs and trying to book a cab (I don't believe he bothered to check, but correct me if I'm wrong). When I stayed with all of the involved parties for a few days: Alice, Chloe, Kat, Emerson, and Drew (which was not in Peurto Rico), I got taxis twice, and it was slightly annoying - I spent about 5-10 minutes explaining where exactly to meet me, but was able to successfully get taxis on both of those occasions. Of course, that was just in one place that they lived (I think they were in that location for a couple of weeks if I recall correctly), and it might have been harder in other places, but at least in that location, getting taxis was no more than a minor nuisance.

Update: since it's so easy to verify the claim about taxis, I just went ahead and checked it myself. My understanding is that Chloe was talking about Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. I used google maps to find and then call three taxi companies in that region. The first two didn't pick up. The third said to text them, which I did, and they gave me a quote for getting a taxi today to drive 40 minutes (which was $45). It took about 10 minutes of my time (and 20 minutes on the clock, since they took ~10 minutes to give me a quote). 

I didn't realize this earlier, but in their evidence doc, Nonlinear talks about a similar check they did:  "Lastly, it was not complicated to get a taxi there. I quickly checked, because sometimes we are in places that are truly remote. But there were three taxi services in the area that could have picked her up or driven her there. I called one of them and they said it would cost $30 and they could come pick me up whenever. And one of the other places where we were living at the time, she literally had to book a taxi for me out there, so I know she knew how and that it was possible. 

There just wasn’t Uber there, so she’d have to make a phone call to a taxi."

 

I can't tell if you think Alice gave Ben basically accurate information and didn't leave out critically important details, or if you think she did leave out critically important details (or directly lied to Ben),  but it didn't matter because Ben's post was justified regardless.

Habryka @ 2023-12-14T09:04 (+16)

Actually, you are mistaken, Ben did have screenshots. I think you just didn't know that he had them. I can send you proof that he had them via DM if you like.

Sure! DMd you. I might also ping Ben, though want to mostly give him space and time to write a reply and not have to worry about stuff in the comments for now.

It sounds like you're saying this paragraph by Ben: 

"Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free”

is an accurate characterization of this sentiment: she was asked to pick up ADHD medicine in a place where it was believed not to require a prescription, and bring it back to a place where it does require a prescription, but then was told not to worry about it when it was found that it does require a prescription where she was going to pick it up.

To me, the former does a really bad job of capturing the latter, sounding WAY worse ethically. But I'd be curious to know if others agree with me or if they think that Ben's paragraph captured this in a fair way.

On most of the other points I mentioned, it seems you feel that Ben made mistakes or ommisions, which I agree with:

No, that's not what I am saying. I am saying that that paragraph, combined with Kat's paragraph is a pretty reasonable summary of the evidence, and I think overall I think was pretty good at capturing the gist of the story (like, the two conflicting stories capture my present epistemic state still pretty well, which hasn't changed very much).

My current model is that Kat is understating the degree to which she was asking Alice to carry drugs across borders, and so your summary (which is basically just a summary of things Kat has said) is also not an accurate summary of my epistemic state. 

My current epistemic state is something like "Kat did ask Alice to bring over substantial number of prescription drugs, and probably also some recreational drugs that were illegal to bring across the border. My guess is most of the requests of this type were made in voice. I think the pressure here was substantial enough that I would feel very uncomfortable doing this to an employee of mine, and where if I saw the whole interaction I would think it's a quite substantial flag, but also that no one did anything so egregious that this thing alone should cause any major repercussions for anyone involved".

Daystar Eld @ 2023-12-14T16:56 (+13)

Agree that my epistemic state on this point is also something close to this.

Summarized would be "something like asking her to bring the drugs probably happened, and if so was a mistake that I'd hope was learned from, but the major issue would be if she was pressured to do it, and I'm unsure if I trust the person reporting enough to decide either way without evidence."

[Edit: I know this is probably a frustrating thing for others to read, but seems worth saying anyway... since making the above comment I've had private information shared with me that makes me more confident NL didn't act in an abusive way regarding this particular issue.]

Erica_Edelman @ 2023-12-16T18:59 (+24)

Just a note that standard practice on these kinds of jobs is that you get a credit card to make purchases with, and are never using your own money that is later reimbursed.

A big reason for this is the massive mismatch in what money is worth. Employers might think covering a $100 grocery trip until you get reimbursed is not a big deal, but to an employee that might have been their own food money or rent.

The standard answer is you either let your employee borrow your credit card, or you give them their own credit card. You can put a lower limit on it to protect yourself, and can also see the credit card statement (which can be paired with receipts if you don't trust them not to add on extras. I was always careful that my families get all the receipts but they generally just threw them away because they trusted me)

ElliotJDavies @ 2023-12-13T23:41 (+4)

I've been thinking about whether there is some kind of informal court or arbitration system that would allow the social pressure here to be less driven by people trying to individually enact social enforcement

My model has been there should be social enforcement for both poor epistemic practices and rude/unkind communication. 

I have been an active commenter in both posts, with a goal of social pressure in mind (i.e. providing accountability and a social pressure to not behave inappropriately towards/with your employees). 

I'd be interested to hear meta level criticisms of my approach (e.g. "social pressure is inherently bad"). Because, whilst I don't want witch hunting that employs poor epistemic practices, I do think social pressure plays an important role in stabilising communities. Perhaps someone can change my mind on this? If you do change my mind, I'll certainly comment a lot less.

Holly_Elmore @ 2023-12-14T18:46 (+55)

To me it seems like everyone individually applying social pressure is hard to calibrate. Oli seems to be saying that he and Ben did not intend the level of social consequences NL has felt based on what they shared, but rather an update that NL shoudn’t be a trusted EA org. I think that it’s hard to control the impression that people will get when you provide a lot of evidence even if it’s all relatively minor, and almost impossible to control snowballing dynamics in comment sections and on social media when people fear being judged for the wrong reaction, so it just might not be possible for a post like Ben’s to received in a calibrated way.

ElliotJDavies @ 2023-12-14T19:48 (+12)

This sounds right, but the counterfactual (no social accountability) seems worse to me, so I am operating on the assumption it's a necessary evil. 

I live high trust country, which has very little of this social accountability, i.e. if someone does something potentially rude or unacceptable in public, they are given the benefit of the doubt. However, I expect this works because others are employed, full time, to hold people accountable. I.e. police officers, ticket inspectors, traffic wardens. I don't think we have this in the wider Effective Altruism community right now. 

I think this comment will be frustrating for you and is not high quality. Feel free to disagree, I'm including it because I think it's possible many people (or at least some?) will feel wary of this post early on and it might not be clear why. In my opinion, including a photo section was surprising and came across as near completely misunderstanding the nature of Ben's post. It is going to make it a bit hard to read any further with even consideration (edit: for me personally, but I'll just take a break and come back or something). Basically, without any claim on what happened, I don't think anyone suspects "isolated or poor environment" to mean, "absence of group photos in which [claimed] isolated person is at a really pretty pool or beach doing pool yoga." And if someone is psychologically distressed, whether you believe this to be a misunderstanding or maliciously exaggerated, it feels like a really icky move to start posting pictures that add no substance, even with faces blurred, with the caption "s'mores", etc.

I'm disappointed that much of this document involves attacking the people who've accused you of harmful actions, in place of a focus on disputing the evidence they provided (I appreciate that you also do the latter). I also really bounce off the distraction tactics at play here, where you encourage the reader to turn their attention back to the world's problems. It doesn't seem like you've reflected carefully and calmly about this situation; I don't see many places where you admit to making mistakes and it doesn't seem like you're willing to take ownership of this situation at all.

I don't have time to engage with all the evidence here, but even if I came away convinced that all of the original claims provided by Ben weren't backed up, I still feel really uneasy about Nonlinear; uneasy about your work culture, uneasy about how you communicate and argue, and alarmed at how forcefully you attack people who criticise you. 

Whatever people think about this particular reply by Nonlinear, I hope it's clear to most EAs that Ben Pace could have done a much better job fact-checking his allegations against Nonlinear, and in getting their side of the story.

In my comment on Ben Pace's original post 3 months ago, I argued that EAs & Rationalists are not typically trained as investigative journalists, and we should be very careful when we try to do investigative journalism -- an epistemically and ethically very complex and challenging profession, which typically requires years of training and experience -- including many experiences of getting taken in by individuals and allegations that seemed credible at first, but that proved, on further investigation, to have been false, exaggerated, incoherent, and/or vengeful.

EAs pride ourselves on our skepticism and our epistemic standards when we're identifying large-scope, neglected, tractable causes areas to support, and when we're evaluating different policies and interventions to promote sentient well-being. But those EA skills overlap very little with the kinds of investigative journalism skills required to figure out who's really telling the truth, in contexts involving disgruntled ex-employees versus their former managers and colleagues. 

EA epistemics are well suited to the domains of science and policy. We're often not as savvy when it comes to interpersonal relationships and human psychology -- which is the relevant domain here.

In my opinion, Mr. Pace did a rather poor job of playing the investigative journalism role, insofar as most of the facts and claims and perspectives posted by Kat Woods here were not even included or addressed by Ben Pace.

I think in the future, EAs making serious allegations about particular individuals or organizations should be held to a pretty high standard of doing their due diligence, fact-checking their claims with all relevant parties, showing patience and maturity before publishing their investigations, and expecting that they will be held accountable for any serious errors and omissions that they make.

'- Alice has accused the majority of her previous employers, and 28 people - that we know of - of abuse. She accused people of: not paying her, being culty, persecuting/oppressing her, controlling her romantic life, hiring stalkers, threatening to kill her, and even, literally, murder.'


The section of doc linked to here does not in fact provide any evidence whatsoever of Alice making wild accusations against anyone else, beyond plain assertions (i.e. there are no links to other people saying this). 

I want to share the following, while expecting that it will probably be unpopular. 

I feel many people are not being charitable enough to Nonlinear here. 

I have only heard good things about Nonlinear, outside these accusations. I know several people who have interacted with them - mainly with Kat - and had good experiences. I know several people who deeply admire her. I have interacted with Kat occasionally, and she was helpful. I have only read good things about Emerson. 

As far as I can tell from this and everything I know/have read, it seems reasonable to assume that the people at Nonlinear are altruistic people. They have demonstrably made exceptional commitments to doing good; started organisations, invested a lot of time and money in EA causes, and helped a lot of people. 

Right now, on the basis of what could turn out to have been a lot of lies, their reputations, friendship futures and careers are at risk of being badly damaged (if not already so). 

This may have been (more) justified if the claims in the original post were all found and believed to be clearly true. However, that was, and is not, clearly the case at this point in time. 

At present, Nonlinear have demonstrably set aside significant time to write a huge response to the claims made against them. From my initial reading they seem to have largely shown that most claims were not accurate, that the sources of the claims were unreliable (and bad actors), that the method of investigation was unfair (as per their example of its use toward Ben).

Despite this, NL have not been shown much support or sympathy. Relatively few (popular) comments appear to say something like "thank you for writing this up... it must have been hard to deal with the accusations... I changed my mind on x based on your evidence....I still don't think you were correct about y - can you say more there."

Instead, as I see it, the main, or at least most upvoted, response here has been to critique stylistic mistakes made in their almost impossible task of refuting very damaging claims from anonymous sources in unknown contexts. Or to critique remote work and travel while trying to do good, or various ways they are running their organisation unconventionally etc.

[I admit that I am conflicted on the part about Ben - I agree it could be seen as unfair but it shows how his method was flawed in a very effective way. I can understand critiques of this - but surely a comment that is solely a critique isn't the best/fairest way to respond to a post like this in this context]

If you face a lot of false accusations, I can't even imagine how hard it is to find the time and mental strength to produce what has been produced, let alone to respond to all the comments in a measured way. 

If, and it is still to be determined, the claims made were largely false, then I think it is incredibly impressive and admirable that NL still made such a great effort to refute them despite the amount of ingratitude, criticism and unkindness that they faced in the comments on the original post.

I can't help but feel that too many people essentially made their minds up after reading the first post from Ben and are now consciously or unconsciously seeking to maintain their prior negative associations.

I'd like people to imagine what they would do in a similar situation if they were faced with similar accusations. How would you successfully persuade people that you didn't do the things you were accused of, and that the context was not as portrayed? How would you feel when most of the EA forum community appeared to form a firm impression that you and your organisation were bad, and didn't thank you for your effort of writing a huge response or really engage the counterclaims.

Nonlinear and their members may have made some mistakes or acted unethically, but the evidence for this is currently in dispute. In light of what they have done previously, here, and more generally, they surely deserve more empathy and positive (or at least neutral) engagement than what they are getting. I imagine that all of us would want the same if put in their circumstances.

As I finish this, I sort of regret starting to write it, and I may regret posting it. I just don't feel comfortable watching this happen without saying something.

As per my earlier comment, I still need to read Ben's original post and the full appendix from the response posts in more detail, to feel more confident about my judgement. I could change my mind and decide that Nonlinear etc made more serious mistakes than I thought and that I don't feel so positive about them anymore. However, I would still like a more charitable response to their efforts and evidence.

I will also admit that I do like to see the best in people, and this has led me astray in the past (e.g.,  with Gleb). I hope I am not wrong here.

22/12/23 Edit:

I said elsewhere that I would read the arguments from both sides and then make a final decision. I haven't done that because I didn't have time, and it didn't feel like high value. Especially in light of later posts and comments by people who are better qualified. I feel that it is still better (or at least closer to keeping my prior commitment) to state my current position for future readers than to not say anything further. With that in mind, this (copied from elsewhere) is where I ended up:

Before BP post: NL are a sort of atypical, low structure EA group, doing entrepreneurial and coordination focused work that I think is probably positive impact.
After BP post: NL are actually pretty exploitative and probably net negative overall. I'll wait to hear their response, but I doubt it will change my mind very much.
After NL post: NL are probably not exploitative. They made some big mistakes (and had bad luck) with some risks they took in hiring and working unconventionally. I think they are probably still likely to have a positive impact on expectation. I think that they have been treated harshly.
After this post: I update to be feeling more confident that this wasn't a fair way to judge NL and that these sorts of posts/investigations shouldn't be a community norm. 

I am still pretty uncertain overall. I definitely think that NL should be more careful and conventional in their hiring and work practices in the future.

I added this as an edit because I didn't think it warranted a new comment, and a new comment would provoke more engagement and distract more people, etc.

Hey folks, a reminder to please be thoughtful as you comment.

The previous Nonlinear thread received almost 500 comments; many of these were productive, but there were also some more heated exchanges. Following Forum norms—in a nutshell: be kind, stay on topic, be honest—is probably even more important than usual in charged situations like these.

Discussion here could end up warped towards aggression and confusion for a few reasons, even if commenters are generally well intentioned:

• Some of the allegations this post responds to, and the new allegations in the post, are serious and upsetting. People who have gone through similar experiences may find engaging with this topic especially stressful.
• Power dynamics and alleged mistreatment is rightly an emotionally loaded topic, and can be difficult to discuss objectively.
• Differences in personal culture and experiences can lead to hard-to-articulate disagreements over acceptable versus unacceptable behaviour.

Regarding this paragraph from the post:

Given what they have done, a number of people expressed to us that they think Alice/Chloe are a danger to the health of the community and should not be anonymized. We will leave that to the community to decide.

For the time being, please do not post personal information that would deanonymize Alice or Chloe. The moderation team is currently discussing how we might deal with this.

Also, don’t vote using multiple accounts, and don’t engage in vote brigading. We will be monitoring voting activity. We had to ban users for voting violations on the “Sharing Information About Nonlinear” post, and we would like to avoid issuing bans again.

I haven't looked into the evidence here at all, but fwiw the section on 'sharing information on ben pace' is deranged. I know you are using this as an example of how unfounded allegations can damage someone's reputation. But in repeating them, you are also repeating unfounded allegations and damaging someone's reputation. You are also obviously doing this in retaliation for him criticising you. You could have used an infinite number of examples of how unfair allegations can damage someone's reputation, including eg known false allegations against celebrities or other people reported in the news, or hypotheticals.

Just share your counter-evidence, don't in the process try to smear the person criticising you. 

For the most part, an initial reading of this post and the linked documents did have the intended effect on me of making me view many of the original claims as likely false or significantly exaggerated. With that said, my suggestion would have been to remove some sorts of stuff from the post and keep it only in the linked documents or follow-up posts. In particular, I'd say:

• The photos provide a bit of information, but can be viewed as distracting and misleading. I think the value of information they provide is probably sufficient for their inclusion in a linked Google Doc, but including them twice in the post (and once near the top) gives them a lot of salience, and as some of the comments here show, this can cause some readers to switch off or view your post with hostility.
• Some of the alternative hypothesis stuff, and the stuff related to claims about Ben Pace, may also have been better suited to a linked Google Doc -- something that curious readers could dig into, but that was not given a lot of salience for somebody who was just interested in the core claims. I think there's some value to these exercises, but it would muddy the waters less if this were less salient, so that readers could focus on the core claims.
• Some of the editorialization e.g., around what we should be focusing on, or how much effort was wasted on this, would probably have been best left to a follow-up post, if and after the core claims of this post achieved more widespread acceptance. I do see some value in the editorialization, but it feels a bit premature as its validity is contingent on the core claims in the post being accepted. (I do understand thinking about this and feeling strongly about this; I just think this post isn't the optimal point for expressing these thoughts).

Now that the post is written and published, I don't know if it makes sense to make these changes. But my own take is that the post would have been stronger had these changes been made prior to publishing. Curious to hear if others agree or disagree.

I am commenting to encourage everyone to think about the real people at the centre of all of the very ugly accusations being made, which I hope is acceptable to do, even though this comment does not directly address the evidence presented by either Lightcone or Nonlinear. 

This is getting a lot of engagement, as did Ben Pace’s previous post, and for the people being discussed, this must be incredibly stressful. No matter how you think events actually played out, the following are true:

a) at least one group of people is having unfair accusations made against them, either of creating abusive working conditions and taking advantage of the naivety of young professionals, or of being delusional and unreliable or malicious. Neither of these are easy to deal with. 

b) the situation is ongoing, and there is no clear timeline for when things will be neatly wrapped up and concluded.

Given this, and having read several comments speaking to the overwhelming experience of being dogpiled on the internet, I just want to encourage everyone who is friendly with any of the people at the centre of this, including Alice, Chloe, Kat Woods, Emerson and Drew Spartz, Ben Pace, and Habryka to reach out and make sure they are coping well. The goal here is hopefully to get to the truth and to update community norms, and it is far too easy for individuals to become casualties of this process. A simple ‘how ya doing?’ can make a big difference when people are struggling.

My basic takeaway from all of this is not who is right/wrong so much as that EA professional organisations should act more like professional organisations. While it may be temporarily less enjoyable I would expect overall the organisations with things like HR professionals, safeguarding policies, regular working hours, offices in normal cities and work/life boundaries to be significantly more effective contributors to EA

I’m less interested in “debating whether a person in a villa in a tropical paradise got a vegan burger delivered fast enough” or “whether it’s appropriate for your boss to ask you to pick up their ADHD medication from a Mexican pharmacy” or “if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary”? Than in interrogating whether EA wouldn’t be better off with more “boring” organisations led by adults with significant professional experience managing others, where the big company drama is the quality of coffee machine in the office canteen.

I’m glad to see that Nonlinear’s evidence is now public, since Ben’s post did not seem to be a thorough investigation. As I said to Ben before he posted his original post, I knew of evidence that strongly contradicted his post, and I encouraged him to temporarily pause the release of his post so he could review the evidence carefully, but he would not delay.

I tried starting from the beginning of the appendix, and almost immediately encountered a claim for which I feel Nonlinear has overstated their evidence.

Were Alice and Chloe "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"? This is split into three separate rebuttals (family, romantic partners, and locals).

Nonlinear provides screenshots demonstrating that they encouraged Alice and Chloe to regularly spend time with their families, and encouraged Chloe to spend time with her boyfriend as well as letting him live with them... and also, in their own words (which I have reproduced verbatim below) they did, in fact, advise Alice to hang out with EAs they knew instead of family once, and instead of locals at least twice.

Their reporting of the family advice:

Of note, we think where this is coming from is that when Alice said she was going to visit her family in another country, we were surprised. We were having some of the top figures in the field come live with us for weeks right during the dates she’d chosen. 

She’d basically be skipping one of the best career and impact opportunities of her life. 

We, who were her mentors and employers, recommended she not miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity. That she’d probably have more impact if she visited her family at a different time. The friendships she made and the ideas she got exposed to might be the real big break in her ability to do good. 

We were doing our best to launch Alice’s career, and one of those ways to help her was providing her mentorship. Advice. She disagreed with the advice and said she’d prefer to visit family. And we said, “enjoy some quality family time!”

(Source; scroll up and it's directly above the linked screenshot, on the same page.)

In the short summary overview table, Nonlinear describes the claim that Alice was advised not to spend time with her family as a "Bizarre, false accusation." However, the appendix includes the above description of a time when Nonlinear told her to postpone a family visit in order to spend time with EAs Nonlinear had invited to live with them. They say it happened only once, and they provide evidence that they encouraged her to interact with her family on other occasions; I consider this context at least partially mitigating, but I think describing this as a false accusation is misleading.

The advice about locals:

False, Questionable, or Misleading Claim: “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…”

The Other Side: Alice was spending a lot of time hanging out with random Uber drivers and bartenders in rural Puerto Rico, while at the same time kept asking for advice and expressing a strong desire to have the largest impact possible. 

Of course we like interacting with locals (that’s partly why we travel) but at various points we gave advice like “you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”, and “Kat has been constantly introducing you to top EAs, so if you want to maximize impact it’s usually higher leverage to spend time with them vs random bartenders” However, Alice seems to have twisted this completely normal advice into a sinister attempt to control her, as is her pattern. 

(Source)

Nonlinear says that they did sometimes advise Alice to spend less time hanging out with locals as opposed to with EAs they introduced her to, but clarify that Alice had asked for advice and said that she wished to maximize her impact. (They subsequently indicate that both Alice and Chloe sometimes hung out with locals and attended local events. Again, this is mitigating context in my view; however, if I take Nonlinear's description at face value, it would seem to indicate that Alice's claim was true.)

Based on Nonlinear's own recounting of events, I think it's true that Alice and Chloe were advised to prioritize spending time with people who Nonlinear considered to be high-impact, instead of family and locals. (I don't know whether this also happened with romantic partners, but Nonlinear at least does not report having done so). Nonlinear provides mitigating context, and I do not consider this to be proof that they were abusive as employers, but this makes it difficult for me to trust that their assessments of the evidence will match mine for the rest of the document.

Another random spot check: page 115 of the Google Doc. (I generated a random number between 1 and 135.)

This page is split between two sections. The first starts on page 114:

Ben paints Emerson as a power-hungry villain when almost all of the last 4 years Emerson has been working part-time on EA things, gives his money away quietly, and is almost always behind the scenes, giving credit and decision-making power to others

The quote given in support of this is "I think Emerson is very ambitious and would like a powerful role in EA/X-risk/etc." In my opinion, the quote and the paraphrase are very different things, especially since, as it happens, that quote is not even from the original post, it's from a comment.

The Google Doc then goes on to describe the reasons Drew believes that Emerson is not ambitious for status within EA. This is ultimately a character judgement, and I don't have a strong opinion about who is correct about Emerson's character here. However, I do not think it's actually important to the issue at hand, since the purported ambition was not in fact load-bearing to the original argument in any way.

The second section is longer, and goes on for several pages. It concerns Emerson's previous company, Dose. 

Specifically, in the original post, Ben quoted a couple very negative Glassdoor reviews about Dose and about Emerson specifically. He also noted there were "also far worse reviews about a hellish work place which are very worrying, but they’re from the period after Emerson’s LinkedIn says he left, so I’m not sure to what extent he is responsible he is for them." 

According to the Google Doc, Ben's original post included those reviews and he only removed them after being prompted several times. If that's true, that seems suboptimal but not horrible: that's the point of sharing posts with people before sharing them publicly.

Nonlinear's response also claims that 

However, the evidence shows that the opposite is true: while Emerson was CEO, Dose’s average ratings were ~3.9, roughly the same as Meta (#57 best place to work in 2022).  Also, Dose was featured on a number of Best Places To Work Lists, which use anonymous company-wide surveys, which Ben’s article did not include.

The link goes to a comment where Kat calculates that average. I double-checked the numbers by averaging all the Emerson-era reviews, and I got a slightly lower number, but probably that was because I did not know exactly when he left and included all of the 2017 reviews in the average. However. One of the reviews says:

All of these super positive reviews are being commissioned by upper management. That is the first thing you should know about Spartz, and I think that gives a pretty good idea of the company's priorities.

and that seems important. Overall, the reviews, even the overall positive ones, appear to have a consensus that there was a huge amount of micromanagement, and a lot of confusion and lack of direction. Which is not a mortal sin, but seems worth keeping in mind. 

Side note: the EA Forum, months later, found someone had been sockpuppeting the original Nonlinear-Bad-EA Forum thread based on Alice/Chloe’s lies - the sockpuppets created even more false consensus.

This claim has no links or sources, and by its nature, will not be in the original post, so I'm not sure how to fact-check it.

Habryka found that it was difficult to find particularly negative reviews, until finally he found one anonymous comment claiming “management commissioned positive reviews”... whatever that means.

This part has no links to sources, so I don't know what exactly Habryka found or said about it, but in fact there are seven 1-star reviews from this period, out of a total of 35 reviews. (The comment mentioning commissioned reviews was actually not one of them.) Obviously Nonlinear is correct that one anonymous allegation of commissioning reviews is not conclusive, but in my subjective opinion, it seems broadly plausible.

This section also contains a great deal of anger at Ben for his perceived carelessness with Emerson's reputation. I agree that the anger would be justified if he was in fact careless, but I do not in fact see all that much evidence of that carelessness in this section. Which makes the outrage ring somewhat hollow. It is difficult to take seriously accusations that Ben "frames it in the most outrage-inducing way" when, as far as I can tell, that is what the document I am reading is doing.

Overall, my impression is that the evidence is inconclusive about whether Emerson was a bad boss at Dose. It seems valid for Ben to have included the poor reviews in the original post, though I think he should have also included the fact that there were a bunch of positive reviews.

Reading Lukas_Gloor’s comment (and to a lesser extent, this still helpful one from Erica_Edelman) made me realize what I think is the big disagreement between people and why they are talking past each other. 

It comes down to how you would feel about doing Alice/Chloe’s job. 

Some people, like the Nonlinear folks and most of those sympathetic to them, think something like the following:

“Why is she such an ungrateful whiner? She has THE dream job/life. She gets to travel the world with us (which is awesome since we can do anything and this is what we chose to do), living in some insanely cool places with super cool and successful people AND she has a large degree of autonomy over what she does AND we are building her up and like 15% of her job is some menial tasks that we did right before she joined and come on it’s fine. How can you complain about the smallest unpleasant thing when the rest of your life rocks and this is your FIRST job out of college when this lifestyle is reserved for multimillionaires? She gets to live the life of a multimillionaire and is surrounded by cool EA people”

Others look at Alice/Chloe’s life and think something like the following:

“Wow, that really sucks to have to follow these people around all the time, doing whatever they want to do, living away from the comfort of your own home. She thought she was going to do operations work for a cool longtermist startup that was expanding but instead, she’s always on the clock, paid very little, and being told that getting to travel alongside them and live like them is a PERK! Run away from these people as fast as possible! How is anyone defending these rich, entitled, exploiters? Of course, she would exaggerate some things, it felt like that!”

Look at Lukas’ comment again and how they each describe a certain experience in St. Barth’s. 

From Emerson/Nonlinear’s perspective, they didn’t bring someone on to do some stuff 9-5. They brought someone on to be one of them which includes doing stuff for a couple of hours whenever they pop up and this is just what it’s like to be in a faster pace startup (how Nonlinear describes themself and how Emerson has always lived and how he built his previous companies). It was in the job description. She’s going on this trip too after all and someone has to call the places to organize. Alright, she’s whining again so I’ll just take over, whatever.

From Chloe’s perspective, she’s been following these people around for the past month and always seeing them and wants a break from them and it’s finally her supposed day off so she wants it off but they randomly decide to do a day excursion. Well, that sucks. Now she is forced to spend the day with them AND do stupid planning tasks trying to convince some random guy to let her plan this last minute just because Emerson wants to. She then tells Kat that she doesn’t want to have to work on her weekends.

Look at Erica's comment. If you think this is like being a remote travelling nanny who should be getting paid extra for the travel but you are getting paid less, it sucks. If you think this is joining some cool remote/travelling charity startup, this is awesome.

This also explains why some people (as Kat would say, 19/21 people) who joined Nonlinear under this arrangement had a great time. They got to live a cool life, with a lot of freedom, in cool places. To them, this was a great experience. They got to pocket $12k/year into savings and live like a king. 

Essentially, what I think happened is there was a really bad fit (and there are some bad incentives that are also at play here that will take too long to go into with regards to selecting a candidate) and different expectations between the parties. Nonlinear wanted to start adding people to their crew and expanding their team who travelled the world and worked on AI safety and wanting people to slot right into how they do things; taking spontaneous vacations, living in exotic places where it’s always sunny, getting shit done regardless of who's job it is etc. Alice/Chloe might have thought they wanted it but didn’t know and so they tried it out and they definitely didn’t like it but didn't feel they could quit (Whether this was true or not. Remember that while they could probably leave whenever, they might not have felt like they could for reasons that are hard to explain).

What should have happened here? Hard to say. I think a gradual ramping up to this is super necessary and hiring people (from Nonlinear’s perspective: adding people to the team) after a couple of interviews that you had never really spent a lot of time with or lived with before is ill-advised. A 1/2-week work trial seems especially necessary here. But Alice/Chloe also needed to be doing some constant introspection from day 1 if they wanted to stay here.

I find it interesting and revealing to look at how Nonlinear re-stated Chloe's initial account of an incident into a shorter version.

First, here's their shortened version (by Nonlinear):

One of Chloe’s jobs was to organize fun day trips (which she’d join us on). In fact, one of her unofficial titles was Fun Lord of Nonlinear, First of Her Name. One day, spontaneously, we decided to go on a trip to St. Barths. Emerson asked her to do her usual job, and she said “It’s a weekend” and he said, “But you like organizing fun trips!” - she had said so many times - and she said sure.

She continued doing her job (arranging ATV rentals for the group - herself getting to ride as well of course). Then, when she complained, Emerson said “OK” and then just… went and did her job for her. And that was that.

(This is another example of Chloe coming in with the implicit frame that doing her job is abusive. “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.” We can empathize with her wishing she could join us before finishing her job, but this was her job. Being an assistant is not abuse.)

The day after she talks to me about it, how she wants to not have work spontaneously sprung on her on a break day. I agree with her. I think break days should be sacred. I talk to Emerson about it and tell him that he can’t do that, and that we cannot spring work on her on break days unless they’re an actual emergency. He disagrees because he thinks it’s totally normal for startup employees to ocassionally work on weekends, but I insist, and that’s that.

We proceed to only ask her to do her job on work days. She must just not remember that we set up this policy. But we did.

For comparison, here's Chloe's original: 

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”.

It's probably best for readers to think first about whether they feel like the summary omits important things. I think it's fine to omit some things and mostly describe the incident from Kat and Emerson's perspective. But I think not mentioning the following three things, at least, is pretty bad form and misleading: 

• There's a huge difference between 
  "I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself"
  versus 
  "Emerson asked her to do her usual job, and she said “It’s a weekend”
  This difference above really changes the context for
  "He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”."
  Basically, for the version where Chloe only said "It's a weekend," it's defensible to interpret Emerson's reply as a friendly negotiation attempt. By contrast, in the version where Chloe says "I really need the vacation day for myself," the comment that most readily comes to my hyperbole-prone mind for "But organizing stuff is fun for you!" is "psychopathic."
  (To be fair, it could be that Chloe failed at expressing just how much she needed that day off – I think that's a common pattern with many people to struggle with voicing their needs and limits. Even so, I think it's bad form by Nonlinear to not acknowledge this discrepancy of accounts and instead impose their own framing on Chloe's account. It feels like trying to alter the frame covertly rather than discussing what happened in the open.) (Not to mention that "she said so many times" (about liking to organize trips) is totally beside the point, and pretending otherwise is bizarre. Like, if they can't even get this right here on the forum after three months of thinking about it, things don't look good.)
• I think it's not okay to omit relevant context when they summarized the following passage:
  "(This is another example of Chloe coming in with the implicit frame that doing her job is abusive. “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.” We can empathize with her wishing she could join us before finishing her job, but this was her job. Being an assistant is not abuse.)"
  They make it seem like Chloe was complaining about normal work on a normal work day. However, in this story, Chloe had agreed here to work on a weekend and she only expected that she had to organize the trip (St Martin and back) and nothing else. Getting the ATV rentals while everyone else was having coffee was yet another unexpected task on her off day. It's a very different thing to feel bad about unexpected new tasks coming up on your off day after you already felt like you got talked into doing more than you wanted, than it is to feel bad about normal work while your bosses are resting. It feels unfair not to acknowledge the true source of Chloe's discontent in this specific story about the cafe.
• Chloe doesn't seem to agree with the following description: 
  "Then, when she complained, Emerson said “OK” and then just… went and did her job for her."
  Here, what Nonlinear omitted was this contradicting passage in Chloe's account:
  "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."
  It's strange to omit this. It sounds like Emerson insisted that she made ten phone calls before dropping the idea. To me, it feels quite demanding to ask your assistant to go to such great lengths on what was initially an off day for them (or at all, tbh), especially if you can probably infer based on their mood and behavior that they're not in the happiest and most energetic of states.

In any case, this is the sort of thing that makes me feel like "Nonlinear are being unfair and somewhat sneaky in their presentation."

To be clear, I'm not necessarily accusing them of deliberately misrepresenting what Chloe said. They might reasonably reply, "We know Chloe said different things; after all, we linked to her long comment and we think forum readers can read for themselves. We decided to showcase our side of the story, how we remember it." However, even if that's how they reply, I think it's not okay to do things underhandedly like that, especially when they then go on and make strong negative statements about Chloe's entitlement and bad attitude based on their version of events, without flagging that Chloe disagrees about so much of the context. Doing things underhandedly is manipulative because it hides possible points of disagreement, making it seem like their version of the story is more obviously accurate/objective than it actually is.

(I edited an earlier comment to include this, but it's a bit buried now, so I wanted to make a new comment.)

I've read most of the post and appendix (still not everything). To be a bit more constructive, I want to expand on how I think you could have responded better (and more quickly):

1. We were sad to hear that two of our former employees had such negative experiences working with us. We were aware of some of their complaints, but others took us by surprise.
2. We have a different perspective on many of the issues they raise. In particular, we dispute some of the most serious allegations. We're attaching some evidence here to show that the employees were well-compensated, provided vegan food, and were absolutely not asked to transport illegal substances.
3. We are also aware that one of the ex-employees has a concerning history of behaviour which we think affects how she perceives her time working with us.
4. However, we also recognize that we made mistakes. In particular, we put ourselves and others in a risky situation by travelling and living in foreign countries with people who we both didn't know very well and were employing. We also chose to eschew some standard practices around employment and compensation.
5. We've been reflecting on this, and are committing to make some fundamental changes to how we work. These include:
   1. [Insert meaningful changes here, including perhaps consulting with an outside management consultant to get more perspective and help]

I think (4) and (5) are largely missing, though I do recognize you're making some good changes and note those about halfway through the appendix document.

The evidence collected here doesn’t convince me that Alice and Chloe were lying, or necessarily that Ben Pace did a bad job investigating this. I regret contributing another long and involved comment to this discourse, but I feel like “actually assessing the claims” has been underrepresented compared to people going to the meta level, people discussing the post’s rhetoric, and people simply asserting that this evidence is conclusive proof that Alice and Chloe lied.

My process of thinking through this has made me wish more receipts from Alice and Chloe were included in Ben’s post, or even just that more of the accusations had come in their own words, because then it would be clear exactly what they were claiming. (I think their claims being filtered through first Ben and then Kat/Emerson causes some confusion, as others have noted).

I want to talk about some parts of the post and why I’m not convinced. To avoid cherry-picking, I chose the first claim, about whether Alice was asked to travel with illegal drugs (highlighted by Kat as “if you read just one illustrative story, read this one”), and then I used a random number generator to pick two pages in the appendix (following the lead of other commenters).

I worry that the following will seem maximally negative. But I don’t mean I am strongly convinced of the more negative interpretations I suggest; just that a lot of the screenshots are consistent with Alice and Chloe’s claims being true. This should be read in the spirit of red-teaming or spot-checking, rather than me offering a figured-out narrative.

Was Alice asked to bring drugs across borders illegally?

Ben wrote: ‘Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free”. Privately, Drew said that Kat would “love her forever” if she did this. I bring this up as an example of the sorts of requests that Kat/Emerson/Drew felt comfortable making during Alice’s time there.’

As evidence against this, Kat offers screenshots showing Drew asking Alice to pick up some medicine. When Alice reports that a prescription is needed and says she is too sick to ask around extensively, Drew says not to worry, and hopes she gets better soon.

Does this prove that Alice wasn’t asked to bring drugs across borders illegally?
No: just because on this occasion Drew didn’t push the issue, doesn’t mean she wasn’t asked to do illegal things on other, different occasions.

Note that the exchange is with Drew, who was dating Alice for some of the time, and who as far as I know no-one has made any negative allegations about. This exchange doesn’t have any bearing on whether similar exchanges with Kat or Emerson involved more pressure on Alice. The texts also don’t show whether it would have been legal for her to travel with the medicine to where Nonlinear were based, even if she could purchase it without a prescription where she was.

I realise that it’s actually nigh-on impossible for Nonlinear to prove they never asked Alice to do anything illegal! They’d have to show their entire message history, and even then, Alice could claim that the conversation happened in person. So maybe this is the best evidence they could have included. But just because it’s the best evidence we could hope for, doesn’t mean we should accept it as knock-down, irrefutable evidence that Alice lied; that requires believing that this is the incident Alice was referring to in her conversations with Ben, which is not clear to me.

Spot checks: p 52

From the appendix:
‘Alice says “look at this screenshot - it’s proof that Kat is trying to silence me by withholding my pay!” But Alice strategically cropped this screenshot.’

This is the screenshot that was included in Ben’s original post, when Alice says she is figuring out ‘survival stuff’ and Kat appears to make her silence about her experience a condition of offering her help. In the appendix, Kat shows more context; she shows that she proactively reached out to Alice, suggested some free accommodation (like the EA hotel) and a mental health resource. She comments:
“This, by the way, is a perfect example of how Alice spreads falsehoods. They’re mostly lying by omission. She’ll say something that is true (the cropped screenshot), but not show the rest. And the rest will totally flip the sign of the whole accusation.”

I disagree that the rest flips the sign of the accusation. I think these messages are consistent with Kat’s story: that Alice was mentally unwell and spreading (false) bad stories, and Kat genuinely wanted to help her while preventing her from spreading lies. I also think they’re consistent with Alice’s story; that Kat had found out that Alice was telling (true) stories about bad experiences she’d had at Nonlinear, and Kat was trying to persuade her to stop. If you want to persuade someone to stop telling negative stories about you —whether true or false —being helpful and friendly is a good way to do it! Ime it’s much harder to say negative things about someone who is being explicitly very generous to you. 

I guess something that confuses me here about Kat's story is, if Alice was telling lies because of mental illness or a lack of contact with reality, then I’m not sure why Kat expected a commitment from her to mean anything anyway.

I think it’s right that Ben’s claim that Alice was “in a position of strong need” was stretching it: she does say she’s safe, and ‘figuring out basic survival stuff’ *could* mean being very needy, but could also mean something less extreme than that.

Spot check: p. 104
from the appendix:
"Kat: It’s incredibly unwise to date your colleague/roommate/boss’s brother who has a different relationship orientation, but it’s up to you.  
Alice: Kat’s trying to force me to not be poly!"

Here Kat gives some evidence that she’s not anti-poly and would never try to interfere with someone’s dating life:

‘For example, around the time Alice alleges that Kat said she couldn’t be poly around her, Kat suggested that Alice might like dating two of her poly friends coming to visit who she knows are looking for a third to form a triad. Also, we’ve invited many poly people to travel with us. Including Alice, who was practicing polyamory the entire time she lived with us. We knew she was poly before she even arrived and were 100% fine with it. She started polyamorously sleeping with multiple of our friends within a week of joining us in Puerto Rico. So clearly we don’t mind having poly people live with us.’

To say ‘we can’t be anti-poly because we invited polyamorous Alice to travel with us’ is begging the question, since Alice claimed that Kat asked her to stop being poly and wasn't '100% fine with it'. 

The other parts aren’t strong evidence that Kat did not have the conversation Alice reported. Someone can have a bias or discomfort without that affecting them literally all the time. Lots of people in the EA and AI safety community are poly, so it would be difficult for Nonlinear to avoid asking poly people to travel with them.

I think it’s reasonable for Kat to discourage Alice from dating Drew —albeit arguably hypocritical, given that Kat and Emerson are a couple and also colleagues, so they clearly can’t think it’s inappropriate in all cases.

Again, there is probably no way that Kat could actually prove that she never told Alice she shouldn’t be poly! But again, just because this is the best evidence we could reasonably hope for, doesn’t mean it’s actually that strong.

General thoughts
This is all tricky, because my impression is that this was always very much about…vibes? (Which partly comes from the fact that I heard about it from Alice and Chloe, rather than Ben’s post). It’s understandable that lots of discussion has been about legible, concrete things: how much were they paid? Were they asked to bring illegal drugs across borders or not? But that legible stuff has always seemed less central than ‘there were just super toxic interpersonal dynamics at play’.  And that’s tricky either way: if Alice and Chloe are telling the truth, it’s tricky because it’s really hard to express ‘why was it so bad’ (I thought Chloe’s comment about her experience on the weekend day trip was really useful here). And if Kat and Emerson are telling the truth, it’s hard to argue against a vibe, or to argue that the vibe came from unreasonable interpretations or expectations on the part of Alice and Chloe. In general, it just seems really, really hard to think clearly about situations like this. My sympathies to everyone involved. 

Places I think people messed up and where improvement is needed

The Nonlinear Team

1. The Nonlinear team should have gotten their replies up sooner, even if in pieces. In the court of public opinion, time/speed matters. Muzzling up and taking ~3 months to release their side of the story comes across as too polished and buttoned up.
2. Not being selective enough about who they took into a very unorthodox work/living environment. I don’t think this type of work/living arrangement is always bad (though I do think that NL shouldn’t try it again, nor do I think a nomadic lifestyle is the most effective one generally). Still, I do think it needs to grow a lot more organically and have lower commitment tests that build up to this arrangement. Taking in a new employee to this environment is ill-advised. I’m happy to see that Nonlinear no longer lives with or travels with their employees.
3. I think Emerson’s threat of a libel lawsuit encourages a bad norm. He went to it far too fast and it escalated things too quickly.

Ben Pace

1. I think it is pretty reasonable to assume that ~1000-10000 hours and possibly more were spent by the community due to his original post (I am including all the reading and all the commenting in both posts) and a lot more time by all those doing the investigating and debunking. I also think it’s reasonable to assume that at least 10% of this time was likely to be spent and thus Ben should have put a lot more effort into fact-checking, waiting for evidence, etc.
2. I think Ben really messed up with not letting Nonlinear respond. I think it would have been reasonable for Ben to give Nonlinear, say, exactly one week to provide the evidence they wanted with a promise to read/review it and decide if he felt it was worthwhile to edit the post before publishing. A “search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders, not from a search to give a balanced picture of its overall costs and benefits.” definitely seems to be the wrong way to approach this. 

The EA Forum comment section

1. There is far too much “I haven’t read the post or the evidence but the vibes/tone feel off so I am not going to bother reading what they wrote and I will continue to have my negative opinions” going on and not nearly enough grappling with the substance of what they wrote. 
2. People should spend more time reading/reflecting than trying to comment right away.
3. People seem to really gravitate towards drama. These posts have some of the highest number of comments on any forum posts on the forum.

The EA community/the Community Health team

1. How could this not have been sent to the Community Health team for them to perform a private and thorough investigation with a conclusion at the end? It would have saved a lot of people a lot of time and reputational damage.

One of the big disputes here is over whether Alice was running her own incubated organization (which she could reasonably expect to spin out) or just another project under Nonlinear. Since Kat cites this as significant evidence for Alice's unreliability, I wanted to do a spot-check.

(Because many of the claims in this response are loosely paraphrased from Ben's original post, I've included a lot of quotes and screenshots to be clear about exactly who said what. Sorry for the length in advance.)

Let's start with claims in Ben's original post: 

Alice joined as the sole person in their incubation program. She moved in with them after meeting Nonlinear at EAG and having a ~4 hour conversation there with Emerson, plus a second Zoom call with Kat. Initially while traveling with them she continued her previous job remotely, but was encouraged to quit and work on an incubated org, and after 2 months she quit her job and started working on projects with Nonlinear. 

and

 One of the central reasons Alice says that she stayed on this long was because she was expecting financial independence with the launch of her incubated project that had $100k allocated to it (fundraised from FTX). In her final month there Kat informed her that while she would work quite independently, they would keep the money in the Nonlinear bank account and she would ask for it, meaning she wouldn’t have the financial independence from them that she had been expecting, and learning this was what caused Alice to quit.

These are the only mentions I can find of Alice running an incubated project. An important point: Ben never says that Alice thought she was running a separate organization. He represents Alice as claiming that her organization was fiscally sponsored by Nonlinear and shared a bank account and operational resources, but operated independently and planned to spin out in the future.

Now let's look at Kat's counterclaims,  starting from page 91 of the appendix:

False claim example: “as she quit she gave Nonlinear (on their request) full ownership of the organization that she had otherwise finished incubating.” She’s clearly still telling Ben that the Productivity Fund was a separate organization. “Her” incubated organization. Which is so strange because we told her again and again and again that it was a project under Nonlinear. That it wasn’t her own organization. And she’d say “Yes, I get it.” Then she’d come back a few days later thinking it was hers.

This is supported by a screenshot which shows minutes from a meeting on April 14, 2022, listing Kat as "Supreme Commander" and a redacted name (presumably Alice) as "PM."

Kat also includes a screenshot of a Whatsapp conversation with Alice about her organization/project, the Productivity Fund. The texts show that 1) money for the Productivity Fund was raised from FTX, and 2) Alice could spend money "as [she] saw fit" as long as it's within scope for the original application. If she wanted to do something out of scope for the Productivity Fund, she wouldn't be able to use their allocated budget.

Finally, Kat says Alice wasn't running her own organization, because she was still "Attending Nonlinear weekly meetings, Getting expenses reimbursed by Nonlinear, Using a Nonlinear email address, Having Chloe, our operations manager, handle her operations"

In summary: Kat says that Alice's project was not an incubated organization at all, but only a project under Nonlinear. But the evidence she cites isn't conclusive either way. 

I think this is due to some confusion about how incubation/fiscal sponsorship works. As an example, I run an organization (Asterisk Magazine) which is fiscally sponsored by another organization (Effective Ventures Foundation U.S.). This means that I report to the CEO of EVF, my organization's allocated funding is housed in EVF's bank account, and many of my ops tasks, like accounting and finance, are handled by EVF's staff. However, I have full control over the project I run, and I'm currently in the process of spinning out into a separate organization – at which point the funds I've raised would follow me. In this case, EVF is acting as an incubator to help me get Asterisk off the ground while I build up operational capacity.

Everything Kat shows here is consistent with Alice running her own incubated organization. It's normal for the head of an incubated organization to report to the CEO of their fiscal sponsor, use their fiscal sponsor's operational resources, and be reimbursed by their fiscal sponsor for expenses. I think that the Whatsapp messages support this interpretation – Kat is telling Alice that she can use the money raised from an outside funder for her organization however she wants, but can't use those funds for other projects (just like I can't use funds allocated for another EVF project to support Asterisk).

Kat keeps talking about Alice being confused and thinking she was running a "separate org" – e.g.  "This is where Alice, again, thinks that it’s a separate organization and that I’ve given her $240,000. Her only evidence for this strange idea is her memory of the conversation" and "Alice misunderstood this as it being a separate org again. Maybe it’s because she kept getting confused about the possibility of spinning out in the future?" But it's really unclear to me if Alice ever believed this, or if she thought she was running a fiscally sponsored organization which would one day be independent and whose budget she controlled. This is what Ben's original post says, and nothing here disproves that interpretation.

On the other hand, there is a fair amount of evidence suggesting that at the time, Nonlinear and Alice both understood Alice to be incubating her own organization.

Here's Alice's job description from Nonlinear's website at the time she worked there:

(Note: This screenshot comes from an archived version of Nonlinear's about page. I'm not providing a link because this would reveal Alice's identity, and I strongly urge everyone reading this not to use this information to dox her. I realize posting this at all caries some doxxing risk, and if mods want me to take it down of course I'll do so.)

Here, Alice is clearly referred to as a incubatee building up her own project, though the project listed here (Idea Market) is different from the project Kat discusses (Productivity Fund). This listing also seems to use incubatee and project manager interchangeably, which could contribute to the confusion over how much independence Alice was supposed to have.

There's also an EA forum comment from Kat talking about incubating a "promising woman" to run an unspecified charity. Based on the dates, I think this has to be referring to Alice. 

[EDIT: a friend points out that Kat refers to Alice as an independent founder in the appendix, too. "Some of Alice’s stories suddenly make no sense when you know she only worked for us for 4 months, and the plan was she’d soon leave to start her own charity - the opposite of controlling" (page 22), "Even though she was there as a friend, Emerson was not charging her rent and was covering groceries while she, a founder, figured out what x-risk charity to start next" (page 22), "We thought [Alice] might spin [the Productivity Fund] out, depending on how it goes, in like, 6 months to 1.5 years maybe" (page 96). All of this seems to suggest an environment where it was generally assumed that Alice was running her own project that she was planning to spin out! I can see why the situation might seem unclear to her.]
 

At this point, I'm pretty confused. Alice's bio refers to the "Idea Market" and clearly lists this as her incubated organization. Ben's post also refers to Alice's incubated organization, and says that it had a  budget of $100k. But Kat's post refers to the "Productivity Fund," which has a budget of $240k.  It's unclear to me if these are separate projects with their own budgets, or if the scope and nature of Alice's project changed while she worked at nonlinear.

In either case, it seems disingenuous of Kat to express total befuddlement at Alice's belief that she was running her own incubated org. It might be that Kat is using a nonstandard definition of "incubate" that includes projects that remain within Nonlinear and never become independent, but this seems inconsistent with Nonlinear's description of their incubation program on their current home page, which does explicitly talk about launching new charities:

 Our goal is to 10x the number of talented people working on x-risk by launching dozens of high impact charities. This helps solve the bottlenecks because entrepreneurs “unlock” latent EA talent - if one person starts an organization that employs 100 people who weren’t previously working on AI safety, that doubles the number of people working on the problem.

It seems very likely to me that both Alice and Kat were confused about what being an incubated organization entailed, and had trouble communicating their expectations with each other.

On the other hand, looking at the public descriptions of Alice's project and Alice's role, I'm troubled by how Nonlinear characterizes it in this rebuttal. The rebuttal makes it sound like Alice would have to be delusional or dishonest to understand the project as "her incubated project", and also claims that the only record of this is Alice's (presumed suspect) memory, when there's in fact documentation that Alice was supposed to be incubating a project. I find this especially concerning because it's part of a larger pattern of Nonlinear mischaracterizing statements by Ben, Alice, or Chloe, which has been pointed out in other spot-checks and leaves me with very serious doubts about their integrity. 

 

This post spends a lot of time touting the travel involved in Alice’s and Chloe’s jobs, which seems a bit off to me. I guess some people deeply value living in beautiful and warm locations and doing touristy things year-round, but my impression is that this is not very common. “Tropical paradises” often lack much of the convenience people take for granted in high-income countries, such as quick and easy access to some products and services that make life more pleasant. I also think most people quickly get bored of doing touristy things when it goes beyond a few weeks per year, and value being close to their family, friends, and the rest of their local community. Constantly packing and traveling can also be tiring and stressful, especially when you’re doing it for others. 

Putting those things together, it’s plausible that Alice and Chloe eventually started seeing the constant travel as a drawback of the job, rather than as a benefit.

I strongly agree with the end of your post:

Remember:

Almost nobody is evil.

Almost everything is broken.

Almost everything is fixable.

I want you to know that I don't think you're a villain, and that your pain makes me sad. I wrote some comments that were critical of your responses ... and still I stand by those comments. I dislike and disapprove the approach you took. But I also know that you're hurting, and that makes me sad.

So... I'd like you to dwell on that for a minute.

I wrote something in an edited paragraph deep within a subthread, and thought I should raise the point more directly. My sense is that you and Emerson have some characteristics or habits that I would call flawed or bad, and that it was justified to publicly write something about that.

But I also have a sense that Ben's post contains errors.

I think you are EAs and rationalists at heart. I respect that. And I respect the (unknown to me but probably large) funds you've put into trying to do good. Because of that, I think Ben & co should've spent more time to get Ben's initial post right.

And I guess I'm sad about this situation because I feel that both Ben's post and your post were worded in somewhat unfair ways, and I'm unconvinced that quite so much acrimony was necessary. I like to imagine a softer version of Ben's post, and a softer version of your response, in which Ben basically says "I've spoken to a bunch of people who disapprove of the way Kat & Emerson handle A, B, C, and D, and two people I'm calling Alice and Chloe were hurt by factors A, B, C and E".... and you end up saying "after a lot of soul-searching we've decided to apologize about A and B and handle those differently in the future, but we still contend that E was an inaccurate characterization, and we stand by C and D because reasons, and we accept that some people won't like that."

Do you think an alternate timeline like that was possible?

Thanks for sharing all this information Kat. It seems like this situation has been very difficult for everyone involved. Members of the community health team will look through the post, comments and appendix and work out what our next steps (if any) will be. 

Thank you for taking the time to write up all of this evidence, and I can only imagine how time-consuming and challenging this must have been.

Apologies if I missed this, but I didn't see a response to Chloe's statement here that one of her tasks was to buy weed for Kat in countries where weed is illegal. This statement wasn't in Ben's original post, so I can see how you might have missed it in your response. But I would appreciate clarification on whether it is true that one of Chloe's tasks was to buy weed in countries where weed is illegal.

This is a bit tangential/meta, but looking at the comment counter makes me want to express gratitude to the Community Health Team at CEA. 

I think here we see a 'practical demonstration' of the counterfactuals of their work:
- insane amount of attention sucked by this
- the court of public opinions on fora seems basically strictly worse at all relevant dimensions like fairness, respect of privacy or compassion to people involved

As 'something like this'  would be quite often the counterfactual to CH to trying to deal with stuff ...it makes it clear how much value they are creating by dealing with these problems, even if their process is imperfect

Came here via the FB post by Kat Woods: https://www.facebook.com/katxiowoods/posts/pfbid02mbupEfdsrmkcJwmDWS3E1qmpJQBycapzeFcijhBpi7rQMVx9iHjksA9koGC9b3WCl

which starts out with "𝗔𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟳𝟓% 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲! "

and follows up with "Two mentally unwell ex-employees told dozens of falsehoods about us, but even in the darkest times, I told myself to trust that EAs/rationalists would update when they saw the evidence, and now I feel justified in that trust.

Turns out that 200+ pages of evidence showing that their accusations were false or misleading is enough for most people "

Since I am much more of a frequent flyer on FB than on the EA Forum I wonder: Where does the 75% measure come from?

EDIT: Asking this despite the post ending with "Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio." since this doesn't help much with deriving said 75%.

The repurposing of a holocaust poem seems insensitive to me

Most of this seems focused on Alice's experience and allegations. As I understand it, most parties involved - including Kat - believe Chloe to be basically reliable, or at least much more reliable. 

Given all that, I'm surprised that this piece does not do more to engage with what Chloe herself wrote about her experience in the original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/32LMQsjEMm6NK2GTH/sharing-information-about-nonlinear?commentId=gvjKdRaRaggRrxFjH

I said at the time that I felt that Ben made a mistake in not waiting a week, though I wasn’t completely confident about this. Having skimmed parts of the document, I’m now much more confident that not waiting was indeed a mistake.

Disclaimer: I remotely interned at Nonlinear.

I've been talking to Nonlinear and Lightcone trying to understand how much time LC gave NL for 'adversarial' fact checking on the final claims. Here's what I've ended up with for the timeline; dates are ET since that's where I am:

• September 2nd (~5d before), LC reached out to NL to set up a meeting. (source)

• September 4th (~3d before), LC shares a high level summary of the claims, an overview of which is public.

• Later on September 4th (~2.5d before), the call happens. NL asks for a week to pull together evidence counter to claims in the draft. (source)

• September 5th (~2d before), LC says they intend to write a draft that week, and will send it to NL for feedback before publishing. Their wording is ambiguous on whether that's the timeline for publishing or drafting ("I intend to write a public update this week").

• Later on September 5th (~1.5d before), NL repeats their request for more time.

• September 6th (21hr before), LC shares a draft of their post with NL. This includes additional accusations. (source) Note that NL and LC disagree on how much this added: NL claims this introduced many new accusations (source), while LC claims they'd already shared all the important ones (source). LC also shares a draft with Spencer Greenberg, who points out some errors and LC corrects. (source, source)

• Later on September 6th (12hr before), NL repeats their request to wait, asking for 9d this time ("end of next week"), and includes that the draft includes "libelous" claims.

• Later on September 6th (~2.5hr before), Spencer sends screenshots that arguably conflict with the post's assertion that when Alice was sick "nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days". (source, source)

• September 7th (30min before), NL writes to LC requesting a week to give evidence that falsifies statements in the post, and saying that if they are not given this time they'll sue for libel. (source)

• Slightly later on September 7th, LC publishes the post.

(The specific times come from screenshots NL shared with me)

Kat, I'm pretty confused about the tax situation. (Disclaimer: not a tax attorney, unfamiliar with PR + tax codes for other countries you worked from)

Alice/Chloe are referred to as "employees" and you provide a work contract titled "Employment Agreement", so it seems like you think they were employees (instead of independent contractors, which would have different tax liabilities associated with their work.) 

Your org was based out of Puerto Rico, so presumably subject to things like PR minimum wage and tax reporting requirements. I know PR differs from US states in some federal income tax regulations, but IIUC PR income is still subject to Social Security, Medicare, and local taxes.

This post suggests the value of the housing should be counted as part of the "compensation" which is valued at ~$70k per year. Housing provided as a fringe benefit is taxable and subject to withholding, just like regular income tax.

Maybe it's inaccurate to consider the AirBnB's "housing" (it's ambiguous given the temporary nature of the housing during travel, but also does seem to be the employees' primary residences during their employment.) Suppose it's not "housing", it's just a travel stipend -- this wouldn't be a taxable benefit.

But in that case, were you compliant with PR minimum wage requirements? If the living expenses aren't treated as taxable income, then my understanding is they also don 't count towards meeting minimum wage requirements.

Unless I'm missing something, it seems like there's a double-bind: did you treat the benefits as taxable, file a W2 and withhold taxes, or did you deem them not taxable and not meet minimum wage requirements?

Once again, where is the board?

Two of the biggest questions for me are whether or not Nonlinear had a board of directors when Alice and Chloe worked for them and, if they did, whether an employee would know the identities and contact information of the board members and could feel reasonably safe approaching board members to express concerns and seek intervention. I can't find evidence they had a board at the time of the complaints or do now a year and a half after Alice and Chloe stopped working with them. The only reference to a board of directors I see in the Google Doc is Lightcone's board, which seems telling on a few levels.

Nonprofit boards are tasked with ensuring legal compliance, including compliance with relevant employment law considerations, and including above board practices in unconventional and riskier structures like Nonlinear chose to operate through. This situation looks very different if a legitimate board is in place than if employees don't have that safeguard.

Though I'm sad about the hurt experienced by many people across the Nonlinear situation, I'm personally less concerned with the minutiae of this particular organization and more about what structures, norms, and safeguards can be established across the EA ecosystem as a whole to reduce risk and protect EA community members going forward. Boards and institutional oversight are a recurring theme, from FTX to Nonlinear (to maybe OpenAI?) and I'm personally more skeptical of any organization that does not make its board information readily apparent.

How do we prevent the methodology of exclusively seeking and publishing negative information, without fact checking, from becoming an acceptable norm?

Re: Checking that claims are true

Adding on as former Nonlinear intern who was aware of a “falling out” between Alice and Nonlinear for almost a year now:

1. To my knowledge, Nonlinear was given very few/practically no opportunities to respond to the many claims made in “Sharing Information About Nonlinear” before they were posted, despite repeatedly communicating for several months that this counter-evidence was available to Ben and some CEA employees.
2. I understand that the power asymmetry, high-trust environment and ethical standards within EA makes this complicated to resolve. However, my issue is that the vast majority of the claims made were easily verifiable/falsifiable. Things like payment/lack of payment, delivery orders, messages, receipts, who stayed where etc. all have paper trails. If it's so trivially easy to verify, there is a responsibility to verify!

I’m not against Ben and Alice choosing to post this. I believe we should normalise people exercising their option to speak out publicly. The alternative is being silenced by massive power asymmetry.

What I am against, is the way these allegations were made, which did not prioritise verifying allegations/claims when repeatedly presented with significant, factual counter-evidence.

Why was Nonlinear not given some chance to present counterevidence? It’s clear the initial investigation took months to gather; only a few days (two days, I think) before posting were Kat and Emerson presented with this, after reaching out to Ben several times! Even granting Nonlinear a day to submit an official refutation of the top 5-10 claims for review would have made a difference.^[1] And that’s before factoring in the asymmetry required to refute these allegations with evidence vs making the initial allegations.

I think the handling of this community issue was not healthy for EA/longtermism. Fewer people will read this post than the initial allegations, and Nonlinear’s reputation has definitely been harmed. At best, future whistleblowers are less likely to be believed. I don’t see this as a win for anyone.

Personal Story: How unverified allegations cause harm to real people

Throughout this discussion, there was this undertone that over-weighting Alice’s claims justified the increased reputational risk to Nonlinear, because Kat and Emerson are “better-off” than Alice, so harming them is a more “acceptable” risk because Kat and Emerson will still do fine, whereas Alice is new and less established in EA.

I’d like to say that these allegations don’t just affect Emerson and Kat. It affects the many independent AI Safety researchers Nonlinear helps fund.^[2] It also affects Nonlinear’s other employees. It has personally affected me. I am from Southeast Asia, where it’s much harder to find work in EA/longtermism than in EA hubs. Nonlinear was the first (and currently only) EA org I’ve interned at.

Nonlinear had formally stopped hiring interns when I applied, due to the incidents mentioned above. I contributed to the Superlinear bounty platform as a remote volunteer, without knowing it was owned by Nonlinear, or what Nonlinear was. I had spent so much time trying to contribute to EA part-time, that I wanted to make the experience easier for others.

When I was hired as an intern, I texted my friend “What’s Nonlinear? Are they … like, a big deal?”. My friend explained that having Nonlinear as a reference would help me gain admission to EA conferences, and be taken seriously for EA job applications.

Now that Nonlinear’s reputation within EA has been seriously harmed, I’ve been very concerned about how this affects my ability to contribute within EA. Should I add Nonlinear/Kat as references and risk very negative associations, or omit them and risk being overlooked in favour of other applicants who do have references from prominent EAs? It means a lot to me because, as a non-US/EU/UK citizen, I know I’m always applying at a significant disadvantage.^[3] I will always have fewer opportunities than an EA born in London who goes to a prestigious UK college with an active EA chapter and many EA internship options, who doesn’t have additional Visa requirements. And if I get rejected for a role, I often don’t get to know why.

I didn’t mention this before, because I cared about whether Alice was actually abused. I had a hunch they were making false claims, but I didn’t want to invalidate victims who might be telling the truth. As of now, this seems … less likely.

These allegations do cause harm: to me, to other Nonlinear employees trying to contribute to EA and the people Nonlinear helps through our work.

In the future, please verify these more seriously. Thank you.

1. ^{^}

   The first time I asked Nonlinear about the allegations, it took me maybe 5-10 minutes to figure out there were multiple misleading statements, since I was shown message logs.

2. ^{^}

    In fundraising, reputation matters. Serious, public allegations of abuse means funders are (rightfully) hesitant, and less funding goes to researchers.

3. ^{^}

    If you are reading this and trying to get into AI Safety/longtermism from a non EA hub, do reach out and I’ll try to reply when I can! We gotta support each other >:)

I wrote this in response to Ben's post 

Thanks for writing this post.

I've heard enough bad stuff about Nonlinear from before, that I was seriously concerned about them. But I did not know what to do. Especially since part of their bad reputation is about attacking critics, and I don't feel well positioned to take that fight.

I'm happy some of these accusations are now out in the open. If it's all wrong and Nonlinear is blame free, then this is their chance to clear their reputation. 

I can't say that I will withhold judgment until more evidence comes in, since I already made a preliminary judgment even before this post. But I can promise to be open to changing my mind. 

I have now read the above post, some of the comments, and very little of the appendix.

Nonlinear seems to have more evidence on their side than I had expected. I had the impression that the whole situation was very informal, with practically nothing written down. Now it looks like Nonlinear actually have documentations on their side. Although I have not actually looked at them. I might do this at some point, but mostly I'm hoping that other impartial observers will do this work for me, and I can just read their summaries in a couple of weeks or so. 

This is to say, I'm still keeping my mind open. But given that this superficially looks better than expected, I am updating in favour on Nonliner's version. I.e, I went from expecting Nonlinear to be in the wrong to being much more unsure.

Some thoughts:

• I expect that if I ever get a clear view of what happened here, it will look like one side was mostly telling the truth and one side where either delusional or straight up lying. But I don't yet know who is telling the truth and who isn't. The reason I think this is that this don't look like just escalating misunderstandings. From what I can see [at least one side is delusional or lying], but also [only one side being delusional or lying] is enough to explain the evidence. I still have enough faith in EA that I think most EAs are mostly sane an honest, which means that [only one side being delusional or lying] is more likely on priors.
• I think the important thing now is to find the truth. Any discussions of what lessons to learn should wait.
• I expect all of these public accusations to be very painful for everyone involved. I want to express sympathy for everyone involved. Someone is falsely accused of terrible things. I think I can imagine how much this hurts.
• I still think it probably good that this issue get public scrutiny. Who ever is right, some of these allegations are serious enough that I don't think it should be over looked, and our community don't have some type of more closed doors court to appeal too. If this was not brough out, who ever is in the wrong, would probably continue to hurt more people. But I also have a lot of uncertainty on this point. 
• Even though I expect it to be mostly one sided (which I could be wrong about by the way). I also expect anyone involved in this, who is trying to be honest, will make mistakes, and will sometimes express things in a somewhat hyperbolic way. That's what happens when you are hurt. 

While there are several stylistic things one might disagree with in the post, to the main charges raised by Ben, this seems about as close to exonerating as one can reasonably expect to get in such cases.

Thanks for writing such an exhaustive post; it can't have been easy.

Sometimes, it is not enough to make a point theoretically, it has to be made in practice. Otherwise, the full depth of the point may not be appreciated.  In this case, I believe the point is that, as a community, we should have consistent (high-quality) standards for investigations or character assessments.

This is why I think it is reasonable to have the section "Sharing Information on Ben Pace".  It is also why I don't see it as retaliatory. 

The response to that section is negative by some even though Kat specifically pointed out all the flaws in it, said that people shouldn't update about it, and that Ben shouldn't have to respond to such things.  Why? I believe she is illustrating the exact problem with saying such things, even if one tries to weaken them.  The emotional and intellectual displeasure you feel is correct. And it should apply to anyone being assessed in such a way.  

I fear there are those who don't see the parallel between Ben's original one-sided (by his own statements) post and Kat's one-sided example (also by her own statements), that is clearly for educational purposes only. 

Although apparently problematic to some, I hope the section has been useful to highlight the larger point: assessments of character should be more comprehensive, more evidence-based, and (broadly) more just (eg allowing those discussed time to respond).  

Overall, I think Nonlinear looks pretty good here. I definitely think they made some mistakes, especially adding members to their work+travel arrangements, but on the whole, I think they acted pretty reasonably and were unjustly vilified.

A lot of people seem very concerned with the tone of the post, whether the “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” section was in bad taste/too retaliatory, whether there were too many pictures depicting the lifestyle, how exactly to compute their employees' salaries, and so on. The primary thing that matters is the veracity and accuracy of the claims made in Ben’s original post, whether Nonlinear successfully refuted (enough of) the claims made, how good their evidence is and finally how open should the EA community be in continuing to work with Nonlinear in the future. 

On the whole, I think Nonlinear fairly successfully refuted the vast majority of the concerning claims in Ben’s post, their evidence is pretty good and I’d be happy for the EA community to work with Nonlinear folks in the future.

From Ben: "After this, there were further reports of claims of Kat professing her romantic love for Alice, and also precisely opposite reports of Alice professing her romantic love for Kat. I am pretty confused about what happened."

Could you comment?

I think the preliminary takeaway is that non-linear are largely innocent, but really bad at appearing that way. They derailed their own exoneration via a series of bizarre editorials, which do nothing but distract, borne out of (seemingly) righteous indignation

I think the best thing for readers to do is to await Ben Pace's response, which he aims to have done in week or two.

This whole fiasco has wasted enough EA time as it is. Whether it continues to is in the hands of each reader. Let's put down the popcorn / pitchforks and get back to work.

"she said it was finally time to be strong and speak up now, as long as she was fully anonymized ... She’s still lying awake each night, replaying, over and over, the nightmare of what Ben did to her."

And then you publish it for the first time telling everyone not to believe her???

If what you describe is actually what she told you, how dare you use it for your own gain here? What a cruel and bizarre thing to do

[Third edit to add my current position on 22/12/23]

I said below that I would read the arguments from both sides and then make a final decision. I haven't done that because I didn't have time, and it didn't feel like high value. Especially in light of later posts and comments by people who are better qualified. I feel that it is still better (or at least closer to keeping my prior commitment) to state my current position for future readers than to not say anything further. With that in mind, this (copied from elsewhere) is where I ended up:

Before BP post: NL are a sort of atypical, low structure EA group, doing entrepreneurial and coordination focused work that I think is probably positive impact.
After BP post: NL are actually pretty exploitative and probably net negative overall. I'll wait to hear their response, but I doubt it will change my mind very much.
After NL post: NL are probably not exploitative. They made some big mistakes (and had bad luck) with some risks they took in hiring and working unconventionally. I think they are probably still likely to have a positive impact on expectation. I think that they have been treated harshly.
After this post: I update to be feeling more confident that this wasn't a fair way to judge NL and that these sorts of posts/investigations shouldn't be a community norm. 

I am still pretty uncertain overall. I definitely think that NL should be more careful and conventional in their hiring and work practices in the future.

I added this as an edit because I didn't think it warranted a new comment, and a new comment would provoke more engagement and distract more people, etc.


[Second edit to say that I am not sure if I fully endorse this comment anymore. I briefly re-read some of the previous post by Ben and saw various claims that I didn't recall and that I am not sure are refuted. I will try to find time to review everything in more detail tomorrow.]

[First edit: To split the comment into two parts because I want to know which part people are disagreeing/agreeing with. The removed content is in my first reply below]

I sympathise with everyone involved in this (and everyone like me who planned to do something productive and then stumbled across this or the original post).

It is very unfortunate that this saga does not seem to have resulted in a clear conclusion for the majority of readers. I doubt it ever will.

Personally, I have updated back to being relatively unconcerned about bad behaviour at Nonlinear (and feeling weakly positive about them in general, but very uncertain). It seems that some things were probably not done well but not to some exceptionally bad degree and I assume ignorance/fallibility, not malice.

I personally feel bad for not reaching out to Kat or others at nonlinear to offer support, commenting something on the original post expressing that I would withhold judgement until they responded, or managing to withhold judgement at the time.

[I probably won't reply to any responses to this comment due to a lack of time].

Kat, I appreciate you responding in detail to Ben's post. I haven't had time yet to look at all the evidence but will hopefully do that in more detail later. One thing that stood out to me from the appendix:

False, questionable, or misleading claim: “The staff they hire … live in the house with them.”

The other side: False. We no longer do this, and haven’t since Alice/Chloe left ~1.5 years ago. Despite having lived with many employees in the past and it being a good experience, we’ve decided that in the current climate of EA (high amounts of assuming ill-intent), it seems too risky.

This sounds a bit like you haven't really reflected on whether the setup of living with your employees is a good idea in general, regardless of the climate in EA. In your comment below, you say:

I think it's valuable to have social experiments. However, I do think the social experiment of living and working with your employees while traveling has now been experimented with and the results are "it's very risky". I've been doing it with Emerson and Drew for years now and it's been fine, but I think we have a really good dynamic and it's hard to replicate.

I liked Holly's comment on Ben's original post saying that if we encourage lots of experimentation as a community, it is unfair to blame people if the experimentation goes wrong. However, I think this is conditional on the people in question acknowledging that something went wrong and being willing to learn from it.

I wish there was more reflection and apologising in your post. Just blaming the EA community for assuming ill-intent too often and spending all your energy on debunking as many claims as possible gives the impression that you're not really taking responsibility for the situation. It seems pretty clear to me that working and living together (especially when going to lots of new places where you don't have an existing support system) does create a lot of dependence and makes it more likely for your employees to feel stripped of their agency. I think a lot of the things that I find icky from Ben's post and that still feel icky to me have to do with this dynamic of completely blurred professional and personal boundaries. In the same vein, I agree with Frances's comment, that including all these photos seems to be missing the point. Yes, you traveled to really cool places together and everyone looks really happy in these pictures, but it is a highly unusual situation to have this kind of relationship with your employers and I don't find it that surprising that people left feeling really bad about some of the dynamics that played out.

I know it must have been tough to respond to the original post and I understand why you focused on debunking as many claims as possible. However, to rebuild trust in the community I think it would be really helpful to hear more about what your reflections are and how you're planning to prevent anything like this from happening again.

Kat, thank you for this post. I appreciate the very helpful/understanding manner in which it is written. I'm really sorry that you needed to invest so much into this, although I think you made the right decision in doing so.

I'll read more fully, probably sit with this for some time, and respond properly after that. (Keeping in mind my conditional pre-commitments to signal boost and seriously engage.)

We have a work contract and interview recordings.

Just to be clear, was this work contract was signed by both parties? If one has made a verbal contract to do X, but before any work is done, a different written contract to do Y is drafted and signed, the written contract will take precedence over the verbal contract (Y>X). I.e. it wouldn't matter what was promised in interviews, as long as you have a written contract agreeing the compensation package. ^[1]

1. ^{^}

   GPT 4 Tells me this is often referred to as the "parol evidence rule" , and identifies some exceptions to this rule https://chat.openai.com/share/9139370f-9004-4717-85a6-f83a6a3cb07d

I won't comment on who is right and who is wrong. That's not what is relevant here in my opinion anyway. Rather the carelessness with which the money is used and the attitude behind, which gives ground to EA critics, and how could they be not wrong? If we trust the picture given by these people--luxurious salaries, luxurious retreats, carelessness about the money and romantic involvement with each other that leads to drama--, I'm ashamed to be an EA. The fact that no one comments on this worries me tremendously. 

This situation disappoints me deeply, and it prompts reflection on what is EA in such circles, and what should be EA. It's disheartening to witness the allocation of funds in a manner that seemingly deviates from the core values of this movement.

My concern extends beyond individual actions; what truly troubles me is the apparent lack of stewardship over financial resources. The discretion given to Chloé regarding her compensation, supposedly from funds "raised," raises questions about accountability. Additionally, extravagant expenditures, like Ben's $5000 for evaluating job applicants, appear starkly incongruent with the principles of effectiveness and impact that EA advocates.

This isn't about adopting a holier-than-thou stance, but rather about upholding the fundamental tenets of EA. It's disconcerting to see substantial financial resources being directed towards luxurious AI retreats, seemingly deviating from the ethos I initially embraced within EA.

Many within EA seek to make a meaningful difference through diligent, often challenging work—researching, striving for jobs aligned with their values, living modestly to contribute more to causes. EA, while predominantly associated with a specific demographic of rich white men in STEM (statistically that is what EA is, as the movement is around 90% white and 69% male) should not dismiss the struggles of those outside this stereotype.

The recent focus on Nonlinear feels like a departure from the altruistic essence of EA. It stands in stark contrast to the ethos set forth by McAskill's example of allocating the majority of his income to charitable causes.

My concerns regarding Nonlinear's operations in the Bahamas were met with a response emphasizing increased productivity without substantiated evidence. This lack of quantitative validation adds to the disillusionment surrounding the situation.

Something needs to be done. Many valuable people are exiting the movement because of shady allocations of funds--isn't that funny to read these posts about which charity is the best, penny-close wise, while la crème de la crème does luxurious AI safety retreats? This isn't a 'one-time type of thing', this is well-known. And yet nothing is done. I will sound Cromwellian, but we need morals and reality-check for people in power. Nothing surprising, but it needs to be repeated, again.

Oh, and I feel that this should be my signature: if you dislike my comment, why is that? So far I've received one comment nitpicking about how one AI safety retreat they know of is not luxury; aside from that, does anyone has anything to say about how poorly this reflects on EA? How a whole movement pays the PR price of the luxury lifestyle of a few? How this is plainly in contradiction with principles of effective altruism and nobody says anything because I assume the funder and the causes are hyped? I have a lot of respect for someone who funds something like Charity Entrepreneurship, it's definitely one of the best things EA did. However the rest doesn't speak in their favor and doesn't justify this debauchery.

• [Alice] chose to pay herself an annualized ~$72,000 per year - more than anyone else at the org, and far more than the ~minimum wage she earned in previous jobs. 
• This is more than most people make at OpenPhil, according to Glassdoor.

This seems unlikely - these numbers on Glassdoor are way lower than I'd expect for most of these job titles. Can anyone from OP corroborate?

I really like the "no villains" conclusion. It might be naive and definitely would be difficult, but I would love to see us all have that attitude of goodwill and forgiveness towards one another.

Looking at this from a systemic perspective, I wonder how we can prevent this situation from happening again. To clarify, the situation I refer to is intense criticism presented without consideration of the facts that requires significant resources to be directed towards defense in order to maintain credibility.

Writing and responding to discrediting posts consumes a lot of resources that counterfactually could have been used for more impactful purposes.

Additionally, it creates a lot of fear - I can only imagine the distress this situation caused Kat and NL. It takes a lot of personal strength and conviction to stand up to such negativity, and I fear that this kind of whistleblowing is more likely to push people away from doing the hard job of being a nonprofit entrepreneur.

I'd love to hear any suggestions about how to prevent this from happening again.

Contradicting myself to write comments that it wouldn't be helpful for me to sit with...

At that hourly rate, he spent perhaps ~$130,000 of Lightcone donors’ money on this. But it’s more than that. When you factor in our time, plus hundreds/thousands of comments across all the posts, it’s plausible Ben’s negligence cost EA millions of dollars of lost productivity. If his accusations were true, that could have potentially been a worthwhile use of time - it's just that they aren't, and so that productivity is actually destroyed. And crucially, it was very easy for him to have not wasted everybody’s time - he just had to be willing to look at our evidence.

1. Posting a price at which you're willing to do investigative work does not imply that this price is your current average wage.
2. The lost productivity claim somewhat rubs me the wrong way. It feels like this could be used as motivated reasoning to underinvest in community norm/safety enforcement.
   1. That said, I totally agree that if someone does have cheap ways to spare the (very real) productivity costs, they should do so.
      1. I think the crux might be whether or not Ben did have a cheap option. My memory (maybe misremembered) is that he and Habryka felt that engaging further with Nonlinear could come with a large delay. I'm not sure if you think Ben was right to think this but disagree about whether the large delay was cheap, or if you think that Ben was wrong to think this.
   2. I even think that this reasoning can hold true in cases where you are 100% sure that the bad thing was bad. (If the badness is sufficiently low/productivity costs sufficiently high.)

Apologies for the repeat, I asked these questions on LessWrong but didn’t get an answer so I'm trying here.

1. When did Chloe sign her contract? The document says she was sent it 6 days after starting, but not when she signed it.
2. What was the agreement on medical care? At points you describe Emerson’s covering Alice’s expenses as generous and voluntary, but elsewhere say medical expenses were a part of compensation.

I am pretty confused by some of the comments here. I think "Sharing information on Ben Pace" is supposed to be about Kat's experiences and that Kat is expecting/wanting that to be obvious.

In Ben's post, he paraphrased Nonlinear as saying (N.B.: these are Ben's words, written from Nonlinear's perspective, not Nonlinear's words):

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.

Regarding Ben's summary of his call with Nonlinear, of which the above is part, Ben claimed in his post:

Afterwards, I wrote up a paraphrase of their responses. I shared it with Emerson and he replied that it was a “Good summary!”.

In this Nonlinear post responding to Ben's post, they write:

And:

Kat requested Alice bring legal medicine from a pharmacy - specifically antibiotics and one pack of ADHD medicine - not illegal drugs. These medicines are cheap and legal without a prescription in other parts of Mexico we’d visited, and she was already going to a pharmacy anyway. 

And:

We shared much of this information with Ben - he knew it was legal medicine, not illegal drugs - yet he still published this misleading version. We were horrified that Ben published this knowing full well it wasn’t true. We told him we’d share these exact screenshots with him, but he refused to look at them.

So, Ben's post claims that Nonlinear admitted to asking a "semi-employee" to bring "recreational drugs" over a border. In this post, Nonlinear now seems to emphatically deny this claim.

We have an apparent contradiction.

My questions for Nonlinear: 

1) Was Ben's paraphrase (quoted above) inaccurate? 

2) Was Ben's claim that Emerson said the summary of his call with Nonlinear (of which Ben's paraphrase was a part) "good summary" false?

3) What were the so-called "recreational drugs", if there were any? Were they legal drugs, obtained with a prescription, but used recreationally?

It's with a heavy heart that I find myself (a) spotting this post (b) starting to read it. Rightly or wrongly, I'm not enjoying the community drama.

I feel like I just want to forget that I'd ever seen any of these posts, and just continue being kind and friendly to anyone I know who's involved in this.

This solution sounds like a crude cludge (shouldn't I be more truth-seeking that that? can't I be more thoughtful?) But I just don't think I have the energy to do better than that.

Minimally, this is an account of an organisation riddled with mismanagement and confusion; that Nonlinear was responsible for allocating non-trivial sums of money, career coaching, or whatever else is a symptom of the degradation of "Effective" Altruism in recent years.

There's a human cognitive bias that may be relevant to this whole discussion, but that may not be widely appreciated in EA yet: gender bias in 'moral typecasting'.

In a 2020 paper, my UNM colleague Tania Reynolds and coauthors found a systematic bias for women to be more easily categorized as victims and men as perpetrators, in situations where harm seems to have been done. The ran six studies in four countries (total N=3,317). 

(Ever since a seminal paper by Gray & Wegner (2009), there's been a fast-growing literature on moral typecasting. Beyond this Nonlinear dispute, it's something that EAs might find useful in thinking about human moral psychology.) 

If this dispute over Nonlinear is framed as male Emerson Spartz (at Nonlinear) vs. the females 'Alice' and 'Chloe', people may tend to see Nonlinear as the harm perpetrator. If it's framed as male Ben Pace (at LessWrong) vs. female Kat Woods (at Nonlinear), people may tend to see Ben as the harm-perpetrator.

This is just one of the many human cognitive biases that's worth bearing in mind when trying to evaluate conflicting evidence in complex situations. 

Maybe it's relevant here, maybe it's not. But the psychological evidence suggests it may be relevant more often than we realize.

TL;DR: In this comment I share my experience being coached by Kat.

I care about the world and about making sure that we develop and implement effective solutions to the many global challenges we face. To accomplish this, we need more people actively working on these issues. I think that Kat plays an important role in facilitating this.

Since I have not followed or analyzed all the recent developments surrounding Nonlinear in detail, I cannot and will not provide my opinion on these developments. 

However, I think it’s still useful to share my experience with Kat, because I believe that if more people had the opportunity to speak with her about their projects and challenges, it would be highly valuable, provided they go as I experienced them. I had three calls with Kat, two of which occurred in July and August 2023.

So, what was my experience being coached by Kat? It was very positive. During our conversations, I felt listened to, and she directly addressed the challenges I communicated. What particularly stood out was Kat’s energy and enthusiasm which are infectious. Starting a new organization is challenging, and I remember a call where I felt somewhat discouraged about a development at my project. After the call, I felt re-energized and gained new perspectives on tackling the issues we discussed. She encouraged me to reach out again if I needed further discussion which made me feel supported.

Having someone to bounce ideas off, especially someone who has co-founded multiple organizations is incredibly helpful. Kat's directness was both amusing and beneficial in ensuring clear communication. This frank approach is refreshing compared to the often indirect and confusing hints others may give.

A significant aspect of coaching is understanding the coachee's needs in depth to provide tailored solutions. Different coaching styles work for different people. In my case, while I felt listened to, the coaching could have been even more effective if Kat had spent more time initially asking questions. This would have allowed for a more nuanced understanding before she passionately began offering resources and solutions to my problems. However, this point didn't detract from the overall value of the calls. I always felt that I made significant progress and found the calls highly beneficial. 

Another aspect of my interaction with Kat that I greatly appreciated was her warm and bubbly nature. This demeanor added a sense of comfort and positivity to our discussions. Working on reducing existential risks can often be a daunting and emotionally taxing endeavor. It's rare to find someone who can blend professional insight with a genuinely uplifting attitude, and Kat does this exceptionally well. Her ability to lighten the mood without undermining the seriousness of the topics we discussed was a skill that significantly enhanced the coaching experience.

Overall, I would rate her 9 out of 10, considering these points. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to receive guidance and coaching from Kat and hope that she can assist many more individuals in their efforts to do good better. 
 

@Kat Woods 

I'm trying to piece together a timeline of events. 

You say in the evidence doc that

3 days after starting at Nonlinear, Alice left to spend a whole month with her family. We even paid her for 3 of the 4 weeks despite her not doing much work. (To be fair, she was sick.)

Can you tell me what month this was? Does this mean just after she quit her previous job or just after she started traveling with you?

[NOTE: This comment is specifically about things that Nonlinear could have done better after the employees in question had left the organization. This is not intended to connote that others were faultless; I'm just focusing on things from Nonlinear's perspective for the purpose of this comment. Also, I am assuming the essential truth of the information Nonlinear has shared, again for the sake of argument.]

One thing I would have suggested Nonlinear do differently in the past few months, after getting clear information that Alice/Chloe were spreading information about Nonlinear that was at odds with Nonlinear's own understanding of what had happened: start privately putting together a document (like this one) as a defensive measure, even before the allegations became widespread. Obviously the document could not be super-specific without knowledge of exactly what allegations would be made or exactly how they would be worded, but going by what Kat suggests in the post, the approximate list of concerns that the former employees were raising was already known to Nonlinear. (In fact, I'd go further and say they should have focus-grouped or otherwise gotten feedback on their responses so as to understand how others might perceive things). Having a document like this prepared before there was a PR crisis would have helped in several ways:

• Nonlinear staff (Kat and others) could have gotten over some of the emotional edge that one has when first confronting accusations, or putting one's response to accusations on paper, which may have improved the quality of their communication, reducing the risk of them appearing defensive or otherwise sending out signals of poor epistemic virtue.
• Nonlinear could have proactively provided the proofs to Ben without requesting him to wait a week for them to collect proofs, because the proofs would have been ready.
• Even if Ben had not been willing or able to review all of these, Nonlinear could have published its response relatively more quickly after Ben's post was published. The 3-month-plus delay likely cost a lot to Nonlinear's reputation.
• Having a substantive response may also have reduced the chances that Nonlinear would resort to approaches such as legal threats, that (in my view) did not succeed, and rather ended up backfiring for Nonlinear in the court of public opinion.

My suggestion would have been to purely prepare the document defensively, only to be published if the accusations gained wider credence, but potentially the document could also be shared with funders, grantees, potential employees, or other stakeholders who had already heard the accusations and were concerned about associating with Nonlinear due to the accusations.

I think many of the same factors that led to a lot of the problems in the first place likely also constrained Nonlinear's ability to preemptively respond to the problems, namely: not a lot of manpower, not a lot of internal organization, always being on the move, etc. I think it could still be a valuable lesson for other individuals or organizations to consider when they come to learn that there is negative information about them that's floating around.

Preemptively responding to a threat that may never materialize may mean wasted effort. But then again, a lot of the whole existential risk / catastrophic risk / AI safety community is focused on preemptively responding to things that may not materialize. So I don't think that's much of an objection in principle. It comes down partly to how high the probability is, but it's worth keeping in mind the other angle: once the threat has materialized, it's much harder to respond in a level-headed manner.

Your description of Chloe's driving seems consistent with hers- she didn't want to drive without a license, but there were no ubers available and getting her boss to drive her was too hard.