I think being nicer would make truthseeking easier but isn't truthseeking in and of itself.

I also think it's a mistake to assume your inner Alice would shut up if only you came up with a good enough argument. The loudest alarm is probably false. Truthseeking might be useful in convincing other parts of your brain to stop giving Alice so much weight, but I would include "is Alice updating in response to facts?" as part of that investigation. 

I agree this set of questions is really important, and shouldn't be avoided just because it's uncomfortable. And I really appreciate your investment in truthseeking even when it's hard.

But Alice doesn't seem particularly truthseeking to me here, and the voice in your head sounds worse. Alice sounds like she has made up her mind and is attempting to browbeat people into agreeing with her. Nor does Alice seem curious about why her approach causes such indignance, which makes me further doubt this is about pursuit of knowledge for her. 

One reason people react badly to these tactics: rejecting assholes out of hand when they try to extract value from you is an important defense mechanism. If you force people to remove that you make them vulnerable to all kinds of malware (and you can't say "only remove it for good things" because the decision needs to be made before you know if the idea is good or not. That's the point). If Alice is going to push this hard about responsibility to the world she needs to put more thought into her techniques.

Maybe this will be covered in a later post but I have to respond to what's in front of me now. 

This is one benefit to paying people well, and a reason having fewer better-paid workers is sometimes better than more people earning less money. If your grants or salary give you just enough to live as long as the grants are immediately renewed/you don't get fired, even a chance of irritating your source of income imperils your ability to feed yourself. 6 months expenses in savings gives you the ability to risk an individual job/grant. Skills valued outside EA give you the ability to risk pissing off all of EA and still be fine. 

I'm emphasizing risk here because I think it's the bigger issue. If you know something is wrong, you'll usually figure out a way to act on it. The bigger problem is when you some concerns but they legitimately could be nothing, but worry that investigating will imperil your livelihood.

It's hard because Alice is a fictional character in stylized dialogue the author says is intended to be a bad implementation. But in the real world if someone talked like Alice did (about herself and towards Bob) I'd place good money on burnout. 

Probably Bob isn't actually the right person to raise this issue with Alice, because she doesn't respect him enough. But I don't think it's worse than what she's doing to him. 

I can picture ways people could bring up capacity-improvement-for-the-greater-good that I'd be really excited about. It's something I care about and most people aren't interested in. It's the way Alice (in this story, and by default in the real world) brings it up I think is counterproductive. 

Hot take: Bob should be bullying Alice to do less so she doesn't burn out. 

I believe that people who agreed with Alice and had worked to increase their capacity would be more indignant, and that's reason enough to never use this approach even if the goal is good. People hate having their work dismissed.

I think this post raises important points and handles them reasonably well. I am of course celebrating that fact mostly by pointing out disagreements with it.

I wish Alice drew a sharper distinction between Bob being honest about his beliefs, Bob bringing his actions in line with his stated beliefs, and Bob doing what Alice wants. I think pushing people to be honest is prosocial by default (within limits). Pushing people to do what you want is antisocial by default, with occasional exceptions. 

And Alice's methods can be bad, even if the goal is good. If I could push a button and have a community only of people on a long term growth trajectory, I would. But policing this does more harm than good, because it's hard for the police to monitor. Growth doesn't always look like what other people expect, and people need breaks. Demandng everyone present legible growth on a predictable cycle impedes growth (and pushes people to be dishonest).

My personal take here is that you should be ready to work unsustainably and miserably when the circumstances call for it, but the circumstances very rarely call for it, and those circumstances always include being very time-limited. "I'll just take the misery" is a plan with an inherent shelf life. But the capacity to tank the misery when you need to, or to do more work with less misery, is a moral virtue and should be recognized as such. I imagine some of Alice's frustration is that she feels like even if Bob gets less social credit than her, the gap should be bigger to reflect her larger contribution, and people use personal capacity as a reason to shrink the gap. And I think that's a valid complaint, especially if Alice worked to create that sustainable capacity in herself where it didn't exist before. 

Count me as a vote for sharing those papers, here or in your own post. 

Workers are only sterile in the most eusocial of species. In others, being a worker vs. queen is something of a choice, and if circumstances change a worker may start reproducing. There isn't a sharp transition between cooperative breeding and eusociality. 

Even in very eusocial haplodiploid species (so ants and bees, but not termites), unmated workers may reproduce after the death of the queen. They can only produce sons, but it's still reproduction. .  

The reason it still took over the macroscopic world is that evolution does not simply select for reproductive fitness

Here I define reproductive fitness as the average ability of your genes to reproduce

I think this is false by definition? The thing evolution selects for is the ability of genes to reproduce. How are you using the terms here?

The first time: I made no conscious choice about sugar consumption. One day I noticed I'd had the same dessert in my fridge for weeks without any desire to eat it. If I was alone I just had no desire for sugar. If someone prompted me to eat sugar I'd say I didn't want to break the streak. The desire definitely came back gradually, but my watermelon consumption also trailed off gradually as it became harder to get.

The second time: desire for sugar went away the second I gave up stevia soda (which was months after restarting watermelon). 

I think gut bacteria likely are in play here, but it seems like the good bacteria can be cultivated while still consuming sugar. 

oh interesting. Do you have any thoughts on how long it would take for that effect to kick in?

I take a supplement (mostly for the other ingredient) that has 250-500mg of inositol. 2 lbs of watermelon has 280mg (source: first hit on google), and presumably there's more in other foods I eat. I'd be surprised at that big an effect on sugar from such a modest change, but there could be threshold effects, or it could be a combination of things.

This is funny because my next post (not yet cross-posted here) is on inositol for anxiety.

lmk how it goes, I'd love to have more data.

FWIW, my matching symptom buddy says he also got good results from ketotifen and naltrexone

A repost from the discussion on NDAs and Wave (a software company). Wave was recently publicly revealed to have made severance dependent on non-disparagement agreements, cloaked by non-disclosure agreements. I had previously worked at Wave, but negotiated away the non-disclosure agreement (but not the non-disparagement agreement).

But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn't actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth. Bravo, @Elizabeth!)

I appreciate the kudos here, but feel like I should give more context.

I think some of what led to me to renegotiate was a stubborn streak and righteousness about truth. I mostly hear when those traits annoy people, so it’s really nice to have them recognized in a good light here. But that righteous streak was greatly enabled by the fact that my mom is a lawyer who modeled reading legal documents before signing (even when it's embarrassing your kids who just want to join their friends at the rockclimbing birthday party), and that I could afford to forgo severance. Obviously I really wanted the money, and I couldn’t afford to take this kind of stand every week. But I believe there were people who couldn’t even afford to add a few extra days, and so almost had to cave

To the extent people in that second group were unvirtuous, I think the lack of virtue occurred when they didn’t create enough financial slack to even have the time to negotiate. By the time they were laid off without a cushion it was too late. And that’s not available to everyone- Wave paid well, but emergencies happen, any one of them could have a really good reason their emergency fund was empty.

So the main thing I want to pitch here is that “getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap” is an underrated strategy.

There's also a dynamic of something like... this is one of those issues where being too interested in the problem is correlated with being bad at solving it.  Obviously you have to compromise on this a little or these kinds of things never get done, but if someone's only qualification is interest I think the EV is very negative.

That sounds really discouraging, so I want to tell @tailcalled: I think it's great you care about people are want to prevent them from being hurt. I think the easiest, least risky way to do that is to create abundance so people have less dependence on any one entity and are thus less vulnerable. The more parties being thrown by people who aren't creeps (or harboring creeps), the easier it is to avoid the parties that are. So I'd encourage you to start by building socially, rather than investigation. 

One thing that struck me reading your post was the number of times I wanted to say "no, you".  Issues where you see mistreatment of vegans or bad epistemics from omnivores, and I see the symmetric bad behavior from vegans^[1]. My guess is we're both accurately describing things we've seen, and we're both activated and protective after engaging in a lot of interactions where the other party was acting in bad faith. And those situations just take a lot of time to wind backwards, even though I think we've both done admirable jobs of it here.

I few things I thing are important and could possibly be addressed in a quick response:

You're worried my posts will lead more people to eat meat. AFAIK the practical effects have been dozens of vegans getting tested (with some portion of those starting vegan supplements), and one and a half people saying the posts were a component leading them to consider adding meat in once or twice a week (and those came much later, not as a result of the testing posts). People are more likely to report supplements than diet changes, but I also think my posts deserve more responsibility for the tests and supplements than for the dietary changes. It would mean a great deal to me to have this empirical fact either explicitly disagreed with or acknowledged. 

But you're right my posts probably weren't optimal for maximizing the number of vegans in the world. Probably because I wasn't optimizing for that, because I don't think it's as important as you or other vegan advocates do. I consider this a direct consequence of EA vegan advocacy's failure to provide basic nutritional education to the vegans it created. If you don't want omnivores running your vegan education, provide it yourself. 

You bring up EA/rat optimization drive as the root cause of nutritional issues. I think your description is confused but there is some core vibe I agree with, and I agree people would be better off relaxing that cosntraint on themselves. But I have no idea how to fix it. Meanwhile, for most existing naive vegans there's a $20 bill on the floor, in the form of some simple tests and supplements. I do write posts along the lines of "chill out" and maybe they're even helpful, but they have nowhere near the surgical problem-solving capacity of "hey here is a major problem you can fix with a pill."

And yes, I do talk about $20 bills for omnivores (or just unrelated to diet) when I find them, but most of the problems with omnivorism are more complicated or involve giving up things people like, which is just much harder. 

1. ^{^}

   E.g. you see all the places not offering vegan meals. I see vegan meals at Lightcone and Constellation. EAG serves only vegan meals (even when the caterer is unequipped for this). My impression is CEA's general policy is vegan-only. The upcoming Manifest conference explicitly promises vegetarian and vegan food. Atlas Fellowship workshops' chefs would technically serve meat, but you could tell their focus was on the vegan food. 
   
   You see omnivores as having bad epistemics and not giving their real reasons. I see the omnivores I knew in 2016 who were actively pursuing information about animal suffering and reducitarianism/ameliatarianism, until bad vegan advocates ground that curiosity down.  Advocates who wouldn't acknowledge the existence of trade offs, or differences in ability to be vegan, or wouldn't let the discussion be about anything except veganism and vegetarianism even when vegetarianism was higher net suffering than the complicated thing the omnivore was considering. 

Hi Martin- I really appreciate the thought and detail that went into this post, it was well worth the wait.

I have a lot of things I want to clarify, but suspect it just doesn't make sense to do so in this format. One option would be to try out LW's new Dialogue format. However I'd need to start this week, and it sounds like that's not an option for you. If this is a thing where money can help, I have some grant money and a good dialogue would be a good use of it, but I understand it probably can't. In which case hopefully you'll see my next post when things clear up and we can talk then. 

I forget how long they gave us at first (my deadline got extended). I do think that companies should give people long deadlines for this, and short deadlines are maybe the most antisocial part of this? People are predictably stressed out and have a lot to deal with (because they've been laid off or fired), and now they have to read complicated paperwork, find a lawyer, and negotiate with a company? That's a lot.

Non-disparagement and non-disclosure feel complicated to me and I can see how strong blanket statements became the norm, but using tight deadlines to pressure people on significant legal and financial decisions seems quite bad.

But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn't actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth. Bravo, @Elizabeth!)

I appreciate the kudos here, but feel like I should give more context.

I think some of what led to me to renegotiate was a stubborn streak and righteousness about truth. I mostly hear when those traits annoy people, so it’s really nice to have them recognized in a good light here. But that righteous streak was greatly enabled by the fact that my mom is a lawyer who modeled reading legal documents before signing (even when its embarrassing your kids who just want to join their friends at the rockclimbing birthday party), and that I could afford to forgo severance. Obviously I really wanted the money, and I couldn’t afford to take this kind of stand every week. But I believe there were people who couldn’t even afford to add a few extra days, and so almost had to cave

To the extent people in that second group were unvirtuous, I think the lack of virtue occurred when they didn’t create enough financial slack to even have the time to negotiate. By the time they were laid off without a cushion it was too late. And that’s not available to everyone- Wave paid well, but emergencies happen, any one of them could have a really good reason their emergency fund was empty.

So the main thing I want to pitch here is that “getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap” is an underrated strategy.

1. the median outcome for projects like this is doing far more harm than good
2. you haven't given any indication you understand the risks, much less are likely to beat them. 

This sounds like you're saying "I won't prescribe B12 until my patient gives up oreos" or even "I won't prescribe B12 until everyone gives up oreos", which would be an awful way to treat people. Even if you're right that oreos represent a larger problem, taking B12 pills is useful in its own right, and easier than giving up oreos^[1].

I assume you don't mean that. You probably mean "I don't think Elizabeth/anyone should spend time on veganism's problems, when metabolic issues are doing so much more aggregate harm." But tractability applies even more on a population level.  People aren't eating oreos out of ignorance: they know they're bad. They eat them because taste is winning out over health. 

It's impossible for a blog post to fix "oreos taste good" or "people care more about taste than health". But it's pretty easy theoretically possible for a blog post to fix ignorance of the benefits of some tests and supplements. When I see similarly tractable opportunities to help omnivores, I take them.

Hell, I found a (vegan) cure for oreos tasting good (n=1). Finding it took years of self-experimentation (where the iron post took a few days, for more certainly).   AFAIK no one else has tried it, because it takes consistent effort over several months to see an effect on weight^[2]. 

So no, I am not going to let McDonalds shitty advertising hold up alerting people to problems with simple diagnoses with simple solutions

1. ^{^}

   Especially by the time someone is in the doctor's office for oreo-related problems. The people who find oreos easy to give up have already done so. 

2. ^{^}

   It also costs $5-$10/day, but I know people jumping through a lot of hoops to get semaglutide, so I'm pretty sure the issue here is the delay and uncertainty. 

McDonalds and sugary cereal advertisers are widely viewed as harmful if not evil for the way they confuse the epistemic environment in order to make money and others' expense. Calling something "no worse than fast food and sugary cereal advertisers" is an enormous moral and epistemic insult to it. 

I spent a long time simplifying my life so that the number of things I needed to do really was manageable (which included limiting my freelance work to things that were either short or didn't have deadlines. This required strategy and sacrifice on my end, but I also feel like I should own that I had other gifts that made it easier, like a set of skills people will sometimes pay a lot for even when I won't do tight deadlines). 

It was often hard for me to know what I was capable of because it fluctuates and because I sometimes won't realize I'm spending down reserves until they're gone, so it was really important not just that the overall workload be low, but that I be able to suddenly peace out without it being a disaster. 

I also had to give up doing The Most Important Thing, in favor of Something That Will Actually Get Done. I think EA/rationality memes are paralyzing to a certain type of person, and what I really needed at the time was to do small things, for lots of reasons. the cumulative finishing of small things freed up energy in my life,  it built a sense of efficacy, and it gave me information that was eventually useful in doing bigger things. I talk about this some here,   

An intermediate point was, when choosing what to do for a day or week, forcing myself to think of one or two alternatives and choose between them. I didn't have to pick the absolute best choice (which was I probably right was impossible, and was parayzling even if i was wrong), but I did have to think about my choice at all. This naturally built up the skill of identifying and choosing between options.

After things had been going well for several years, I started to get a sense that I really wanted  more continuity and long term investment in my projects. This was different than the previous big-thinking, which was mostly about making other people happy (see the post I linked above). It was more like an itch, or a nutrient I needed. That started a little under two years ago. I spent the first year trying stuff, little of which panned out but I think I was following the right algorithm.

A little over one year ago I made a list of potential projects and resources they needed, and it became clear that getting myself more energy and time should be my top priority. Of ways to do that sleep was probably the most influential, except it was also affected by most things, so that didn't really add much clarity. I spent three months with medical stuff being my primary focus, most of which was useless but at the very end I found a magic device that improved my life by 2 points out of 10 (unfortunately this only replicates for a few people). 

I started creating or signing up for bigger commitments. I recently finished 2 months teaching at a summer program, and my next few months are spoken for by grants I applied for back in July (which was a big step for me, to be confident I'd want to stick with anything that long, and that I could predict it two months ahead of time). I'm currently in the middle of figuring out a project management system that will support my new workload, in addition to actually doing the work. 

Something I want to caution here is that, if you're like me, your body will eventually go on strike unless it believes in what you're doing. So it was important to get myself internally aligned and pointed in the right direction before I stepped on the accelerator. 

Oh man, it's worse than that. My original paperwork had both a non-disparagement clause and a non-disclosure clause relating to the agreement itself. The latter was removed in my agreement but presumably not others'.

While I have the emails open, I want to note that the lawyer described the agreement as pretty standard.

It's been a while but I think I remember who I negotiated with and it wasn't Lincoln (or Drew, the other co-founder). I find it pretty plausible that person had the authority to make changes to my agreement without running them by the founders, but would not have had the authority to change the default. So it's entirely possible multiple people pushed back but it never reached the conscious attention of the founders. 

And it may not have even come up that often. I think I am several sigmas out in my willingness to read legal paperwork, push back, and walk away from severance payments, so you'd need a large sample to have it come up frequently. Wave probably hasn't laid off or fired that many people with severance, and presumably the founders were less likely to hear about pushback as the company grew.

So it just seems really likely to me that Wave didn't invest its limited energy in writing its own severance agreement, and the situation didn't have enough feedback loops to make people with decision-making power question that. 

I think you are incorrect.

Cryptid Brent Dill doesn't look that much like the exiled Brent Dill. I'm mildly face blind and would normally defer to others on this, but it really doesn't look like him to me.

Cryptid Brent Dill's youtube channel goes back 6 years and seems based in the Pacific Northwest. That's well before the exile, and while I guess I can't rule out that he had a secret double life the whole time it seems really unlikely.  I've heard credible rumors of where he has been in the meantime, and it wasn't the PNW. 

I don't think making sure that no EA every give paid work to another EA, with out a formal contract, will help much

I feel like people are talking about written records like it's a huge headache, but they don't need to be. When freelancing I often negotiate verbally, then write an email with terms to the client., who can confirm or correct them. I don't start work until they've confirmed acceptance of some set of terms.  This has enough legal significance that it lowers my business insurance rates, and takes seconds if people are genuinely on the same page. 

What my lawyer parent taught me was that contracts can't prevent people from screwing you over. (which is impossible). At my scale and probably most cases described here, the purpose of a contract is to prevent misunderstandings between people of goodwill. And it's so easy to do notably better than nonlinear did here. 

source

FWIW: I have an NDA from Wave. I negotiated at the time to be able to mention the existence of the NDA, and that it didn't restrict private conversation, just public statements. You and I have probably talked about Wave, and I guess it never occurred to me to mention the NDA because I knew it was standard and it wasn't restricting my private speech. I wasn't keeping it secret, I've talked about it with people when it has come up, but I didn't make a point of doing so.

So I don't think it's obvious you'd know about the NDA if it weren't self-protecting. 

It's possible I should have disclosed the NDA every time I said something positive about Wave in public. I think that would have occurred to me if I'd ever been talking about Wave qua Wave, but it was always as an example in posts that were focused on something else, so that feels like a lot of overhead. 

Edit: I guess I should say I think the ban on  disclosing the existence of the agreement is very bad, and that's why I negotiated to change it (and would have walked if they hadn't, despite not having anything I was burning to say). But I had that right and still didn't mention it to habryka in medicine.

How does this differ from what you’d expect to see if an organization had substantial downsides, but supressed negative information?

I strongly suspect that Wave treats people quite well and that this policy isn't silencing anything to a non-trivial degree

What are you basing this on?^[1] 

1. ^{^}

   I'm a former employee of wave, so I want to make it clear that this question is not driven by private information. I would have asked that question in response to that sentence no matter what the proper noun was. I have been on about "it's impossible to make a utilitarian argument for lying^[2] because truth is necessary to calculate utils" for months.

2. ^{^}

   Except when you are actively at war with someone and are considering other usually-banned actions like murder and property destruction. 

@Natália Coelho Mendonça I would really appreciate a reply or at least acknowledgement of my comment here. I took your initial comment to be a very strong endorsement of the paper in ways I think make a reply a fair request. 

Without saying anything about Wave in particular, I do think the prevalence of NDAs biases the information people know about start-ups in generality. The prevalence of early excitement vs. the hard parts makes they too optimistic, and get into situations they could have known would be bad for them. it's extra hard because the difficulties at bigtech companies are much discussed. 

So I think the right thing to weigh against the averted slander is "the harm to employees who joined, who wouldn't have if criticisms had been more public". Maybe there are other stakeholders here, but employees seem like the biggest.  

Because gamification is for things with a known correct answer. Solving genuine unknowns requires a stronger connection with truth. 

When I look back on these comments, it looks to me like you'd rather nutritional difficulties with veganism weren't discussed, even when the discussion is truthful and focuses on mitigations within veganism. Is that true? If not, what do you think is the right way to discuss the challenges of veganism? I don't believe the current system is working, given that multiple people (some in the comments here) describe converting to veganism naively. 

Some other advice for getting started with the object level might be "start small and repeatable". The worst case scenario is if you run out of energy before getting the reward for finishing, and can't pick it back up. Plus you're probably doing a new thing without expertise, so you'll learn a lot from repetition with variation. 

Projects that are technically object level but are too big or require too much learning to be practical are another meta trap for me. 

Huh, I think "build things" is a meta comment, and on the lower end of helpfulness at that. 

Said's later comment with definitions for "building" and "things" seems significantly more helpful. 

This makes me think maybe there's more to explore about rest for you? Like, maybe you're not doing more object level because you're out of energy, and with more energy you'd automatically do more. Maybe a bottleneck is learning how to properly rest instead of spending down whatever energy you have (an issue I struggle with too). Maybe you're doing a perfectly reasonable amount of actual work, but are holding yourself to an unrealistic standard. 

I'm not confident in any of the specifics but if fatigue is what pushes you from object level to meta it seems worth exploring. 

CEA was pretty bad at this a few years ago, although I'm told they've improved. Things like forgetting to pay contractors, inconsistent about what expenses were reimbursable, even having people start trials without settling on salary.

I have friends who, early in EA or rationality, did things that look a lot like joining nonlinear. 10+ years later they're still really happy with those decisions. Some of that is selection effects of course, but think some of it is the reasons they joined were very different.

People who joined early SingInst or CEA by and large did it because they'd been personally convinced this group of weirdos was promising. The orgs maybe tried to puff themselves up, but they had almost no social proof. Whereas nowadays saying "this org is EA/rationalist" gives you a built-in audience. You can prestige hack within EA (and I think nonlinear did^[1]) and convince people they should join you because you're ingroup and can grant them prestige in the group.

Orgs that attract via object-level ideas rather than prestige are probably healthier to work at (although still pretty easy to fuck yourself up with), and people attracted by ideas rather than ingroup prestige are probably more emotionally resilient. They're also more likely to leave if the program isn't good for them. 

1. ^{^}

    E.g. grants programs announced with great fanfare that, in the fine print, had tiny budgets. 

Cultivate an appreciation for the object level

When I pay attention, some object level stuff feels nourishing, the same way certain food feels more nourishing even when it's not as dopamine-inducing as hyperpalatable snacks. Sounds like you're already doing this

Let meta be leisure

It's pretty bad to do meta with the false justification it's advancing a goal, but the problem is in the false justification, not the meta itself. I'm allowed to do things just because I enjoy them, and I enjoy meta, so I do it. As long as I'm honest about why I'm doing it it seems no worse for me than competing leisure activities, and there are occasional pay offs. 

Some examples of this: 

• I have a productivity porn list on GoodReads and pull from it whenever I want peppy vibes, without the illusion the content will transform my life.
• Writing my plans down on fancy post-its makes me happy. It might also help with planning or organizing my thoughts, but mostly I'm in it for the fancy post-its.  

Some things that help me with this:

1. pots theory of art (which was actually about film photography, which I think was unusually likely to benefit from more raw attempts, but chanting "pots theory" still helps me).
2. Zefrank's Brain Crack video. This is the guy who does True Facts about [Animals] and the sad cat diaries, so he has credibility on artistic work. 
3. Remember my taste will always exceed my ability and it would kind of be a bad sign if I could live up to my own standard of perfection.

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. 

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 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. 

especially people that aren't psychologically stable

his capabilities weren't enough to tackle it productively

man these seem like really unnecessarily judgemental ways to make this point

some features I definitely want in an app:

* ~infinitely nested plans similar to workflowy or roam

* when I check off a task on a plan, it gets added to a "shit I did on this date" list. I can go to that page and see what I did on various days

Problems I am trying to figure out right now:

1. breaking large projects down into small steps. I think this would pay off in a lot of ways: lower context switching costs, work generally easier, greater feelings of traction and satisfaction, instead of "what the hell did I do last week? I guess not much". This is challenging because my projects are, at best ill-defined knowledge work, and sometimes really fuzzy medical or emotional work. I strongly believe the latter have paid off for me on net, but individual actions are often lottery tickets with payouts in an undetermined currency.

2. prioritizing. There's both "what's the top priority?" and "what will reach this priority the fastest?" and they both feel pretty complicated.

In the spirit of this comment on lions and simulacra levels I present: simulacra and halloween decorations

Level 1: this is actually dangerous. Men running at you with knives, genuinely poisonous animals.

Level 2: this is supposed to invoke genuine fear, which will dissipate quickly when you realize it's fake. Fake poisonous spiders that are supposed to look real, a man with a knife jumps with a fake knife but doesn't stab you, monsters in media that don't exist but hit primal fear buttons in your brain. 

Level 3: reminds people of fear without ever actually making you concerned for your life (which may still be a little unsettling, depending on your sensitivity, and everything has someone who's deathly afraid of it even in a nonthreatening form). Halloween decorations top out here unless you spend a ton of money at specialty shops. 

Level 4: reminds people of things that induce fear without ever for a second unnerving (most of) them. Goofy looking bat balloons.

Heads up that for many people the first few weeks are the best they ever get on wellbutrin, and it will eventually settle at somewhere like 70% of that peak. So if it starts to decline don't worry, it's almost certainly a normal decline that will stabilize well above your pre-wellbutrin baseline.