Jeff is talking about Wave. We use a standard form of non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses in our severance agreements: when we fire or lay someone off, getting severance money is gated on not saying bad things about the company. We tend to be fairly generous with our severance, so people in this situation usually prefer to sign and agree. I think this has successfully prevented (unfair) bad things from being said about us in a few cases, but I am reading this thread and it does make me think about whether some changes should be made.
I also would re-emphasize something Jeff said—that these things are quite common—if you just google for severance package standard terms, you’ll find non-disparagement clauses in them. As far as I am aware, we don’t ask current employees or employees who are quitting without severance to not talk about their experience at Wave.
Wow, I see that as a pretty major breach of trust, especially if the existence of the non-disparagement clause is itself covered by the NDA, which I know is relatively common, and seems likely the case based on Jeff’s uncertainty about whether he can mention the organization.
I… don’t know how to feel about this. I was excited about you being a board member of EV, but now honestly would pretty strongly vote against that and would have likely advocated against that if I had known this a few weeks earlier. I currently think I consider this a major lapse of judgement and integrity, unless there was some culture in which it was clear that it was OK for people to criticize you anyways (though from what you are saying the non-disparagement clause was intentionally trying to cover this).
I… really don’t know what to say. Wave has been at the top of my list of projects that I’ve had good feelings about for years in EA, but now I think that is actually quite likely in substantial parts because of information control on your part. I’ve recommended that people go work for you, and I’ve mentioned your organization many times in the past few years as a place that seems like it’s done pretty clearly good stuff, while having a culture that seems to get stuff done. I do think I right now regret those recommendations.
I might change my mind on this after reflecting more, but this does really seem like a huge deal to me. I don’t know how I could have found out about this, and I have talked to people for dozens of hours about Wave over the years, and this very meaningfully changed my actions over the years in ways that I now feel quite betrayed about.
I’m sorry you feel that way. I will push back a little, and claim you are over-indexing on this: I’d predict that most (~75%) of the larger (>1000-employee) YC-backed companies have similar templates for severance, so finding this out about a given company shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
I did a bit of research to check my intuitions + it does seem like non-disparagement is at least widely advised (for severance specifically and not general employment), e.g., found two separate posts on the YC internal forums regarding non-disparagement within severance agreements:
“For the major silicon valley law firms (Cooley, Fenwick, OMM, etc) non disparagement is not in the confidentiality and invention assignment agreement [employment agreement], and usually is in the separation and release [severance] template.”
(^ this person also noted that it would be a red flag to find non-disparagement in the employment agreement.)
“One thing I’ve learned—even when someone has been terminated with cause, a separation agreement [which includes non-disparagement] w a severance can go a long way.”
I mean, yeah, sometimes there are pretty widespread deceptive or immoral practices, but I wouldn’t consider them being widespread that great of an excuse to do them anyways (I think it’s somewhat of an excuse, but not a huge one, and it does matter to me whether employees are informed that their severance is conditional on signing a non-disparagement clause when they leave, and whether anyone has ever complained about these, and as such you had the opportunity to reflect on your practices here).
I feel like the setup of a combined non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement should have obviously raised huge flags for you, independently of its precedent in Silicon Valley.
I think a non-disparagement clause can make sense in some circumstances, but I find really very little excuse to combine that with a non-disclosure clause. This is directly asking the other person to engage in a deceptive relationship with anyone who wants to have an accurate model of what it’s like to work for you. They are basically forced to lie when asked about their takes on the organization, since answering with “I cannot answer that” is now no longer an option due to revealing the non-disparagement agreement. And because of the disparagement clause they are only allowed to answer positively. This just seems like a crazy combination to me.
I think this combination is really not a reasonable thing to ask off of people in a community like ours, where people put huge amounts of effort into sharing information on the impact of different organizations, and where people freely share information about past employers, their flaws, their advantages, and where people (like me) have invested years of their life into building out talent pipelines and trying to cooperate on helping people find the most impactful places for them to work.
Like, I don’t know what you mean by over-indexing. De-facto I recommended that people work for Wave, on the basis of information that you filtered for me, and most importantly, you contractually paid people off to keep that filtering hidden from me. How am I supposed to react with anything but betrayal? Like, yeah, it sounds to me like you paid at least tens (and maybe hundreds) of thousands of dollars explicitly so that I and other people like me would walk away with this kind of skewed impression. What does it mean to over-index on this?
I don’t generally engage in high-trust relationships with random companies in Silicon Valley, so the costs for me there are much lower. I also generally don’t recommend that people work there in the same way that I did for Wave, and didn’t spend years of my life helping build a community that feeds into companies like Wave.
They are basically forced to lie when asked about their takes on the organization, since answering with “I cannot answer that” is now no longer an option due to revealing the non-disparagement agreement. And because of the disparagement clause they are only allowed to answer positively. This just seems like a crazy combination to me.
I agree this is very awkward.
If people asked about my time at Wave I would just not talk about it; I wouldn’t selectively say positive things.
If most firms have these clauses, one firm doesn’t, and most people don’t understand this, it seems possible that most people would end up with a less accurate impression of their relative merits than if all firms had been subject to equivalent evidence filtering effects.
In particular, it seems like this might matter for Wave if most of their hiring is from non-EA/LW people who are comparing them against random other normal companies.
So I agree that I wish fewer organizations would ask for non-disparagement clauses, especially for employees that are leaving. I don’t yet agree that this is the ‘obvious standard’ / non-disparagement is haram instead of makruh.
A related thing that’s coming to mind is that I have mediated a handful of disputes under conditions of secrecy. I currently don’t view this as a betrayal of you (that I’ve accepted information that I cannot share with you) but do you view it as me betraying you somehow?
A related thing that’s coming to mind is that I have mediated a handful of disputes under conditions of secrecy. I currently don’t view this as a betrayal of you (that I’ve accepted information that I cannot share with you) but do you view it as me betraying you somehow?
I think if, during those disputes, you committed to only say positive things about either party (in pretty broad generality, as non-disparagement clauses tend to do), and that you promised to keep that commitment of yours secret, and if because of that I ended up with a mistaken impression on reasonably high-stakes decisions, then yeah, I would feel betrayed by that.
I think accepting confidentiality is totally fine. It’s costly, but I don’t see a way around it in many circumstances. The NDA situation feels quite different to me, where it’s really a quite direct commitment to providing filtered evidence, combined with a promise to keep that filtering secret, which seems very different from normal confidentiality to me.
I can understand the sentiment here, but contracts are generally voluntary agreements. It feels like at least some part of your feelings should be directed at the other party in these agreements. Probably not in anywhere close to equal measure, given the power dynamics between the signing parties, and your own relationship with and trust level in each.
But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn’t actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth. Bravo, @Elizabeth!)
Some signers may have really needed the severance money, which makes things trickier, but not unsolvable. For the future, you might want to announce to your friends now that, if they forgo signing a severance agreement in order to share information with you, you’ll reimburse them (though please think through the particulars and how this could be exploited or go wrong, first).
Also, another thing you might be missing:
though my sense is this only happened because Jeff did something slightly risky under his NDA, by leaking some relevant information (there are not that many places Jeff worked, so him saying he knew about one organization, and having to check for permission, was leaking some decent number of bits, possibly enough to risk a suit if Lincoln wanted to),
If I were @jefftk, I would probably have been more worried about the risk of violating a contract I had knowingly and willingly agreed to than about getting sued! That’s a risk to honor and reputation, and a serious deontological line to cross for a lot of people[1], even if the contract is unfair in some ways, or a betrayal of a thirdparty’s trust.
(To be clear, I agree with Jeff’s own assessment that he didn’t really take much of a risk of any kind here. I’m not actually questioning his honor; just using it as an example to illustrate the point. Though I do predict Jeff’s initial concern was more about damaging a relationship through a breach of trust, than of getting sued per se.)
But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn’t actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth. Bravo, @Elizabeth!)
I appreciate the kudos here, but feel like I should give more context.
I think some of what led to me to renegotiate was a stubborn streak and righteousness about truth. I mostly hear when those traits annoy people, so it’s really nice to have them recognized in a good light here. But that righteous streak was greatly enabled by the fact that my mom is a lawyer who modeled reading legal documents before signing (even when its embarrassing your kids who just want to join their friends at the rockclimbing birthday party), and that I could afford to forgo severance. Obviously I really wanted the money, and I couldn’t afford to take this kind of stand every week. But I believe there were people who couldn’t even afford to add a few extra days, and so almost had to cave
To the extent people in that second group were unvirtuous, I think the lack of virtue occurred when they didn’t create enough financial slack to even have the time to negotiate. By the time they were laid off without a cushion it was too late. And that’s not available to everyone- Wave paid well, but emergencies happen, any one of them could have a really good reason their emergency fund was empty.
So the main thing I want to pitch here is that “getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap” is an underrated strategy.
Rereading my emails, it looks like I noticed the provision and pushed back on it, and was told I needed to follow up with a different person. I can’t find any record of having done that, and don’t remember any of this well. Looking at timestamps, though, my guess at what happened is that I was intending to follow up but ran out of time and needed to accept the offer as-is.
(We did have enough of a financial cushion that we could have waived severance without risk to our family, but it was also enough money that I didn’t want to risk it.)
I forget how long they gave us at first (my deadline got extended). I do think that companies should give people long deadlines for this, and short deadlines are maybe the most antisocial part of this? People are predictably stressed out and have a lot to deal with (because they’ve been laid off or fired), and now they have to read complicated paperwork, find a lawyer, and negotiate with a company? That’s a lot.
Non-disparagement and non-disclosure feel complicated to me and I can see how strong blanket statements became the norm, but using tight deadlines to pressure people on significant legal and financial decisions seems quite bad.
For the future, you might want to announce to your friends now that, if they forgo signing a severance agreement in order to share information with you, you’ll reimburse them
Well, either the information is worth that much or more (to someone), in which case the true value of the option Wave is offering is ~0, or it’s not, in which case the package deal is worth some non-zero amount that might still be significantly less than the headline value of the unencumbered financial benefits.
By successfully executing these agreements, Wave and their terminated employees managed to capture some value for themselves, at the cost of imposing negative externalities on parties not directly involved (Oli, other prospective Wave employees, would-be startup employees more generally).
And I’m saying (a) we should probably assign some blame to all parties involved in creating this externality and (b) Oli himself might be in a position to do something unilaterally to disincentivize others from creating or benefiting from it in the future.
Even a limited monetary offer might be a way to add force / credibility / publicity to the approach that Ben and Oli appear to already be taking, of making it well-known that they consider making these kinds of offers to be harmful and norm-violating. So it seemed worth throwing out there as a suggestion, even if it unrealistic or unworkable at scale.
Well, either the information is worth that much or more (to someone), in which case the true value of the option Wave is offering is ~0, or it’s not, in which case the package deal is worth some non-zero amount that might still be significantly less than the headline value of the unencumbered financial benefits.
What do you think the altruistic value in 2017 (ex-ante) was of negotiating releasing one laid off Wave employee from a non-disparagement+non-disclosure? (When the alternative is that they stay quiet about their time at Wave, not say selectively positive things.)
Pretty low! I know nothing about the specifics, but I personally would probably not have predicted that the information gained from such a release would be worth much to anyone. One reason is that I predict (retrodict?) that if there were a lot of value in this information, at least one of the laid-off employees would have declined the severance agreement or negotiated for better terms.
Also, in my model, a lot of the value isn’t exactly altruistic. In a lot of possible worlds, most of the value would accrue in the form of a better working life for well-off people who in principle have the resources and selfish interest to pay for such benefits, even if there’s no mechanism for them to actually do so. The counterfactual EA who learns that e.g. Lincoln Quirk is a terrible boss (but everything else about Wave is otherwise as it appears), instead goes off to work in some equally high-paying and high-impact role, but is personally happier during their working hours.
I really appreciate this as a push towards holding people/companies to a higher moral standard, and as an expectation that you think about such questions yourself rather than falling back to “well everyone else is doing it”.
Yeah fwiw I wanted to echo that Oli’s statement seems like an overreaction? My sense is that such NDAs are standard issue in tech (I’ve signed one before myself), and that having one at Wave is not evidence of a lapse in integrity; it’s the kind of thing that’s very easy to just defer to legal counsel on. Though the opposite (dropping the NDA) would be evidence of high integrity, imo!
Most people in the world lie from time to time, and are aware that their friends lie. Nonetheless I don’t think that Lincoln would lie to me. As a result, I trust his word.
Most CEOs get people who work for them to sign contracts agreeing that they won’t share negative/critical information about the company. Nonetheless I didn’t think that Lincoln would get people he works with to sign contracts not to share negative/critical information about Wave. As a result, I trusted the general perception I had of Wave.
I currently feel a bit tricked, not dissimilar to if I found out Lincoln had intentionally lied to me on some minor matter. While it is common for people to lie, it’s not the relationship I thought I had here.
I definitely feel like “intentionally lying” is still a much much stronger norm violation than what happened here. There’s like a million decisions that you have to make as a CEO and you don’t typically want to spend your decisionmaking time/innovation budget on random minutiae like “what terms are included inside our severance agreements?” I would be a bit surprised if “should we include a NDA & non-disclosure” had even risen to the level of a conscious decision of Lincoln’s at any point throughout Wave’s history, as opposed to eg getting boilerplate legal contracts from their lawyers/an online form and then copying that for each severance agreement thereafter.
There’s like a million decisions that you have to make as a CEO and you don’t typically want to spend your decisionmaking time/innovation budget on random minutiae like “what terms are included inside our severance agreements?”
Technically true, but also somewhat reminds me of this.
I would be a bit surprised if “should we include a NDA & non-disclosure” had even risen to the level of a conscious decision of Lincoln’s at any point throughout Wave’s history
I think it’s pretty likely that at least one departing employee would have pushed back on it some, so I wouldn’t be surprised?
Yeah, I guess that’s fair—you have much more insight into the number of and viewpoints of Wave’s departing employees than I do. Maybe “would be a bit surprised” would have cashed out to “<40% Lincoln ever spent 5+ min thinking about this, before this week”, which I’d update a bit upwards to 50⁄50 based on your comment.
For context, I don’t think I pushed back on (or even substantively noticed) the NDA in my own severance agreement, whereas I did push back quite heavily on the standard “assignment of inventions” thing they asked me to sign when I joined. That said, I was pretty happy with my time and trusted my boss enough to not expect for the NDA terms to matter.
Below you can see Elizabeth writing about how she successfully pushed back and got it removed from her agreement, so it does seem like my guess was correct! [EDIT: except nothing in her post mentions Lincoln, so probably not]
(I didn’t know about Elizabeth’s situation before her post)
It’s been a while but I think I remember who I negotiated with and it wasn’t Lincoln (or Drew, the other co-founder). I find it pretty plausible that person had the authority to make changes to my agreement without running them by the founders, but would not have had the authority to change the default. So it’s entirely possible multiple people pushed back but it never reached the conscious attention of the founders.
And it may not have even come up that often. I think I am several sigmas out in my willingness to read legal paperwork, push back, and walk away from severance payments, so you’d need a large sample to have it come up frequently. Wave probably hasn’t laid off or fired that many people with severance, and presumably the founders were less likely to hear about pushback as the company grew.
So it just seems really likely to me that Wave didn’t invest its limited energy in writing its own severance agreement, and the situation didn’t have enough feedback loops to make people with decision-making power question that.
Epistemic status: Thinking out loud. Overall I’m rather confused about what to think here.
Yeah. And there is a Chesterton’s Fence element here too. Like as CEO, if you really want to go with a non-standard legal thing, you probably would want to make sure you understand why the standard thing is what it is.
Which, well, I guess you can just pay someone a few hundred dollars to tell you. Which I’d expect someone with the right kind of moral integrity to do. And I’d expect the answer to be something along the lines of:
If you actually treat people well, it only offers a pretty small degree of protection. And standard thinking only accounts for selfish company interests, not actual altruistic concern for employees or the norms you do or don’t endorse. So if you do care about the latter and intend to treat people well, it would probably make sense to get rid of it.
Although, perhaps it’d take a special lawyer to actually be frank with you and acknowledge all of that. And you’d probably want to get a second and third and fourth opinion too. But still, seeking that out seems like a somewhat obvious thing to do for someone with moral integrity. And if you do in fact get the response I described above, ditching the non-disparagement seems like a somewhat obvious way to respond.
Hm, I wonder how this evidence should cause us to shift our beliefs.
At first I was thinking that it shifts towards non-disparagement not being too bad. I don’t think it’s intuitively an obviously terrible thing. And thinking about YC, I get the sense that they actually do want to Be Good. And that, if true, they wouldn’t really stand for so many YC-backed companies having non-disparagement stuff.
But then I remembered to be a little cynical. Over the years, I feel like I’ve seen YC companies do a bunch of unethical things. In such a way that I just don’t think YC is policing its companies and pushing very hard against it. Although, I do think that people like Paul Graham do actually want the companies to Be Good. But anyway, I think that regardless of how YC feels about it, they wouldn’t really police it, and so the observation that tons of YC-backed companies have this clause doesn’t really shift my beliefs very much.
A very general point about how we are supposed to update in a complex system:
Evidence that a company you trust uses these should cause you to update BOTH slightly more towards “this isn’t too bad,” and slightly more towards “YC companies, and this company in particular, are unethical.”
(Though one of those updates might be a lot smaller than the other, if you’ve e.g. already thought about one of those topics a lot and reached a confident conclusion.)
How much does it make a difference that Lincoln just came out and volunteered that information? The non-disparagement contracts are not themselves hidden.
They were hidden up until this very moment, from me, presumably with a clause in the NDA that contractually committed everyone who signed them to keep them hidden from me.
I am pretty sure many past Wave employees would have brought them up to me had they not been asked to sign an NDA in order to get their severance package. I agree it’s worth something that Lincoln just said it straightforwardly, though my sense is this only happened because Jeff did something slightly risky under his NDA, by leaking some relevant information (there are not that many places Jeff worked, so him saying he knew about one organization, and having to check for permission, was leaking some decent number of bits, possibly enough to risk a suit if Lincoln wanted to), and me finding this out was sheer luck, and in most worlds I would have never found out.
FWIW: I have an NDA from Wave. I negotiated at the time to be able to mention the existence of the NDA, and that it didn’t restrict private conversation, just public statements. You and I have probably talked about Wave, and I guess it never occurred to me to mention the NDA because I knew it was standard and it wasn’t restricting my private speech. I wasn’t keeping it secret, I’ve talked about it with people when it has come up, but I didn’t make a point of doing so.
So I don’t think it’s obvious you’d know about the NDA if it weren’t self-protecting.
It’s possible I should have disclosed the NDA every time I said something positive about Wave in public. I think that would have occurred to me if I’d ever been talking about Wave qua Wave, but it was always as an example in posts that were focused on something else, so that feels like a lot of overhead.
Edit: I guess I should say I think the ban on disclosing the existence of the agreement is very bad, and that’s why I negotiated to change it (and would have walked if they hadn’t, despite not having anything I was burning to say). But I had that right and still didn’t mention it to habryka in medicine.
Aside: can we taboo “NDA” in this discussion? It seems pretty fucked that it means both non-disparagement-agreement and non-disclosure-agreement and it’s annoying to track which one people are referring to.
Oh man, it’s worse than that. My original paperwork had both a non-disparagement clause and a non-disclosure clause relating to the agreement itself. The latter was removed in my agreement but presumably not others’.
While I have the emails open, I want to note that the lawyer described the agreement as pretty standard.
There are enough EA orgs that I know something about (and that other people know I know something about) that I think the number of bits I was leaking here was pretty low?
Another thing that’s not visible is that I sent Lincoln an email linking to this thread, which I expect is why he jumped in with more context. I really appreciate him doing so, and don’t want him and Wave to end up worse off than in a world in which he’d stayed quiet.
possibly enough to risk a suit if Lincoln wanted to
Would be pretty tough to do given the legal dubiousness re: enforceability of non-disparagement agreements in the US (note: the judgement applies retroactively)
these things are quite common—if you just google for severance package standard terms, you’ll find non-disparagement clauses in them
? I mean I agree(d, for a long time prior to any of all this) that these clauses are terrible for the ecosystem. But it feels like this should be like a vegan learning their associate eats meat and has just noticed that maybe that’s problematic?
I think this is how your mind should have changed:
large update that companies in general are antagonists on a personal level (if you didn’t already know this)
small update that Wave is bad to work with, insofar as it’s a company, mostly screened off by other info you have about it
very small update that Lincoln is bad to work with
with a huge update that they are incredibly good to work with on this specific dimension if “does make me think about whether some changes should be made” results in changes way before the wider ecosystem implements them
moderate update that Lincoln isn’t actively prioritizing noticing and rooting out all bad epistemic practice, among the many things they could be prioritizing, when it goes against “common wisdom” and feels costly, which means if you know of other common wisdom things you think are bad, maybe they implement those
I disagree. I see it as a bad thing, but moreso a minor bad thing than a major one.
From a first-order consequentialist perspective, I strongly suspect that Wave treats people quite well and that this policy isn’t silencing anything to a non-trivial degree.
Looking at the nth-order effects of this policy, or from a more “virtues as heuristics” perspective, I think it probably has some sort of small negative consequences. Like marginally normalizing an unfair and unhealthy norm. And also normalizing the idea of doing sketchy things in the name of the greater good. But I’m pretty confident that overall, the negative consequences here aren’t large.
Furthermore, I think that Working With Monsters is important. Well, there’s some threshold. I’m not sure where that threshold is. I’m extremely confident that Nonlinear has crossed that threshold by a large margin, for what that’s worth. But in general I feel like the threshold should be on the high side. It’s just too hard to coordinate to get anything done if you get hung up on these sorts of things. Especially if you have shorter timelines. And with that said, I suspect quite strongly that Wave is way below the threshold and that it’d make sense to continue being strong “allies” with them.
I’m a former employee of wave, so I want to make it clear that this question is not driven by private information. I would have asked that question in response to that sentence no matter what the proper noun was. I have been on about “it’s impossible to make a utilitarian argument for lying[2] because truth is necessary to calculate utils” for months.
A prior that most organizations don’t have >= moderately-sized issues that really need to be silenced. Which is vaguely informed by my own experiences working for various companies, chatting with friends and acquaintances about their experiences, etc.
A prior that rationalists and rationalist-adjacent people are a good deal above average in terms of how well they treat people.
I’ve read a bunch of benkuhn’s writing and Dan Luu’s writing. From this writing, I’m very confident that both of them are really awesome people. And they’re associated with Wave. And I remember Ben writing Wave-specific things that made me feel good about Wave. I see all of this as, I dunno, weak-to-moderate evidence of Wave being “good”.
I see now that lincolnquirk is a cofounder of Wave. I don’t remember anything specific about him, but the name rings a bell of “I have above-average opinions of you compared to other rationalists”. And I have pretty good opinions about the average rationalist.
I think what I’d expect to see in terms of stories of people being mistreated would be roughly the same. Because if they are mistreating people, evidence of that would likely be suppressed.
So I think where I’m coming from is moreso that various things, IMO, point towards the prior probability[1] of mistreatment being low in the first place.
(This is a fun opportunity to work on some Bayesian reasoning. Not to be insensitive about the context that it’s in. Please let me know if you/anyone has comments or advice. Maybe I’m missing something here.)
In the sense of, before opening your eyes and looking at what stories about Wave are out there, what would I expect the probability of there being bad things to be. Or something like that.
As an analogy, suppose you told me that Alice is a manager at Widget Corp. Then you tell me that she is a rationalist. Then you show me her blog, I read it, and I get good vibes. We can ask at this point what I think her probability of her mistreating employees and stuff being. And given what I know, I’d say that it’s very low. From there, you can say, “Ok, now go out and google stuff about Alice and Widget Corp. How do the results of googling shift your beliefs?” I think they probably wouldn’t shift my beliefs much, since regardless of whether she does bad stuff, if the information is being suppressed, I’m unlikely to observe it. But I can still think that the probability of bad stuff is low, despite the suppression.
I apologize for derailing the N(D|D)A discussion, but it’s kind of crazy to me that you think that Nonlinear (based on the content of this post?) has crossed a line such that you wouldn’t work with them, by a large margin? Why not? That post you linked is about working with murderers, not working with business owners who seemingly took advantage of their employees for a few months, or who made a trigger-happy legal threat!
Compared to (for example) any random YC company with no reputation to speak of, I didn’t see anything in this post that made it look like working with them would either be more likely to be regrettable for you, or more likely to be harmful to others, so what’s the problem?
That is a very fair question to ask. However, it’s not something that I’m interested in diving into. Sorry.
I will say that Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence comes to mind. A lot of the evidence we have probably wouldn’t be admissible as legal evidence, and perhaps some not even as scientific evidence. But IMO, there is in fact a very large amount of Bayesian evidence that Nonlinear has crossed the line (hard to articulate where exactly the line is) by a very large margin.
As does the idea of being anchored to common sense, and resistant to reason as memetic immune disorder. Like if you described this story to a bunch of friends at a bar, I think the obvious, intuitive, “normie” conclusion would be that Nonlinear crossed the line by a wide margin (a handful of normie friends I mentioned this to felt this way).
I’ll also point out that gut instincts can certainly count as Bayesian evidence, and I’m non-trivially incorporating mine here.
If there was a way to bet on it, I’d be eager to. If anyone wants to, I’d probably be down to bet up to a few hundred dollars. I’d trust a lot of random people here (above 100 karma, let’s say) to approach the bet in an honorable way and I am not concerned about the possibility that I end up feeling unhappy with how things turn out (worst case it’s a few hundred bucks, oh well).
Without saying anything about Wave in particular, I do think the prevalence of NDAs biases the information people know about start-ups in generality. The prevalence of early excitement vs. the hard parts makes they too optimistic, and get into situations they could have known would be bad for them. it’s extra hard because the difficulties at bigtech companies are much discussed.
So I think the right thing to weigh against the averted slander is “the harm to employees who joined, who wouldn’t have if criticisms had been more public”. Maybe there are other stakeholders here, but employees seem like the biggest.
Jeff is talking about Wave. We use a standard form of non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses in our severance agreements: when we fire or lay someone off, getting severance money is gated on not saying bad things about the company. We tend to be fairly generous with our severance, so people in this situation usually prefer to sign and agree. I think this has successfully prevented (unfair) bad things from being said about us in a few cases, but I am reading this thread and it does make me think about whether some changes should be made.
I also would re-emphasize something Jeff said—that these things are quite common—if you just google for severance package standard terms, you’ll find non-disparagement clauses in them. As far as I am aware, we don’t ask current employees or employees who are quitting without severance to not talk about their experience at Wave.
Wow, I see that as a pretty major breach of trust, especially if the existence of the non-disparagement clause is itself covered by the NDA, which I know is relatively common, and seems likely the case based on Jeff’s uncertainty about whether he can mention the organization.
I… don’t know how to feel about this. I was excited about you being a board member of EV, but now honestly would pretty strongly vote against that and would have likely advocated against that if I had known this a few weeks earlier. I currently think I consider this a major lapse of judgement and integrity, unless there was some culture in which it was clear that it was OK for people to criticize you anyways (though from what you are saying the non-disparagement clause was intentionally trying to cover this).
I… really don’t know what to say. Wave has been at the top of my list of projects that I’ve had good feelings about for years in EA, but now I think that is actually quite likely in substantial parts because of information control on your part. I’ve recommended that people go work for you, and I’ve mentioned your organization many times in the past few years as a place that seems like it’s done pretty clearly good stuff, while having a culture that seems to get stuff done. I do think I right now regret those recommendations.
I might change my mind on this after reflecting more, but this does really seem like a huge deal to me. I don’t know how I could have found out about this, and I have talked to people for dozens of hours about Wave over the years, and this very meaningfully changed my actions over the years in ways that I now feel quite betrayed about.
I’m sorry you feel that way. I will push back a little, and claim you are over-indexing on this: I’d predict that most (~75%) of the larger (>1000-employee) YC-backed companies have similar templates for severance, so finding this out about a given company shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
I did a bit of research to check my intuitions + it does seem like non-disparagement is at least widely advised (for severance specifically and not general employment), e.g., found two separate posts on the YC internal forums regarding non-disparagement within severance agreements:
(^ this person also noted that it would be a red flag to find non-disparagement in the employment agreement.)
I mean, yeah, sometimes there are pretty widespread deceptive or immoral practices, but I wouldn’t consider them being widespread that great of an excuse to do them anyways (I think it’s somewhat of an excuse, but not a huge one, and it does matter to me whether employees are informed that their severance is conditional on signing a non-disparagement clause when they leave, and whether anyone has ever complained about these, and as such you had the opportunity to reflect on your practices here).
I feel like the setup of a combined non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement should have obviously raised huge flags for you, independently of its precedent in Silicon Valley.
I think a non-disparagement clause can make sense in some circumstances, but I find really very little excuse to combine that with a non-disclosure clause. This is directly asking the other person to engage in a deceptive relationship with anyone who wants to have an accurate model of what it’s like to work for you. They are basically forced to lie when asked about their takes on the organization, since answering with “I cannot answer that” is now no longer an option due to revealing the non-disparagement agreement. And because of the disparagement clause they are only allowed to answer positively. This just seems like a crazy combination to me.
I think this combination is really not a reasonable thing to ask off of people in a community like ours, where people put huge amounts of effort into sharing information on the impact of different organizations, and where people freely share information about past employers, their flaws, their advantages, and where people (like me) have invested years of their life into building out talent pipelines and trying to cooperate on helping people find the most impactful places for them to work.
Like, I don’t know what you mean by over-indexing. De-facto I recommended that people work for Wave, on the basis of information that you filtered for me, and most importantly, you contractually paid people off to keep that filtering hidden from me. How am I supposed to react with anything but betrayal? Like, yeah, it sounds to me like you paid at least tens (and maybe hundreds) of thousands of dollars explicitly so that I and other people like me would walk away with this kind of skewed impression. What does it mean to over-index on this?
I don’t generally engage in high-trust relationships with random companies in Silicon Valley, so the costs for me there are much lower. I also generally don’t recommend that people work there in the same way that I did for Wave, and didn’t spend years of my life helping build a community that feeds into companies like Wave.
I agree this is very awkward.
If people asked about my time at Wave I would just not talk about it; I wouldn’t selectively say positive things.
If most firms have these clauses, one firm doesn’t, and most people don’t understand this, it seems possible that most people would end up with a less accurate impression of their relative merits than if all firms had been subject to equivalent evidence filtering effects.
In particular, it seems like this might matter for Wave if most of their hiring is from non-EA/LW people who are comparing them against random other normal companies.
So I agree that I wish fewer organizations would ask for non-disparagement clauses, especially for employees that are leaving. I don’t yet agree that this is the ‘obvious standard’ / non-disparagement is haram instead of makruh.
A related thing that’s coming to mind is that I have mediated a handful of disputes under conditions of secrecy. I currently don’t view this as a betrayal of you (that I’ve accepted information that I cannot share with you) but do you view it as me betraying you somehow?
I think if, during those disputes, you committed to only say positive things about either party (in pretty broad generality, as non-disparagement clauses tend to do), and that you promised to keep that commitment of yours secret, and if because of that I ended up with a mistaken impression on reasonably high-stakes decisions, then yeah, I would feel betrayed by that.
I think accepting confidentiality is totally fine. It’s costly, but I don’t see a way around it in many circumstances. The NDA situation feels quite different to me, where it’s really a quite direct commitment to providing filtered evidence, combined with a promise to keep that filtering secret, which seems very different from normal confidentiality to me.
I can understand the sentiment here, but contracts are generally voluntary agreements. It feels like at least some part of your feelings should be directed at the other party in these agreements. Probably not in anywhere close to equal measure, given the power dynamics between the signing parties, and your own relationship with and trust level in each.
But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn’t actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth. Bravo, @Elizabeth!)
Some signers may have really needed the severance money, which makes things trickier, but not unsolvable. For the future, you might want to announce to your friends now that, if they forgo signing a severance agreement in order to share information with you, you’ll reimburse them (though please think through the particulars and how this could be exploited or go wrong, first).
Also, another thing you might be missing:
If I were @jefftk, I would probably have been more worried about the risk of violating a contract I had knowingly and willingly agreed to than about getting sued! That’s a risk to honor and reputation, and a serious deontological line to cross for a lot of people[1], even if the contract is unfair in some ways, or a betrayal of a thirdparty’s trust.
(To be clear, I agree with Jeff’s own assessment that he didn’t really take much of a risk of any kind here. I’m not actually questioning his honor; just using it as an example to illustrate the point. Though I do predict Jeff’s initial concern was more about damaging a relationship through a breach of trust, than of getting sued per se.)
In some parts of the multiverse, breaching a contract can get you sent to Abaddon...
I appreciate the kudos here, but feel like I should give more context.
I think some of what led to me to renegotiate was a stubborn streak and righteousness about truth. I mostly hear when those traits annoy people, so it’s really nice to have them recognized in a good light here. But that righteous streak was greatly enabled by the fact that my mom is a lawyer who modeled reading legal documents before signing (even when its embarrassing your kids who just want to join their friends at the rockclimbing birthday party), and that I could afford to forgo severance. Obviously I really wanted the money, and I couldn’t afford to take this kind of stand every week. But I believe there were people who couldn’t even afford to add a few extra days, and so almost had to cave
To the extent people in that second group were unvirtuous, I think the lack of virtue occurred when they didn’t create enough financial slack to even have the time to negotiate. By the time they were laid off without a cushion it was too late. And that’s not available to everyone- Wave paid well, but emergencies happen, any one of them could have a really good reason their emergency fund was empty.
So the main thing I want to pitch here is that “getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap” is an underrated strategy.
Rereading my emails, it looks like I noticed the provision and pushed back on it, and was told I needed to follow up with a different person. I can’t find any record of having done that, and don’t remember any of this well. Looking at timestamps, though, my guess at what happened is that I was intending to follow up but ran out of time and needed to accept the offer as-is.
(We did have enough of a financial cushion that we could have waived severance without risk to our family, but it was also enough money that I didn’t want to risk it.)
I forget how long they gave us at first (my deadline got extended). I do think that companies should give people long deadlines for this, and short deadlines are maybe the most antisocial part of this? People are predictably stressed out and have a lot to deal with (because they’ve been laid off or fired), and now they have to read complicated paperwork, find a lawyer, and negotiate with a company? That’s a lot.
Non-disparagement and non-disclosure feel complicated to me and I can see how strong blanket statements became the norm, but using tight deadlines to pressure people on significant legal and financial decisions seems quite bad.
Uh, this could be quite expensive. For example, if someone with a salary of $250k is given 16 weeks plus two weeks for every year of service that could easily be $100k+.
Well, either the information is worth that much or more (to someone), in which case the true value of the option Wave is offering is ~0, or it’s not, in which case the package deal is worth some non-zero amount that might still be significantly less than the headline value of the unencumbered financial benefits.
By successfully executing these agreements, Wave and their terminated employees managed to capture some value for themselves, at the cost of imposing negative externalities on parties not directly involved (Oli, other prospective Wave employees, would-be startup employees more generally).
And I’m saying (a) we should probably assign some blame to all parties involved in creating this externality and (b) Oli himself might be in a position to do something unilaterally to disincentivize others from creating or benefiting from it in the future.
Even a limited monetary offer might be a way to add force / credibility / publicity to the approach that Ben and Oli appear to already be taking, of making it well-known that they consider making these kinds of offers to be harmful and norm-violating. So it seemed worth throwing out there as a suggestion, even if it unrealistic or unworkable at scale.
What do you think the altruistic value in 2017 (ex-ante) was of negotiating releasing one laid off Wave employee from a non-disparagement+non-disclosure? (When the alternative is that they stay quiet about their time at Wave, not say selectively positive things.)
Pretty low! I know nothing about the specifics, but I personally would probably not have predicted that the information gained from such a release would be worth much to anyone. One reason is that I predict (retrodict?) that if there were a lot of value in this information, at least one of the laid-off employees would have declined the severance agreement or negotiated for better terms.
Also, in my model, a lot of the value isn’t exactly altruistic. In a lot of possible worlds, most of the value would accrue in the form of a better working life for well-off people who in principle have the resources and selfish interest to pay for such benefits, even if there’s no mechanism for them to actually do so. The counterfactual EA who learns that e.g. Lincoln Quirk is a terrible boss (but everything else about Wave is otherwise as it appears), instead goes off to work in some equally high-paying and high-impact role, but is personally happier during their working hours.
I really appreciate this as a push towards holding people/companies to a higher moral standard, and as an expectation that you think about such questions yourself rather than falling back to “well everyone else is doing it”.
Yeah fwiw I wanted to echo that Oli’s statement seems like an overreaction? My sense is that such NDAs are standard issue in tech (I’ve signed one before myself), and that having one at Wave is not evidence of a lapse in integrity; it’s the kind of thing that’s very easy to just defer to legal counsel on. Though the opposite (dropping the NDA) would be evidence of high integrity, imo!
Most people in the world lie from time to time, and are aware that their friends lie. Nonetheless I don’t think that Lincoln would lie to me. As a result, I trust his word.
Most CEOs get people who work for them to sign contracts agreeing that they won’t share negative/critical information about the company. Nonetheless I didn’t think that Lincoln would get people he works with to sign contracts not to share negative/critical information about Wave. As a result, I trusted the general perception I had of Wave.
I currently feel a bit tricked, not dissimilar to if I found out Lincoln had intentionally lied to me on some minor matter. While it is common for people to lie, it’s not the relationship I thought I had here.
I definitely feel like “intentionally lying” is still a much much stronger norm violation than what happened here. There’s like a million decisions that you have to make as a CEO and you don’t typically want to spend your decisionmaking time/innovation budget on random minutiae like “what terms are included inside our severance agreements?” I would be a bit surprised if “should we include a NDA & non-disclosure” had even risen to the level of a conscious decision of Lincoln’s at any point throughout Wave’s history, as opposed to eg getting boilerplate legal contracts from their lawyers/an online form and then copying that for each severance agreement thereafter.
Technically true, but also somewhat reminds me of this.
I think it’s pretty likely that at least one departing employee would have pushed back on it some, so I wouldn’t be surprised?
Yeah, I guess that’s fair—you have much more insight into the number of and viewpoints of Wave’s departing employees than I do. Maybe “would be a bit surprised” would have cashed out to “<40% Lincoln ever spent 5+ min thinking about this, before this week”, which I’d update a bit upwards to 50⁄50 based on your comment.
For context, I don’t think I pushed back on (or even substantively noticed) the NDA in my own severance agreement, whereas I did push back quite heavily on the standard “assignment of inventions” thing they asked me to sign when I joined. That said, I was pretty happy with my time and trusted my boss enough to not expect for the NDA terms to matter.
Below you can see Elizabeth writing about how she successfully pushed back and got it removed from her agreement, so it does seem like my guess was correct! [EDIT: except nothing in her post mentions Lincoln, so probably not]
(I didn’t know about Elizabeth’s situation before her post)
It’s been a while but I think I remember who I negotiated with and it wasn’t Lincoln (or Drew, the other co-founder). I find it pretty plausible that person had the authority to make changes to my agreement without running them by the founders, but would not have had the authority to change the default. So it’s entirely possible multiple people pushed back but it never reached the conscious attention of the founders.
And it may not have even come up that often. I think I am several sigmas out in my willingness to read legal paperwork, push back, and walk away from severance payments, so you’d need a large sample to have it come up frequently. Wave probably hasn’t laid off or fired that many people with severance, and presumably the founders were less likely to hear about pushback as the company grew.
So it just seems really likely to me that Wave didn’t invest its limited energy in writing its own severance agreement, and the situation didn’t have enough feedback loops to make people with decision-making power question that.
Epistemic status: Thinking out loud. Overall I’m rather confused about what to think here.
Yeah. And there is a Chesterton’s Fence element here too. Like as CEO, if you really want to go with a non-standard legal thing, you probably would want to make sure you understand why the standard thing is what it is.
Which, well, I guess you can just pay someone a few hundred dollars to tell you. Which I’d expect someone with the right kind of moral integrity to do. And I’d expect the answer to be something along the lines of:
Although, perhaps it’d take a special lawyer to actually be frank with you and acknowledge all of that. And you’d probably want to get a second and third and fourth opinion too. But still, seeking that out seems like a somewhat obvious thing to do for someone with moral integrity. And if you do in fact get the response I described above, ditching the non-disparagement seems like a somewhat obvious way to respond.
Hm, I wonder how this evidence should cause us to shift our beliefs.
At first I was thinking that it shifts towards non-disparagement not being too bad. I don’t think it’s intuitively an obviously terrible thing. And thinking about YC, I get the sense that they actually do want to Be Good. And that, if true, they wouldn’t really stand for so many YC-backed companies having non-disparagement stuff.
But then I remembered to be a little cynical. Over the years, I feel like I’ve seen YC companies do a bunch of unethical things. In such a way that I just don’t think YC is policing its companies and pushing very hard against it. Although, I do think that people like Paul Graham do actually want the companies to Be Good. But anyway, I think that regardless of how YC feels about it, they wouldn’t really police it, and so the observation that tons of YC-backed companies have this clause doesn’t really shift my beliefs very much.
A very general point about how we are supposed to update in a complex system:
Evidence that a company you trust uses these should cause you to update BOTH slightly more towards “this isn’t too bad,” and slightly more towards “YC companies, and this company in particular, are unethical.”
This is formally correct.
(Though one of those updates might be a lot smaller than the other, if you’ve e.g. already thought about one of those topics a lot and reached a confident conclusion.)
How much does it make a difference that Lincoln just came out and volunteered that information? The non-disparagement contracts are not themselves hidden.
They were hidden up until this very moment, from me, presumably with a clause in the NDA that contractually committed everyone who signed them to keep them hidden from me.
I am pretty sure many past Wave employees would have brought them up to me had they not been asked to sign an NDA in order to get their severance package. I agree it’s worth something that Lincoln just said it straightforwardly, though my sense is this only happened because Jeff did something slightly risky under his NDA, by leaking some relevant information (there are not that many places Jeff worked, so him saying he knew about one organization, and having to check for permission, was leaking some decent number of bits, possibly enough to risk a suit if Lincoln wanted to), and me finding this out was sheer luck, and in most worlds I would have never found out.
FWIW: I have an NDA from Wave. I negotiated at the time to be able to mention the existence of the NDA, and that it didn’t restrict private conversation, just public statements. You and I have probably talked about Wave, and I guess it never occurred to me to mention the NDA because I knew it was standard and it wasn’t restricting my private speech. I wasn’t keeping it secret, I’ve talked about it with people when it has come up, but I didn’t make a point of doing so.
So I don’t think it’s obvious you’d know about the NDA if it weren’t self-protecting.
It’s possible I should have disclosed the NDA every time I said something positive about Wave in public. I think that would have occurred to me if I’d ever been talking about Wave qua Wave, but it was always as an example in posts that were focused on something else, so that feels like a lot of overhead.
Edit: I guess I should say I think the ban on disclosing the existence of the agreement is very bad, and that’s why I negotiated to change it (and would have walked if they hadn’t, despite not having anything I was burning to say). But I had that right and still didn’t mention it to habryka in medicine.
Aside: can we taboo “NDA” in this discussion? It seems pretty fucked that it means both non-disparagement-agreement and non-disclosure-agreement and it’s annoying to track which one people are referring to.
Oh man, it’s worse than that. My original paperwork had both a non-disparagement clause and a non-disclosure clause relating to the agreement itself. The latter was removed in my agreement but presumably not others’.
While I have the emails open, I want to note that the lawyer described the agreement as pretty standard.
There are enough EA orgs that I know something about (and that other people know I know something about) that I think the number of bits I was leaking here was pretty low?
Another thing that’s not visible is that I sent Lincoln an email linking to this thread, which I expect is why he jumped in with more context. I really appreciate him doing so, and don’t want him and Wave to end up worse off than in a world in which he’d stayed quiet.
Would be pretty tough to do given the legal dubiousness re: enforceability of non-disparagement agreements in the US (note: the judgement applies retroactively)
Did you previously know that
? I mean I agree(d, for a long time prior to any of all this) that these clauses are terrible for the ecosystem. But it feels like this should be like a vegan learning their associate eats meat and has just noticed that maybe that’s problematic?
I think this is how your mind should have changed:
large update that companies in general are antagonists on a personal level (if you didn’t already know this)
small update that Wave is bad to work with, insofar as it’s a company, mostly screened off by other info you have about it
very small update that Lincoln is bad to work with
with a huge update that they are incredibly good to work with on this specific dimension if “does make me think about whether some changes should be made” results in changes way before the wider ecosystem implements them
moderate update that Lincoln isn’t actively prioritizing noticing and rooting out all bad epistemic practice, among the many things they could be prioritizing, when it goes against “common wisdom” and feels costly, which means if you know of other common wisdom things you think are bad, maybe they implement those
I disagree. I see it as a bad thing, but moreso a minor bad thing than a major one.
From a first-order consequentialist perspective, I strongly suspect that Wave treats people quite well and that this policy isn’t silencing anything to a non-trivial degree.
Looking at the nth-order effects of this policy, or from a more “virtues as heuristics” perspective, I think it probably has some sort of small negative consequences. Like marginally normalizing an unfair and unhealthy norm. And also normalizing the idea of doing sketchy things in the name of the greater good. But I’m pretty confident that overall, the negative consequences here aren’t large.
Furthermore, I think that Working With Monsters is important. Well, there’s some threshold. I’m not sure where that threshold is. I’m extremely confident that Nonlinear has crossed that threshold by a large margin, for what that’s worth. But in general I feel like the threshold should be on the high side. It’s just too hard to coordinate to get anything done if you get hung up on these sorts of things. Especially if you have shorter timelines. And with that said, I suspect quite strongly that Wave is way below the threshold and that it’d make sense to continue being strong “allies” with them.
What are you basing this on?[1]
I’m a former employee of wave, so I want to make it clear that this question is not driven by private information. I would have asked that question in response to that sentence no matter what the proper noun was. I have been on about “it’s impossible to make a utilitarian argument for lying[2] because truth is necessary to calculate utils” for months.
Except when you are actively at war with someone and are considering other usually-banned actions like murder and property destruction.
Hm. Something along these lines I think:
A prior that most organizations don’t have >= moderately-sized issues that really need to be silenced. Which is vaguely informed by my own experiences working for various companies, chatting with friends and acquaintances about their experiences, etc.
A prior that rationalists and rationalist-adjacent people are a good deal above average in terms of how well they treat people.
I’ve read a bunch of benkuhn’s writing and Dan Luu’s writing. From this writing, I’m very confident that both of them are really awesome people. And they’re associated with Wave. And I remember Ben writing Wave-specific things that made me feel good about Wave. I see all of this as, I dunno, weak-to-moderate evidence of Wave being “good”.
I see now that lincolnquirk is a cofounder of Wave. I don’t remember anything specific about him, but the name rings a bell of “I have above-average opinions of you compared to other rationalists”. And I have pretty good opinions about the average rationalist.
How does this differ from what you’d expect to see if an organization had substantial downsides, but supressed negative information?
I think what I’d expect to see in terms of stories of people being mistreated would be roughly the same. Because if they are mistreating people, evidence of that would likely be suppressed.
So I think where I’m coming from is moreso that various things, IMO, point towards the prior probability[1] of mistreatment being low in the first place.
(This is a fun opportunity to work on some Bayesian reasoning. Not to be insensitive about the context that it’s in. Please let me know if you/anyone has comments or advice. Maybe I’m missing something here.)
In the sense of, before opening your eyes and looking at what stories about Wave are out there, what would I expect the probability of there being bad things to be. Or something like that.
As an analogy, suppose you told me that Alice is a manager at Widget Corp. Then you tell me that she is a rationalist. Then you show me her blog, I read it, and I get good vibes. We can ask at this point what I think her probability of her mistreating employees and stuff being. And given what I know, I’d say that it’s very low. From there, you can say, “Ok, now go out and google stuff about Alice and Widget Corp. How do the results of googling shift your beliefs?” I think they probably wouldn’t shift my beliefs much, since regardless of whether she does bad stuff, if the information is being suppressed, I’m unlikely to observe it. But I can still think that the probability of bad stuff is low, despite the suppression.
I apologize for derailing the N(D|D)A discussion, but it’s kind of crazy to me that you think that Nonlinear (based on the content of this post?) has crossed a line such that you wouldn’t work with them, by a large margin? Why not? That post you linked is about working with murderers, not working with business owners who seemingly took advantage of their employees for a few months, or who made a trigger-happy legal threat!
Compared to (for example) any random YC company with no reputation to speak of, I didn’t see anything in this post that made it look like working with them would either be more likely to be regrettable for you, or more likely to be harmful to others, so what’s the problem?
That is a very fair question to ask. However, it’s not something that I’m interested in diving into. Sorry.
I will say that Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence comes to mind. A lot of the evidence we have probably wouldn’t be admissible as legal evidence, and perhaps some not even as scientific evidence. But IMO, there is in fact a very large amount of Bayesian evidence that Nonlinear has crossed the line (hard to articulate where exactly the line is) by a very large margin.
Faster Than Science also comes to mind.
The Sin of Underconfidence also comes to mind.
As does the idea of being anchored to common sense, and resistant to reason as memetic immune disorder. Like if you described this story to a bunch of friends at a bar, I think the obvious, intuitive, “normie” conclusion would be that Nonlinear crossed the line by a wide margin (a handful of normie friends I mentioned this to felt this way).
I’ll also point out that gut instincts can certainly count as Bayesian evidence, and I’m non-trivially incorporating mine here.
If there was a way to bet on it, I’d be eager to. If anyone wants to, I’d probably be down to bet up to a few hundred dollars. I’d trust a lot of random people here (above 100 karma, let’s say) to approach the bet in an honorable way and I am not concerned about the possibility that I end up feeling unhappy with how things turn out (worst case it’s a few hundred bucks, oh well).
Without saying anything about Wave in particular, I do think the prevalence of NDAs biases the information people know about start-ups in generality. The prevalence of early excitement vs. the hard parts makes they too optimistic, and get into situations they could have known would be bad for them. it’s extra hard because the difficulties at bigtech companies are much discussed.
So I think the right thing to weigh against the averted slander is “the harm to employees who joined, who wouldn’t have if criticisms had been more public”. Maybe there are other stakeholders here, but employees seem like the biggest.