A quick update from Nonlinear
One example of the evidence we’re gathering
We are working hard on a point-by-point response to Ben’s article, but wanted to provide a quick example of the sort of evidence we are preparing to share:
Her claim: “Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.”
The truth (see screenshots below):
There was vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, mixed nuts, prunes, peanuts, tomatoes, cereal, oranges) which we offered to cook for her.
We were picking up vegan food for her.
Months later, after our relationship deteriorated, she went around telling many people that we starved her. She included details we believe were strategically chosen to depict us in a maximally damaging light—what could be more abusive than refusing to care for a sick girl, alone in a foreign country? And if someone told you that, you’d probably believe them, because who would make something like that up?
Evidence
The screenshots below show Kat offering Alice the vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, cereal, etc), on the first day she was sick. Then, when she wasn’t interested in us bringing/preparing those, I told her to ask Drew to go pick up food, and Drew said yes. Kat also left the house and went and grabbed mashed potatoes for her nearby.
See more screenshots here of Drew’s conversations with her.
Initially, we heard she was telling people that she “didn’t eat for days,” but she seems to have adjusted her claim to “barely ate” for “2 days”.
It’s important to note that Alice didn’t lie about something small and unimportant. She accused of us a deeply unethical act—the kind that most people would hear and instantly think you must be a horrible human—and was caught lying.
We believe many people in EA heard this lie and updated unfavorably towards us. A single false rumor like this can unfairly damage someone’s ability to do good, and this is just one among many she told.
We have job contracts, interview recordings, receipts, chat histories, and more, which we are working full-time on preparing.
This claim was a few sentences in Ben’s article but took us hours to refute because we had to track down all of the conversations, make them readable, add context, anonymize people, check our facts, and write up an explanation that was rigorous and clear. Ben’s article is over 10,000 words and we’re working as fast as we can to respond to every point he made.
Again, we are not asking for the community to believe us unconditionally. We want to show everybody all of the evidence and also take responsibility for the mistakes we made.
We’re just asking that you not overupdate on hearing just one side, and keep an open mind for the evidence we’ll be sharing as soon as we can.
Meta: I would like to see these sorts of posts receive substantially less attention.
I see the primary topic as being “drama” (for lack of a better term).
I think drama tends to be pretty mind-killing, which leads to low quality discussion, discussions that last way too long, and discussions that frequently end up being demon threads.
I think it usually leaves people feeling kinda sour and bad after reading, skimming, or participating in the discussion.
I don’t really see what people who aren’t in the same social or professional circles as the involved parties have to gain by investing time into these topics. Updating your beliefs about the EA community? Meh, maybe. It seems pretty tough to generalize much about the broader community based on the experiences of the handful of people involved in this incident. But if that is the goal, you can probably take advantage of the Pareto Principle and get perhaps 90% of the benefit with only a few minutes of effort by reading the tl;dr’s and top comment or two.
To be clear, I do think it makes sense for the people involved to be discussing this. Reputation is, in fact, important. I also think it makes sense for leaders in the EA community to want to police things a bit. What I’m proposing is that the 99% for whom this isn’t actually relevant to your life, don’t get sucked in. A few minutes is fine. A few hours probably isn’t.
Idea for how these sorts of “drama posts” might be best handled:
Voting is turned off.
The posts are only available in a special section on LessWrong. They aren’t available in the feed on the main page. This nudges users towards more of a Pit Of Success, yet makes the conversation accessible if you do want to go out of your way to join it.
They are time-boxed. Perhaps a “soft” time-box, perhaps a “hard” one. I’m not sure.
At the end, a moderator (or group of moderators) makes a judgement, writes up a summary, and we move on.
I suppose some sort of appeals process might be needed. I’m not sure. My impression: it’d probably make sense to have one to protect against grievous misjudgement in the initial case, but not as an excuse for dragging the discussion out longer than it deserves.
Edit: I see a lot of smart, high-karma, successful, and impactful people commenting (on Ben’s post) in such a way that makes me thing they’ve spent many hours reading, thinking and writing about this. That makes me sad and frustrated since I believe it is a lot of time and energy that otherwise would be put to quite good use.
I agree to some extent, but I think it would’ve been much better if you’d posted this on the original post, not on the reply. The current phrasing of “I would like to see these sorts of posts receive substantially less attention.” really doesn’t work well when it’s in a response post, rather than the original post. The current setup makes it sound (unintentionally) like accusation posts are fine, and only the responses should receive less attention, which I doubt anyone endorses.
Also, it’s absolutely silly that this is the top comment on this post. Imagine being on the receiving end of drama, responding to it, and then having the top comment be yours, rather than one which engages with the object-level claims.
So I suggest your comment might be better-suited as a top-level meta post of the form “People spend too much time on community drama” or something, where you’d probably get some interesting back and forth and pushback on that claim, and without taking up oxygen in a post where someone is trying to defend their reputation. If you did make it a full post, you could also do a Fermi estimate of the advantages and disadvantages of engaging in community drama; I’m particularly interested in your estimate, not of participating in the drama, but of posting the drama in the first place.
I agree that it would have been better, but disagree about it mattering much. The comment isn’t something that is specific to the post. Rather, it is about the particular type of post.
FWIW, the reason I posted it here is simply because it was the first of the two posts I saw, and my impression at the time was that Ben’s post was only on the EA Forum, not on LW. From there, it didn’t feel worth re-arranging the comments.
Yeah, maybe. I’m not sure.
I feel moderately confident that it is a net harm. From behind a veil of ignorance, I wouldn’t want it posted.
My model is that it sucks people in, wastes their time, and increases the general degree of hostility without really accomplishing much.
The main thing I see it accomplishing is reinforcing the precedent of accountability; that if you do something bad, the community will hold you accountable and penalize you. However, my sense is that the community already does a pretty good job of this, a good enough job such that there isn’t really a need to tug harder on the accountability string.
Yeah, we’re so great at that that we caught FTX in advance, right?
No, seriously, given stuff like FTX, what exactly gives you the impression that we’re good enough at accountability? Even if we consider FTX to be a one-off outlier, outliers with outsized impact deserve outsized consideration nonetheless.
I think I would like it if there were some soft nudges away from drama posts.
Something like “hi, you’ve been reading this post for 30 minutes today, here’s a button for blocking it for the rest of the day (you can read and catch up on comments tomorrow).”
Yeah, me too. I’m a little embarrassed to admit, I’ve checked in on this and on Ben’s post a few times in the past few hours, spending perhaps 30-45 minutes skimming around, which is about 25-40 minutes more time than I endorse me and people similar to me spending on this.
This isn’t exactly implementing any of your ideas, but do note that these kinds of posts are not on the LessWrong frontpage, i.e. they are hidden by-default from new users unless they deactivate the frontpage-only filter.
It did show up in the podcast, which I believe is just filtered by upvotes?
I… do want to flag something like “You say you want less attention on posts like this, but, then you commented 15 times on this+the-other-post. Do you endorse that?”
It’s not obvious to me whether people-in-general or you-in-particular are spending too much time on this. But.… as the saying goes “You’re not ‘stuck in traffic.’ You are traffic.” And, you’re not stuck in drama. You are drama.
I do think there are things we could do on the margin to nudge people somewhat away from drama posts (it turns out EA Forum automatically hides community posts with lots of comments from their Recent Discussion section and I kinda like that idea).
I think I basically do want established community members putting thought into this, but I think my preferred outcome is something like… jury duty? Like, either explicitly or organically, a few senior members put a lot of time into understanding the situation, hearing evidence from various sources, and writing up their thoughts. But not everyone needs to get consumed.
But, regardless want to flag that if you think there’s too much attention here, adding comments is a fairly odd.
No, I got sucked in and don’t endorse it.
It’s been a planning fallacy sort of thing. “Zooming in on this one thing, it doesn’t seem too time consuming or bad to jump into. Zooming out: I spent how many hours on this?”
I’m going to try from here on out to be pretty selective about reading and commenting more. I’m not sure how successful I’ll end up being though.I appreciate you pointing this out. I was thinking of bringing it up.
I like that jury duty analogy. It sounds like a good approach to me.
I agree about the “drama” potential.
That said, I think such discussions are very important. If there are bad things happening in the EA community, it is better if we can detect and fix them. Because the possible alternatives include a huge scandal later in media, or EA becoming something different than what we wanted it to be. If you believe that EA could dramatically improve the world, then corrupting EA could dramatically worsen it.
Sometimes the alternative to “drama” is the “missing stair”.
The technical details are not important for most of us, only the general pattern is. It would be more effective if only Ben checked them and told us the summary (which he did). But when Ben is accused of doing this unfairly, I suppose other people needs to check the details, too. Not everyone needs to, I agree.
I suspect that we don’t disagree.
I agree that it is important to detect and fix bad things that happen in the community.
I think though that such situations can be handled by a handful of leaders/moderators as opposed to thousands and thousands of people who visit LessWrong. It sounds like you agree with this.
Relatedly, we agree that we can’t rely on few people having this power without having some sort of checks on that power.
I also think that it has a net negative impact for most non leaders/moderators to invest more than a few minutes into this. I’m not clear on whether or not you agree with this, but I’d bet that you agree.
I think it would be difficult to implement what you’re asking for without needing to make the decision about whether investing time in this (or other) subjects is worth anyone’s time on behalf of others.
If you notice in yourself that you have conflicting feelings about whether something is good for you to be doing, e.g., in the sense which you’ve described: that you feel pulled in by this, but have misgivings about it, then I recommend considering this situation to be that you have uncertainty about what you ought to be doing, as opposed to being more certain that you should be doing something else, and only that you have some kind of addiction to drama or something like that.
It may in fact be that you feel pulled in because you actually can add value to the discussion, or at least that watching this is giving you some new knowledge in some way. It’s at least a possibility.
Ultimately, it should be up to you, so if you’re convinced it’s not for you, so be it. However, I feel uncomfortable not allowing people to decide that for themselves.
Kelsey Piper wrote this comment on the EA Forum:
To which Kat Woods replied:
Rob Bensinger replied with:
Agreed.
Thanks for sharing.
After reading the screenshots (linked in the Google Docs link) of Alice’s conversation with Drew, I mostly don’t agree with the claim that Alice was lying*. For one thing, the December 15 exchange with Drew indicates that he ultimately did not bring her dinner because he didn’t want to get fast food or drive more than 12 minutes away (he did later offer to bring her a salad from the place he ended up going to, which she declined.) This is a pretty different picture than the conclusion one would draw from just reading the screenshot embedded in the post, which makes it sound like Alice did receive her requested impossible burger.
I read the linked screenshot as Alice communicating that she is basically out of food she can eat, making a few requests to get food that met her dietary restrictions, encountering social friction, and giving up.
(I also think it normally isn’t an employer’s responsibility to deliver food to their sick employee, but also normally employees don’t live with their employers in a foreign country with no other support network, which to me changes the picture substantially).
*edit: That is, the screenshots don’t convince me that this claim in particular (quoted in the post) was a lie: “Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.”
also edit: also see KPier’s more thorough comment here
She said “nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food”, but you can see that
There was vegan food in the house. We offered her oatmeal, quinoa, peanuts, almonds, prunes, tomatoes, cereal, and an orange, which were in the house.
I picked her up mashed potatoes and cooked it for her on that day. Despite the fact that I was also sick (eventually found out it was covid).
In the conversation with Drew, she says it’s fine, because she has mashed potatoes.
She said that we didn’t bring her vegan food and we did. The text messages show that.
Where are we disagreeing?
Not sure why no one picks up on the fact that the list you refer to in 1.) is hard to make an edible meal from.
You mention oatmeal and cereal, but if there is no vegan milk substitute to eat with it, how is she supposed to consume it? Eat it dry, or mixed with water? Nuts and fruit are fine for a snack but I don’t think it’s unreasable to refuse to eat only nuts/fruit for a day or more. The only thing I could reasonably see in that list that could be made into a warm meal is cooking quinoa and serving with nuts and tomatoes. I could well imagine why someone might not consider it a passable meal though, eg if she didn’t like quinoa.
Seeing you consider this random list of ingredients sufficient “vegan food” makes me think you didn’t particularly consider her position.
When I eat oatmeal or cereal, I almost never eat it with milk (non-vegan or otherwise). I soak oats in boiling water, and eat cereal dry.
You both agree that no one was willing to bring Alice vegan food that she wanted from outside the house.
You disagree about relevance/importance of the fact that there was different vegan food available for her.
I did go out to get the potatoes. When I was sick myself.
It was very hard to find vegan food in the area, and I read through all of the different products in the store, looking to make sure they didn’t have any sneaky non-vegan ingredients, like whey.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
1) I disagree with that interpretation.
2) She was not an employee of Nonlinear at the time, just a friend. Ben’s post said she was, but that was a factual inaccuracy, one of many we are working hard to correct in our forthcoming post.
Do you have an update on this? I would like to reward Lightcone iff the original post was good work, and part of determining that was Nonlinear’s response. But it’s been over a month and I haven’t seen anything new from nonlinear.
EDIT: absent a response from Nonlinear I offered Lighthaven $1,000. I sometimes contract for them, so they have tentatively opted to accept this in work credits rather than money.