According to the post, the employees actively wanted to live somewhere else and were in a practical sense prevented from doing so. They also weren’t willing to work for next to no pay—that is again specifically one of the issues that was raised. It’s also plausible to me that the romantic attraction component was endogenous to the weirdness they were objecting to. It seems like the gist of your argument is ‘weird things they were happy to do’ >= ‘weird things they say they weren’t happy to do’, but a significant proportion of the components on the LHS should actually be on the RHS. That doesn’t mean that any of it is true, but your argument seems like a misreading of the post.
I agree that the payment does create some suboptimal incentives, but I’m operating under the assumption that Ben decided on giving the sources money after hearing about the bulk of what happened, and that they didn’t predict he would do so, rather than something like (to make it more extreme) ‘if you tell me enough crazy stuff to make this worth a forum post, I’ll reimburse you for your trouble’.
I indeed only brought up that I would like to compensate them after they had spent many many hours processing their experiences, explaining them, writing long docs about the hurt they had experienced, and expressed a great deal of fear/intimidation.
Sure, but wasn’t there some previous occasion where Lightcone made a grant to people after they shared negative stories about a former employer (maybe to Zoe Curzi? but I can’t find that atm)? If so, then presumably at some point you get a reputation for doing so.
Yep, Oli gave Zoe Curzi $15k. I do think the reputation-for-it is relevant, and will probably change the dynamics the next time that someone comes to me/Lightcone with reports of terrible behavior, but in this case Alice and Chloe (and others) spent the majority of the time I’m referring to talking to CEA, who has no such reputation.
Notably, one way to offset the reputational issue is to sometimes give people money for saying novel positive things about an org. The issue is less “people receive money for updating us” and more “people receive money only if they updated us in a certain direction”, or even worse “people receive money only if they updated us in a way that fits a specific narrative (e.g., This Org Is Culty And Abusive)”.
I’m especially excited about giving money to people who have been credibly silenced and intimidated. I think this is good, but will systematically spread info about wrongdoing.
If it’s money for “credible signs of intimidation” maybe that’s less gameable.
Actually, I do know of an example of y’all offering money to someone for defending an org you disliked and were suspicious of. @habryka, did that money get accepted?
(The incentive effects are basically the same whether it was accepted or not, as long as it’s public knowledge that the money was offered; so it seems good to make this public if possible.)
That summary is inaccurate, so I don’t think there is any org for which that is true. I offered money to both Zoe Curzi and to Cathleen for doing info-gathering on Leverage stuff, but that was explicitly for both positive and negative information (and happens to have been offered in roughly equal measure, with Zoe writing a quite negative piece and Cathleen writing a relatively positive piece).
According to the post, the employees actively wanted to live somewhere else and were in a practical sense prevented from doing so
No not really, they weren’t prevented from living where they so chose. To me living in fun, exotic locations, but you have to live with your boss sounds simply like a trade-off that the employees were willing to make. I don’t see anything in the post to suggest that they were prevented from doing otherwise. Just that to do otherwise they would probably have had to pick a different job!
They also weren’t willing to work for next to no pay—that is again specifically one of the issues that was raised
Like, why did they do it then? Were they forced to? Was someone making them take this job? I don’t see allegations of this nature in the post. Are you saying that Kat and Emerson have some obligation to accede to their employees requests for higher pay? I can see that the employees wanted higher pay, but the fact remains that they worked for Kat and Emerson and earned next to no pay.
What I see is that the bosses were making an offer, come work for us and we’ll pay for your expenses and let you live with us rent free. But they weren’t making an offer to, come work for us and we’ll pay you a salary. Yes, employees often prefer to get paid more and to get paid in different ways. This doesn’t mean an employer who offers them a worse deal is preventing them from taking the better deal. Your response suggests that if Bob presents Charles options A and B, Charles doesn’t really have a free choice if he prefers unoffered option C. If the employees thought they could get a job that pays more somewhere else they could have taken that other job.[1]
‘weird things they were happy to do’ >= ‘weird things they say they weren’t happy to do’
I’m not saying “happy to do” I’m saying “chose to do freely and willingly without any undue coercion.”
but a significant proportion of the components on the LHS should actually be on the RHS
This seems wrong on it’s face to me from the body of the post. Ben says:
I do have a strong heuristic that says consenting adults can agree to all sorts of things that eventually hurt them (i.e. in accepting these jobs), even if I paternalistically might think I could have prevented them from hurting themselves. That said, I see clear reasons to think that Kat, Emerson and Drew intimidated these people into accepting some of the actions or dynamics that hurt them, so some parts do not seem obviously consensual to me.
And I honestly don’t see any of the clear reasons Ben suggests. I see intimidation designed to prevent the employees from badmouthing Kat and Emerson, but not any intimidation to keep working for them. Ben just cites to Emerson’s comment that, “he gets mad at his employees who leave his company for other jobs that are equally good or less good.” Which sounds weird to me, but doesn’t suggest retaliation or intimidation.
To me, the clearly consensual[2] LHS ‘having sex with the boss’ suggests that most everything is LHS. If someone can freely leave a job, and is having sex with their boss totally freely, I don’t think their complaints about other, smaller workplace troubles have much validity.
If it turns out that this wasn’t consensual my opinion on the whole situation changes significantly. But I have seen 0 allegations suggesting the intern-boss relationship wasn’t wholly consensual (besides the whole intern-boss thing) so I’m not going to read those allegations in on my own.
I don’t think the post fully conveyed it, but I think the employees were quite afraid of leaving and expected this to get them a lot of backlash or consequences. A particularly salient for people early in EA careers is what kind of reference they’ll get.
Think about the situation of leaving your first EA job after a few months. Option 1: say nothing about why you left, have no explanation for leaving early, don’t really get a reference. Option 2: explain why the conditions were bad, risk the ire of Nonlinear (who are willing to say things like “your career could be over in a couple of DMs”). It’s that kind of bind that gets people to keep persisting, hope it’ll get better.
The agreement was $75k, which is very much not next to nothing, and regardless of the split of expenses/cash, it doesn’t seem like they added up to close to that?
It was $70k in approximate/expected total compensation. The $1k a month was just a small part of the total compensation package.
Despite false claims to the contrary, it wasn’t just verbally agreed, we have written records.
Despite false claims to the contrary, we were roughly on track to spend that much. This is another thing we will show evidence for ASAP, but there is a lot of accounting/record keeping etc to do to organize all the spending information, etc.
According to the post, the employees actively wanted to live somewhere else and were in a practical sense prevented from doing so. They also weren’t willing to work for next to no pay—that is again specifically one of the issues that was raised. It’s also plausible to me that the romantic attraction component was endogenous to the weirdness they were objecting to. It seems like the gist of your argument is ‘weird things they were happy to do’ >= ‘weird things they say they weren’t happy to do’, but a significant proportion of the components on the LHS should actually be on the RHS. That doesn’t mean that any of it is true, but your argument seems like a misreading of the post.
I agree that the payment does create some suboptimal incentives, but I’m operating under the assumption that Ben decided on giving the sources money after hearing about the bulk of what happened, and that they didn’t predict he would do so, rather than something like (to make it more extreme) ‘if you tell me enough crazy stuff to make this worth a forum post, I’ll reimburse you for your trouble’.
I indeed only brought up that I would like to compensate them after they had spent many many hours processing their experiences, explaining them, writing long docs about the hurt they had experienced, and expressed a great deal of fear/intimidation.
Sure, but wasn’t there some previous occasion where Lightcone made a grant to people after they shared negative stories about a former employer (maybe to Zoe Curzi? but I can’t find that atm)? If so, then presumably at some point you get a reputation for doing so.
Yep, Oli gave Zoe Curzi $15k. I do think the reputation-for-it is relevant, and will probably change the dynamics the next time that someone comes to me/Lightcone with reports of terrible behavior, but in this case Alice and Chloe (and others) spent the majority of the time I’m referring to talking to CEA, who has no such reputation.
Notably, one way to offset the reputational issue is to sometimes give people money for saying novel positive things about an org. The issue is less “people receive money for updating us” and more “people receive money only if they updated us in a certain direction”, or even worse “people receive money only if they updated us in a way that fits a specific narrative (e.g., This Org Is Culty And Abusive)”.
I’m especially excited about giving money to people who have been credibly silenced and intimidated. I think this is good, but will systematically spread info about wrongdoing.
If it’s money for “credible signs of intimidation” maybe that’s less gameable.
Actually, I do know of an example of y’all offering money to someone for defending an org you disliked and were suspicious of. @habryka, did that money get accepted?
(The incentive effects are basically the same whether it was accepted or not, as long as it’s public knowledge that the money was offered; so it seems good to make this public if possible.)
That summary is inaccurate, so I don’t think there is any org for which that is true. I offered money to both Zoe Curzi and to Cathleen for doing info-gathering on Leverage stuff, but that was explicitly for both positive and negative information (and happens to have been offered in roughly equal measure, with Zoe writing a quite negative piece and Cathleen writing a relatively positive piece).
No not really, they weren’t prevented from living where they so chose. To me living in fun, exotic locations, but you have to live with your boss sounds simply like a trade-off that the employees were willing to make. I don’t see anything in the post to suggest that they were prevented from doing otherwise. Just that to do otherwise they would probably have had to pick a different job!
Like, why did they do it then? Were they forced to? Was someone making them take this job? I don’t see allegations of this nature in the post. Are you saying that Kat and Emerson have some obligation to accede to their employees requests for higher pay? I can see that the employees wanted higher pay, but the fact remains that they worked for Kat and Emerson and earned next to no pay.
What I see is that the bosses were making an offer, come work for us and we’ll pay for your expenses and let you live with us rent free. But they weren’t making an offer to, come work for us and we’ll pay you a salary. Yes, employees often prefer to get paid more and to get paid in different ways. This doesn’t mean an employer who offers them a worse deal is preventing them from taking the better deal. Your response suggests that if Bob presents Charles options A and B, Charles doesn’t really have a free choice if he prefers unoffered option C. If the employees thought they could get a job that pays more somewhere else they could have taken that other job.[1]
I’m not saying “happy to do” I’m saying “chose to do freely and willingly without any undue coercion.”
This seems wrong on it’s face to me from the body of the post. Ben says:
And I honestly don’t see any of the clear reasons Ben suggests. I see intimidation designed to prevent the employees from badmouthing Kat and Emerson, but not any intimidation to keep working for them. Ben just cites to Emerson’s comment that, “he gets mad at his employees who leave his company for other jobs that are equally good or less good.” Which sounds weird to me, but doesn’t suggest retaliation or intimidation.
To me, the clearly consensual[2] LHS ‘having sex with the boss’ suggests that most everything is LHS. If someone can freely leave a job, and is having sex with their boss totally freely, I don’t think their complaints about other, smaller workplace troubles have much validity.
Something I have experience with!
If it turns out that this wasn’t consensual my opinion on the whole situation changes significantly. But I have seen 0 allegations suggesting the intern-boss relationship wasn’t wholly consensual (besides the whole intern-boss thing) so I’m not going to read those allegations in on my own.
I don’t think the post fully conveyed it, but I think the employees were quite afraid of leaving and expected this to get them a lot of backlash or consequences. A particularly salient for people early in EA careers is what kind of reference they’ll get.
Think about the situation of leaving your first EA job after a few months. Option 1: say nothing about why you left, have no explanation for leaving early, don’t really get a reference. Option 2: explain why the conditions were bad, risk the ire of Nonlinear (who are willing to say things like “your career could be over in a couple of DMs”). It’s that kind of bind that gets people to keep persisting, hope it’ll get better.
The agreement was $75k, which is very much not next to nothing, and regardless of the split of expenses/cash, it doesn’t seem like they added up to close to that?
Just to clear up a view things:
It was $70k in approximate/expected total compensation. The $1k a month was just a small part of the total compensation package.
Despite false claims to the contrary, it wasn’t just verbally agreed, we have written records.
Despite false claims to the contrary, we were roughly on track to spend that much. This is another thing we will show evidence for ASAP, but there is a lot of accounting/record keeping etc to do to organize all the spending information, etc.