Very thoughtful post. I liked that you delved into this out of interest even though you aren’t particularly involved in this community, but then instead of just treating it as fun but unproductive gossip, you used your interest to make a high-value contribution!
It changed my mind in some places (I had a favorable reaction to the initial post by Ben; also, I still appreciate what Ben tried to do).
I will comment on two points that I didn’t like, but I’m not sure to what degree this changes your recommended takeaways (more on this below).
They [Kat and Emerson] made a major unforced tactical error in taking so long to respond and another in not writing in the right sort of measured, precise tone that would have allowed them to defuse many criticisms.
I don’t like that this sounds like this is only (or mostly) about tone.
I updated that the lawsuit threat was indeed more about tone than I initially thought. I initially thought that any threat of a lawsuit is strong evidence that someone is a bad actor. I now think it’s sometimes okay to mention the last resort of lawsuits if you think you’re about to be defamed.
At the same time, I’d say it was hard for Lightcone to come away with that interpretation when Emerson used phrases like ‘maximum damages permitted by law’ (a phrasing optimized for intimidation). Emerson did so in the context where one of the things he was accused of was unusually hostile negotiation and intimidation tactics! So, given the context and “tone” of the lawsuit threat, I feel like it made a lot of sense for Lightcone to see their worst concerns about Emerson “confirmation-boosted” when he made that lawsuit threat.
In any case, and more to my point about tone vs other things, I want to speak about the newer update by Nonlinear that came three months after the original post by Ben. Criticizing tone there is like saying “they lack expert skills at defusing tensions; not ideal, but also let’s not be pedantic.” It makes it sound like all they need to become great bosses is a bit of tactfulness training. However, I think there are more fundamental things to improve on, and these things lend a bunch of credibility to why someone might have a bad time working with them. (Also, they had three months to write that post, and it’s really quite optimized for presentation in several ways, so it’s not like we should apply low standards for this post.) I criticized some aspects of their post here and here. In short, I feel like they reacted by (1) conceding little to no things they could have done differently and (2), going on the attack with outlier-y black-and-white framings against not just Alice, but also Chloe, in a way that I think is probably more unfair/misleading/uncharitable about Chloe than what Chloe said about them. (I say “probably” because I didn’t spend a lot of time re-reading Ben’s original post and trying to separate which claims were made by Alice vs Chloe, doing the same about Nonlinear’s reply, and filtering out whether they’re ascribing statements to Chloe with their quotes-that-aren’t-quotes that she didn’t actually say.) I think that’s a big deal because their reaction pattern-matches to how someone would react if they did indeed have a “malefactor” pattern of frequently causing interpersonal harm. Just like it’s not okay to make misleading statements about others solely because you struggled with negative emotions in their presence, it’s also (equally) not okay to make misleading statements solely because someone is accusing you of being a bad boss or leader. It can be okay to see red in the heat of battle, but it’s an unfortunate dynamic because it blurs the line between people who are merely angry and hurt and people who are character-wise incapable of reacting appropriately to appropriate criticism. (This also goes into the topic of “adversarial epistemology” – if you think the existence of bad actors is a sufficient problem, you want to create social pressure for good-but-misguided actors to get their shit together and stop acting in a way/pattern that lends cover to bad actors.)
Eliezer recently re-tweeted this dismissive statement about DARVO. I think this misses the point. Sure, if the person who accuses you is a malicious liar or deluded to a point where it has massively destructive effects and is a pattern, then, yeah, you’re forced to fight back. So, point taken: sometimes the person who appears like the victim initially isn’t actually the victim. However, other times the truth is at least somewhat towards the middle, i.e., the person accusing you of something may have some points. In that case, you can address what happened without character-assassinating them in return, especially if you feel like you had a lot of responsibility in them having had a bad time. Defending Alice is not the hill I want to die on (although I’m not saying I completely trust Nonlinear’s picture of her), but I really don’t like the turn things took towards Chloe. I feel like it’s messed up that several commenters (at one point my comment here had 9 votes and −5 overall karma, and high disagreement votes) came away with the impression that it might be appropriate to issue a community-wide warning about Chloe as someone with a pattern of being destructive (and de-anonymizing her, which would further send the signal that the community considers her a toxic person). I find that a really scary outcome for whistleblower norms in the community. Note that this isn’t because I think it’s never appropriate to de-anonymize someone.
Here are the list of values that are important to me about this whole affair and context:
I want whistleblower-type stuff to come to light because I think the damage bad leaders can do is often very large
I want investigations to be fair. In many cases, this means giving accused parties time to respond
I understand that there’s a phenotype of personality where someone has a habit of bad-talking others through false/misleading/distorted claims, and I think investigations (and analysis) should be aware of that
(FWIW, I assume that most people who vehemently disagree with me about some of the things I say in this comment and elsewhere would still endorse these above values.)
So, again, I’m not saying I find this a scary outcome because I have a “always believe the victim” mentality. (Your post fortunately doesn’t strawman others like that, but there were comments on Twitter and facebook that pushed this point, which I thought was uncalled for.)
Instead, consider for a moment the world where I’m right that:
Chloe isn’t a large outlier in any relevant way of personality, except perhaps she was significantly below average at standing up for her interests/voicing her boundaries (for which it might even be possible that it was selected for in the Nonlinear hiring process)
This is what I find most plausible based on a number of data points. In that world, I think something about the swing of the social pendulum went wrong when the result of Chloe sharing her concerns makes things worse for her. (I’m not saying this is currently the case – I’m saying it would be the case if we fully bought into Nonlinear’s framing or the people who make the most negative comments about both Chloe and Alice, without flagging that many people familiar with the issue thought that Alice was a less reliable narrator than Chloe, etc.)
Of course, I focused a lot on a person who is currently anonymized. Fair to say that this is unfair given that Nonlinear have their reputation at stake all out in the open. Like I said elsewhere, it’s not like I think they deserved the full force of this.
These are tough tradeoffs to make. Unfortunately, we need some sort of policy to react to people who might be bad leaders. Among all the criticisms about Ben’s specific procedure, I don’t want this part to be de-emphasized.
The community mishandled this so badly and so comprehensively that inasmuch as Nonlinear made mistakes in their treatment of Chloe or Alice, for the purposes of the EA/LW community, the procedural defects have destroyed the case.
I’m curious what you mean by the clause “for the purposes of the EA/LW community.” I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but I’d be sympathetic to a claim that goes as follows. From a purely procedural perspective about what a fair process should look like for a community to decide that a particular group should be cut out from the community’s talent pipeline (or whatever harsh measure people want to consider), it would be unfair to draw this sort of conclusion against Nonlinear based on the too many flaws in the process used. If that’s what you’re saying, I’m sympathetic to that at the very least in the sense of “seems like a defensible view to me.” (And maybe also overall – but I find it hard to think about this stuff and I’m a bit tired of the affair.)
At the same time, I feel like, as a private individual, it’s okay to come away with confident beliefs (one way or the other) from this whole thing. It takes a higher bar of evidence (and assured fairness of procedure) to decide “the community should act as though x is established consensus” than it takes to yourself believe x.
I don’t like that this sounds like this is only (or mostly) about tone.
The core of it, for me, is that Nonlinear was in a brutally difficult position. I’ve been on the receiving end of dogpiles from my own community before, and I know what it feels like. It’s excruciating, it’s terrifying, and you all-but see your life flashing before your eyes. Crisis communication is very, very, very difficult, particularly when people are already skeptical of you. Nonlinear’s response to Ben was as he was on the verge of fundamentally changing the trajectory of their reputations and would not be swayed from his course, and their response to the community was in a similarly high-pressure frame.
The pressure and stress of a position like that makes it very hard for me to apply someone’s behavior in those circumstances to other settings. A normal person acts very differently under intense pressure than in regular situations, so when I think someone is put in an unfair situation (as I do of Nonlinear) I’m reluctant to pass too much judgment from the sidelines. We don’t know how the Nonlinear people would have reacted had those concerns been brought up in a measured, reasonable matter, because that did not happen.
In short: it’s less about tone, more about the pragmatic reality that at the bottom of a dogpile, tactical communication ability and grace under pressure matter immensely in ways that are hard to apply to regular situations.
Chloe isn’t a large outlier in any relevant way of personality, except perhaps she was significantly below average at standing up for her interests/voicing her boundaries (for which it might even be possible that it was selected for in the Nonlinear hiring process)
I think it’s likely that Chloe is not a large outlier, but the rumor mill is incredibly destructive and spending a year working alongside someone who does seem like more of an outlier to spread rumors is not a productive or healthy way to handle interpersonal work conflicts. I think it’s useful for whistleblower-type stuff to come to light, but not through whisper networks, and I think Alice and Chloe’s rumor-mill response to the situation worsened it in material ways that are important to establish.
At the same time, I feel like, as a private individual, it’s okay to come away with confident beliefs (one way or the other) from this whole thing.
I don’t disagree with this. People come to strong opinions about all sorts of things on the basis of much weaker evidence than is available about this stuff at this point. I just wanted to establish my feeling that at the community level as a whole, the errors in the way things were handled mean that a retraction and a change of process moving forward are appropriate, and people collectively reacted in mixed-to-negative ways to the two people who in my judgment were most correct about the initial situation (Spencer and Geoffrey) in ways that should inform their judgment moving forward.
Very thoughtful post. I liked that you delved into this out of interest even though you aren’t particularly involved in this community, but then instead of just treating it as fun but unproductive gossip, you used your interest to make a high-value contribution!
It changed my mind in some places (I had a favorable reaction to the initial post by Ben; also, I still appreciate what Ben tried to do).
I will comment on two points that I didn’t like, but I’m not sure to what degree this changes your recommended takeaways (more on this below).
I don’t like that this sounds like this is only (or mostly) about tone.
I updated that the lawsuit threat was indeed more about tone than I initially thought. I initially thought that any threat of a lawsuit is strong evidence that someone is a bad actor. I now think it’s sometimes okay to mention the last resort of lawsuits if you think you’re about to be defamed.
At the same time, I’d say it was hard for Lightcone to come away with that interpretation when Emerson used phrases like ‘maximum damages permitted by law’ (a phrasing optimized for intimidation). Emerson did so in the context where one of the things he was accused of was unusually hostile negotiation and intimidation tactics! So, given the context and “tone” of the lawsuit threat, I feel like it made a lot of sense for Lightcone to see their worst concerns about Emerson “confirmation-boosted” when he made that lawsuit threat.
In any case, and more to my point about tone vs other things, I want to speak about the newer update by Nonlinear that came three months after the original post by Ben. Criticizing tone there is like saying “they lack expert skills at defusing tensions; not ideal, but also let’s not be pedantic.” It makes it sound like all they need to become great bosses is a bit of tactfulness training. However, I think there are more fundamental things to improve on, and these things lend a bunch of credibility to why someone might have a bad time working with them. (Also, they had three months to write that post, and it’s really quite optimized for presentation in several ways, so it’s not like we should apply low standards for this post.) I criticized some aspects of their post here and here. In short, I feel like they reacted by (1) conceding little to no things they could have done differently and (2), going on the attack with outlier-y black-and-white framings against not just Alice, but also Chloe, in a way that I think is probably more unfair/misleading/uncharitable about Chloe than what Chloe said about them. (I say “probably” because I didn’t spend a lot of time re-reading Ben’s original post and trying to separate which claims were made by Alice vs Chloe, doing the same about Nonlinear’s reply, and filtering out whether they’re ascribing statements to Chloe with their quotes-that-aren’t-quotes that she didn’t actually say.) I think that’s a big deal because their reaction pattern-matches to how someone would react if they did indeed have a “malefactor” pattern of frequently causing interpersonal harm. Just like it’s not okay to make misleading statements about others solely because you struggled with negative emotions in their presence, it’s also (equally) not okay to make misleading statements solely because someone is accusing you of being a bad boss or leader. It can be okay to see red in the heat of battle, but it’s an unfortunate dynamic because it blurs the line between people who are merely angry and hurt and people who are character-wise incapable of reacting appropriately to appropriate criticism. (This also goes into the topic of “adversarial epistemology” – if you think the existence of bad actors is a sufficient problem, you want to create social pressure for good-but-misguided actors to get their shit together and stop acting in a way/pattern that lends cover to bad actors.)
Eliezer recently re-tweeted this dismissive statement about DARVO. I think this misses the point. Sure, if the person who accuses you is a malicious liar or deluded to a point where it has massively destructive effects and is a pattern, then, yeah, you’re forced to fight back. So, point taken: sometimes the person who appears like the victim initially isn’t actually the victim. However, other times the truth is at least somewhat towards the middle, i.e., the person accusing you of something may have some points. In that case, you can address what happened without character-assassinating them in return, especially if you feel like you had a lot of responsibility in them having had a bad time. Defending Alice is not the hill I want to die on (although I’m not saying I completely trust Nonlinear’s picture of her), but I really don’t like the turn things took towards Chloe. I feel like it’s messed up that several commenters (at one point my comment here had 9 votes and −5 overall karma, and high disagreement votes) came away with the impression that it might be appropriate to issue a community-wide warning about Chloe as someone with a pattern of being destructive (and de-anonymizing her, which would further send the signal that the community considers her a toxic person). I find that a really scary outcome for whistleblower norms in the community. Note that this isn’t because I think it’s never appropriate to de-anonymize someone.
Here are the list of values that are important to me about this whole affair and context:
I want whistleblower-type stuff to come to light because I think the damage bad leaders can do is often very large
I want investigations to be fair. In many cases, this means giving accused parties time to respond
I understand that there’s a phenotype of personality where someone has a habit of bad-talking others through false/misleading/distorted claims, and I think investigations (and analysis) should be aware of that
(FWIW, I assume that most people who vehemently disagree with me about some of the things I say in this comment and elsewhere would still endorse these above values.)
So, again, I’m not saying I find this a scary outcome because I have a “always believe the victim” mentality. (Your post fortunately doesn’t strawman others like that, but there were comments on Twitter and facebook that pushed this point, which I thought was uncalled for.)
Instead, consider for a moment the world where I’m right that:
Chloe isn’t a large outlier in any relevant way of personality, except perhaps she was significantly below average at standing up for her interests/voicing her boundaries (for which it might even be possible that it was selected for in the Nonlinear hiring process)
This is what I find most plausible based on a number of data points. In that world, I think something about the swing of the social pendulum went wrong when the result of Chloe sharing her concerns makes things worse for her. (I’m not saying this is currently the case – I’m saying it would be the case if we fully bought into Nonlinear’s framing or the people who make the most negative comments about both Chloe and Alice, without flagging that many people familiar with the issue thought that Alice was a less reliable narrator than Chloe, etc.)
Of course, I focused a lot on a person who is currently anonymized. Fair to say that this is unfair given that Nonlinear have their reputation at stake all out in the open. Like I said elsewhere, it’s not like I think they deserved the full force of this.
These are tough tradeoffs to make. Unfortunately, we need some sort of policy to react to people who might be bad leaders. Among all the criticisms about Ben’s specific procedure, I don’t want this part to be de-emphasized.
I’m curious what you mean by the clause “for the purposes of the EA/LW community.” I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but I’d be sympathetic to a claim that goes as follows. From a purely procedural perspective about what a fair process should look like for a community to decide that a particular group should be cut out from the community’s talent pipeline (or whatever harsh measure people want to consider), it would be unfair to draw this sort of conclusion against Nonlinear based on the too many flaws in the process used. If that’s what you’re saying, I’m sympathetic to that at the very least in the sense of “seems like a defensible view to me.” (And maybe also overall – but I find it hard to think about this stuff and I’m a bit tired of the affair.)
At the same time, I feel like, as a private individual, it’s okay to come away with confident beliefs (one way or the other) from this whole thing. It takes a higher bar of evidence (and assured fairness of procedure) to decide “the community should act as though x is established consensus” than it takes to yourself believe x.
I appreciate the detailed response!
The core of it, for me, is that Nonlinear was in a brutally difficult position. I’ve been on the receiving end of dogpiles from my own community before, and I know what it feels like. It’s excruciating, it’s terrifying, and you all-but see your life flashing before your eyes. Crisis communication is very, very, very difficult, particularly when people are already skeptical of you. Nonlinear’s response to Ben was as he was on the verge of fundamentally changing the trajectory of their reputations and would not be swayed from his course, and their response to the community was in a similarly high-pressure frame.
The pressure and stress of a position like that makes it very hard for me to apply someone’s behavior in those circumstances to other settings. A normal person acts very differently under intense pressure than in regular situations, so when I think someone is put in an unfair situation (as I do of Nonlinear) I’m reluctant to pass too much judgment from the sidelines. We don’t know how the Nonlinear people would have reacted had those concerns been brought up in a measured, reasonable matter, because that did not happen.
In short: it’s less about tone, more about the pragmatic reality that at the bottom of a dogpile, tactical communication ability and grace under pressure matter immensely in ways that are hard to apply to regular situations.
I think it’s likely that Chloe is not a large outlier, but the rumor mill is incredibly destructive and spending a year working alongside someone who does seem like more of an outlier to spread rumors is not a productive or healthy way to handle interpersonal work conflicts. I think it’s useful for whistleblower-type stuff to come to light, but not through whisper networks, and I think Alice and Chloe’s rumor-mill response to the situation worsened it in material ways that are important to establish.
I don’t disagree with this. People come to strong opinions about all sorts of things on the basis of much weaker evidence than is available about this stuff at this point. I just wanted to establish my feeling that at the community level as a whole, the errors in the way things were handled mean that a retraction and a change of process moving forward are appropriate, and people collectively reacted in mixed-to-negative ways to the two people who in my judgment were most correct about the initial situation (Spencer and Geoffrey) in ways that should inform their judgment moving forward.