This is a short response while I write up something more substantial.
The true story is very different than the one you just read.
Ben Pace purposefully posted this without seeing our evidence first, which I believe is unethical and violates important epistemic norms.
He said “I don’t believe I am beholden to give you time to prepare”
We told him we have incontrovertible proof that many of the important claims were false or extremely misleading. We told him that we were working full-time on gathering the evidence to send him.
We told him we needed a week to get it all together because there is a lot of it. Work contracts, receipts, chat histories, transcripts, etc.
Instead of waiting to see the evidence, he published. I feel like this indicates his lack of interest in truth.
He did this despite there being no time sensitivity to this question and working on it for months. Despite him saying that he would look at the evidence.
I’m having to deal with one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me. Somebody who I used to care about is telling lies about me to my professional and social community that make me seem like a monster. And I have clear evidenceto show that they’re lies.
Please, if you’re reading this, before signal boosting, I beg you to please reserve judgment until we have had a chance to present our evidence.
Ben Pace purposefully posted this without seeing our evidence first, which I believe is unethical and violates important epistemic norms.
For what it’s worth, I do not view this post as unethical or violating important epistemic norms. [I do think repeating hearsay is unseemly—I would prefer the post written by Alice and Chloe—but I see why Ben is doing it in this case.]
A factor that seems somewhat important to me, and perhaps underlies a major disagreement here, is that I think reputation, while it is about you, is not for you. It’s for the community you’re a part of, so that other people can have accurate expectations of what you’re like; both to help people who will appreciate interacting with you find you and help people who will regret interacting with you avoid you. Trying to manage your reputation is like trying to manage your bank balance: there are a small handful of ethical ways to do it and many unethical ways to do it.
And so the most concerning parts of the post (to me) are the parts where it sounds like you’re trying to suppress negative evidence, and the response from Nonlinear in the comments so far feels like it supports that narrative instead of undermining it.
Could we have a list of everything you think this post gets wrong, separately from the evidence that each of those points is wrong?
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems like it should take less than an hour to read the post, make a note of every claim that’s not true, and then post that list of false claims, even if it would take many days to collect all the evidence that shows those points are false.
I imagine that would be helpful for you, because readers are much more likely to reserve judgement if you listed which specific things are false.
Personally, I could look over that list and say “oh yeah, number 8 [or whatever] is cruxy for me. If that turns out not to be true, I think that substantially changes my sense of the situation.”, and I would feel actively interested in what evidence you provide regarding that point later. And it would let you know which points to prioritize refuting, because you would know which things are cruxy for people reading.
In contrast, a generalized bid to reserve judgement because “many of the important claims were false or extremely misleading”...well, it just seems less credible, and so leaves me less willing to actually reserve judgement.
Indeed, deferring on producing such a list of claims-you-think-are-false suggests the possibility that you’re trying to “get your story straight.” ie that you’re taking the time now to hurriedly go through and check which facts you and others will be able to prove or disprove, so that you know which things you can safely lie or exagerate about, or what narrative paints you in the best light while still being consistent with the legible facts.
Yup, I strongly agree. And I’d even go further and say that there are pretty large diminishing returns at play here. It should take even less time to come up with a list of the most important and cruxy things. Ie. maybe tier 1 of the total list takes 20 minutes and provides 70% of the value, tier 2 takes an additional 40 minutes and provides an additional 20% of the value, etc.
I am confused how to square your claim of requesting extra time for incontrovertible proof, with Ben’s claim that he had a 3 hour call with you and sent the summary to Emerson, who then replied “good summary!”
Was Emerson’s full reply something like, “Good summary! We have incontrovertible proof disproving the claims made against us, please allow us one week to provide it?”
Yes, Ben took Emerson’s full email out of context, implying that Emerson was fully satisfied when in actuality, Emerson was saying, no, there is more to discuss—so much that we’d need a week to organize it.
He got multiple extremely key things wrong in that summary and was also missing key points we discussed on the call, but we figured there would be no reason he wouldn’t give us a week to clear everything up. Especially since he had been working on it for months.
(Just for the record, I would have probably also walked away from this email interaction thinking that the summary did not “get multiple extremely key things wrong”, according to you.
I feel kind of bad about summarizing it as just “good summary” without the “some points still require clarification” bit, but I do think that if you intended to communicate that the summary had major issues, you did fail at that, and indeed, it really seems to me like you said something that directly contradicted that)
We were very clear that we felt there were still major issues to address. Here’s another email in the thread a day later:
We also clearly told Ben and Robert in the call many times that there is a lot more to the story, and we have many more examples to share. This is why we suggested writing everything up, to be more precise and not say anything that was factually untrue. Since our former employees’ reputations are on the line as well, it makes sense to try to be very deliberate.
It’s possible there was a miscommunication between you and Ben around how strongly we communicated the fact that there was a lot more here.
Wait, just so I understand, what I thought happened was that Ben sent you the summary before a call, to which you sent the first email (saying “good summary”).
Then Ben said that he planned to publish this whole post and shared you on a draft, at which point you sent the email screenshotted in your most recent reply. They are responding to totally different pieces of text.
I absolutely agree that you clearly communicated that you think the full post is full of inaccuracies, but we were talking about whether the specific summary that Ben shared with you first, which is now included in this post as the “Paraphrasing Nonlinear” section, was something you communicated was inaccurate, which does not seem true to me according to the emails you shared here.
Honestly, one of the reasons I don’t find the Nonlinear narrative credible is the absolute 100% denial of any wrongdoing, a 0% reflection. Clearly, Ben really looked into this and has various accounts from multiple people or really questionable behavior, that seems very credible and to come against all of it with such force and conviction is a tactic of people who want to deny and distort the truth.
To be clear—I think Nonlinear may honestly feel wronged here and in their story, they are the victim. I’m not necessarily saying that they are purposefully lying about this—they may believe what they are saying/describing.
Given that it’s been a while since @Kat Woods and @Emerson Spartz claimed they had “incontrovertible proof” that warranted a delay in publishing, I’m hoping it’s coming out soon. If not, a simple “we goofed” response would seem appropriate.
I think it might actually be better if you just went ahead with a rebuttal, piece by piece, starting with whatever seems most pressing and you have an answer for.
I don’t know if it is all that advantageous to put together a long mega-rebuttal post that counters everything at once.
Then you don’t have that demand nagging at you for a week while you write the perfect presentation of your side of the story.
This is a short response while I write up something more substantial.
The true story is very different than the one you just read.
Ben Pace purposefully posted this without seeing our evidence first, which I believe is unethical and violates important epistemic norms.
He said “I don’t believe I am beholden to give you time to prepare”
We told him we have incontrovertible proof that many of the important claims were false or extremely misleading. We told him that we were working full-time on gathering the evidence to send him.
We told him we needed a week to get it all together because there is a lot of it. Work contracts, receipts, chat histories, transcripts, etc.
Instead of waiting to see the evidence, he published. I feel like this indicates his lack of interest in truth.
He did this despite there being no time sensitivity to this question and working on it for months. Despite him saying that he would look at the evidence.
I’m having to deal with one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me. Somebody who I used to care about is telling lies about me to my professional and social community that make me seem like a monster. And I have clear evidence to show that they’re lies.
Please, if you’re reading this, before signal boosting, I beg you to please reserve judgment until we have had a chance to present our evidence.
For what it’s worth, I do not view this post as unethical or violating important epistemic norms. [I do think repeating hearsay is unseemly—I would prefer the post written by Alice and Chloe—but I see why Ben is doing it in this case.]
A factor that seems somewhat important to me, and perhaps underlies a major disagreement here, is that I think reputation, while it is about you, is not for you. It’s for the community you’re a part of, so that other people can have accurate expectations of what you’re like; both to help people who will appreciate interacting with you find you and help people who will regret interacting with you avoid you. Trying to manage your reputation is like trying to manage your bank balance: there are a small handful of ethical ways to do it and many unethical ways to do it.
And so the most concerning parts of the post (to me) are the parts where it sounds like you’re trying to suppress negative evidence, and the response from Nonlinear in the comments so far feels like it supports that narrative instead of undermining it.
Could we have a list of everything you think this post gets wrong, separately from the evidence that each of those points is wrong?
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems like it should take less than an hour to read the post, make a note of every claim that’s not true, and then post that list of false claims, even if it would take many days to collect all the evidence that shows those points are false.
I imagine that would be helpful for you, because readers are much more likely to reserve judgement if you listed which specific things are false.
Personally, I could look over that list and say “oh yeah, number 8 [or whatever] is cruxy for me. If that turns out not to be true, I think that substantially changes my sense of the situation.”, and I would feel actively interested in what evidence you provide regarding that point later. And it would let you know which points to prioritize refuting, because you would know which things are cruxy for people reading.
In contrast, a generalized bid to reserve judgement because “many of the important claims were false or extremely misleading”...well, it just seems less credible, and so leaves me less willing to actually reserve judgement.
Indeed, deferring on producing such a list of claims-you-think-are-false suggests the possibility that you’re trying to “get your story straight.” ie that you’re taking the time now to hurriedly go through and check which facts you and others will be able to prove or disprove, so that you know which things you can safely lie or exagerate about, or what narrative paints you in the best light while still being consistent with the legible facts.
Yup, I strongly agree. And I’d even go further and say that there are pretty large diminishing returns at play here. It should take even less time to come up with a list of the most important and cruxy things. Ie. maybe tier 1 of the total list takes 20 minutes and provides 70% of the value, tier 2 takes an additional 40 minutes and provides an additional 20% of the value, etc.
I am confused how to square your claim of requesting extra time for incontrovertible proof, with Ben’s claim that he had a 3 hour call with you and sent the summary to Emerson, who then replied “good summary!”
Was Emerson’s full reply something like, “Good summary! We have incontrovertible proof disproving the claims made against us, please allow us one week to provide it?”
Yes, Ben took Emerson’s full email out of context, implying that Emerson was fully satisfied when in actuality, Emerson was saying, no, there is more to discuss—so much that we’d need a week to organize it.
He got multiple extremely key things wrong in that summary and was also missing key points we discussed on the call, but we figured there would be no reason he wouldn’t give us a week to clear everything up. Especially since he had been working on it for months.
(Just for the record, I would have probably also walked away from this email interaction thinking that the summary did not “get multiple extremely key things wrong”, according to you.
I feel kind of bad about summarizing it as just “good summary” without the “some points still require clarification” bit, but I do think that if you intended to communicate that the summary had major issues, you did fail at that, and indeed, it really seems to me like you said something that directly contradicted that)
We were very clear that we felt there were still major issues to address. Here’s another email in the thread a day later:
We also clearly told Ben and Robert in the call many times that there is a lot more to the story, and we have many more examples to share. This is why we suggested writing everything up, to be more precise and not say anything that was factually untrue. Since our former employees’ reputations are on the line as well, it makes sense to try to be very deliberate.
It’s possible there was a miscommunication between you and Ben around how strongly we communicated the fact that there was a lot more here.
Wait, just so I understand, what I thought happened was that Ben sent you the summary before a call, to which you sent the first email (saying “good summary”).
Then Ben said that he planned to publish this whole post and shared you on a draft, at which point you sent the email screenshotted in your most recent reply. They are responding to totally different pieces of text.
I absolutely agree that you clearly communicated that you think the full post is full of inaccuracies, but we were talking about whether the specific summary that Ben shared with you first, which is now included in this post as the “Paraphrasing Nonlinear” section, was something you communicated was inaccurate, which does not seem true to me according to the emails you shared here.
Honestly, one of the reasons I don’t find the Nonlinear narrative credible is the absolute 100% denial of any wrongdoing, a 0% reflection. Clearly, Ben really looked into this and has various accounts from multiple people or really questionable behavior, that seems very credible and to come against all of it with such force and conviction is a tactic of people who want to deny and distort the truth.
To be clear—I think Nonlinear may honestly feel wronged here and in their story, they are the victim. I’m not necessarily saying that they are purposefully lying about this—they may believe what they are saying/describing.
Given that it’s been a while since @Kat Woods and @Emerson Spartz claimed they had “incontrovertible proof” that warranted a delay in publishing, I’m hoping it’s coming out soon. If not, a simple “we goofed” response would seem appropriate.
I think it might actually be better if you just went ahead with a rebuttal, piece by piece, starting with whatever seems most pressing and you have an answer for.
I don’t know if it is all that advantageous to put together a long mega-rebuttal post that counters everything at once.
Then you don’t have that demand nagging at you for a week while you write the perfect presentation of your side of the story.