I told you what I wanted you to do. You say it's unrealistic, I say that I wouldn't think to hold you to a standard I don't hold myself to.

I'm a blogger and a podcast producer, not an investigative journalist, and I'm paid to focus on internet nonsense, not truly critical, world-saving stuff. But I do my fair share of investigative work. This article is one of my recent high-effort investigations, over someone getting punched on a beach after a long series of ugly subculture drama—a much lower-stakes sequence than the one you covered, but one no less personal or painful for the participants. 

The "antagonists" were not particularly communicative, but I reached out to them multiple times, including right before publication, checking if I could ask questions and asking them to review my claims about them for accuracy. I went to the person closest to them who was informed on the situation and got as much information as I could from them. I spent hours talking with my primary sources, the victim and his boyfriend, and collecting as much hard evidence as possible. I spent a long time weighing which points were material and which would just serve to stir up and uncover old drama. Parties claimed I was making major material errors at several points during the process, and I dug into their claims as thoroughly as I could and asked for all available evidence to verify. Often, the disputes they claimed were material hinged on dissatisfaction with framing.

All sources were, mutually, worried about retribution and vitriol from the other parties involved. All sources were part of the same niche subculture spaces, all had interacted many times over the past half-decade, mostly unhappily, and all had complicated, ugly backstories. 

I was not paid for this, except inasmuch as I'm paid a part-time monthly salary for podcast production work. I did it in my spare time while balancing a full law school schedule. I approached it with care, with seriousness, and with full understanding of the reputational effects I expected it to have and the evidence I had backing and justifying those effects. What I want you to do is exactly what I would do if I were assigned this task, given comparable timing and hour constraints. No more, no less. 

There's no threshold of hours of engagement. The test I am describing is this: are you receiving, or do you seem likely to receive, new material facts that contradict elements of your narrative? You were, up until two hours before publication, with a promise that there was more on the way. There is nothing unreasonable about saying publication should be delayed in that circumstance.

Anyway, look, I'm not an investigative reporter with experience in the field, much as I LARP as one online. That said, I'm on good personal terms with several and am happy to put my money where my mouth is and check with them. Let me know if the following is an appropriate summary or whether you'd make changes:

Say you were advising someone on a story they'd been working on for six months aimed at presenting an exposé of a group their sources were confident was doing harm. They'd contacted dozens of people, cross-checked stories, and did extensive independent research over the course of hundreds of hours, paying their key sources for the trouble. Their sources, who will be anonymous but realistically identifiable in the article, express serious concerns about retribution and request a precise, known-in-advance publication date. Towards the end, they contact the group in question, with their primary conversation lasting a few hours and coming less than a week before their scheduled publication date. The group claims that several points in their article are materially wrong and libelous and asks for another week to compile evidence to rebut those claims, growing increasingly frantic as the publication date approaches and escalating to a threat of a libel suit. On the last day before publication, they show a draft to another person close to the story, who makes at least one clear correction of material fact, then, with a couple of hours to go before the scheduled publication, provides evidence contradicting another of the article's supporting claims. 

Would you advise them to publish the article in its current form, make a last-minute edit to include the final piece of material evidence, wait another week to review the claimed rebuttal, or take some other course of action?

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-15T04:49:35.251Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I like this summary, actually! Some small edits I would make: 

On the last day before publication, they show a draft to another person close to the story, who makes at least one clear correction of material fact, then, with a couple of hours to go before the scheduled publication, provides evidence contradicting another of the article's supporting claims. 

This is currently inaccurate. Spencer did not point out a material inaccuracy. Here is the original quote that we showed Spencer: 

(After making that decision I was also linked to this ominous yet still vague EA Forum thread [EA(p) · GW(p)], which further links to a lot of Glassdoor reviews for the previous company run by Nonlinear Cofounder Emerson Spartz, with many strongly negative reviews saying things like “I still have nightmares. Like, actual nightmares while I'm asleep.” and “On any given week in the office, the chances were pretty high that someone would end up crying, screaming or melting down.” and “Don't work here unless you want to be belittled, stretched too thin, and undervalued.” and “No amount of snacks make up for the toxic and traumatizing workplace environment nurtured here”.)

This is all totally accurate. Spencer pointed out that a good chunk of the relevant review period was not the one in which Emerson was CEO, and so not all of these reviews must be of Emerson as CEO (which we did not claim, but I can see how someone might read it that way). So we edited it to be the following: 

(After making that decision I was also linked to this ominous yet still vague EA Forum thread [EA(p) · GW(p)], that includes a former coworker of Kat Woods saying they did not like working with her, more comments like the one I received above, and links to a lot of strongly negative Glassdoor reviews for Nonlinear Cofounder Emerson Spartz's former company “Dose”. Note that more than half of the negative reviews are for the company after Emerson sold it, but this is a concerning one from 2015 (while Emerson Spartz was CEO/Cofounder): "All of these super positive reviews are being commissioned by upper management. That is the first thing you should know about Spartz, and I think that gives a pretty good idea of the company's priorities… care more about the people who are working for you and less about your public image". A 2017 review says "The culture is toxic with a lot of cliques, internal conflict, and finger pointing." There are also far worse reviews about a hellish work place which are very worrying, but they’re from the period after Emerson’s LinkedIn says he left, so I’m not sure to what extent he is responsible he is for them.)

I think the previous reviews were relevant to the case at hand, and the evidence was accurate as presented (even if they were about the company that Emerson left behind, and not while he was there, though some of the reviews were about Emerson). We did nevertheless replace it with just reviews from the relevant time period, to make things more robust, but I do not consider the previous presentation inaccurate, and the pointer to the glassdoor page to still be relevant evidence (especially given the one review we quoted here, which mentions Spartz directly).

As such, it is not accurate to say that material inaccuracies were pointed out to us in the post. 

Towards the end, they contact the group in question, with their primary conversation lasting a few hours and coming less than a week before their scheduled publication date. 

This is also inaccurate in that we first talked to Nonlinear about the accusations many months before the publication date, when we weren't sure yet whether we would publish anything on this topic. What is accurate is that we only informed Nonlinear that we are going to publish a post and informed them about the material facts. 

Here is how I would currently phrase things, leaving most of your language intact: 

Say you were advising someone on a story they'd been working on for six months aimed at presenting an exposé of a group their sources were confident was doing harm. They'd contacted dozens of people, cross-checked stories, and did extensive independent research over the course of hundreds of hours. 

Their sources, who will be anonymous but realistically identifiable in the article, express serious concerns about retribution and request a known-in-advance publication date. 

They have talked to the group they are investigating multiple times to gather evidence, but have not informed them that they are planning to release an exposé with the evidence they gathered. 7 days before their scheduled publication date they contact the group and inform them about their intent to publish and the key claims they are planning to include in their exposé.

The group claims that several points in their article are materially wrong and libelous and asks for another week to compile evidence to rebut those claims, growing increasingly frantic as the publication date approaches and escalating to a threat of a libel suit. 

On the last day before publication, they show a draft to another person close to the story who points out a detail that does not directly contradict anything in the post, but seems indirectly implied to be false, which they correct in the final publication. Then with two hours to go before the scheduled publication, the same contact provides evidence against one of the statements made in the post, though also does not definitely disprove it.

Would you advise them to publish the article in its current form, or delay publication, despite the credible requests about the sources about retribution and the promise of the scheduled publication date?

If you would be up for sending something like this to someone who works in investigative journalism, I would actually appreciate it. Some things that seem relevant to clarify: 

1. I would really like you to avoid framing the question too much. I think this is very easy among friends.
2. I think it would be good to differentiate "what he considers prudent for your own libel risk" from "what he considers his ethical responsibility". I think it's somewhat plausible (though not that likely) that he would be like "well, you really want to avoid a libel suit so you have to halt publication", but I am more interested what he would consider ethical, ignoring self-interest (I think whether it was prudent to go ahead given libel risk is an interesting question, but not I hope to answer with this inquiry). 

Thank you for offering to do this. I do find myself pretty interested in the answer. I don't think an answer one way or another would totally flip me here, but I would definitely update somewhat.

Replies from: tracingwoodgrains

↑ comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-12-15T04:56:52.941Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It's tempting to nitpick the edits a bit, but I think this is probably close enough to get good answers while being approximately satisfactory to both of us. I'll let you know how it goes.

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-15T04:59:54.785Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you, I appreciate it! 

Replies from: tracingwoodgrains

↑ comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-12-15T16:39:58.708Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The above image contains the full text of my message, absent the rest of the copy-pasted hypo. I'll note in the interests of broad fairness that other involved parties suggested edits, notably that the last-minute evidence was evidence indicating the key witness had lied and that "7 days" is longer than they had to respond to the material claims. I used none of their suggestions. I think the hypo could be a reasonable question across a somewhat broad range of specific factual emphases and think the framing as-is is sufficient to get good answers; in my messages, I did not alter the hypo from the words you chose.

I reached out to three journalists with long investigative track records and have two responses so far. It goes without saying that these are people I have close working relationships, regular communication, or other personal connections with, but I believe the framing and lack of context provided mean they are well-positioned to consider the question in the abstract and on the merits independent of any connections.

The first response (update: from Katie Herzog):

I would delay publication. I’m not sure about the specifics of libel law but putting myself in a publisher’s shoes, they do tend to not want to get sued and your first commitment, beyond getting the scoop or even stopping the hypothetical group from doing harm, should be towards accuracy. 

The second (update: from Jesse Singal):

I think it depends a lot on the group's ability to provide evidence the investigators' claims are wrong. In a situation like that I would really press them on the specifics. They should be able to provide evidence fairly quickly. You don't want a libel suit but you also don't want to let them indefinitely delay the publication of an article that will be damaging to them. It is a tricky situation! I am not sure an investigative reporter would be able to help much more simply because what you're providing is a pretty vague account, though I totally understand the reasons why that's necessary.

UPDATE: 

The third, from Helen Lewis:

This feels like a good example of why you shouldn’t over-promise to your sources—you want a cordial relationship with them but you need boundaries too. I can definitely see a situation where you would agree to give a source a heads up once you’d decided to publish — if it was a story where they’d recounted a violent incident or sexual assault, or if they needed notice to stay somewhere else or watch out for hacking attempts. But I would be very wary of agreeing in advance when I would publish an investigation—it isn’t done until it’s done.

In the end the story is going out under your name, and you will face the legal and ethical consequences, so you can’t publish until you’re satisfied. If the sources are desperate to make the information public, they can make a statement on social media. Working with a journalist involves a trade-off: in exchange for total control, you get greater credibility, plausible deniability and institutional legal protection. If I wasn’t happy with a story against a ticking clock, I wouldn’t be pressured into publication. That’s a huge risk of libelling the subjects of the piece and trashing your professional reputation.

On the request for more time for right to reply, that’s a judgement call—is this a fair period for the allegations involved, or time wasting? It’s not unknown for journalists to put in a right to reply on serious allegations, and the subject ask for more time, and then try to get ahead of the story by breaking it themselves (by denying it).

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-15T17:50:15.470Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you!

Hmm, the first one seems to be responding at the level of "here is how you don't get sued". Would be interested in a follow-up question asking what to do if you are not concerned about getting sued.

The second one makes sense. Would be happy to draft something with more detail as a response, so we can get something out of it. 

Replies from: tracingwoodgrains

↑ comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-12-15T19:25:02.086Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've been trying to stay out of this, but I'm honestly shocked at this claim you're making.

You say:

We talked to dozens of other people working at the organization, extensively cross-checked the stories they told us

But this is, just, wildly false? You did not speak to dozens of other people working at Nonlinear.

And Ben himself contradicts you. In Ben's post, he says:

My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe).

Ben thinks we’ve only had 7 total team members, but we've actually had 21 - extremely far off.

If you "extensively cross-checked the stories," how did Ben get such a basic number so wrong? And why are you under the impression that you had talked to dozens of employees if Ben did not?

The fact that you spent 1000 hours on this and got such key details this wrong is surprising to me.

Ok, but why is this a big deal? Aside from showing egregiously bad fact checking, a large portion of Ben's post was trying to make the case that there is a pattern of Nonlinear "chewing up and spitting out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world." It would significantly weaken your case if it were 2 out of 21 team members ^[1]were unhappy instead of 2 out of 7.

Not only that, but to my knowledge, Ben did not talk to a single employee or intern since Alice and Chloe to see if these patterns were, in fact, patterns.

This seems like poor truth-seeking to me.

1. ^{^}

   edit: changed "employees" to "team members"

Hm, a lot I disagree with here, but a crux is that I think you're not really replying to TracingWoodgrain's original point, which was that Ben knew there might be significant evidence contradicting much of his post but decided not to wait for it and published anyways (which TW considers to be a bad norm). Instead you seem to be changing frame to "did Ben publish anything which he knew for sure wasn't true", which is quite different, particularly in this case where evidence is deliberately not being looked at.

Concretely, here's what you should have done instead:

Pause. Wait. Delay. Completely halt publication of the post, against the direct promises you made to your sources, who have shown you credible evidence that they are worried about retaliation. Make your excuses, make your apologies, recognize that you are on the verge of publishing a partial narrative aimed at dealing serious reputational damage to someone in your sphere, and take a moment to absolutely ensure all the i's are dotted and all the t's are crossed. 

If you receive concrete evidence that you are about to publish a falsehood aimed at inflicting material harm on someone, your duty is simply not to do that. If you are scrambling on the last day to update clear material falsehoods in your post, as Spencer reports with the company reviews, something has failed in your fact-checking process, and you should grimace, take a deep breath, and pause publication until you have things figured out.

Of course Nonlinear was using aggressive tactics. There's no truly returning from reputational damage inflicted by a post of that sort. Even if a response sways some people, it will at best always result in a sharp community divide, with people taking sides and landing with one adversarial party (you) or the other (them). I was unfamiliar with Nonlinear and Lightcone until these events, and don't have any sort of personal stake in the fight other than a desire to see careful standards applied to investigative work. But it seems abundantly clear to me that proper caution was not taken in the publication of the original post, and the root of that seems to be an impression that it's alright to publish material falsehoods if you update later, and that it's more important to keep to a publication schedule than to ensure you're presenting a complete picture. I emphatically disagree on both counts.

My read is that many people still consider the publication of the original post to be prudent and responsible given the circumstances, while any updates based on information that comes to light here will be prudent and responsible given the new information. Instead, I think people should view the original post as imprudent and irresponsible to the extent that it did not give one side of an adversarial situation an adequate hearing-out (and it really seems like it didn't: a three-hour phone call where you misleadingly summarize their response as "Good summary!", then refuse to wait until they can provide a more substantive response, is extraordinarily bad practice given the hundreds of hours he mentions putting into the rest of the investigation), with any subsequent updates being judged as returning towards responsibility after the fact rather than continuing a pattern of prudence.

I think what is bugging me about this whole situation is that there doesn't seem to be any mechanism of accountability for the (allegedly) false and/or highly misleading claims made by Alice. You seem to be saying something like, "we didn't make false and/or highly misleading claims, we just repeated the false and/or highly misleading claims that Alice told us, then we said that Alice was maybe unreliable," as if this somehow makes the responsibility (legal, ethical, or otherwise) to tell the truth disappear. 

Here is what Ben said in his post, Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation [EA · GW]:

"Eventually, after getting to talk with Alice and Chloe, it seemed to me Alice and Chloe would be satisfied to share a post containing accusations that were received as credible. They expected that the default trajectory, if someone wrote up a post, was that the community wouldn't take any serious action, that Nonlinear would be angry for "bad-mouthing" them, and quietly retaliate against them (by, for instance, reaching out to their employer and recommending firing them, and confidentially sharing very negative stories). They wanted to be confident that any accusations made would be strong enough that people wouldn't just shrug and move on with their lives. If that happened, the main effect would be to hurt them further and drive them out of the ecosystem.

It seemed to me that I could not personally vouch for any of the claims (at the time), but also that if I did vouch for them, then people would take them seriously. I didn't know either Alice or Chloe before, and I didn't know Nonlinear, so I needed to do a relatively effortful investigation to get a better picture of what Nonlinear was like, in order to share the accusations that I had heard."

It's not 100% clear, but it seems like Ben is saying that he does (at the time he wrote that post) vouch for the claims of Alice that he included in his post. If Ben did vouch for those claims, and those claims were wrong, and those wrong claims caused large amounts of damage to Nonlinear, and Ben thinks that any retaliation against Alice is unacceptable, then that leaves Ben Pace and Lightcone ultimately responsible does it not? 

Ok, so it sounds like a crux for you is that Ben in fact had high confidence in what he was relaying from Alice being true. In a dispute like this I don't think you can do very good due diligence when avoiding the people who are most likely to have counter-evidence; even if it is well-intentioned, it's a sort of conscious confirmation bias. Ben sort of admits to using poor epistemics in his disclaimer (at the top of his original post) about how to update from reading his post, but doesn't seem to update much on this himself (?), which seems like an error to me particularly when the stakes are this high. Perhaps it's unnecessary, but I will also point out that deliberately using poor epistemics feels pretty contrary to the spirit of rationality, which for good reason has fought for truth and against poor epistemics.

(I further argue against the premise of the disclaimer and Ben posting without hearing both sides here [EA(p) · GW(p)]).

I'm not really sure what we're arguing at this point. My initial reply was about how collaborative Nonlinear had been, which I don't think you've addressed and isn't particularly related to whether Ben said true things. I'd also add that in my view Ben posting without getting Nonlinear's side of the story was itself pretty uncollaborative, and so the "retaliation" against him (in the form of criticizing him for the way he wrote his post) to me seems entirely justified.

Ok, so I'm guessing your position is that a) you, having read Nonlinear's reply, continue to believe that most of what Ben relayed from Alice was true, and b) if a few things turn out to be untrue it's not a big deal because it doesn't change the overall story, and in any case Ben admitted that Alice might be unreliable.

I'm not entirely sure how you weigh (a) and (b) but it makes more sense to me if your crux is (a), that most of Alice's claims are true. For that, I'm not sure where to start; as far as I've seen they all seem to be false. I guess we could start with the claims about not being paid, e.g. from Ben's high level overview:

Salary negotiations were consistently a major stressor for Alice’s entire time at Nonlinear. Over her time there she spent through all of her financial runway, and spent a significant portion of her last few months there financially in the red (having more bills and medical expenses than the money in her bank account) in part due to waiting on salary payments from Nonlinear. She eventually quit due to a combination of running exceedingly low on personal funds and wanting financial independence from Nonlinear, and as she quit she gave Nonlinear (on their request) full ownership of the organization that she had otherwise finished incubating.

Nonlinear has several rows in their overview table [LW · GW] which contradict this account:

• Alice "wasn't getting paid" only due to her own rather strange mistakes, such as not logging her expenses or not checking her own bank account to see that the money was actually there.
• Alice eventually got to choose her own salary.
• Alice claimed to be making significant income from her side business.
• Alice had much less involvement and ownership of "the organization" than she claimed, and was repeatedly informed of this (this section of the appendix is relevant).

Ben also admits that "[Alice] also had a substantial number of emergency health issues covered [by Nonlinear]".

We could also talk about Alice's accusations of not being fed vegan food or being forced to travel with illegal drugs. I'm not sure if this is what you meant by "grievous error" though -- please let me know if I'm barking up the wrong tree.

Pace reports Nonlinear said they did ask for people to bring illegal recreational drugs over the border for them. Have they claimed he was lying when he reports them here [EA · GW]:

"Third; the semi-employee was also asked to bring some productivity-related and recreational drugs over the border for us. In general we didn't push hard on this. For one, this is an activity she already did (with other drugs). For two, we thought it didn't need prescription in the country she was visiting, and when we found out otherwise, we dropped it. And for three, she used a bunch of our drugs herself, so it's not fair to say that this request was made entirely selfishly. I think this just seems like an extension of the sorts of actions she's generally open to"

Again, I don't care about this much, but Pace can't be accused of not following the facts if Nonlinear said they did something very similar to the thing they are accused of on another occasion, right?

Pace says "I bring this up as an example of the sorts of requests that Kat/Emerson/Drew felt comfortable making during Alice’s time there."

Pace reports Nonlinear as saying "I think this just seems like an extension of the sorts of actions she's generally open to"

Looks pretty similar to me. Sometimes people take drugs across borders. That's on them, but if you're asking employees to do it, then that's the kind of thing you ask employees to do. 

Whether he preceded it with “Alice says” makes little difference in terms of either moral or legal responsibility.

Morally, I agree with you. Legally, I think you are not correct at least as pertains to US law, which has much higher standards to meet for defamation claims than most European countries. In the US, the truth of the statement is generally an absolute defense to liability. If I publish a story of the form "A says B committed a crime; B denies/disputes it", then in general I would not have liability if A in fact said that, because my statement was true (though A might have liability, of course).

I also appreciate this!

Thanks for the research! I'm guessing that there's probably a lot of nuance here, such as if, e.g. the President falsely accuses someone, then the false accusation is independently newsworthy and that might be protective of the media outlet who repeated it while saying that it doesn't believe the President's accusation. But I've updated my view on the core question and disendorsed my initial comment.

Yes, just citing someone is not sufficient, though from what I read it does still pretty substantially matter to how these kinds of suits go. 

The more relevant dimension where this matters is that the prosecution would have to prove that Ben knew the information was inaccurate, which is a lot harder if the post is pretty clear about its sources and epistemic status and evidence that was available. 

Hmm, at least for me many of the quotes above are substantially more load-bearing, but also not totally crazy that this differs between people. I do think in that case it might make sense to say "load bearing for my overall judgement of Nonlinear", since I (and Ben) do think many of the above are on a similar or higher level of being concerning than the salary point, and Ben intended to communicate that.

I also want to highlight that I do currently believe that Alice was asked to smuggle harder drugs across the border than Adderall (though the Adderall one seems confirmed), and that Nonlinear are disputing this because it will be hard to prove, not because its false (though I am also not like 90%+ confident).

Yeah, I agree that a compensation package costing $X will be worth less than $X, and as an employee it totally makes sense to adjust for that.

But then I think separately it's important that the package did actually cost $X, especially if the $X was supposed to include many of the things that determine your very basic quality of life, like food, toiletries, rent, basic transportation, medical care, etc. I also think it matters how far Chloe got into the hiring process of Nonlinear on the assumption that total compensation would be "equivalent to $X", which to be clear, I don't currently know the details off.

even people who like traveling rarely want to spend 80% of their income on it

Two additional perspectives for looking at how much we should expect this to be a bad deal:

• Spending 80% of your income on traveling is uncommon, but spending 80% of your income on housing, food, and transportation while paying a premium for living in a desirable location is actually pretty common among young professionals?

• After graduating college I spent several months washing dishes for ~$200/wk, because I wanted to spend the summer at at a camp that charged vacationers ~$800/wk. I knew what I was getting into, had a good time, and don't feel like I was exploited.

It's not reasonable to bill an employee for their boss's travel tastes

From the evidence above the deal was pretty clearly $1k/mo + NL pays for stuff. Reading the interview transcript, Kat's saying this can be thought of as being worth $70k isn't an offer to pay $70k with deductions for stuff.

Now, Chloe clearly didn't end up liking the deal and I think the deal was probably not legal [1][2], but those are different objections!

[1] When they were in Puerto Rico $1k/mo ($5.68/hr) was below the minimum wage.

[2] Multijurisdictional employment is famously complex, and digital nomads commonly ignore the legal requirements of working from the various countries. I have no evidence on how NL handled this, but since it's so hard and so rarely done right my guess is NL commonly was employing Alice and Chloe illegally.

80% of the money we spent on their compensation was not going to travel. Copy-pasting comments from the thread [EA(p) · GW(p)] over here where this number was originally said:

"

spend >80% of their income as travel

Where are you getting that number from? It was a mix of rent, food, medical, productivity tools, etc. Some quick math I did shows that only 6% of the money we spent on her was for travel. 

Math from this doc

Flights:800+190=990

Total spent on her when she was compensated with room, board, travel, and medical + stipend: 17,174

990/17174 = 6%

(I didn't include the flight from the Bahamas to London because that was when she was picking her own cash salary, rather than the all expenses paid + stipend. We'd just already booked it before she'd switched to cash. 

If you want to include that, it's hard, because then should we include the cash comp or not?)

It's also important to emphasize that even though compensation is not the same as purely cash pay, she signed up for the compensation package that she got. When she asked to get compensated purely in cash, we said yes.

So it's not like she was forced to spend money in a certain way. It's like if you signed up for a fellowship that covered room and board and a stipend. Later, you decide that you want to spend the money differently, so you talk to the person in charge and they say it's fine for you to be purely compensated with cash. There's no forcing you at any point in that process to spend your money in a particular way. 

Second follow up comment:

most people in Alice or Chloe's shoes would've preferred to be paid the equivalent cash amount

Alice did, and then when she asked she got it. Chloe never requested this. 

It's really important that they signed up for this. If we had promised them $75,000 cash salary and then instead gave them this compensation package, I think that is indeed unethical and unfair. However if they knew what they were signing up for and it was clearly communicated and they said yes, then that is totally fine and an informed choice they made.

I don't see an alternative. I can't read minds. I couldn't change their comp package if I didn't know they wanted to. And when I did know, I said yes. 

If they chose this compensation package when they could have applied for other jobs with a more standard package or could have asked for a standard package, then they did indeed choose this compensation package. 

Additionally, we need to be able to distinguish between “this was what they chose” and “this was what they would have preferred if they could have had anything in the world right away without having to ask”. 

Like, imagine I applied the same standards to funders. “I asked for $50,000 and they gave me $50,000, but I would have preferred $75,000. Yes, I didn’t ask for $75,000, but most people in my shoes would prefer $75,000 over $50,000.” (Or replace with whatever numbers make most sense to you)

This follows the same structure of the argument “Alice and Chloe signed up for a all-expenses-paid + stipend compensation package and they got that, but they would have preferred a cash salary of a similar value to the comp package. Yes, they didn’t ask for that, but most people in their shoes would prefer a cash salary over the other comp package.”

Or maybe a better analogy is a charity applying for funding and the grantmaker donates but with earmarked funds. All orgs would prefer unearmarked funds (flexible funds are more useful than earmarked ones), but that doesn’t mean it’s unethical for a donor to earmark their donations. 

Is rent a travel expense? 

Counting rent while traveling if this was a part-time travel experience seems reasonable. For example, if they usually live in the Bay area and they're expected to travel to London for EAG, the cost of the Airbnb in London is clearly a travel expense. 

However, if they are always traveling and they do not have a permanent place anywhere, that does not seem like a travel expense but rather just regular rent. Neither of them had a permanent place. Alice had been nomadic before she even met us. Counting that as a travel expense in this context doesn't make sense and will lead to people being misled.

Think about it. Otherwise then, for the last 4 years I have paid zero rent? Clearly, if you are a full-time nomad then airbnbs are just rent, not travel.

How to calculate total compensation

I quickly googled “when people describe a compensation package do they usually include medical” and the first result said: 

“Health Insurance Benefits are a huge piece of your overall compensation package. This can include Medical, Dental, Vision, as well as HSA/FSA accounts. When calculating how much your benefits are worth, think about what percentage your employer is going to be covering. Is your employer covering 100% of the cost? 80%? Does that change if you were to include a spouse or dependents in the coverage? These are all important questions to ask when evaluating an offer package and figuring out how much your health benefits are worth.”

“A total compensation package goes beyond your new hires' base pay rate. It also includes items like health insurance, bonuses, and paid time off”

When I Google “how to calculate the value of your compensation package” these are the first results:

“To calculate total compensation for an employee, take the sum of their base salary and the dollar value of all additional benefits. Additional benefits include insurance benefits, commissions and bonuses, time-off benefits, and perks.”

“Total compensation is the combined value of your salary, bonuses, a 401(k) match, free office coffee, and more. All those freebies or conveniences that feel like work perks—including your PTO—are actually parts of your total compensation package, and they can have just as much value as your salary.”

Since Google knows my history, I thought maybe it's giving me a biased result. So I tried searching in incognito mode so it wasn't taking into account my recent posting, and it gave the same results. 

Now, I do think that a compensation package is clearly different from cash salary. We say that right away [EA · GW] at the almost the very beginning of our post. But we did not describe it to them or to anybody as a $75,000 salary cash. We described it as a compensation package that we estimated to be worth around $70,000.

Once, off hand, in a recorded interview. Every single other communication was just saying all expenses paid plus stipend. 

They were informed about this beforehand and they signed up for it. If they had wanted something different, all they had to do was ask. Or they could have applied to a different job. When Alice did, she got it.

If people come away from reading this thinking that we said that we paid them both a cash salary of $75,000 or that it's the same as a $75,000 cash salary, then they made the same mistake that Chloe seems to have made. Chloe kept on saying that we offered to pay her something equivalent to a $75,000 cash salary. We were saying that this was worth around $70,000. I think her interpreting it this way led to a lot of suffering. We tried to explain it to her a bunch of times that that was not what we were saying but she did not seem to be able to update. I do think people seem to struggle with this a lot.

I think the main thing though, and the way I think about it at least, is as a consequentialist. I don't think in terms of how much money is it worth etc. I tend to think of it as are you getting your needs met? What about your preferences? And I think the key is that she was living an exceptionally comfortable lifestyle. She was living the almost exactly the same lifestyle as myself.

She also had plenty of freedom and options. She publicly says she had savings and we covered everything so well that, as far as we can tell, all of her stipend went into savings as well. She got her dream job 2 and 1/2 months after she quit. And she could have gotten a regular dev job far faster if she wanted. 

I don't know how she would have spent the money otherwise, But that seems irrelevant. It seems like if somebody got a scholarship that included room and board, and then they get upset, because they would have spent it on a different house. If they accept the scholarship, then that is how they would spend it. They would spend it on that house and that food, because that is what they chose. They could have just tried to get a different scholarship or a job. In fact, if you accept that scholarship, and then speak to the people who gave you it and say that you would prefer cash instead and they say yes, that is exceptionally generous and way outside the norm of what is expected. 

If a scholarship/fellowship/job offered you room and board and you accepted and then later asked for cash instead I suspect that 98% of them would say no. 

She is trying to make it sound like a hardship and us being unreasonable when it is incredibly unreasonable to ask for your compensation package to be changed so quickly after you accepted it. 

Most people do not ask for changes in compensation until they've been working for at least a year. 

Most people if they’re offered room and board + stipend never get the option of switching to cash only.

Most people don’t accept a compensation package and then later say they would have preferred a different compensation package and therefore they were financially controlled. 

Most people don’t go to the EA Hotel and say that they’re being financially controlled because they got room and board and a stipend and couldn’t choose to spend the money on something else. 

Most people don’t say that a scholarship offering to pay for room and board is somehow bad because the student could have used that money to spend less on a room or paid for a different room. 

Sure, everybody would prefer that. But they are not entitled to that. 

Sure, some people might misinterpret a compensation package being estimated to be worth $X as being the same as a cash salary of $X. But as long as you clearly communicate what they’re signing up for and they have other options and they choose the compensation package, then nothing wrong was done. If they later change their mind and want something different, they have to ask or quit and find a job that meets their criteria. They can’t make a choice, later want to make a different choice, then try to pillory an person for not reading their mind and giving them everything they ask for right away. 

People can’t say “They told me I’d get paid $X and I got paid $X but I think $Y would be better, therefore we have to warn the community about the ‘predator’ in our midst, ‘chewing up and spitting out’ the youth of the community.” 

They can say "They offered me $X and I got paid $X, and I would have preferred $Y, and when I asked for $Y, I got $Y." 

They can say "They offered me $X and I got paid $X. I would have preferred $Y, but I never asked for $Y and that made me sad. I guess I should learn from this and get better at asking people for things instead of expecting mind-reading and getting everything that I want immediately without asking."

I have noticed that you are asking yourself “can I believe this?” when assessing Alice and Chloe’s claims and “must I believe this?” when assessing our claims. Please try to apply similar evidentiary standards to all claims. 

This seems to confidently speak about the internals of my mind, which isn't always a bad thing to do, but in this case I don't think is accurately capturing reality. My guess is its best to keep at least this conversation at the level of facts and arguments.

And it would be really weird to say that too. I’ve never heard of somebody offering room & board + a stipend who’s said that it has to add up to a certain amount, otherwise you pay the difference (but you don’t pay the difference if the costs go over). 

I did not say here that you "have to pay the difference" (and I don't think anyone else has said that).

I don't understand the relevance of this screenshot. I don't think it matters for anyone's model whether Chloe thought of the $1000/mo as salary or stipend. She says "you mentioned that everything is covered", which is vague and doesn't tell us what exactly she thought was covered.

The contract states clearly that there wasn’t any “and then we’ll pay the difference if it’s below $70k” clause.

Yes, I agree that the literal contract is quite relevant, though again, nobody said that there was such a clause. The relevant component is whether the expectation was set that the benefits would add up to ~$70k, and whether that expectation was set accurately. If my employer sells me on a job by offering me a compensation package they estimate to be worth $70k, and then they spend much less than that, then that clearly seems like cause for a legitimate grievance.

I do think the contract generally does matter. It also matters a bunch when Chloe actually signed the contract since it determines for how much of your relevant work period you were on the same page about at least the legal context. Could you confirm when Chloe actually signed the contract?

Surely, "it was a big gamble that didn't pay off" works as well as an explanation here. They didn't realise how bad it would be and regret taking up the offer.

That's what it seems like they were doing to me from discussions about their work.

definition of unskilled labor: "labor that requires relatively little or no training or experience for its satisfactory performance"

What I've read alice and chloe did:

• booking flights
• driving to places
• renting transportation
• cleaning up around the house
• doing laundry
• filling out forms
• buying groceries

edit: Looked at the responsibilities on the job description. Reads like unskilled labor there to me. Especially how the story seems to be that even for filing miscellaneous forms the executive assistant got a ton of help from management and couldn't do it on their own.

If you have a different opinion on what their work amounted to I'd be interested to hear it. But it's definitely not even close to a crux for me.