A quick update from Nonlinear

post by KatWoods (ea247) · 2023-09-07T21:28:26.569Z · LW · GW · 23 comments

Contents

  One example of the evidence we’re gathering
  Evidence
None
23 comments

One example of the evidence we’re gathering

We are working hard on a point-by-point response to Ben’s article [EA · GW], but wanted to provide a quick example of the sort of evidence we are preparing to share:

Her claim:  “Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.” 


The truth (see screenshots below):

  1. There was vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, mixed nuts, prunes, peanuts, tomatoes, cereal, oranges) which we offered to cook for her.
  2. We were picking up vegan food for her.

Months later, after our relationship deteriorated, she went around telling many people that we starved her. She included details we believe were strategically chosen to depict us in a maximally damaging light - what could be more abusive than refusing to care for a sick girl, alone in a foreign country? And if someone told you that, you’d probably believe them, because who would make something like that up?

Evidence

Initially, we heard she was telling people that she “didn’t eat for days,” but she seems to have adjusted her claim to “barely ate” for “2 days”.

It’s important to note that Alice didn’t lie about something small and unimportant. She accused of us a deeply unethical act - the kind that most people would hear and instantly think you must be a horrible human - and was caught lying.

We believe many people in EA heard this lie and updated unfavorably towards us. A single false rumor like this can unfairly damage someone’s ability to do good, and this is just one among many she told.

We have job contracts, interview recordings, receipts, chat histories, and more, which we are working full-time on preparing.

This claim was a few sentences in Ben’s article but took us hours to refute because we had to track down all of the conversations, make them readable, add context, anonymize people, check our facts, and write up an explanation that was rigorous and clear. Ben’s article is over 10,000 words and we’re working as fast as we can to respond to every point he made. 

Again, we are not asking for the community to believe us unconditionally. We want to show everybody all of the evidence and also take responsibility for the mistakes we made. 

We’re just asking that you not overupdate on hearing just one side, and keep an open mind for the evidence we’ll be sharing as soon as we can. 

23 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Adam Zerner (adamzerner) · 2023-09-08T01:02:25.667Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Meta: I would like to see these sorts of posts receive substantially less attention.

  • I see the primary topic as being "drama" (for lack of a better term).
  • I think drama tends to be pretty mind-killing [? · GW], which leads to low quality discussion, discussions that last way too long, and discussions that frequently end up being demon threads [? · GW].
  • I think it usually leaves people feeling kinda sour and bad after reading, skimming, or participating in the discussion.
  • I don't really see what people who aren't in the same social or professional circles as the involved parties have to gain by investing time into these topics. Updating your beliefs about the EA community? Meh, maybe. It seems pretty tough to generalize much about the broader community based on the experiences of the handful of people involved in this incident. But if that is the goal, you can probably take advantage of the Pareto Principle and get perhaps 90% of the benefit with only a few minutes of effort by reading the tl;dr's and top comment or two.

To be clear, I do think it makes sense for the people involved to be discussing this. Reputation is, in fact, important. I also think it makes sense for leaders in the EA community to want to police things a bit. What I'm proposing is that the 99% for whom this isn't actually relevant to your life, don't get sucked in. A few minutes is fine. A few hours probably isn't.

Idea for how these sorts of "drama posts" might be best handled:

  • Voting is turned off.
  • The posts are only available in a special section on LessWrong. They aren't available in the feed on the main page. This nudges users towards more of a Pit Of Success, yet makes the conversation accessible if you do want to go out of your way to join it.
  • They are time-boxed [LW · GW]. Perhaps a "soft" time-box, perhaps a "hard" one. I'm not sure.
  • At the end, a moderator (or group of moderators) makes a judgement, writes up a summary, and we move on.
    • I suppose some sort of appeals process might be needed. I'm not sure. My impression: it'd probably make sense to have one to protect against grievous misjudgement in the initial case, but not as an excuse for dragging the discussion out longer than it deserves.

Edit: I see a lot of smart, high-karma, successful, and impactful people commenting (on Ben's post) in such a way that makes me thing they've spent many hours reading, thinking and writing about this. That makes me sad and frustrated since I believe it is a lot of time and energy that otherwise would be put to quite good use.

Replies from: MondSemmel, elityre, habryka4, Raemon, Viliam, thoth-hermes
↑ comment by MondSemmel · 2023-09-08T07:46:44.877Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree to some extent, but I think it would've been much better if you'd posted this on the original post, not on the reply. The current phrasing of "I would like to see these sorts of posts receive substantially less attention." really doesn't work well when it's in a response post, rather than the original post. The current setup makes it sound (unintentionally) like accusation posts are fine, and only the responses should receive less attention, which I doubt anyone endorses.

Also, it's absolutely silly that this is the top comment on this post. Imagine being on the receiving end of drama, responding to it, and then having the top comment be yours, rather than one which engages with the object-level claims.

So I suggest your comment might be better-suited as a top-level meta post of the form "People spend too much time on community drama" or something, where you'd probably get some interesting back and forth and pushback on that claim, and without taking up oxygen in a post where someone is trying to defend their reputation. If you did make it a full post, you could also do a Fermi estimate of the advantages and disadvantages of engaging in community drama; I'm particularly interested in your estimate, not of participating in the drama, but of posting the drama in the first place.

Replies from: adamzerner
↑ comment by Adam Zerner (adamzerner) · 2023-09-08T08:01:50.780Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree to some extent, but I think it would've been much better if you'd posted this on the original post, not on the reply.

I agree that it would have been better, but disagree about it mattering much. The comment isn't something that is specific to the post. Rather, it is about the particular type of post.

FWIW, the reason I posted it here is simply because it was the first of the two posts I saw, and my impression at the time was that Ben's post was only on the EA Forum, not on LW. From there, it didn't feel worth re-arranging the comments.

It might be better-suited as a top-level meta post of the form "People spend too much time on community drama" or something

Yeah, maybe. I'm not sure.

If you did make it a full post, you could also do a Fermi estimate of the advantages and disadvantages of engaging in community drama; I'm particularly interested in your estimate, not of participating in the drama, but of posting the drama in the first place.

I feel moderately confident that it is a net harm. From behind a veil of ignorance, I wouldn't want it posted.

My model is that it sucks people in, wastes their time, and increases the general degree of hostility without really accomplishing much.

The main thing I see it accomplishing is reinforcing the precedent of accountability; that if you do something bad, the community will hold you accountable and penalize you. However, my sense is that the community already does a pretty good job of this, a good enough job such that there isn't really a need to tug harder on the accountability string.

Replies from: MondSemmel
↑ comment by MondSemmel · 2023-09-08T08:32:16.425Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The main thing I see it accomplishing is reinforcing the precedent of accountability; that if you do something bad, the community will hold you accountable and penalize you. However, my sense is that the community already does a pretty good job of this, a good enough job such that there isn't really a need to tug harder on the accountability string.

Yeah, we're so great at that that we caught FTX in advance, right?

No, seriously, given stuff like FTX, what exactly gives you the impression that we're good enough at accountability? Even if we consider FTX to be a one-off outlier, outliers with outsized impact deserve outsized consideration nonetheless.

↑ comment by Eli Tyre (elityre) · 2023-09-08T03:50:48.419Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think I would like it if there were some soft nudges away from drama posts. 

Something like "hi, you've been reading this post for 30 minutes today, here's a button for blocking it for the rest of the day (you can read and catch up on comments tomorrow)."
 

Replies from: adamzerner
↑ comment by Adam Zerner (adamzerner) · 2023-09-08T03:53:10.589Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah, me too. I'm a little embarrassed to admit, I've checked in on this and on Ben's post a few times in the past few hours, spending perhaps 30-45 minutes skimming around, which is about 25-40 minutes more time than I endorse me and people similar to me spending on this.

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-09-08T01:04:03.670Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This isn't exactly implementing any of your ideas, but do note that these kinds of posts are not on the LessWrong frontpage, i.e. they are hidden by-default from new users unless they deactivate the frontpage-only filter. 

Replies from: frank-bellamy
↑ comment by River (frank-bellamy) · 2023-09-09T00:35:34.029Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It did show up in the podcast, which I believe is just filtered by upvotes?

↑ comment by Raemon · 2023-09-09T21:37:56.658Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I... do want to flag something like "You say you want less attention on posts like this, but, then you commented 15 times on this+the-other-post. Do you endorse that?"

It's not obvious to me whether people-in-general or you-in-particular are spending too much time on this. But.... as the saying goes "You're not 'stuck in traffic.' You are traffic." And, you're not stuck in drama. You are drama. 

I do think there are things we could do on the margin to nudge people somewhat away from drama posts (it turns out EA Forum automatically hides community posts with lots of comments from their Recent Discussion section and I kinda like that idea). 

I think I basically do want established community members putting thought into this, but I think my preferred outcome is something like... jury duty? Like, either explicitly or organically, a few senior members put a lot of time into understanding the situation, hearing evidence from various sources, and writing up their thoughts. But not everyone needs to get consumed.

But, regardless want to flag that if you think there's too much attention here, adding comments is a fairly odd.

Replies from: adamzerner
↑ comment by Adam Zerner (adamzerner) · 2023-09-09T21:52:12.679Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I... do want to flag something like "You say you want less attention on posts like this, but, then you commented 15 times on this+the-other-post. Do you endorse that?"

No, I got sucked in and don't endorse it.

It's been a planning fallacy sort of thing. "Zooming in on this one thing, it doesn't seem too time consuming or bad to jump into. Zooming out: I spent how many hours on this?"

I'm going to try from here on out to be pretty selective about reading and commenting more. I'm not sure how successful I'll end up being though.

I appreciate you pointing this out. I was thinking of bringing it up.

I think I basically do want established community members putting thought into this, but I think my preferred outcome is something like... jury duty?

I like that jury duty analogy. It sounds like a good approach to me.

↑ comment by Viliam · 2023-09-08T09:14:08.388Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree about the "drama" potential.

That said, I think such discussions are very important. If there are bad things happening in the EA community, it is better if we can detect and fix them. Because the possible alternatives include a huge scandal later in media, or EA becoming something different than what we wanted it to be. If you believe that EA could dramatically improve the world, then corrupting EA could dramatically worsen it.

Sometimes the alternative to "drama" is the "missing stair".

The technical details are not important for most of us, only the general pattern is. It would be more effective if only Ben checked them and told us the summary (which he did). But when Ben is accused of doing this unfairly, I suppose other people needs to check the details, too. Not everyone needs to, I agree.

Replies from: adamzerner
↑ comment by Adam Zerner (adamzerner) · 2023-09-08T18:00:08.663Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I suspect that we don't disagree.

  1. I agree that it is important to detect and fix bad things that happen in the community.
  2. I think though that such situations can be handled by a handful of leaders/moderators as opposed to thousands and thousands of people who visit LessWrong. It sounds like you agree with this.
    1. Relatedly, we agree that we can't rely on few people having this power without having some sort of checks on that power.
  3. I also think that it has a net negative impact for most non leaders/moderators to invest more than a few minutes into this. I'm not clear on whether or not you agree with this, but I'd bet that you agree.
↑ comment by Thoth Hermes (thoth-hermes) · 2023-09-10T02:26:16.787Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think it would be difficult to implement what you're asking for without needing to make the decision about whether investing time in this (or other) subjects is worth anyone's time on behalf of others.

If you notice in yourself that you have conflicting feelings about whether something is good for you to be doing, e.g., in the sense which you've described: that you feel pulled in by this, but have misgivings about it, then I recommend considering this situation to be that you have uncertainty about what you ought to be doing, as opposed to being more certain that you should be doing something else, and only that you have some kind of addiction to drama or something like that.

It may in fact be that you feel pulled in because you actually can add value to the discussion, or at least that watching this is giving you some new knowledge in some way. It's at least a possibility.

Ultimately, it should be up to you, so if you're convinced it's not for you, so be it. However, I feel uncomfortable not allowing people to decide that for themselves.

comment by Erich_Grunewald · 2023-09-07T22:54:07.184Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Kelsey Piper wrote this comment [EA(p) · GW(p)] on the EA Forum:

It could be that I am misreading or misunderstanding these screenshots, but having read through them a couple of times trying to parse what happened, here's what I came away with:

On December 15, Alice states that she'd had very little to eat all day, that she'd repeatedly tried and failed to find a way to order takeout to their location, and tries to ask that people go to Burger King and get her an Impossible Burger which in the linked screenshots they decline to do because they don't want to get fast food. She asks again about Burger King and is told it's inconvenient to get there.  Instead, they go to a different restaurant and offer to get her something from the restaurant they went to. Alice looks at the menu online and sees that there are no vegan options. Drew confirms that 'they have some salads' but nothing else for her. She assures him that it's fine to not get her anything.


It seems completely reasonable that Alice remembers this as 'she was barely eating, and no one in the house was willing to go out and get her nonvegan foods' - after all, the end result of all of those message exchanges was no food being obtained for Alice and her requests for Burger King being repeatedly deflected with 'we are down to get anything that isn't fast food' and 'we are down to go anywhere within a 12 min drive' and 'our only criteria is decent vibe + not fast food', after which she fails to find a restaurant meeting those (I note, kind of restrictive if not in a highly dense area) criteria and they go somewhere without vegan options and don't get her anything to eat. 

It also seems totally reasonable that no one at Nonlinear understood there was a problem. Alice's language throughout emphasizes how she'll be fine, it's no big deal, she's so grateful that they tried (even though they failed and she didn't get any food out of the 12/15 trip, if I understand correctly). I do not think that these exchanges depict the people at Nonlinear as being cruel, insane, or unusual as people. But it doesn't seem to me that Alice is lying to have experienced this as 'she had covid, was barely eating, told people she was barely eating, and they declined to pick up Burger King for her because they didn't want to go to a fast food restaurant, and instead gave her very limiting criteria and went somewhere that didn't have any options she could eat'.

On December 16th it does look like they successfully purchased food for her. 

My big takeaway from these exchanges is not that the Nonlinear team are heartless or insane people, but that this degree of professional and personal entanglement and dependence, in a foreign country, with a young person, is simply a recipe for disaster. Alice's needs in the 12/15 chat logs are acutely not being met. She's hungry, she's sick, she conveys that she has barely eaten, she evidently really wants someone to go to BK and get an impossible burger for her, but (speculatively) because of this professional/personal entanglement, she lobbies for this only by asking a few times why they ruled out Burger King, and ultimately doesn't protest when they instead go somewhere without food she can eat, assuring them it's completely fine. This is also how I relate to my coworkers, tbh - but luckily, I don't live with them and exclusively socialize with them and depend on them completely when sick!!

Given my experience with talking with people about strongly emotional events, I am inclined towards the interpretation where Alice remembers the 15th with acute distress and remembers it as 'not getting her needs met despite trying quite hard to do so', and the Nonlinear team remembers that they went out of their way that week to get Alice food - which is based on the logs from the 16th clearly true! But I don't think I'd call Alice a liar based on reading this, because she did express that she'd barely eaten and request apologetically for them to go somewhere she could get vegan food (with BK the only option she'd been able to find) only for them to refuse BK because of the vibes/inconvenience.

To which Kat Woods replied [EA(p) · GW(p)]:

We definitely did not fail to get her food, so I think there has been a misunderstanding - it says in the texts below that Alice told Drew not to worry about getting food because I went and got her mashed potatoes. Ben mentioned the mashed potatoes in the main post, but we forgot to mention it again in our comment - which has been updated

The texts involved on 12/15/21:

I also offered to cook the vegan food we had in the house for her.

I think that there's a big difference between telling everyone "I didn't get the food I wanted, but they did get/offer to cook me vegan food, and I told them it was ok!" and "they refused to get me vegan food and I barely ate for 2 days".

Also, re: "because of this professional/personal entanglement" - at this point, Alice was just a friend traveling with us. There were no professional entanglements.

Replies from: EmersonSpartz
↑ comment by Emerson Spartz (EmersonSpartz) · 2023-09-08T00:14:23.657Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Rob Bensinger replied [EA(p) · GW(p)] with:

I think that there's a big difference between telling everyone "I didn't get the food I wanted, but they did get/offer to cook me vegan food, and I told them it was ok!" and "they refused to get me vegan food and I barely ate for 2 days".

Agreed.

And this: [EA(p) · GW(p)]

This also updates me about Kat's take (as summarized by Ben Pace in the OP):

> Kat doesn’t trust Alice to tell the truth, and that Alice has a history of “catastrophic misunderstandings”.

When I read the post, I didn't see any particular reason for Kat to think this, and I worried it might be just be an attempt to dismiss a critic, given the aggressive way Nonlinear otherwise seems to have responded to criticisms.

With this new info, it now seems plausible to me that Kat was correct (even though I don't think this justifies threatening Alice or Ben in the way Kat and Emerson did). And if Kat's not correct, I still update that Kat was probably accurately stating her epistemic state, and that a lot of reasonable people might have reached the same epistemic state.

comment by mayleaf · 2023-09-07T22:10:22.346Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for sharing.

After reading the screenshots (linked in the Google Docs link) of Alice's conversation with Drew, I mostly don't agree with the claim that Alice was lying*. For one thing, the December 15 exchange with Drew indicates that he ultimately did not bring her dinner because he didn't want to get fast food or drive more than 12 minutes away (he did later offer to bring her a salad from the place he ended up going to, which she declined.) This is a pretty different picture than the conclusion one would draw from just reading the screenshot embedded in the post, which makes it sound like Alice did receive her requested impossible burger.

I read the linked screenshot as Alice communicating that she is basically out of food she can eat, making a few requests to get food that met her dietary restrictions, encountering social friction, and giving up.

(I also think it normally isn't an employer's responsibility to deliver food to their sick employee, but also normally employees don't live with their employers in a foreign country with no other support network, which to me changes the picture substantially).

*edit: That is, the screenshots don't convince me that this claim in particular (quoted in the post) was a lie: "Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days."

also edit: also see KPier's more thorough comment here [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Replies from: ea247, EmersonSpartz
↑ comment by KatWoods (ea247) · 2023-09-08T07:27:17.712Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

She said "nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food", but you can see that

  1. There was vegan food in the house. We offered her oatmeal, quinoa, peanuts, almonds, prunes, tomatoes, cereal, and an orange, which were in the house. 
  2. I picked her up mashed potatoes and cooked it for her on that day. Despite the fact that I was also sick (eventually found out it was covid). 

In the conversation with Drew, she says it's fine, because she has mashed potatoes. 

She said that we didn't bring her vegan food and we did. The text messages show that. 

Where are we disagreeing? 

Replies from: Lachouette, Viliam
↑ comment by Lachouette · 2023-09-19T01:41:31.627Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Not sure why no one picks up on the fact that the list you refer to in 1.) is hard to make an edible meal from.

You mention oatmeal and cereal, but if there is no vegan milk substitute to eat with it, how is she supposed to consume it? Eat it dry, or mixed with water? Nuts and fruit are fine for a snack but I don't think it's unreasable to refuse to eat only nuts/fruit for a day or more. The only thing I could reasonably see in that list that could be made into a warm meal is cooking quinoa and serving with nuts and tomatoes. I could well imagine why someone might not consider it a passable meal though, eg if she didn't like quinoa.

Seeing you consider this random list of ingredients sufficient "vegan food" makes me think you didn't particularly consider her position.

Replies from: mikkel-wilson
↑ comment by MikkW (mikkel-wilson) · 2023-09-29T13:10:14.434Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

When I eat oatmeal or cereal, I almost never eat it with milk (non-vegan or otherwise). I soak oats in boiling water, and eat cereal dry.

↑ comment by Viliam · 2023-09-08T09:23:05.536Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You both agree that no one was willing to bring Alice vegan food that she wanted from outside the house.

You disagree about relevance/importance of the fact that there was different vegan food available for her.

Replies from: ea247
↑ comment by KatWoods (ea247) · 2023-09-08T16:53:52.708Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I did go out to get the potatoes. When I was sick myself. 

It was very hard to find vegan food in the area, and I read through all of the different products in the store, looking to make sure they didn't have any sneaky non-vegan ingredients, like whey. 

↑ comment by Emerson Spartz (EmersonSpartz) · 2023-09-07T23:34:32.319Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

1) I disagree with that interpretation.

2) She was not an employee of Nonlinear at the time, just a friend. Ben's post said she was, but that was a factual inaccuracy, one of many we are working hard to correct in our forthcoming post.

comment by Elizabeth (pktechgirl) · 2023-10-11T06:02:14.471Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Do you have an update on this? I would like to reward Lightcone iff the original post was good work, and part of determining that was Nonlinear's response. But it's been over a month and I haven't seen anything new from nonlinear. 

EDIT: absent a response from Nonlinear I offered Lighthaven $1,000. I sometimes contract for them, so they have tentatively opted to accept this in work credits rather than money.