I think if you are a cofounder of a organization and have a front row seat, that even if you were not directly doing the worst things, I want hold you culpable for not noticing or intervening.
“Alice quit being vegan while working there. 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.”
Seems like other people besides Ruby are confused about this too, maybe also because Ben sometimes says “the Nonlinear cofounders” and Emerson/Kat/Drew
A source of terminological confusion here is that Lightcone team often internally uses the word cofounder to mean ‘person with a very strong investment and generalist skill set, who takes responsibility in a particular way’. Ie have used it to refer to multiple people on the Lightcone team who didn’t literally found the org but are pretty deeply involved.
The crux for me with Drew, and I assume with Ruby/Ben, is ‘does he have that kind of relationship with the org?’, rather than ‘did he literally cofound the org’.
I do think this terminology is probably confusing for other readers, and seems good to correct, although I would guess not actually misleading in an way that’s particularly relevant for most people’s assessment of the situation.
I think it is not correct to refer to a person of a “cofounder” of an org because they seem to be a generalist taking responsibility for the org, if they did not actually co-found the org and are not referred to as a cofounder by the org.
This seems like a simple error / oversight, rather than a deliberate choice.
But I definitely don’t feel like the assessment of “this person was in a defacto cofounder role, in practice, so it’s not a big deal if we call them a cofounder” holds water.
FWIW, I also don’t think this holds water, and at least I don’t use co-founder this way these days (though maybe Ray does). The LessWrong/Lightcone team developed very gradually, and I think it’s reasonable to call the people who came on board in like the first 1-2 years of existence of the project co-founders, since it grew gradually and as a fiscally sponsored nonprofit we never went through a formal incorporation step that would have formalized equity shares in the same clear way, but I think while it might make sense to call anyone coming on later than that some title that emphasizes that they have a lot of responsibility and stake in the organization, it doesn’t IMO make sense to refer to them as a “co-founder”.
I’m not arguing that this usage is good, I just think it’s the usage Ben and Ruby were implicitly using. I’m guessing Drew is in a role that is closer to me, Jim or Ruby, which was a time period you were explicitly calling us cofounders. Which it sounds like you still endorse?
(To be clear I agree the word is misleading here, and Ben should probably edit the word to something clearer. I also don’t really think it made sense for the Lightcone team to talk about itself having 5 cofounders, which I think we explicitly did at the time. I was just noting the language-usage-difference.
But also this doesn’t seem cruxy to me about the substance of the claim that “Drew was involved enough that he had some obligation to notice if fishy things were going on, even if they weren’t explicitly his responsibility”)
I don’t think I would call Jim or Ruby cofounders, especially in any public setting. I do think to set expectations for what it’s like to work with me on LessWrong, back then, I would frequently say something like “cofounder level stake and responsibility”, though I think that has definitely shifted over time.
I have this opposing consideration. I think it does speak to your point—I gather that part of the reason Alice and Chloe feel this way is that Drew did try to be helpful with respect to their concerns, at least to whatever degree was required for them to ask for him to be shielded from professional consequences.
Here’s another (in my view weaker, but perhaps more directly relevant to your point) consideration. To the extent you believe that Nonlinear has been a disfunctional environment, in significant part due to domineering characteristics of senior staff, I think that you should also believe that a junior family member beginning to work in this environment is going to have a hard time reasoning through and pushing back against it. Happy to expand.
As I understand it – with my only source being Ben’s post and a couple of comments that I’ve read – Drew is also a cofounder of Nonlinear. Also, this was reported:
Alice and Chloe reported a substantial conflict within the household between Kat and Alice. Alice was polyamorous, and she and Drew entered into a casual romantic relationship. Kat previously had a polyamorous marriage that ended in divorce, and is now monogamously partnered with Emerson. Kat reportedly told Alice that she didn’t mind polyamory “on the other side of the world”, but couldn’t stand it right next to her, and probably either Alice would need to become monogamous or Alice should leave the organization. Alice didn’t become monogamous. Alice reports that Kat became increasingly cold over multiple months, and was very hard to work with. (footnote) After this, there were further reports of claims of Kat professing her romantic love for Alice, and also precisely opposite reports of Alice professing her romantic love for Kat. I am pretty confused about what happened.
So, based on what we’re told, there was romantic entanglement between the employers – Drew included – and Alice, and such relationships, even in the best-case scenario, need to be handled with a lot of caution, and this situation seems to be significantly worse than a best-case scenario.
My understanding (definitely fallible, but I’ve been quite engaged in this case, and am one of the people Ben interviewed) has been that Alice and Chloe are not concerned about this, and in fact that they both wish to insulate Drew from any negative consequences. This seems to me like an informative and important consideration. (It also gives me reason to think that the benefits of gaining more information about this are less likely to be worth the costs.)
This seems like a potentially downstream issue of rationalist/EA organizations ignoring a few Chesterton Fences that are really important, and one of those Chesterton Fences is not having dating/romantic relationships in the employment context if there is any power asymmetry issues. These can easily lead to abuse or worse issues.
In general, one impression I get from a lot of rationalist/EA organizations is that there are very few boundaries between work, romantic/dating and potentially living depending on the organization, and the ones it does have are either much too illegible and high context, especially social context, and/or are way too porous, in that they can be easily violated.
Yes, there are no preformed Cartesian boundaries that we can use, but that doesn’t stop us from at least forming approximate boundaries and enforcing them, and while legible norms are never fun and have their costs, I do think that the benefits of legible norms, especially epistemically legible norms in the dating/romantic scene, especially in an employment context are very, very high value, so much that I think the downsides aren’t enough to say that it’s bad overall to enforce legible norms around dating/romantic relationships in the employment context. I’d say somewhat similar things around legible norms on living situations, pay etc.
Seems like some rationalists have a standard solution to Chesterton’s Fence: “Yes, I absolutely understand why the fence is there. It was built for stupid people. Since I am smart, the same rules obviously do not apply to me.”
And when later something bad happens (quite predictably, the outside view would say), the lesson they take seems to be: “Well, apparently those people were not smart enough or didn’t do their research properly. Unlike me. So this piece of evidence does not apply to me.”
*
I actually often agree with the first part. It’s just that it is easy to overestimate one’s own smartness. Especially because it isn’t a single thing, and people can be e.g. very smart at math, and maybe average (i.e. not even stupid, just not exceptionally smart either) in human relations. Also, collective wisdom can be aware of rare but highly negative outcomes, which seem unlikely to you, because they are, in fact, rare.
What makes my blood boil is the second part. If you can’t predict ahead who will turn out “apparently not that smart” and you only say it in hindsight after the bad thing has already happened, it means you are just making excuses to ignore the evidence. Even if, hypothetically speaking, you are the smartest person and the rules truly do not apply to you, it is still highly irresponsible to promote this behavior among rationalists in general (because you know that a fraction of them will later turn out to be “not that smart” and will get hurt, even if that fraction may not include you).
promote this behavior among rationalists in general
What are you imagining when you say “promote this behavior”? Writing lesswrong posts in favor? Choosing to live that way yourself? Privately recommending that people do that? Not commenting when other people say that they’re planning to do something that violates the Chesterton’s fence?
The example I had mostly in mind was experimenting with drugs. I think there were no posts on LW in favor of this, but it gets a lot of defense in comments. Like when someone mentions in some debate that they know rationalists who have overdosed, or who went crazy after experimenting with drugs, someone else always publicly objects against collectively taking the lesson.
If people do stupid things in private, that can’t (and arguably shouldn’t) be prevented.
There were various suspicious/bad things Drew did.
Viewed in isolation, that could have a wide spectrum of explanations. Maybe we could call it weak-to-moderate evidence in favor of him being “bad”.
But then we have to factor in the choice he’s made to kinda hang around Emerson and Kat for this long. If we suppose[1] that we are very confident that Emerson and Kat are very bad people who’ve done very bad things, then, well, that doesn’t reflect very favorably on Drew. I think it is moderate-to-strong evidence that Drew is “bad”.
To “there were various suspicious/bad things Drew did,” I would reply:
I have this opposing consideration. [...] I gather that part of the reason Alice and Chloe feel this way is that Drew did try to be helpful with respect to their concerns, at least to whatever degree was required for them to ask for him to be shielded from professional consequences.
and, to “the choice he’s made to kinda hang around Emerson and Kat for this long,” I would reply:
To the extent you believe that Nonlinear has been a disfunctional environment, in significant part due to domineering characteristics of senior staff, I think that you should also believe that a junior family member beginning to work in this environment is going to have a hard time reasoning through and pushing back against it.
To the extent you believe that Nonlinear has been a disfunctional environment, in significant part due to domineering characteristics of senior staff, I think that you should also believe that a junior family member beginning to work in this environment is going to have a hard time reasoning through and pushing back against it.
Successfully pushing back against is certainly difficult. Instead, I would expect, in general, Good Person to not have a very strong relationship with their brother, Bad Person, in the first place, and either not end up working with them or quitting once they started working with them and observed various bad things.
Why include Drew?
I think if you are a cofounder of a organization and have a front row seat, that even if you were not directly doing the worst things, I want hold you culpable for not noticing or intervening.
Just FYI Drew is not a cofounder of Nonlinear. That is another inaccurate claim from the article. He did not join full time until April 2022.
Which part of the post claims that? The post seems to say the opposite:
There might be another part that does refer to Drew as a co-founder, but I can’t find anything of that sort.
“Alice quit being vegan while working there. 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.”
Seems like other people besides Ruby are confused about this too, maybe also because Ben sometimes says “the Nonlinear cofounders” and Emerson/Kat/Drew
A source of terminological confusion here is that Lightcone team often internally uses the word cofounder to mean ‘person with a very strong investment and generalist skill set, who takes responsibility in a particular way’. Ie have used it to refer to multiple people on the Lightcone team who didn’t literally found the org but are pretty deeply involved.
The crux for me with Drew, and I assume with Ruby/Ben, is ‘does he have that kind of relationship with the org?’, rather than ‘did he literally cofound the org’.
I do think this terminology is probably confusing for other readers, and seems good to correct, although I would guess not actually misleading in an way that’s particularly relevant for most people’s assessment of the situation.
I think it is not correct to refer to a person of a “cofounder” of an org because they seem to be a generalist taking responsibility for the org, if they did not actually co-found the org and are not referred to as a cofounder by the org.
This seems like a simple error / oversight, rather than a deliberate choice.
But I definitely don’t feel like the assessment of “this person was in a defacto cofounder role, in practice, so it’s not a big deal if we call them a cofounder” holds water.
FWIW, I also don’t think this holds water, and at least I don’t use co-founder this way these days (though maybe Ray does). The LessWrong/Lightcone team developed very gradually, and I think it’s reasonable to call the people who came on board in like the first 1-2 years of existence of the project co-founders, since it grew gradually and as a fiscally sponsored nonprofit we never went through a formal incorporation step that would have formalized equity shares in the same clear way, but I think while it might make sense to call anyone coming on later than that some title that emphasizes that they have a lot of responsibility and stake in the organization, it doesn’t IMO make sense to refer to them as a “co-founder”.
I’m not arguing that this usage is good, I just think it’s the usage Ben and Ruby were implicitly using. I’m guessing Drew is in a role that is closer to me, Jim or Ruby, which was a time period you were explicitly calling us cofounders. Which it sounds like you still endorse?
(To be clear I agree the word is misleading here, and Ben should probably edit the word to something clearer. I also don’t really think it made sense for the Lightcone team to talk about itself having 5 cofounders, which I think we explicitly did at the time. I was just noting the language-usage-difference.
But also this doesn’t seem cruxy to me about the substance of the claim that “Drew was involved enough that he had some obligation to notice if fishy things were going on, even if they weren’t explicitly his responsibility”)
I don’t think I would call Jim or Ruby cofounders, especially in any public setting. I do think to set expectations for what it’s like to work with me on LessWrong, back then, I would frequently say something like “cofounder level stake and responsibility”, though I think that has definitely shifted over time.
In practice I don’t think there was any pump against linguistic drift to abbreviate ‘cofounder level responsibility’ to ‘cofounder’.
e.g.
I have this opposing consideration. I think it does speak to your point—I gather that part of the reason Alice and Chloe feel this way is that Drew did try to be helpful with respect to their concerns, at least to whatever degree was required for them to ask for him to be shielded from professional consequences.
Here’s another (in my view weaker, but perhaps more directly relevant to your point) consideration. To the extent you believe that Nonlinear has been a disfunctional environment, in significant part due to domineering characteristics of senior staff, I think that you should also believe that a junior family member beginning to work in this environment is going to have a hard time reasoning through and pushing back against it. Happy to expand.
As I understand it – with my only source being Ben’s post and a couple of comments that I’ve read – Drew is also a cofounder of Nonlinear. Also, this was reported:
So, based on what we’re told, there was romantic entanglement between the employers – Drew included – and Alice, and such relationships, even in the best-case scenario, need to be handled with a lot of caution, and this situation seems to be significantly worse than a best-case scenario.
My understanding (definitely fallible, but I’ve been quite engaged in this case, and am one of the people Ben interviewed) has been that Alice and Chloe are not concerned about this, and in fact that they both wish to insulate Drew from any negative consequences. This seems to me like an informative and important consideration. (It also gives me reason to think that the benefits of gaining more information about this are less likely to be worth the costs.)
This seems like a potentially downstream issue of rationalist/EA organizations ignoring a few Chesterton Fences that are really important, and one of those Chesterton Fences is not having dating/romantic relationships in the employment context if there is any power asymmetry issues. These can easily lead to abuse or worse issues.
In general, one impression I get from a lot of rationalist/EA organizations is that there are very few boundaries between work, romantic/dating and potentially living depending on the organization, and the ones it does have are either much too illegible and high context, especially social context, and/or are way too porous, in that they can be easily violated.
Yes, there are no preformed Cartesian boundaries that we can use, but that doesn’t stop us from at least forming approximate boundaries and enforcing them, and while legible norms are never fun and have their costs, I do think that the benefits of legible norms, especially epistemically legible norms in the dating/romantic scene, especially in an employment context are very, very high value, so much that I think the downsides aren’t enough to say that it’s bad overall to enforce legible norms around dating/romantic relationships in the employment context. I’d say somewhat similar things around legible norms on living situations, pay etc.
Seems like some rationalists have a standard solution to Chesterton’s Fence: “Yes, I absolutely understand why the fence is there. It was built for stupid people. Since I am smart, the same rules obviously do not apply to me.”
And when later something bad happens (quite predictably, the outside view would say), the lesson they take seems to be: “Well, apparently those people were not smart enough or didn’t do their research properly. Unlike me. So this piece of evidence does not apply to me.”
*
I actually often agree with the first part. It’s just that it is easy to overestimate one’s own smartness. Especially because it isn’t a single thing, and people can be e.g. very smart at math, and maybe average (i.e. not even stupid, just not exceptionally smart either) in human relations. Also, collective wisdom can be aware of rare but highly negative outcomes, which seem unlikely to you, because they are, in fact, rare.
What makes my blood boil is the second part. If you can’t predict ahead who will turn out “apparently not that smart” and you only say it in hindsight after the bad thing has already happened, it means you are just making excuses to ignore the evidence. Even if, hypothetically speaking, you are the smartest person and the rules truly do not apply to you, it is still highly irresponsible to promote this behavior among rationalists in general (because you know that a fraction of them will later turn out to be “not that smart” and will get hurt, even if that fraction may not include you).
What are you imagining when you say “promote this behavior”? Writing lesswrong posts in favor? Choosing to live that way yourself? Privately recommending that people do that? Not commenting when other people say that they’re planning to do something that violates the Chesterton’s fence?
The example I had mostly in mind was experimenting with drugs. I think there were no posts on LW in favor of this, but it gets a lot of defense in comments. Like when someone mentions in some debate that they know rationalists who have overdosed, or who went crazy after experimenting with drugs, someone else always publicly objects against collectively taking the lesson.
If people do stupid things in private, that can’t (and arguably shouldn’t) be prevented.
There were various suspicious/bad things Drew did.
Viewed in isolation, that could have a wide spectrum of explanations. Maybe we could call it weak-to-moderate evidence in favor of him being “bad”.
But then we have to factor in the choice he’s made to kinda hang around Emerson and Kat for this long. If we suppose[1] that we are very confident that Emerson and Kat are very bad people who’ve done very bad things, then, well, that doesn’t reflect very favorably on Drew. I think it is moderate-to-strong evidence that Drew is “bad”.
If you don’t believe this, then of course it wouldn’t make sense to view his hanging around Emerson and Kat as evidence of him being “bad”.
To “there were various suspicious/bad things Drew did,” I would reply:
and, to “the choice he’s made to kinda hang around Emerson and Kat for this long,” I would reply:
Successfully pushing back against is certainly difficult. Instead, I would expect, in general, Good Person to not have a very strong relationship with their brother, Bad Person, in the first place, and either not end up working with them or quitting once they started working with them and observed various bad things.