All of Daystar Eld's Comments + Replies

Agreed that would have been better!

It sounds like what you would be more convinced by is a short, precise refutation of the exact things said by the original post.

But I feel the opposite. That to me would have felt corporate, and also is likely impossible given the way the original allegations are such a blend of verified factual assertions, combined with some things that are technically true but misleading, may be true but are hearsay, and some things that do seem directly false.

Rather than "retaliatory and unkind," my main takeaway from the post was something like "passive-aggressive bene... (read more)

I agree, and find the ratio of agree/disagreement on your comment really disheartening in terms of what lesson this community has learned from all this. 

I get that people find it too "retaliatory" and bad-faith. Maybe it would have been cleaner if it wasn't about Ben, though I don't think a hypothetical person would have made the lesson as clear, and if Ben wasn't fair game for having written that article, I don't know who would be. Unless people believe Kat is just making up accusations entirely, they must believe those accusations deserve just as mu... (read more)

I feel like I'm confused by what you would find more convincing here given that there was no evidence in the first place that they did say something like that?

Like would them saying "No we didn't" actually be more persuasive than showing an example of how they did the opposite?

Or like... if we take for granted that words that someone might interpret that way left their mouth, at what point do we stop default trusting the person who clearly feels aggrieved by them and seems willing to exaggerate or lie when they then share those words to others?

There are pl... (read more)

It at least allows people who now trust them again to choose to work with them and have things to point to as to why.

FWIW I think I don't care how much money she actually made. I care how much money she said she made to NL, and how much she told Ben that she told NL she was making.

If she insinuated high to NL to get the job and then did not own up to that when talking to Ben, that is very hard for me to forgive. Even setting aside the idea that NL might not have hired her in the first place if she accurately represented both her skills and her financial dependence, thus avoiding this whole mess in the first place... it basically treated Ben as an arrow to be fired at peo... (read more)

I agree in principle with the things you're saying here. I disagree with these particulars because I disagree that the photos are poor evidence of anything relevant. The only issue at play here is NOT whether NL was abusive, or else I would agree with you.

To be more specific, the photos provide evidence of a unique kind for things like "was this job the kind of job that it's reasonable to sell as ~$75k in compensation."

Again, this can be true in addition to it ending up being an abusive environment. But when the discourse around this topic also includes th... (read more)

While I agree that this would largely have been an effective rebuttal that prevented many people from having the vibes-based reactions they're having, I think it itself excludes a thing I find rather valuable from this post... namely, that the thing that happened here is one that the community (and indeed most if not all communities) did not handle well and I think are overall unprepared for handling in future circumstances.

Open to hearing ways that point could have been made in a different way, but your post still treats this all as "someone said untrue things about us, here's the evidence they were untrue and our mistakes," and I think more mistakes were made beyond just NL or Alice/Chloe.

I feel like this response ignores my central points ― my sense that Kat misrepresented/strawmanned the positions of Chloe/Alice/Ben and overall didn't respond appropriately.

And I disagree, and used one example to point out why the response is not (to me) a misrepresentation or strawman of their positions, but rather treating them as mostly a collection of vague insinuations peppered with specific accusations that NL can only really respond to by presenting all the ways they possibly can how the relationship they're asserting is not supported by whatever ev... (read more)

While I disagree that the photos are hijacking "our" irrationality, I could be persuaded that the photos are harmful toward some people's, maybe even most people's, general epistemics around issues like this. But the solution to that seems to me to be people working on improving how their epistemics work, not asking for less evidence to avoid becoming confused?

To me the photos are evidence of a particular, specific set of things. Whether anyone "disputed" those things is irrelevant to me; I have more information than I did without them, and also the photos... (read more)

"My own suspicion is that everyone, even Nonlinear, would have been better off if Nonlinear had just let this lie and instead gone about earning trust by doing good work with normal working relationships."

I think I'm not sure this is actually possible without having addressed the original claims. The overriding take I felt from the community after Ben's post was that they were in exile limbo until their side of the story was shared.

I know this is probably a frustrating thing for others to read, but seems worth saying anyway... since making the above comment I've had private information shared with me that makes me more confident NL didn't act in an abusive way regarding this particular issue.

Edited above comment to clarify:

By "hold up" I meant in the emotional takeaway of "NL was abusive," to be clear, not on the factual "these bank account numbers changed in these ways." To me hiring someone who turns out to be financially dependent into a position like this is unwise, not abusive. If someone ends up in the financial red in a situation where they are having their living costs covered and being paid a $1k monthly stipend... I am not rushing to pass judgement on them, I am just noting that this seems like a bad fit for this sort of position, wh... (read more)

I agree that asking employees to commit illegal acts they wouldn't normally commit is bad. I qualify it like that be because I've known many people who casually break the law in many ways on "victimless crimes" like smoking pot (particularly before it became largely legalized) or getting prescription medicine from others, and I think rationalists/EAs are not unique compared to base rates in skirting laws like this.

Unless the accusers are the sorts of people who don't, like me, then it would make sense to me if they were asked to do something that seemed in line with their normal behavior. But this is speculation on my part, and I agree that pressuring them in any case would be wrong.

Agree that my epistemic state on this point is also something close to this.

Summarized would be "something like asking her to bring the drugs probably happened, and if so was a mistake that I'd hope was learned from, but the major issue would be if she was pressured to do it, and I'm unsure if I trust the person reporting enough to decide either way without evidence."

[Edit: I know this is probably a frustrating thing for others to read, but seems worth saying anyway... since making the above comment I've had private information shared with me that makes me more confident NL didn't act in an abusive way regarding this particular issue.]

I think I'm confused by the claim that the written evidence without the picture evidence would be better than the written + pictures.

To me the photos are only manipulative if they are on their own.

If someone chooses not to read the evidence and only focus on the pictures, then feels manipulated by that...

I don't really know what to say to that. I am confused by how this is in any way NL's fault, and why it should imply that less evidence overall would be better.

I agree that this would be a good thing to get clarity on as well, though I think it's a very dangerous thing to ask people to verify in a public setting? We could take for granted that it's true if they don't explicitly deny it, but the issue might matter more or less to different people if it was simply an ask vs if there was pressure to do it.

Personally my take is something like "It would be bad to pressure people to do this if they don't want to. It would be the kind of mistake I hope someone would learn from if they made it. It affects some level of h... (read more)

My read on this is that a lot of the things in Ben's post are very between-the-lines rather than outright stated. For example, the financial issues all basically only matter if we take for granted that the employees were tricked or manipulated into accepting lower compensation than they wanted, or were put in financial hardship.

Which is very different from the situation Kat's post seems to show. Like... I don't really think any of the financial points made in the first one hold up, and without those, what's left? A She-Said-She-Said about what they were as... (read more)

It feels really cruxy to me whether you or Ben received any actual evidence of whether Alice or Chloe had lied or misrepresented anything in that 1 week.

Because to me the actual thing I felt from reading the original post's "Response from Nonlinear" was largely them engaging in some kind of justification or alternative narrative for the overall practices of Nonlinear... but I didn't care about that, and honestly it felt like it kind of did worse for them because it almost seemed like they were deflecting from the actual claims of abuse.

To me, if you receiv... (read more)

Just finishing up the post now, sorry for the delay! I've been gathering and double-checking permissions :)

I'm finishing writing the post now :)

Hoping to announce by the end of the month :) It'll be its own top level post.

Ah yeah the September 1 deadline was meant for the writing retreat, the overall deadline is Oct 1st.

Yeah, I think it is actually incredibly easy to undervalue CH, particularly if people don't regularly interact with it or make use of them rather than just having a single anecdata to go off of. So much of what I do in the community (everything from therapy to mediation to teaching at the camps) is made easier by Community Health, and no one knows about any of it because why would they? I guess I should make a post to highlight this.

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

By the end of Sep 1st.

Up to you!

Thanks for your submission! There have been a few others already, but so far they've all been through DMs.

Thanks!

Yes, we've definitely talked about collecting fiction that already exists and is still relevant to the modern understanding of the issues involved. That's why I'm happy for people to submit existing stories as well, and one thing we've discussed is possibly reaching out to authors of such stories or whoever holds their rights to interweave them with new stories if we try to publish in a traditional anthology.

Same with turning fables into videos; we're pretty confident that if we get a few good stories out of this, turning them into animations or short audiobooks will be worth doing :)

Absolutely. Part of the hope is that, if we can gather a good collection of stories, we can find ways to promote and publish some or all of them, whether through traditional publishing or audiobooks or youtube animated stories.

I don't think these visions are mutually exclusive: there are ways to portray positive visions of the future while still teaching something real about the way AI can actually work or the risks that were solved along the way.

Multiple submissions are fine :)

Thanks for the writeup! I haven't read either of your stories yet (there are far too many these days for me to keep up with alongside writing my own) but I'm wondering if you participate in the /r/rational subreddit or discord community at all?  A sense of community and people to talk to about the story/get more engaged feedback on questions/struggles etc you have might be helpful (sorry if this seems basic, I don't recognize your username or the story names from there but I may have missed them).

I would like to request people share their models for what mechanisms or laws might actually allow this sort of thing to happen.

So far as I know from only basic research, clawbacks are the result of things like tax miscalculations, contract effects (excess profit made that then has to be divided as agreed upon), insurance fraud, etc. Unless a contract was signed or criminal connection is suspected, it seems highly unlikely to me.

Thanks to both of you for writing this! Very valuable resource to have on hand, and a great review of different aspects of therapeutic modes of thought/self-help processes.

Great breakdown of the skills and concrete steps,  thanks for writing this! I can already tell I'll be linking people to this fairly often :)

I've been speaking to a number of people in university organizing groups who have been aware of these issues, and almost across the board the major issue they feel is that it seems too conflict-generating/bad/guilt-inducing to essentially tell their friends and peers in their or other universities something like "Hey, I think the thing you're doing is actually causing a lot of harm, actually."

I would be very in favor of helping find ways to facilitate better communication between these groups that specifically targets ways they can improve in non-blaming, pro-social and supportive ways.

Hi Dave, emailing you now :)

This is an enormously valuable project, thank you and the others so much for continuing to work on making sure it can meet the community's needs!

Woops, good point. Fixed!

Done!

Gavin covers the rest of it, so to talk about the "parts" thing; in this context I'm using it more as a semantic handle on what it means to have internal conflict, and not explicitly as an IFS thing. Psychotherapists have been talking about individuals as being made up of "parts" from the very beginning (Freud's Id, Ego, Superego) and  with all due respect to our mutual CFAR friend, if there's any other way to describe and interface with the experience of internal conflict as well, I have yet to hear it :) 

In other words, I've written "a signal f... (read more)

Agreed, more public figures of people who found something meaningful and impactful that wasn't what they initially thought they would/should work on would help with that :)

This is great to hear and an interesting read, thank you for sharing!

Ah, yeah that wasn't intended as my meaning. Will edit :)

Hey, thanks for the comment! Just to clarify because I may be too sleep deprived to track what you're saying... I originally read that as proportional by percent but not by absolute numbers, right?  

So if roughly 900 new people per year are considered engaged enough to count as part of the community, ~20% of that and ~20% of 650 would still leave a growing number of people in the community working EA jobs, and even ~30% or ~40% increase in jobs would still leave a growing absolute number of people in the community not working EA jobs.

(Again, not to say that this is bad necessarily, and as you noted there's also people who were funded by grants or doing research or similar)

Yeah, this seems a hard problem to do well and safely from an organizational standpoint. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that it is an onerous cost on the organization's side; what I'm uncertain about is whether it ends up being more beneficial to the community on net.

It's been an ongoing discussion at SPARC and ESPR to try to decide how much or how little exposure to EA (as opposed to "EA ideas") we want to make explicit during the camps. So far the answer has been mostly "fairly little," and of course we do focus quite a lot on frank conversations about the ups and downsides. But it's definitely difficult to pass down wisdom rather than just knowledge, and some of the questions have no genuine or easy answer. Thinking on this is certainly something that keeps me up at night every so often.