Sharing Information About Nonlinear

On behalf of Chloe and in her own words, here’s a response that might illuminate some pieces that are not obvious from Ben’s post - as his post is relying on more factual and object-level evidence, rather than the whole narrative.

“Before Ben published, I found thinking about or discussing my experiences very painful, as well as scary - I was never sure with whom it was safe sharing any of this with. Now that it’s public, it feels like it’s in the past and I’m able to talk about it. Here are some of my experiences I think are relevant to understanding what went on. They’re harder to back up with chatlog or other written evidence - take them as you want, knowing these are stories more than clearly backed up by evidence. I think people should be able to make up their own opinion on this, and I believe they should have the appropriate information to do so.

I want to emphasize *just how much* the entire experience of working for Nonlinear was them creating all kinds of obstacles, and me being told that if I’m clever enough I can figure out how to do these tasks anyway. It’s not actually about whether I had a contract and a salary (even then, the issue wasn’t the amount or even the legality, it was that they’d be verbally unclear about what the compensation entailed, eg Emerson saying that since he bought me a laptop in January under the premise of “productivity tool”, that meant my January salary was actually higher than it would have been otherwise, even though it was never said that the laptop was considered as part of the compensation when we discussed it, and I had not initiated the purchase of it), or whether I was asked to do illegal things and what constitutes as okay illegal vs not okay illegal - it’s the fact that they threw some impossibly complex setup at us, told us we can have whatever we want, if we are clever enough with negotiating (by us I mostly mean me and Alice). And boy did we have to negotiate. I needed to run a medical errand for myself in Puerto Rico and the amount of negotiating I needed to do to get them to drive me to a different city that was a 30 min drive away was wild. I needed to go there three times, and I knew the answer of anyone driving me would be that it’s not worth their time, at the same time getting taxis was difficult while we were living in isolated mountain towns, and obviously it would have been easiest to have Drew or Emerson drive me. I looked up tourism things to do in that city, and tried to use things like “hey this city is the only one that has a store that sells Emerson’s favorite breakfast cereal and I could stock up for weeks if we could just get there somehow”. Also - this kind of going out of your way to get what you wanted or needed was rewarded with the Nonlinear team members giving you “points” or calling you a “negotiation genius”. 

Of course I was excited to learn how to drive - I could finally get my tasks done and take care of myself, and have a means to get away from the team when it became too much to be around them. And this is negotiating for just going to a city that’s a 30 minute drive away - three times. Imagine how much I had to negotiate to get someone to drive me to a grocery store to do weekly groceries, and then add to that salary or compensation package negotiations and negotiate whether I could be relieved from having to learn how to buy weed for Kat in every country we went to. I’m still not sure how to concisely describe the frame they prescribed to us (here’s a great post on frame control by Aella that seems relevant https://aella.substack.com/p/frame-control ), but most saliently it included the heavy pep talk of how we could negotiate anything we wanted if we were clever enough, and if we failed - it was implied that we simply weren’t good enough. People get prescribed an hourly rate, based on how much their time is worth at Nonlinear. On the stack of who has most value, it goes Emerson, Kat, Drew, Alice, Chloe. All this in the context where we were isolated, and our finances mostly controlled by Emerson. I’ll add a few stories from my perspective, of how this plays out in practice.

Note: These stories are roughly 2 to 3 months into my job, this means 2 to 3 months of needing to find clever solutions to problems that ought to be simple, as well as ongoing negotiations with members of the Nonlinear team, to get the basics of my job done.

 (⅙)”

…

“When we were flying to the Bahamas from St Martin, I was given a task of packing up all of Nonlinear’s things (mostly Kat & Emerson) into 5 suitcases. Emerson wanted the suitcases to be below the allowed limit if possible. I estimated that the physical weight of their items would exceed the weight limit of 5 suitcases. I packed and repacked the suitcases 5 to 6 times, after each time Emerson would check my work, say that the suitcases are too heavy, and teach me a new rule according to which to throw things out. Eventually I got it done to a level that Emerson was satisfied with. Him and Kat had been working outside the entire time.

In a previous packing scenario I had packed some things like charging cables and similar daily used items too fast, which Emerson did not appreciate, so this time I had left some everyday things around for him to use and grab as the last things. When I said we are packed and ready to go, he looked around the house and got angry at all the things that were lying around that he now had to pack himself - I remember him shouting in anger. I was packing up the cars and didn’t deal with him, just let him be mad in the house. This got Drew pretty frustrated as well, he had witnessed me repacking five bags 5-6 times and also tried to negotiate with Emerson about ditching some things that he refused to leave behind (we carried around 2 mountain bikes, and Emerson tasked me with packing in a beach chair as well). When we got into the car which was packed to the brim, Drew got to driving and as we drove out, he shouted really loudly out of anger. The anger was so real that I parsed it as him making a joke because I could not fathom how angry he was - my immediate response was to laugh. I quickly realized he was serious, I stopped and apologized, to which he responded with something like “no I am actually mad, and you should be too!” - related to how much we had to pack up. (2/6)“

…

“Kat had asked me to buy her a specific blonde hair coloring, at the time she told me it’s urgent since she had grown out her natural hair quite a lot. We were living in St Martin where they simply do not sell extreme blond coloring in the specific shade I needed to find, and Amazon does not deliver to St Martin. I also needed to grab this hair coloring while doing weekly groceries. One important guideline I needed to follow for groceries was that it had to be roughly a 10 min car trip but they were frequently disappointed if I didn’t get all their necessities shopped for from local stores so I naturally ventured further sometimes to make sure I got what they asked for.

I ended up spending hours looking for that blonde hair coloring in different stores, pharmacies, and beauty stores, across multiple weekly grocery trips. I kept Kat updated on this. Eventually I found the exact shade she asked for - Kat was happy to receive this but proceeded to not color her hair with it for another two weeks. Then we had to pack up to travel to the Bahamas. The packing was difficult (see previous paragraph) - we were struggling with throwing unnecessary things out. The hair color had seemed pretty important, and I thought Bahamas would also be a tricky place to buy that haircolor from, so I had packed it in. We get to the airport, waiting in the queue to check in the suitcases. Kat decides to open up the suitcases to see which last minute things we can throw out to make the suitcases lighter. She reaches for the hair color and happily throws it out. My self worth is in a place where I witness her doing this (she knows how much effort I put into finding this), and I don’t even think to say anything in protest - it just feels natural that my work hours are worth just this much. It’s depressing. (3/6)”

…

“There was a time during our stay at St Martin when I was overwhelmed from living and seeing only the same people every single day and needed a day off. Sometimes I’d become so overwhelmed I became really bad at formulating sentences and being in social contexts so I’d take a day off and go somewhere on the island where I could be on my own, away from the whole team - I’ve never before and after experienced an actual lack of being able to formulate sentences just from being around the same people for too long. This was one of these times. We had guests over and the team with the guests had decided in the morning that it’s a good vacation day for going to St Barths. I laid low because I thought since I’m also on a weekend day, it would not be mine to organize (me and Kat would take off Tuesdays and Saturdays, these were sometimes called weekend or vacation days).

Emerson approaches me to ask if I can set up the trip. I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself. He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”. I don’t know how to respond nor how to get out of it, I don’t feel like I have the energy to negotiate with him so I start work, hoping that if I get it done quickly, I can have the rest of the day for myself. 

I didn’t have time to eat, had just woken up, and the actual task itself required to rally up 7 people and figure out their passport situation as well as if they want to join. St Barths means entering a different country, which meant that I needed to check in with the passport as well as covid requirements and whether all 7 people can actually join. I needed to quickly book some ferry tickets there and back for the day, rally the people to the cars and get to the ferry - all of this within less than an hour. We were late and annoyed the ferry employees - but this is one of the things generally ignored by the Nonlinear team, us being late but getting our way is a sign of our agency and how we aren’t NPCs that just follow the prescribed ferry times - they’re negotiable after all, if we can get away with getting to St Barths anyway.

I thought my work was done. We got to the island, my plan was to make the most of it and go on my own somewhere but Emerson says he wants an ATV to travel around with and without an ATV it’s a bit pointless. Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer. All ATVs have been rented out - it’s tourist season. I check back in, Emerson says I need to call all the places on the island and keep trying. I call all the places I can find, this is about 10 places (small island). No luck. Eventually Emerson agrees that using a moped will be okay, and that’s when I get relieved from my work tasks. 

I did describe this to Kat in my next meeting with her that it’s not okay for me to have to do work tasks while I’m on my weekends, and she agreed but we struggled to figure out a solution that would make sense. It remained more of a “let’s see how this plays out”. (4/6)”

…

“One of my tasks was to buy weed for Kat, in countries where weed is illegal. When I kept not doing it and saying that it was because I didn’t know how to buy weed, Kat wanted to sit me down and teach me how to do it. I refused and asked if I could just not do it. She kept insisting that I’m saying that because I’m being silly and worry too much and that buying weed is really easy, everybody does it. I wasn’t comfortable with it and insisted on not doing this task. She said we should talk about it when I’m feeling less emotional about it. We never got to that discussion because in the next meeting I had with her I quit my job. (⅚)”

…

“The aftermath of this experience lasted for several months. Working and living with Nonlinear had me forget who I was, and lose more self worth than I had ever lost in my life. I wasn’t able to read books anymore, nor keep my focus in meetings for longer than 2 minutes, I couldn’t process my own thoughts or anything that took more than a few minutes of paying attention. I was unable to work for a few months. I was scared to share my experiences, terrified that Emerson or Kat would retaliate. While working with them I had forgotten that I used to be excited for work, and getting new tasks would spark curiosity on how to solve them best, rather than feelings of overwhelm. I stopped going for runs and whenever I did exercise I wasn’t able to finish my routine - I thought it meant I was just weak. Emerson held such a strong grasp of financial control over me that I actually forgot that I had saved up money from my previous jobs, to the extent of not even checking my bank statements. I seriously considered leaving effective altruism, as well as AI safety, if it meant that I could get away from running into them, and get away from a tolerance towards such behavior towards people.

It’s really not about the actual contracts, salaries, illegal jobs. Even with these stories, I’m only able to tell some of them that I can wrap my head around. I spent months trying to figure out how to empathize with Kat and Emerson, how they’re able to do what they’ve done, to Alice, to others they claimed to care a lot about. How they can give so much love and support with one hand and say things that even if I’d try to model “what’s the worst possible thing someone could say”, I’d be surprised how far off my predictions would be. I think the reader should make up their own mind on this. Read what Nonlinear has to say. Read what Ben says, what these comments add to it.

People trying their best can sometimes look absolutely terrifying, but actions need to have consequences nonetheless. This isn’t an effect of weird living and working conditions either, I believe it goes deeper than that - I am still happy to hear that Nonlinear has since abandoned at least that part of their “experiment”. But Nonlinear also isn’t my idea of effective altruism or doing good better and I hope we can keep this community safer than it was for me and Alice, for all the current and new members to come along in the future. (6/6) ”

think about how bad you expect the information would be if I selected for the worst, credible info I could share

Alright. Knowing nothing about Nonlinear or about Ben, but based on the rationalist milieu, then for an org that’s weird but basically fine I’d expect to see stuff like ex-employees alleging a nebulously “abusive” environment based on their own legitimately bad experiences and painting a gestalt picture that suggests unpleasant practices but without any smoking-gun allegations of really egregious concrete behavior (as distinct from very bad effects on the accusers); allegations of nepotism based on social connections between the org’s leadership and their funders or staff; accusations of shoddy or motivated research which require hours to evaluate; sources staying anonymous for fear of “retaliation” but without being able to point to any legible instances of retaliation or concrete threats to justify this; and/or thirdhand reports of lying or misdirection around complicated social situations.

[reads post]

This sure has a lot more allegations of very specific and egregious behavior than that, yeah.

EDIT: Based on Nonlinear's reply [LW · GW] and the thorough records they provide, it seems that the smoking-gun allegations of really egregious concrete behavior are probably just false. This leaves room for unresolvable disagreement on the more nebulous accusations, but as I said initially, that's the pattern I'd expect to see if Nonlinear were weird but basically fine.

Going forward I think anyone who works with Kat Woods, Emerson Spartz, or Drew Spartz, should sign legal employment contracts, and make sure all financial agreements are written down in emails and messages that the employee has possession of. I think all people considering employment by the above people at any non-profits they run should take salaries where money is wired to their bank accounts, and not do unpaid work or work that is compensated by ways that don’t primarily include a salary being wired to their bank accounts.

FTFY.

While I have no knowledge of or views on the situation above, this is just a good thing to do in general?  Like, most sentences that begin with the phrase 'my boss, whose house I live at and who I have only a handshake agreement with on pay...' are not going to end well.

FWIW I’ve never known a character of high integrity who I could imagine writing the phrase “your career in EA would be over with a few DMs”.

This is a pretty complex epistemic/social situation. I care a lot about our community having some kind of good process of aggregating information, allowing individuals to integrate it, and update, and decide what to do with it.

I think a lot of disagreements in the comments here and on EAF stem from people having an implicit assumption that the conversation here is about "should [any particular person in this article] be socially punished?". In my preferred world, before you get to that phase there should be at least some period focused on "information aggregation and Original Seeing. [LW · GW]"

It's pretty tricky, since in the default, world, "social punishment?" is indeed the conversation people jump to. And in practice, it's hard to have words just focused on epistemic-evaluation without getting into judgment, or without speech acts being "moves" in a social conflict. 

But, I think it's useful to at least (individually) inhabit the frame of "what is true, here?" without asking questions like "what do those truths imply?".

With that in mind, some generally useful epistemic advice that I think is relevant here:

Try to have Multiple Hypotheses

It's useful to have at least two, and preferably three, hypotheses for what's going on in cases like this. (Or, generally whenever you're faced with a confusing situation where you're not sure what's true). If you only have one hypothesis, you may be tempted to shoehorn evidence into being evidence for/against that hypothesis, and you may be anchored on it.

If you have at least two hypotheses (and, like, "real ones", that both seem plausible to you), I find it easier to take in new bits of data, and then ask "okay, how would this fit into two different plausible scenarios"? which activates my "actually check" process.

I think three hypotheses is better than two because two can still end up in a "all the evidence ways in on a one-dimensional spectrum". Three hypotheses a) helps you do 'triangulation', and b) helps remind you to actually do the "what frame should I be having here? what are other additional hypotheses that I might not have thought of yet?"

Multiple things can be going on at once

If two people have a conflict, it could be the case that one person is at-fault, or both people are at-fault, or neither (i.e. it was a miscommunication or something). 

If one person does an action, it could be true, simultaneously, that:

• They are somewhat motivated by [Virtuous Motive A]
• They are somewhat motivated by [Suspicious Motive B]
• They are motivated by [Random Innocuous Motive C]

I once was arguing with someone, and they said "your body posture tells me you aren't even trying to listen to me or reason correctly, you're just trying to do a status monkey smackdown and put me in my place." And, I was like "what? No, I have good introspective access and I just checked whether I'm trying to make a reasoned argument. I can tell the difference between doing The Social Monkey thing and the "actually figure out the truth" thing."

What I later realized is that I was, like, 65% motivated by "actually wanna figure out the truth", and like 25% motivated by "socially punish this person" (which was a slightly different flavor of "socially punish" then, say, when I'm having a really tribally motivated facebook fight, so I didn't recognize it as easily).

Original Seeing vs Hypothesis Evaluation vs Judgment

OODA Loops include four steps: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

Often people skip over steps. They think they've already observed enough and don't bother looking for new observations. Or it doesn't even occur to them to do that explicitly. (I've noticed that I often skip to the orient step, where I figure out about "how do I organize my information? what sort of decision am I about to decide on?", and not actually do the observe step, where I'm purely focused on gaining raw data.

When you've already decided on a schema-for-thinking-about-a-problem, you're more likely to take new info that comes in and put it in a bucket you think you already understand.

Original Seeing [LW · GW] is different from "organizing information".

They are both different from "evaluating which hypothesis is true"

They are both different from "deciding what to do, given Hypothesis A is true"

Which is in turn different from "actually taking actions, given that you've decided what to do."

I have a sort of idealistic dream that someday, a healthy rationalist/EA community could collectively be capable of raising hypotheses, without people anchoring on them, and people share information in a way you robustly trust won't get automatically leveraged into a conflict/political move. I don't think we're close enough to that world to advocate for it in-the-moment, but I do think it's still good practice for people individually to be spending at least some of their time in node the OODA loop, and tracking which node they're currently focusing on.

One example of the evidence we’re gathering

We are working hard on a point-by-point response to Ben’s article, 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 picked up vegan food for her.

Months later, after our relationship deteriorated, she went around telling many people that we starved her. She included details that depicted 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

• The screenshots below show Kat offering Alice the vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, cereal, etc), on the first day she was sick. Then, when she wasn’t interested in us bringing/preparing those, I told her to ask Drew to go pick up food, and Drew said yes. 
   

• See more screenshots here of Drew’s conversations with her, saying that I got her mashed potatoes. I did this while I was sick, and went out and checked everything at the store, checking for sneaky non-vegan ingredients, like whey. 

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 chose this example not because it’s the most important (although it certainly paints us in a very negative and misleading light) but simply because it was the fastest claim to explain where we had extremely clear evidence without having to add a lot of context, explanation, find more evidence, etc. 

Even so, it took us hours to put together and share. Both because we had to track down all of the old conversations, make sure we weren’t getting anything wrong, anonymize Alice, format the screenshots (they kept getting blurry), and importantly, write it up. 

We also had to spend time dealing with all of the other comments while trying to pull this together. My inbox is completely swamped. 

This claim was a few sentences in Ben’s article but took us hours to refute. 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 that we did make. 

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. 

Several ex-employees have shared positive experiences with Nonlinear or Kat Woods on LW or EAF. I would like to ask those employees for some specifics:

1. how explicit were salary negotiations (yours or those you heard about)? It seems like one of the things that went wrong here was extremely informal ~employment agreements, and I'd like to know if that was common practice. 
2. If negotiations were informal or after the fact (which isn't uncommon in EA), what happened when there was a disagreement? Did it feel like Kat/Emerson/Nonlinear went out of their way to be generous (as this person describes [EA(p) · GW(p)] in their explicit negotiations with Kat at Charity Science Health), or was it very stressful to get even basic needs met (like Ben describes getting medical attention in PR).
   1. I can imagine some of the problem lived in Alice and Chloe, and people who were better at advocating for their own needs would have been fine. I would never work in the conditions described here specifically because they would make me bad at getting my own needs met. I would still think this represented a problem on Nonlinear's part, but it's a much smaller problem than if they were deliberately exploitative. 
3. When did whatever quoted interaction take place, and with what org? Some of the positive information about Kat comes from different orgs several years ago, which I think has some relevance but less than people who worked for nonlinear in the last few years.
   1. at least two people commented on receiving coaching from Kat and finding it very positive. This isn't irrelevant, but the power dynamics are so different I don't find it that useful. 

There are certain claims here that are concretely bad, but they're also mixed in confusingly with what seem like nonsense complaints that are just... the reality of people spending extended time with other people, like:

• "My roommates didn't buy me vegan food while I was sick"
• "Someone gives a lot of compliments to me but I don't think they're being genuine"
• "I feel 'low-value'"

If someone is being defrauded, yeah that's one thing, but I'd rather not litigate "Is Kat/Emerson an asshole" in the court of public opinion.

Ben, I want to say thank you for putting in a tremendous amount of work, and also for being willing to risk attempts at retaliation when that's a pretty clear threat. 

You're in a reasonable position to take this on, having earned the social standing to make character smears unlikely to stick, and having the institutional support to fight a spurious libel claim. And you're also someone I trust to do a thorough and fair job.

I wish there were someone whose opportunity cost were lower who could handle retaliation-threat reporting, but it's pretty likely that anyone with those attributes will have other important opportunities.

Hi all, I wanted to chime in because I have had conversations relevant to this post with just about all involved parties at various points. I've spoken to "Alice" (both while she worked at nonlinear and afterward), Kat (throughout the period when the events in the post were alleged to have happened and afterward), Emerson, Drew, and (recently) the author Ben, as well as, to a much lesser extent, "Chloe" (when she worked at nonlinear). I am (to my knowledge) on friendly terms with everyone mentioned (by name or pseudonym) in this post. I wish well for everyone involved. I also want the truth to be known, whatever the truth is.

I was sent a nearly final draft of this post yesterday (Wednesday), once by Ben and once by another person mentioned in the post.
 

I want to say that I find this post extremely strange for the following reasons:
 

(1) The nearly final draft of this post that I was given yesterday had factual inaccuracies that (in my opinion and based on my understanding of the facts) are very serious despite ~150 hours being spent on this investigation. This makes it harder for me to take at face value the parts of the post that I have no knowledge of.  Why am I, an outsider on this whole thing, finding serious errors in the final hours before publication? That's not to say everything in the post is inaccurate, just that I was disturbed to see serious inaccuracies, and I have no idea why nobody caught these (I really don't feel like I should be the one to correct mistakes, given my lack of involvement, but it feels important to me to comment here since I know there were inaccuracies in the piece, so here we are).
 

(2) Nonlinear reached out to me and told me they have proof that a bunch of claims in the post are completely false. They also said that in the past day or so (upon becoming aware of the contents of the post), they asked Ben to delay his publication of this post by one week so that they could gather their evidence and show it to Ben before he publishes it (to avoid having him publish false information). However, he refused to do so.
 

This really confuses me. Clearly, Ben spent a huge amount of time on this post (which has presumably involved weeks or months of research), so why not wait one additional week for Nonlinear to provide what they say is proof that his post contains substantial misinformation? Of course, if the evidence provided by nonlinear is weak, he should treat it as such, but if it is strong, it should also be treated as such. I struggle to wrap my head around the decision not to look at that evidence. I am also confused why Ben, despite spending a huge amount of time on this research, apparently didn't seek out this evidence from Nonlinear long ago.

To clarify: I think it’s very important in situations like this not to let the group being criticized have a way to delay publication indefinitely. If I were in Ben’s shoes, I believe what I would have done is say something like, “You have exactly one week to provide proof of any false claims in this post (and I’ll remove any claim you can prove is false) then I’m publishing the post no matter what at that time.” This is very similar to the policy we use for our Transparent Replications project (where we replicate psychology results of publications in top journals), and we have found it to work well. We give the original authors a specific window of time during which they can point out any errors we may have made (which is at least a week). This helps make sure our replications are accurate, fair, and correct, and yet the teams being replicated have no say over whether the replications are released (they always are released regardless of whether we get a response).
 

It seems to me that basic norms of good epistemics require that, on important topics, you look at all the evidence that can be easily acquired.
 

I also think that if you publish misinformation, you can't just undo it by updating the post later or issuing a correction. Sadly, that's not the way human minds/social information works. In other words, misinformation can't be jammed back into the bottle once it is released. I have seen numerous cases where misinformation is released only later to be retracted, in which the misinformation got way more attention than the retraction, and most people came away only with the misinformation. This seems to me to provide a strong additional reason why a small delay in the publication date appears well worth it (to me, as an outsider) to help avoid putting out a post with potentially substantial misinformation. I hope that the lesswrong/EA communities will look at all the evidence once it is released, which presumably will be in the next week or so, in order to come to a fair and accurate conclusion (based on all the evidence, whatever that accurate final conclusion turns out to be) and do better than these other cases I’ve witnessed where misinformation won the day.
 

Of course, I don't know Ben's reason for jumping to publish immediately, so I can't evaluate his reasons directly.
 

Disclaimer: I am friends with multiple people connected to this post.  As a reminder, I wish well for everyone involved, and I wish for the truth to be known, whatever that truth happens to be. I have acted (informally) as an advisor to nonlinear (without pay) - all that means, though, is that every so often, team members there will reach out to me to ask for my advice on things.

Note: I've updated this comment a few times to try to make my position clearer, to add some additional context, and to fix grammatical mistakes.

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-09-07T08:17:30.647Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't have all the context of Ben's investigation here, but as someone who has done investigations like this in the past, here are some thoughts on why I don't feel super sympathetic to requests to delay publication: 

In this case, it seems to me that there is a large and substantial threat of retaliation. My guess is Ben's sources were worried about Emerson hiring stalkers, calling their family, trying to get them fired from their job, or threatening legal action. Having things be out in the public can provide a defense because it is much easier to ask for help if the conflict happens in the open. 

As a concrete example, Emerson has just sent me an email saying: 

Given the irreversible damage that would occur by publishing, it simply is inexcusable to not give us a bit of time to correct the libelous falsehoods in this document, and if published as is we intend to pursue legal action for libel against Ben Pace personally and Lightcone for the maximum damages permitted by law. The legal case is unambiguous and publishing it now would both be unethical and gross negligence, causing irreversible damage.

For the record, the threat of libel suit and use of statements like "maximum damages permitted by law" seem to me to be attempts at intimidation. Also, as someone who has looked quite a lot into libel law (having been threatened with libel suits many times over the years), describing the legal case as "unambiguous" seems inaccurate and a further attempt at intimidation. 

My guess is Ben's sources have also received dozens of calls (as have I have received many in the last few hours), and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Emerson called up my board, or would otherwise try to find some other piece of leverage against Lightcone, Ben, or Ben's sources if he had more time. While I am not that worried about Emerson, I think many other people are in a much more vulnerable position and I can really resonate with not wanting to give someone an opportunity to gather their forces (and in that case I think it's reasonable to force the conflict out in the open, which is far from an ideal arena, but does provide protection against many types of threats and adversarial action).

Separately, the time investment for things like this is really quite enormous and I have found it extremely hard to do work of this type in parallel to other kinds of work, especially towards the end of a project like this, when the information is ready for sharing, and lots of people have strong opinions and try to pressure you in various ways. Delaying by "just a week" probably translates into roughly 40 hours of productive time lost, even if there isn't much to do, because it's so hard to focus on other things. That's just a lot of additional time, and so it's not actually a very cheap ask.

Lastly, I have also found that the standard way that abuse in the extended EA community has been successfully prevented from being discovered is by forcing everyone who wants to publicize or share any information about it to jump through a large number of hoops. Calls for "just wait a week" and "just run your posts by the party you are criticizing" might sound reasonable in isolation, but very quickly multiply the cost of any information sharing, and have huge chilling effects that prevent the publishing of most information and accusations. Asking the other party to just keep doing a lot of due diligence is easy and successful and keeps most people away from doing investigations like this. 

As I have written about before, I myself ended up being intimidated by this for the case of FTX and chose not to share my concerns about FTX more widely, which I continue to consider one of the worst mistakes of my career.

My current guess is that if it is indeed the case that Emerson and Kat have clear proof that a lot of the information in this post is false, then I think they should share that information publicly. Maybe on their own blog, or maybe here on LessWrong or on the EA Forum. It is also the case that rumors about people having had very bad experiences working with Nonlinear are already circulating around the community and this is already having a large effect on Nonlinear, and as such, being able to have clear false accusations to respond against should help them clear their name, if they are indeed false.

I agree that this kind of post can be costly, and I don't want to ignore the potential costs of false accusations, but at least to me it seems like I want an equilibrium of substantially more information sharing, and to put more trust in people's ability to update their models of what is going on, and less paternalistic "people are incapable of updating if we present proof that the accusations are false", especially given what happened with FTX and the costs we have observed from failing to share observations like this.

A final point that feels a bit harder to communicate is that in my experience, some people are just really good at manipulation, throwing you off-balance, and distorting your view of reality, and this is a strong reason to not commit to run everything by the people you are sharing information on. A common theme that I remember hearing from people who had concerns about SBF is that people intended to warn other people, or share information, then they talked to SBF, and somehow during that conversation he disarmed them, without really responding to the essence of their concerns. This can take the form of threats and intimidation, or the form of just being really charismatic and making you forget what your concerns were, or more deeply ripping away your grounding and making you think that your concerns aren't real, and that actually everyone is doing the thing that seems wrong to you, and you are going to out yourself as naive and gullible by sharing your perspective.

[Edit: The closest post we have to setting norms on when to share information with orgs you are criticizing is Jeff Kauffman's post [EA · GW] on the matter. While I don't fully agree with the reasoning within it, in there he says: 

Sometimes orgs will respond with requests for changes, or try to engage you in private back-and forth. While you’re welcome to make edits in response to what you learn from them, you don’t have an obligation to: it’s fine to just say “I’m planning to publish this as-is, and I’d be happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments.”

[EDIT: I’m not advocating this for cases where you’re worried that the org will retaliate or otherwise behave badly if you give them advance warning, or for cases where you’ve had a bad experience with an org and don’t want any further interaction. For example, I expect Curzi didn’t give Leverage an opportunity to prepare a response to My Experience with Leverage Research, and that’s fine.]

This case seems to me to be fairly clearly covered by the second paragraph, and also, Nonlinear's response to "I am happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments" was to respond with "I will sue you if you publish these concerns", to which IMO the reasonable response is to just go ahead and publish before things escalate further. Separately, my sense is Ben's sources really didn't want any further interaction and really preferred having this over with, which I resonate with, and is also explicitly covered by Jeff's post.

So in as much as you are trying to enforce some kind of existing norm that demands running posts like this by the org, I don't think that norm currently has widespread buy-in, as the most popular and widely-quoted post on the topic does not demand that standard (I separately think the post is still slightly too much in favor of running posts by the organizations they are criticizing, but that's for a different debate).]

Replies from: jkaufman, EmersonSpartz

↑ comment by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2023-09-07T17:11:32.813Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This case seems to me to be fairly clearly covered by the second paragraph, and also, Nonlinear's response to "I am happy to discuss your concerns publicly in the comments" was to respond with "I will sue you if you publish these concerns"

agreed

Replies from: EmersonSpartz

↑ comment by Emerson Spartz (EmersonSpartz) · 2023-09-07T21:23:52.343Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In case it wasn't clear,  we didn't say 'don't publish', we said 'don't publish until we've had a week to gather and share the evidence we have':

Replies from: jkaufman, bec-hawk, martin-randall

↑ comment by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2023-09-07T23:26:29.277Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm trying to support two complementary points:

• The norm I've been pushing of sharing things with EA organizations ahead of time is only intended for cases where you have a neutral or better relationship with the organization, and not situations like this one where there are allegations of mistreatment, or you don't trust them to behave cooperatively.

• A threat to sue if changes are not made to the text of the post is not cooperative.

↑ comment by Rebecca (bec-hawk) · 2023-09-07T22:03:41.626Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You say "if published as is", not "if published now". Is what you're saying in the comment that, if Ben had waited a week and then published the same post, unedited, you would not want to sue? That is not what is conveyed in the email.

Replies from: EmersonSpartz

↑ comment by Emerson Spartz (EmersonSpartz) · 2023-09-07T22:42:36.283Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes, that is what I intended to communicate here, and I was worried people might think I was trying to suppress the article so I bolded this request to ensure people didn't misunderstand:

Replies from: jkaufman

↑ comment by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2023-09-07T23:19:08.640Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

For what it's worth, I also interpreted the "if published as is" as "if you do not edit the post to no longer be libelous" and not "if you do not give us a week to prepare a contemporaneous rebuttal".

I think if you wanted to reliably communicate that you were not asking for changes to the text of the post, you would have needed to be explicit about that?

↑ comment by Martin Randall (martin-randall) · 2023-09-10T02:28:06.266Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Please don't post screenshots of comments that include screenshots of comments. It is harder to read and to search and to reply. You can just quote the text, like habryka did above.

Replies from: SaidAchmiz

↑ comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2023-09-10T07:34:16.918Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Consider that making it harder to search for the text may be the whole point of posting a screenshot.

↑ comment by Emerson Spartz (EmersonSpartz) · 2023-09-07T09:05:43.191Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

There is a reason courtrooms give both sides equal chances to make their case before they ask the jury to decide. 

It is very difficult for people to change their minds later, and most people assume that if you’re on trial, you must be guilty, which is why judges remind juries about “innocent before proven guilty”. 

This is one of the foundations of our legal system, something we learned over thousands of years of trying to get better at justice. You’re just assuming I’m guilty and saying that justifies not giving me a chance to present my evidence.

Also, if we post another comment thread a week later, who will see it? EAF/LW don’t have sufficient ways to resurface old but important content. 

Re: “my guess is Ben’s sources have received dozens of calls” - well, your guess is wrong, and you can ask them to confirm this.

You also took my email strategically out of context to fit the Emerson-is-a-horned-CEO-villain narrative. Here’s the full one:

Replies from: None, TekhneMakre, adamzerner, adamzerner

↑ comment by [deleted] · 2023-09-07T09:10:27.700Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Also, if we post another comment thread a week later, who will see it? EAF/LW don’t have sufficient ways to resurface old but important content. 

This doesn't seem like an issue. You could instead write a separate post a week later which has a chance of gaining traction.

Replies from: Viliam, ea247

↑ comment by Viliam · 2023-09-07T10:24:10.792Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yep. Posts critical of Less Wrong are often highly upvoted on Less Wrong, so I'd say a good defense (one containing factual statements, not just "this is 100% wrong and I will sue you") has like 80% chance to get 100 or more karma.

I didn't understand the part about "resurfacing old content", but one can simply link the old article from the new one, and ask moderators to link the new article from the old one. (The fact that the new article will be on the front page but the old one will no longer be there, seems to work in favor of the new article.) Even if moderators for some mysterious reason refused to make the link, a comment under the old article saying "there is a response from Nonlinear" with a link would probably be highly upvoted.

Replies from: Benito

↑ comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2023-09-07T18:20:04.463Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Oli's comment is a good summary of my relevant concerns! And I'm definitely happy to link prominently to any response by Nonlinear, and make edits if things are shown to be false.

As well as a bunch of other reasons already mentioned (and some not), another one is that most of the things they proposed to show me didn't seem that cruxy to me? Maybe a few of stories are wrong, but I believe the people were really very hurt by their time at Nonlinear, and I believe both were quite credibly intimidated, and I'm pretty sure a lot of folks in the relevant ecosystems would like to know if I believe that. When we talked Nonlinear mostly wanted to say that Alice told lies about things like why she quit being vegan, but even if that's true tons of my evidence doesn't come from Alice or from her specific stories, so the delay request didn't seem like it would likely change my mind. Maybe it will, but I think it's more important to say when I believe that terrible behavior has occurred, so I didn't feel beholden to delay for them.

↑ comment by KatWoods (ea247) · 2023-09-07T10:24:40.371Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes, we intend to. But given that our comments just asking for people to withhold judgment are getting downvoted, that doesn’t bode well for future posts getting enough upvotes to be seen.

It's going to take us at least a week to gather all the evidence, then it will take a decent amount of time to write up. 

In the meantime, people have heard terrible things about us and nobody's a perfect rationalist who will simply update. Once you've made up your mind about somebody, it can be really hard to change. 

Additionally, once things are on the internet, they're usually there for good. Now it might be that the first thing people find when looking up Nonlinear is this post, even if we do disprove the claims.

A post that would most likely have been substantially different if he'd seen all of our evidence first. He already made multiple updates to the post based on the things we shared, and he would have made far more if he had given us the chance to actually present our evidence. 

Not to mention that now that he's published this and sent them money, it's psychologically difficult for him to update. 

Replies from: AprilSR, bec-hawk

↑ comment by AprilSR · 2023-09-07T17:47:27.535Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think a comment "just asking for people to withhold judgement" would not be especially downvoted. I think the comments in which you've asked people to withhold judgement include other incredibly toxic behavior.

↑ comment by Rebecca (bec-hawk) · 2023-09-07T10:40:47.534Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You could possibly do a more incremental version of this, e.g. link to a Google Drive where you upload the pieces of evidence as you find them? That way people could start updating right away rather than waiting until everything's been put together.  And then you could add a comment linking to the write-up when it's done.

↑ comment by TekhneMakre · 2023-09-07T19:10:55.027Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I want to note a specific pattern that I've noticed. I am not commenting on this particular matter overall; the events with Nonlinear may or may not be an instance of the pattern. It goes like this:

1. Fred does something unethical / immoral.
2. People start talking about how Fred did something bad.
3. Fred complains that people should not be talking the way they are talking, and Fred specifically invokes the standard of the court system, saying stuff like "there's a reason courts presume innocence / allow the accused to face the accuser / give a right to a defense attorney / have discovery / have the right to remain silent / right to avoid incriminating oneself / etc. etc.".

Fred's implication is that people shouldn't be talking the way they're talking because it's unjust.

... Of course, this pattern could also happen when step 1 is Fred not doing something bad; and either way, maybe Fred is right... But I suspect that in reality, Fred uses this as a way of isolated demands for rigor.

↑ comment by Adam Zerner (adamzerner) · 2023-09-09T04:20:08.822Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You also took my email strategically out of context to fit the Emerson-is-a-horned-CEO-villain narrative. Here’s the full one:

I don't get that impression. Nothing in the full one stands out to me as important context that would really change anything non-trivially.

↑ comment by Adam Zerner (adamzerner) · 2023-09-09T04:33:55.255Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You seem to be disregarding other considerations at play here.

Zooming out, if we forget about the specifics of this situation and instead think about the more general question of whether or not one should honor requests to delay such publications, one consideration is wanting to avoid unjustifiably harming someones reputation (in this case yours, Kat's, and Nonlinear's).

But I think habryka lists some other important considerations too in his comment [LW(p) · GW(p)]:

• Guarding against retaliation
• Guarding against lost productivity
• Guarding against reality-distortion fields

Personally, I don't have strong feelings about where the equilibrium should be here. However, I do feel strongly that the discussion needs to look at the considerations on both sides.

Also, I raise my eyebrow a fair bit at those who do have strong feelings about where the equilibrium should be. At least if they haven't thought about it for many hours. It strikes me as a genuinely difficult task to enumerate and weigh the considerations at play.

Replies from: spencerg

↑ comment by spencerg · 2023-09-09T10:45:21.913Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If we want to look at general principles rather than specific cases, if the original post had not contained a bunch of serious misinformation (according to evidence that I have access to) then I would have been much more sympathetic to not delaying.

But the combination of serious misinformation + being unwilling to delay a short period to get the rest of the evidence I find to be a very bad combination.

I also don’t think the retaliation point is a very good one, as refusing to delay doesn’t actually prevent retaliation.

I don’t find the lost productivity point is particularly strong given that this was a major investigation already involving something like 150 hours of work. In that context, another 20 hours carefully reviewing evidence seems minimal (if it’s worth ~150 hours to investigate it’s worth 170 to ensure it’s accurate presumably)

Guarding against reality distortion fields is an interesting point I hadn’t thought of until Oliver brought it up. However, it doesn’t seem (correct me if I’m wrong) that Ben felt swayed away from posting after talking to nonlinear for 3 hours - if that’s true then it doesn’t seem like much of a concern here. I also think pre-committing to a release date helps a bit with that.

So, Nonlinear-affiliated people are here in the comments disagreeing, promising proof that important claims in the post are false. I fully expect that Nonlinear's response, and much of the discussion, will be predictably shoved down the throat of my attention, so I'm not too worried about missing the rebuttals, if rebuttals are in fact coming.

But there's a hard-won lesson I've learned by digging into conflicts like this one, which I want to highlight, which I think makes this post valuable even if some of the stories turn out to be importantly false:

If a story is false, the fact that the story was told, and who told it, is valuable information. Sometimes it's significantly more valuable than if the story was true. You can't untangle a web of lies by trying to prevent anyone from saying things that have falsehoods embedded in them. You can untangle a web of lies by promoting a norm of maximizing the available information, including indirect information like who said what.

Think of the game Werewolf, as an analogy. Some moves are Villager strategies, and some moves are Werewolf strategies, in the sense that, if you notice someone using the strategy, you should make a Bayesian update in the direction of thinking the person using that strategy is a Villager or is a Werewolf.

I'm surprised (unless I've missed it) that nobody has explicitly pointed out the most obvious reason to take the responses of the form "Kat/Emerson/Drew have been really good to me personally" as very weak evidence at best.

The allegations imply that in the present situation, Kat/Emerson/Drew would immediately tell anyone in their orbit to come and post positive testimonials of them under promises of reward or threat of retaliation (precisely as the quoted Glassdoor review says).

P(generic positive testimonials | accusation true) ≈ P(generic positive testimonials | accusation false).

The only thing that would be strong evidence against the claims here would be direct counterevidence to the claims in the post. Everything else so far is a smokescreen.

I generally got a sense from speaking with many parties that Emerson Spartz and Kat Woods respectively have very adversarial and very lax attitudes toward legalities and bureaucracies, with the former trying to do as little as possible that is asked of him

Could you give more detail here? I feel like "viewing bureaucracies as obstacles to be maneuvered around" is not particularly uncommon in EA and rationality, including at Lightcone, so I assume you mean something more than that. 

A brief note on defamation law:

The whole point of having laws against defamation, whether libel (written defamation) or slander (spoken defamation), is to hold people to higher epistemic standards when they communicate very negative things about people or organizations -- especially negative things that would stick in the readers/listeners minds in ways that would be very hard for subsequent corrections or clarifications to counter-act.

Without making any comment about the accuracy or inaccuracy of this post, I would just point out that nobody in EA should be shocked that an organization (e.g. Nonlinear) that is being libeled (in its view) would threaten a libel suit to deter the false accusations (as they see them), to nudge the author(e.g. Ben Pace) towards making sure that their negative claims are factually correct and contextually fair. 

That is the whole point and function of defamation law: to promote especially high standards of research, accuracy, and care when making severe negative comments. This helps promote better epistemics, when reputations are on the line. If we never use defamation law for its intended purpose, we're being very naive about the profound costs of libel and slander to those who might be falsely accused. 

EA Forum is a very active public forum, where accusations can have very high stakes for those who have devoted their lives to EA. We should not expect that EA Forum should be completely insulated from defamation law, or that posts here should be immune to libel suits. Again, the whole point of libel suits is to encourage very high epistemic standards when people are making career-ruining and organization-ruining claims.

(Note: I've also cross-posted this to EA Forum here [EA · GW] )

(Crossposted from EA Forum)

On an earlier discussion [EA(p) · GW(p)] of Nonlinear's practices, I wrote:

I worked closely with Kat for a year or so (2018-2019) when I was working at (and later leading) Charity Science Health. She's now a good friend.  

I considered Kat a good and ethical leader. I personally learned a lot from working with her. In her spending and life choices, she has shown a considerable moral courage: paying herself only $12K/year, dropping out of college because she didn't think it passed an impact cost-benefit test. Obviously that doesn't preclude the possibility that she has willfully done harmful things, but I think willfully bad behavior by Kat Woods is quite unlikely, a priori. 

I would also like to share my experience negotiating my salary with Kat when I first joined Charity Science Health, i.e., before we were friends. It was extremely positive. She was very committed to frugality, and she initially offered me the position of Associate Director at a salary of $25K/year, the bottom end of the advertised salary range. We exchanged several long emails discussing the tradeoffs in a higher or lower salary (team morale, risk of value drift, resources available for the core work, counterfactual use of funds, etc.). The correspondence felt like a genuine, collaborative search for the truth. I had concluded that I needed to make at least $45K/year to feel confident I was saving the minimum I would need in retirement, and in the end we agreed on $45K. Subsequently Kat sent me a contract for $50K, which I perceived as a goodwill gesture. My positive experience seems very different from what is reported here. 

Thanks for writing this post.

I've heard enough bad stuff about Nonlinear from before, that I was seriously concerned about them. But I did not know what to do. Especially since part of their bad reputation is about attacking critics, and I don't feel well positioned to take that fight.

I'm happy some of these accusations are now out in the open. If it's all wrong and Nonlinear is blame free, then this is their chance to clear their reputation. 

I can't say that I will withhold judgment until more evidence comes in, since I already made a preliminary judgment even before this post. But I can promise to be open to changing my mind. 

Note that during our conversation, Emerson brought up HPMOR and the Quirrell similarity, not me.

Began laughing hysterically here.

The "give us a week" message appears either misleading or overly optimistic. Unless there have been replies from Nonlinear in a separate thread, I don't think they have explained anything beyond their initial explanation of getting food. Coupled with the fact that it's hard to imagine a valid context or explanation for some of the things they confirm to have happened (drug smuggling, driving without a license or much experience), I have to conclude that they're not likely to change my mind at this point. I realize that probably doesn't matter to them since I'm just a random person on the internet, but it's disappointing that they haven't made a better effort to explain or atone.

Thanks, @Ben Pace, [LW · GW] for doing the initial work on this. I agree with your other message stating that you're done with this; you don't need to get sucked further down this hole than you already are.

To share some anecdotal data: I personally have had positive experiences doing regular coaching calls with Kat this year and feel that her input has been very helpful. 

I would encourage us all to put off updating until we also get the second side of the story - that generally seems like good practice to me whenever it is possible.

(also posted this comment on the EA forum)

It's probably too late to do this for the OP, but in the future, I propose having two separate posts in situations like these.

1. One discussing any general thoughts on things like communication cultures [? · GW] and community norms.
2. And a second discussing any things specific to the particular incident. Which in this case would be discussions about Kat, Emerson, Alice and Chloe.

Why? Because as discussed here [LW(p) · GW(p)], I think most people shouldn't spend more than a few minutes paying attention to (2). On the other hand, (1) seems like a perfectly good conversation for most people to spend time on.

And as a bonus, I pretty strongly suspect that firmly factoring out (1) from (2) would be quite helpful in making progress on (2).

This is honestly really weird and typical of what I expect from the people who spend their time being business-side community members in EA.

I (using Lightcone funds) am going to pay them each $5,000 after publishing this post.

I don't think you understand just what this means. You're paying your sources to contribute to muckraking.

Nonlinear seems like the standard rationalist org that does weird stuff commercially, hires weird people, and has weird rules about social and sexual stuff. The disgruntled, former friend-employee was sleeping with one of the bosses. Like, why should I care that one of the other bosses told stupid stories about what a badass negotiator he is? Once your workplace devolves into the employees sleeping with the bosses, the regular standards of workplace decorum are out the window.

I think in general, the sense I get from this post is just that, you're applying a regular standard of workplace decorum to a clearly unusual and non-standard workplace. Like what's really weird to me is how little play the whole "intern is sleeping with the head boss's brother and the boss's girlfriend is maybe trying to sleep with the same intern" situation gets from this post. It's very clearly like, totally insane and anyone normal hearing about a workplace like this would instantly recognize that there' going to be a million other weird and BAD things going on.

Yes if I was a working professional who worked in financial regulation compliance at some $10k/month office building with my own office and my boss asked me to clean up his cereal it would be fucking weird. I would get out of there. But I'm not. I'm some person who's willingly working for next to no pay, traveling around the world with my boss, living in the same home as them, doing illegal drugs with them, sleeping with them, etc. Being asked to: clean up their cereal/drive without a license/not hang out with low value people/eat meat is just one more thing that is consistent with the office environment. Then someone else hears about all the stupid shit that went on in my workplace and decides it's worth $5,000 and a blog post.

Good on the employees for leaving, maybe they were un-corrupted pure youth who were swayed by the mighty lies and persuasive ability of Woods and the Emersons.

@Ben Pace [LW · GW]  Can you please add at the top of the post "Nonlinear disputes at least 85 of the claims in this post and intends to publish a detailed point-by-point response.

They also published this short update [LW · GW] giving an example of the kind of evidence they plan to demonstrate."

We keep hearing from people who don't know this. Our comments get buried, so they think your summary at the bottom contains the entirety of our response, though it is just the tip of the iceberg. As a result, they think your post marks the end of the story, and not the opening chapter.
 

I think in almost any functioning professional ecosystem, there should be some general principles like:

• If you employ someone, after they work for you, unless they've done something egregiously wrong or unethical, they should be comfortable continuing to work and participate in this professional ecosystem.
• If you employ someone, after they work for you, they should feel comfortable talking openly about their experience working with you to others in this professional ecosystem.

Any breaking of the first rule is very costly, and any breaking of the second rule is by-default a red-line for me not being willing to work with you.

I agree these are good principles, but I want to point out that fairly stringent non-disparagement and non-disclosure provisions are pretty common in ordinary (non-EA) business contexts, including employment contracts and severance agreements.

My own view is that such norms are often bad, and EAs and rationalists should strive to do better in our own dealings. But NDAs are not a red-line for me personally, and not even a particularly big negative signal, given how common they are.

(I may be interpreting you overly literally or missing context; I haven't read most of the rest of this piece.)

(Note: this was cross-posted to EA Forum here [EA · GW]; I've corrected a couple of minor typos, and swapping out 'EA Forum' for 'LessWrong' where appropriate)

A note on EA LessWrong posts as (amateur) investigative journalism:

When passions are running high, it can be helpful to take a step back and assess what's going on here a little more objectively.

There are all different kinds of EA Forum LessWrong posts that we evaluate using different criteria. Some posts announce new funding opportunities; we evaluate these in terms of brevity, clarity, relevance, and useful links for applicants. Some posts introduce a new potential EA cause area; we evaluate them in terms of whether they make a good empirical case for the cause area being large-scope, neglected, and tractable. Some posts raise a theoretical issues in moral philosophy; we evaluate those in terms of technical philosophical criteria such as logical coherence.

This post by Ben Pace is very unusual, in that it's basically investigative journalism, reporting the alleged problems with one particular organization and two of its leaders. The author doesn't explicitly frame it this way, but in his discussion of how many people he talked to, how much time he spent working on it, and how important he believes the alleged problems are, it's clearly a sort of investigative journalism.

So, let's assess the post by the usual standards of investigative journalism. I don't offer any answers to the questions below, but I'd like to raise some issues that might help us evaluate how good the post is, if taken seriously as a work of investigative journalism. 

Does the author have any training, experience, or accountability as an investigative journalist, so they can avoid the most common pitfalls, in terms of journalist ethics, due diligence, appropriate degrees of skepticism about what sources say, etc?

Did the author have any appropriate oversight, in terms of an editor ensuring that they were fair and balanced, or a fact-checking team that reached out independently to verify empirical claims, quotes, and background context? Did they 'run it by legal', in terms of checking for potential libel issues?

Does the author have any personal relationship to any of their key sources? Any personal or professional conflicts of interest? Any personal agenda? Was their payment of money to anonymous sources appropriate and ethical?

Were the anonymous sources credible? Did they have any personal or professional incentives to make false allegations? Are they mentally healthy, stable, and responsible? Does the author have significant experience judging the relative merits of contradictory claims by different sources with different degrees of credibility and conflicts of interest?

Did the author give the key targets of their negative coverage sufficient time and opportunity to respond to their allegations, and were their responses fully incorporated into the resulting piece, such that the overall content and tone of the coverage was fair and balanced?

Does the piece offer a coherent narrative that's clearly organized according to a timeline of events, interactions, claims, counter-claims, and outcomes? Does the piece show 'scope-sensitivity' in accurately judging the relative badness of different actions by different people and organizations, in terms of which things are actually trivial, which may have been unethical but not illegal, and which would be prosecutable in a court of law? 

Does the piece conform to accepted journalist standards in terms of truth, balance, open-mindedness, context-sensitivity, newsworthiness, credibility of sources, and avoidance of libel? (Or is it a biased article that presupposed its negative conclusions, aka a 'hit piece', 'takedown', or 'hatchet job').

Would this post meet the standards of investigative journalism that's typically published in mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Economist?

I don't know the answers to some of these, although I have personal hunches about others. But that's not what's important here. 

What's important is that if we publish amateur investigative journalism in EA Forum LessWrong, especially when there are very high stakes for the reputations of individuals and organizations, we should try to adhere, as closely as possible, to the standards of professional investigative journalism. Why? Because professional journalists have learned, from centuries of copious, bitter, hard-won experience, that it's very hard to maintain good epistemic standards when writing these kinds of pieces, it's very tempting to buy into the narratives of certain sources and informants, it's very hard to course-correct when contradictory information comes to light, and it's very important to be professionally accountable for truth and balance.

Relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NCefvet6X3Sd4wrPc/uncritical-supercriticality [LW · GW]

And it is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.

Meta: Here is a link to the crosspost on the EA Forum [EA · GW].

(Also shared on the EA Forum) 

I’m one of the Community Liaisons for CEA’s Community Health and Special Projects team. The information shared in this post is very troubling. There is no room in our community for manipulative or intimidating behaviour.

We were familiar with many (but not all) of the concerns raised in Ben’s post based on our own investigation. We’re grateful to Ben for spending the time pursuing a more detailed picture, and grateful to those who supported Alice and Chloe during a very difficult time. 

We talked to several people currently or formerly involved in Nonlinear about these issues, and took some actions as a result of what we heard. We plan to continue working on this situation. 

From the comments on this post, I’m guessing that some readers are trying to work out whether Kat and Emerson’s intentions were bad. However, for some things, intentions might not be very decision-relevant. In my opinion, meta work like incubating new charities, advising inexperienced charity entrepreneurs, and influencing funding decisions should be done by people with particularly good judgement about how to run strong organisations, in addition to having admirable intentions. 

I’m looking forward to seeing what information Nonlinear shares in the coming weeks.  

[Chloe was] paid the equivalent of $75k^[1] [LW(p) · GW(p)] per year (only $1k/month, the rest via room and board)

So, it's not the most important thing in the post, but this sounds hella sketchy.  Are you sure these are the numbers that were given?

$75k/yr minus $1k/mo leaves $63k/year in 'room and board'.  The median household income in New York City is $70,663/yr per census.gov.  Where were they boarding her, the Ritz Carlton?

By the way, this topic was already briefly discussed [EA(p) · GW(p)] on the EA forum 10 months ago.

The comments there feel like a copy of the comments here, so I guess the only new information for those who don't read the EA forum is the very fact that this was already publicly discussed 10 months ago.

EDIT 2: To be clear, I was doing the exercise Ben recommended at the start of the post: predicting what I think the worst, credible info he could've found was. And this was a quickly written sketch of my off-the-cuff predictions. To be clear, the upper bounds I give are loose bounds and I lumped some really bad stuff with not-so-bad stuff. The me who wrote this comment a couple days ago would've been shocked if anyone in Non-linear had done the worst stuff in this list. But admittedly somewhat less shocked than the median LW user, I think. Milder forms of misconduct, like corruption and contract breaking, would've been most of the 1/100 chance I mention below. 

A quick sketch of my estimates about how bad Ben's claims are:

I think there's like a ~1/1000-1/100 chance for each person amongst Non-linear to have been a rapist.

Maybe a 1/100-1/10 chance of other bad things having been done by people in Non-linear. Much/most of that probability mass is in miscelaneous forms of corruption. But I'd put maybe ~1/100 chance of any of corruption, blackmail, embezzlement, breaking major contracts, risking people's lives, beating someone up, and admittedly very unlikely, but possibly seriously physically injuring/killing someone. 

Minor corruption or failures in rationality happening in the organization happening as a whole somewhere seem quite likely?

Edit: To be clear, this isn't because I've heard anything wrong about Non-linear previously. I've just updated hard enough on evidence of malfeasance amongst rats/EAs that I think that rat orgs are pretty average in how uncorrupt they are, and rats are pretty average in how moral they are, given their demographics. It is hard to say whether the initial part of this post, and some tangential discussion of it, affected my estimates.

[Cross-commenting from the EA Forum.]

[Disclaimers: My wife Deena works with Kat as a business coach. I briefly met Kat and Emerson while visiting in Puerto Rico and had positive interactions with them. My personality is such that I have a very strong inclination to try to see the good in others, which I am aware can bias my views.]

A few random thoughts related to this post:

1. I appreciate the concerns over potential for personal retaliation, and the other factors mentioned by @Habryka [EA · GW] and others for why it might be good to not delay this kind of post. I think those concerns and factors are serious and should definitely not be ignored. That said, I want to point out that there's a different type of retaliation in the other direction that posting this kind of thing without waiting for a response can cause: Reputational damage. As others have pointed out, many people seem to update more strongly on negative reports that come first and less on subsequent follow up rebuttals. If it turned out that the accusations are demonstrably false in critically important ways, then even if that comes to light later the reputational damage to Kat, Emerson, and Drew may now be irrevocable.

Reputation is important almost everywhere, but in my anecdotal experience reputation seems to be even more important in EA than in many other spheres. Many people in EA seem to have a very strong in-group bias towards favoring other "EAs" and it has long seemed to me that (for example) getting a grant from an EA organization often feels to be even more about having strong EA personal connections than for other places. (This is not to say that personal connections aren't important for securing other types of grants or deals or the like, and it's definitely not to say that getting an EA grant is only or even mostly about having strong EA connections. But from my own personal experience and from talking to quite a few others both in and out of EA, this is definitely how it feels to me. Note that I have received multiple EA grants in the past, and I have helped other people apply to and receive substantial EA grants.) I really don't like this sort of dynamic and I've low-key complained about it for a long time - it feels unprofessional and raises all sorts of in-group bias flags. And I think a lot of EA orgs feel like they've gotten somewhat better about this over time. But I think it is still a factor.

Additionally, it sometimes feels to me that EA Forum dynamics tend to lead to very strongly upvoting posts and comments that are critical of people or organizations, especially if they're more "centrally connected" in EA, while ignoring or even downvoting posts and comments in the other direction. I am not sure why the dynamic feels like this, and maybe I'm wrong about it really being a thing at all. Regardless, I strongly suspect that any subsequent rebuttal by Nonlinear would receive significantly fewer views and upvotes, even if the rebuttal were actually very strong.

Because of all this, I think that the potential for reputational harm towards Kat, Emerson, and Drew may be even greater than if this were in the business world or some other community. Even if they somehow provide unambiguous evidence that refutes almost everything in this post, I would not be terribly surprised if their potential to get EA funding going forward or to collaborate with EA orgs was permanently ended. In other words, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if this post spelled the end of their "EA careers" even if the central claims all turned out to be false. My best guess is that this is not the most likely scenario, and that if they provide sufficiently good evidence then they'll be most likely "restored" in the EA community for the most part, but I think there's a significant chance (say 1%-10%) that this is basically the end of their EA careers regardless of the actual truth of the matter.

Does any of this outweigh the factors mentioned by @Habryka [EA · GW]? I don't know. But I just wanted to point out a possible factor in the other direction that we may want to consider, particularly if we want to set norms for how to deal with other such situations going forward.

2. I don't have any experience with libel law or anything of the sort, but my impression is that suing for slander over this kind of piece is very much within the range of normal responses in the business world, even if in the EA world it is basically unheard of. So if your frame of reference is the world outside of EA then suing seems at least like a reasonable response, while if your frame of reference is the EA community then maybe it doesn't. I'll let others weigh in on whether my impressions on this are correct, but I didn't notice others bring this up so I figured I'd mention it.

3. My general perspective on these kinds of things is that... well, people are complicated. We humans often seem to have this tendency to want our heroes to be perfect and our villains to be horrible. If we like someone we want to think they could never do anything really bad, and unless presented with extremely strong evidence to the contrary we'll look for excuses for their behavior so that it matches our pictures of them as "good people". And if we decide that they did do something bad, then we label them as "bad people" and retroactively reject everything about them. And if that's hard to do we suffer from cognitive dissonance. (Cf. halo effect.)

But the reality, at least in my opinion, is that things are more complicated. It's not just that there are shades of grey, it's that people can simultaneously be really good people in some ways and really bad people in other ways. Unfortunately, it's not at all a contradiction for someone to be a genuinely kind, caring, supportive, and absolutely wonderful person towards most of the people in their life, while simultaneously being a sexual predator or committing terrible crimes.

I'm not saying that any of the people mentioned in this post necessarily did anything wrong at all. My point here is mostly just to point out something that may be obvious to almost all of us, but which feels potentially relevant and probably bears repeating in any case. Personally I suspect that everybody involved was acting in what they perceived to be good faith and are / were genuinely trying to do the right thing, just that they're looking at the situation through lenses based on very different perspectives and experiences and so coming to very different conclusions. (But see my disclaimer at the beginning of this comment about my personality bias coloring my own perspective.)

Thanks for this writeup, still undergoing various updates based on the info above and responses from Nonlinear.

One thing I do want to comment on is this:
 

(Personal aside: Regarding the texts from Kat Woods shown above — I have to say, if you want to be allies with me, you must not write texts like these. A lot of bad behavior can be learned from, fixed, and forgiven, but if you take actions to prevent me from being able to learn that the bad behavior is even going on, then I have to always be worried that something far worse is happening that I’m not aware of, and indeed I have been quite shocked to discover how bad people’s experiences were working for Nonlinear.)

I agree that it was a bad message to send. I agree that people shouldn't make it hard for others who have a stake in something to learn about bad behavior from others involved.

But I think it's actually a bit more complex if you consider the 0 privacy norms that might naturally follow from that, and I can kind of understand where Kat is (potentially) coming from in that message. This doesn't really apply if Nonlinear was actually being abusive, of course, only if they did things that most people would consider reasonable but which felt unfair to the recipient.

What I mean is basically that it can be tough to know how to act around people who might start shit-talking your organization when them doing so would be defecting on a peace treaty at best, and abusing good-will at worst. And it's actually generally hard to know if they're cognizant of that, in my experience.

This is totally independent of who's "right" or "wrong," and I have 0 personal knowledge of the Nonlinear stuff. But there are some people who have been to summer camps that we've had the opportunity to put on blast about antisocial things they've done that got them removed from the ecosystem, but we try to be careful to only do that when it's *really* egregious, and so often chose not to because it would have felt like too much of an escalation for something that was contained and private...

...but if they were to shit-talk the camps or how they were treated, that would feel pretty bad from my end in the "Well, fuck, I guess this is what we get for being compassionate" sense.

Many people may think it would be a better world if they imagine everyone's antisocial acts being immediately widely publicized, but in reality what I think would result is a default stance of "All organizations try to ruin people's reputations if they believe they did something even slightly antisocial so that they can't harm their reputation by telling biased stories about them first," and I think most people would actually find themselves unhappy with that world. (I'm not actually sure about that, though it seems safer to err on the side of caution.)

It can sound sinister or be a bad power dynamic from an organization to an individual, but if an individual genuinely doesn't seem to realize that the thing holding the org back isn't primarily a mutual worry of negative reputation harm but something like compassion and general decency norms, it might feel necessary to make that explicit... though of course making it explicit comes off as a threat, which is worse in many ways even if it could have been implicitly understood that the threat of reputation harm existed just from the fact that the organization no longer wants you to work with them.

There are good reasons historically why public bias is in the favor of individuals speaking out against organizations, but I think most people who have worked in organizations know what a headache it can be to deal with the occasional incredibly unreasonable person (again, not saying that's the case here, just speaking in general), and how hard it is to determine how much to communicate to the outside world when you do encounter someone you think is worse than just a "bad fit." I think it's hard to set a policy for that which is fair to everyone, and am generally unsure about what the best thing to do in such cases is.

Once I started actively looking into things, much of my information in the post below came about by a search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders, not from a search to give a balanced picture of its overall costs and benefits.

This is confusing (edit: and concerning) to me. Why not search for a balanced picture instead? Was this intentional? Or was it an unintended slip up that the author is merely admitting to?

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.

A lot of people have been angry about these texts made by Kat towards Alice:

“Given your past behavior, your career in EA would be over in a few DMs, but we aren’t going to do that because we care about you”
“We’re saying nice things about you publicly and expect you will do the same moving forward”

This sounds like a threat and it’s not how I would have worded it had I been in Kat’s shoes. However, I think it looks much more reasonable if you view it through the hypothesis that a) the bad things Alice is saying about Nonlinear are untrue and b) the bad things Kat has been holding off on saying about Alice are true. Basically, I think Kat’s position is that “If you [Alice] keep spreading lies about us, we will have to defend ourselves by countering with the truth, and unfortunately if these truths got out it would make you look bad (e.g. by painting you as dishonest). That’s why we’ve been trying to avoid going down this route, because we actually care about you and don’t want to hurt your reputation (so you can find jobs), so let’s both just say nice things about each other from now on and put this behind us.”. My sense is that Kat, out of fear that her reputation was being badly and unfairly damaged, emphasized the part where bad things happen to Alice in an attempt to get her to stop spreading misinformation. Again, while this isn’t how I’d have worded those messages, given this context I think it’s much more understandable than it might first seem.

Disclaimer: I'm friends with Kat and know some of her side of the story.

I had taken Dan Luu as implicitly endorsing the org by going there. I'm very unhappy that it turns out this is filtered evidence.

I think of myself as playing the role of a wise old mentor who has had lots of experience, telling stories to the young adventurers, trying to toughen them up, somewhat similar to how Prof Quirrell^[8] [? · GW] toughens up the students in HPMOR through teaching them Defense Against the Dark Arts, to deal with real monsters in the world.

Professor Quirrell also teaches his students how to lose. I suspect that Emerson is severely lacking this skill and that this lack is costing him greatly.

Edit: I say this mainly to signal boost the importance of "learn how to lose" and to point to a helpful example of why it is important.

I sense a strong "ends justify the means" mentality amongst Emerson, and to a lesser extent, Kat.

I think that everything we're seeing here more broadly is a great case study in how that sort of thinking can, and often does [LW · GW], go wrong.

In particular, if you are going to use that type of reasoning, you really need to make sure that you think beyond first order effects. What about the second, and third, and nth order effects? Thinking about such things is often difficult and mistake prone, and so something like virtue ethics is probably the approach that yields the most desirable consequences for most [LW · GW] people.

I wonder: is it appropriate to approach this situation from the perspective of gossip? As opposed to a perspective closer to formal legal systems?

I'm not sure. I suspect moderately strongly that a good amount of gossip is appropriate here, but that, at the same time, other parts of this should be approached from a more conservative and formal perspective. I worry that sticking one's chin up in the air at the thought of gossiping is a Valley of Bad Rationality [? · GW] and something a midwit would do.

Robin Hanson has written a lot about gossip. It seems that social scientists see it as something that certainly has it's place. From Scientific American's The Science of Gossip: Why We Can't Stop Ourselves:

Is Gossip Always Bad?
The aspect of gossip that is most troubling is that in its rawest form it is a strategy used by individuals to further their own reputations and selfish interests at the expense of others. This nasty side of gossip usually overshadows the more benign ways in which it functions in society. After all, sharing gossip with another person is a sign of deep trust because you are clearly signaling that you believe that this person will not use this sensitive information in a way that will have negative consequences for you; shared secrets also have a way of bonding people together. An individual who is not included in the office gossip network is obviously an outsider who is not trusted or accepted by the group.

There is ample evidence that when it is controlled, gossip can indeed be a positive force in the life of a group. In a review of the literature published in 2004, Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State University and his colleagues concluded that gossip can be a way of learning the unwritten rules of social groups and cultures by resolving ambiguity about group norms. Gossip is also an efficient way of reminding group members about the importance of the group’s norms and values; it can be a deterrent to deviance and a tool for punishing those who transgress. Rutgers University evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has discussed the evolutionary importance of detecting “gross cheaters” (those who fail to reciprocate altruistic acts) and “subtle cheaters” (those who reciprocate but give much less than they get). [For more on altruism and related behavior, see “The Samaritan Paradox,” by Ernst Fehr and Suzann-Viola Renninger; Scientific American Mind, Premier Issue 2004.]

Gossip can be an effective means of uncovering such information about others and an especially useful way of controlling these “free riders” who may be tempted to violate group norms of reciprocity by taking more from the group than they give in return. Studies in real-life groups such as California cattle ranchers, Maine lobster fishers and college rowing teams confirm that gossip is used in these quite different settings to enforce group norms when an individual fails to live up to the group’s expectations. In all these groups, individuals who violated expectations about sharing resources and meeting responsibilities became frequent targets of gossip and ostracism, which applied pressure on them to become better citizens. Anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer groups have typically revealed a similar social control function for gossip in these societies.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm of the University of Southern California has proposed in his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Harvard University Press, 1999) that gossip evolved as a “leveling mechanism” for neutralizing the dominance tendencies of others. Boehm believes that small-scale foraging societies such as those typical during human prehistory emphasized an egalitarianism that suppressed internal competition and promoted consensus seeking in a way that made the success of one’s group extremely important to one’s own fitness. These social pressures discouraged free riders and cheaters and encouraged altruists. In such societies, the manipulation of public opinion through gossip, ridicule and ostracism became a key way of keeping potentially dominant group members in check.

There are so many things wrong with this post that I'm not entirely sure where to start. Here are a few key thoughts on this:

-EA preaches rationalism. As part of rationalism, to understand something truly, you need to investigate both sides of the argument. Yet the author specifically decided to only look at one side of the argument. How can that possibly be a rationalist approach to truth-seeking? If you're going to write a defamation article about someone, especially in EA, please make sure to go about it with the logical rigor you would give any issue. 

-I've been working with Kat and Nonlinear for years now and I heard about the hiring process, the employment issues, and the nasty separation. I can guarantee you from my perspective as a coach that a good number of the items mentioned here are abjectly false. I think the worst mistake Kat made was to not have a contract in writing with both of her employees (Chloe's agreement was in writing) detailing the terms of their work engagement.

-I'm not seeing information collected from other Nonlinear employees, which makes me wonder why there's a biased sample data here. Again, if you're spending the amount of time and effort as was put into this post to defame someone, choose an appropriate data sample.

-Have you ever been through or seen people go through a divorce? Nasty splits happen all the time, and the anger can cloud retrospective judgment. Yet when we hear someone complain about how bad their ex was, we take it with a grain of salt and assume that personal prejudice is clouding their impression of the person (which is usually true). Why isn't that factor taken into account?

-In general, I think it's not a good idea to live with the people you work with. It destroys relationships. So it probably wasn't a good position to start with. I'm not surprised it went sour - how often do people not have great relationships with their roommates? And when you compound that with a built-in hierarchy of employee and boss, it can make it more challenging. It's possible Alice and Chloe didn't know what they were getting themselves into. But that brings me back to Kat's mistake of not getting it in writing for both of them. Their mistake does not give them an excuse for libel.

Honestly, I'm very disappointed in the author for writing a non-rigorous, slanderous accusation of an organization that does a whole lot of good, especially when I know firsthand that it's false. It makes me lose faith in the integrity of the rationalist community. 

I think of myself as playing the role of a wise old mentor who has had lots of experience, telling stories to the young adventurers, trying to toughen them up, somewhat similar to how Prof Quirrell[8] toughens up the students in HPMOR

Speaking about taking inspiration from fiction...

Several novels by Robert A. Heinlein feature Jubal Harshaw, a fictional wealthy rationalist polymath who is living and working together with 3 sexy female secretaries: a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead (e.g. in "Stranger in a Strange Land").

I wonder if, by a pure coincidence, the 3 women involved in the Nonlinear situation are a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead?

I'm not implying anything, and I see no problem with such a setup at all, as long as everything is done with consent. But if there is indeed such a coincidence, that would make me update about Nonlinear in several ways.