“they should clearly communicate their non-respectful/-kind alternative communication protocols beforehand, and they should help the other person maintain their boundaries;”
Nate did this.
By my somewhat idiosyncratic views on respectful communication, Nate was roughly as respectful as Thomas Kwa.
I do seem to be unusually emotionally compatible with Nate’s style of communication though.
By my somewhat idiosyncratic views on respectful communication, Nate was roughly as respectful as Thomas Kwa.
I agree with a couple of caveats. Even though Nate did try pretty hard and even send us a guide on communicating with him, he’s still difficult (for me) to work with even after reading the guide. I think I’m more capable of minimizing unintentional emotional damage than Nate is just due to our demeanors.
Edit: I misremembered; Nate didn’t send us the guide proactively, someone who knew him sent it to us after we asked for tips on communicating with Nate.
I found that an endearing document to read. A lot of clear self-reflection communicated explicitly, describing both endorsed and unendorsed self-properties, in an effort to help others communicate and interface.
The document is interesting, but how well does it describe Nate’s actual behavior? Can you find the parts that correspond to this:
He didn’t exactly yell at me and my fellow ops coworker, according to my imaginary decibelmeter, but he was indisputably hostile and aggressive, and obviously uninterested in 2-way communication.
I saw Nate in the office kitchen later that day (a Saturday) and thought it was an appropriate time to bring up again that I was having trouble with our available pump. I didn’t know how to–“Learn!” he snapped and then stormed out of the room.
He got really angry at me when the rest of the office outvoted him on the choice of lunch catering.
Nate’s comms doc doesn’t really track my (limited) experience of what it feels like to talk with Nate, and so (IMO) doesn’t make great sense as a baseline of “what happened?”.
The 12 section headings under “Failure modes” are: Confidence, Frustration, Lashing out, Condescension, Nonrespect, Dismissal, Disdain, Disbelieving you, Harshness, Tunnel vision, Retaliation, and Stoneface. The elements in your quoted section appear to me to come up here (e.g. Lashing out, Tunnel vision, Dismissal, etc).
I don’t say it’s a successful document. My first guess is that a more successful version of the doc (edit: or at least a doc that successfully conveys what to expect when interacting with the author) would be shorter and focus on giving a more grounded sense of “here are concrete instances of the peak good and bad interactions I’ve had with people, and some sense of the modal interaction type”. It might include content like “I’ve talked to N people who’ve said they’ve had life-changingly positive interactions with me, and M people who’ve said as a result they were really substantively hurt by interacting with me and wish to indefinitely avoid me, here’s some properties of the interactions they described, also here’s a survey on general properties of how people find me to be in conversation, split out between friends and colleagues”.
However I think that the sort of doc I’m describing is ~unheard of in any setting and way more effort than ~anyone I’m aware of has put into this sort of widespread expectation setting with lots of colleagues and collaborators (I’d say the same for the linked doc that Nate drafted), and people typically do not have much obligation to let people know about bad interactions. Heck, in many countries people can get criminal records expunged so that they don’t have to inform their future employers about them, which is worlds apart from handing someone a doc listing times when people they’ve talked to have felt burned by the interaction, which reads to me like a standard being demanded elsethread.
Woah! That’s like 10x more effort than I expect >90% of difficult-to-communicate-with people will go through.
Kudos to Nate for that.
There are things that I really like about the document, but I feel like I’d need to know more about its reason for being created to say whether this deserves kudos.
It seems plausible that the story went something like this: “Nate had so much social standing that he was allowed/enabled to do what most ‘difficult to interact with’ people couldn’t, namely to continue in their mannerisms without making large changes, and still not suffer from a reduction of social standing. Partly to make this solution palatable to others and to proactively address future PR risks and instances of making people sad (since everyone already expected/was planning for more such instances to come up), Nate wrote this document.”
If an org is going to have this sort of approach to its most senior researcher, it’s still better to do it with a document of this nature than without.
But is this overall a great setup and strategy? I’m doubtful. (Not just for the org as a whole, but also long-term for Nate himself.)
There was never an ask for reciprocal documents from employees. “Here’s a document describing how to communicate with me. I’d appreciate you sending me pointers on how to communicate with you, since I am aware of my communication issues.” was never considered.
There are multiple independent examples of people in various capacities, including his girlfriend, expressing that their opinions were not valued, and a clear hierarchical model was in play.
The more humble “my list of warnings” was highlighted immediately as justification but never broadcast broadly, and there seems to be no cognizance that it’s not something anyone else would ever take upon themselves to share.
So on one hand… your bullet-points there are maybe pointing in a helpful direction. And I think my overall take right now is “however much effort Nate has previously put into improving on his communications or comms-onboarding, probably he (or MIRI) should put more.”
But, your phrasing here feels a bit like a weird demand for exceptional rigor.
Like, although I think Nate is pretty high on “can feel intense to interact with”, it’s not that weird for a company to have an intense manager, and I’ve never heard of companies-with-intense-managers having this sort of doc at all. And I know a bunch of people who are intense to interact with in regular, interpersonal interactions (i.e. while dating), and they also often don’t have docs explaining that.
So, it feels pretty weird (and not particularly “revealing” of anything) that Nate made a pretty novel type of doc… and didn’t (yet) do some additional followup steps with it.
Like, although I think Nate is pretty high on “can feel intense to interact with”, it’s not that weird for a company to have an intense manager, and I’ve never heard of companies-with-intense-managers having this sort of doc at all. And I know a bunch of people who are intense to interact with
But, your phrasing here feels a bit like a weird demand for exceptional rigor.
No—the opposite. I was implying that there’s clearly a deeper underpinning to these patterns that any amount of rigor will be insufficient in solving, but my point has been articulated within KurtB’s excellent later comment, and solutions in the earlier comment by jsteinhardt.
it’s not that weird for a company to have an intense manager
I agree; that’s very true. However, this usually occurs in companies that are chasing zero-sum goals. Employees treated in this manner might often resort to a combination of complaining to HR, being bound by NDAs, or biting the bullet while waiting for their paydays. It’s just particularly disheartening to hear of this years-long pattern, especially given the induced discomfort in speaking out and the efforts to downplay, in an organization that publicly aims to save the world.
Nate did this.
By my somewhat idiosyncratic views on respectful communication, Nate was roughly as respectful as Thomas Kwa.
I do seem to be unusually emotionally compatible with Nate’s style of communication though.
I agree with a couple of caveats. Even though Nate did try pretty hard and even send us a guide on communicating with him, he’s still difficult (for me) to work with even after reading the guide. I think I’m more capable of minimizing unintentional emotional damage than Nate is just due to our demeanors.
Edit: I misremembered; Nate didn’t send us the guide proactively, someone who knew him sent it to us after we asked for tips on communicating with Nate.
Woah! That’s like 10x more effort than I expect >90% of difficult-to-communicate-with people will go through.
Kudos to Nate for that.
For convenience: Nate-culture communication handbook
I found that an endearing document to read. A lot of clear self-reflection communicated explicitly, describing both endorsed and unendorsed self-properties, in an effort to help others communicate and interface.
The document is interesting, but how well does it describe Nate’s actual behavior? Can you find the parts that correspond to this:
As I wrote elsewhere:
The 12 section headings under “Failure modes” are: Confidence, Frustration, Lashing out, Condescension, Nonrespect, Dismissal, Disdain, Disbelieving you, Harshness, Tunnel vision, Retaliation, and Stoneface. The elements in your quoted section appear to me to come up here (e.g. Lashing out, Tunnel vision, Dismissal, etc).
I don’t say it’s a successful document. My first guess is that a more successful version of the doc (edit: or at least a doc that successfully conveys what to expect when interacting with the author) would be shorter and focus on giving a more grounded sense of “here are concrete instances of the peak good and bad interactions I’ve had with people, and some sense of the modal interaction type”. It might include content like “I’ve talked to N people who’ve said they’ve had life-changingly positive interactions with me, and M people who’ve said as a result they were really substantively hurt by interacting with me and wish to indefinitely avoid me, here’s some properties of the interactions they described, also here’s a survey on general properties of how people find me to be in conversation, split out between friends and colleagues”.
However I think that the sort of doc I’m describing is ~unheard of in any setting and way more effort than ~anyone I’m aware of has put into this sort of widespread expectation setting with lots of colleagues and collaborators (I’d say the same for the linked doc that Nate drafted), and people typically do not have much obligation to let people know about bad interactions. Heck, in many countries people can get criminal records expunged so that they don’t have to inform their future employers about them, which is worlds apart from handing someone a doc listing times when people they’ve talked to have felt burned by the interaction, which reads to me like a standard being demanded elsethread.
There are things that I really like about the document, but I feel like I’d need to know more about its reason for being created to say whether this deserves kudos.
It seems plausible that the story went something like this: “Nate had so much social standing that he was allowed/enabled to do what most ‘difficult to interact with’ people couldn’t, namely to continue in their mannerisms without making large changes, and still not suffer from a reduction of social standing. Partly to make this solution palatable to others and to proactively address future PR risks and instances of making people sad (since everyone already expected/was planning for more such instances to come up), Nate wrote this document.”
If an org is going to have this sort of approach to its most senior researcher, it’s still better to do it with a document of this nature than without.
But is this overall a great setup and strategy? I’m doubtful. (Not just for the org as a whole, but also long-term for Nate himself.)
I think we now have an experimental verification that the document, no matter how impressive, doesn’t always achieve its intended goal.
So, the strategy needs an update.
Three points that might be somewhat revealing:
There was never an ask for reciprocal documents from employees. “Here’s a document describing how to communicate with me. I’d appreciate you sending me pointers on how to communicate with you, since I am aware of my communication issues.” was never considered.
There are multiple independent examples of people in various capacities, including his girlfriend, expressing that their opinions were not valued, and a clear hierarchical model was in play.
The more humble “my list of warnings” was highlighted immediately as justification but never broadcast broadly, and there seems to be no cognizance that it’s not something anyone else would ever take upon themselves to share.
So on one hand… your bullet-points there are maybe pointing in a helpful direction. And I think my overall take right now is “however much effort Nate has previously put into improving on his communications or comms-onboarding, probably he (or MIRI) should put more.”
But, your phrasing here feels a bit like a weird demand for exceptional rigor.
Like, although I think Nate is pretty high on “can feel intense to interact with”, it’s not that weird for a company to have an intense manager, and I’ve never heard of companies-with-intense-managers having this sort of doc at all. And I know a bunch of people who are intense to interact with in regular, interpersonal interactions (i.e. while dating), and they also often don’t have docs explaining that.
So, it feels pretty weird (and not particularly “revealing” of anything) that Nate made a pretty novel type of doc… and didn’t (yet) do some additional followup steps with it.
(I think that “intense” is euphemizing.)
No—the opposite. I was implying that there’s clearly a deeper underpinning to these patterns that any amount of rigor will be insufficient in solving, but my point has been articulated within KurtB’s excellent later comment, and solutions in the earlier comment by jsteinhardt.
I agree; that’s very true. However, this usually occurs in companies that are chasing zero-sum goals. Employees treated in this manner might often resort to a combination of complaining to HR, being bound by NDAs, or biting the bullet while waiting for their paydays. It’s just particularly disheartening to hear of this years-long pattern, especially given the induced discomfort in speaking out and the efforts to downplay, in an organization that publicly aims to save the world.