All of Clara Collier's Comments + Replies
One of the big disputes here is over whether Alice was running her own incubated organization (which she could reasonably expect to spin out) or just another project under Nonlinear. Since Kat cites this as significant evidence for Alice's unreliability, I wanted to do a spot-check.
(Because many of the claims in this response are loosely paraphrased from Ben's original post, I've included a lot of quotes and screenshots to be clear about exactly who said what. Sorry for the length in advance.)
Let's start with claims in Ben's original post:
...Alice joine
This seems to be an issue on mailchimp's end, not ours – their servers have been having outages all morning. I recommend trying again in a bit.
We're working on it! The logistics of setting up print subscriptions in a way that syncs with our printer turned out to be pretty complicated and we didn't want to delay the launch further, but the store should be live in a couple of days.
I have a PDF of the print version I'm happy to send to you – if there's a lot of demand, I'll put it up on the website.
Asterisk is a new quarterly magazine/journal of ideas from in and around the EA community. For more about who we are and what we do, check out our forum post. We're hiring for the following roles – you can apply for any of them except Managing Editor here.
- Managing Editor: Our first full-time hire. You can learn more about the role and apply via CEA.
- Copy Editor(s): We're looking for reliable, highly detail-oriented candidates with copy editing experience (work on a student publication is fine). This is a great position for people who want
Perhaps I should have been clearer in my initial post – Asterisk is a popular magazine, not a scientific journal. I'll be selecting pieces, with consultation from coworkers and subject matter experts in situations where that's appropriate.
This is something I've been thinking a lot about, and I've consulted several people working in biosecurity at different organizations. I (edit: currently) think it's quite plausible to thread the needle of discussing what natural pandemics it's important to prepare for without giving actionable ideas to bad actors, but I agree it's something that would have to be treated with caution.
I liked that it brings up associations with risk, stars/space/a bigger, stranger future, and a healthy dose of pedantry. Part of the "EA mindset" I'm trying to illustrate is the urge to investigate claims in more depth. We like footnotes – hence, Asterisk.
Yes, asteriskmag is the domain name. I'm not too worried about the name collision – Asterisk Journal is an undergrad arts magazine at Yale (and I went to Yale and never heard of it before I started looking up names for this project).
Okay, I think it would be helpful to clarify some definitions.
I read your use of "separate organization" to mean a fully independent organization not operating under the legal entity of Nonlinear at all. That's because you talk about Alice using Nonlinear's bank account, ops support, etc. as evidence that she does not have a separate org, while these things would all be perfectly normal for an incubated or fiscally sponsored org. Ben never claims, and never claims that Alice claimed, that she had a fully independent entity of this type. When he says ... (read more)