It's a fair point that we should treat Alice and Chloe separately and that deanonymizing one need not imply that we should deanonymize the other.

While there are several stylistic things one might disagree with in the post, to the main charges raised by Ben, this seems about as close to exonerating as one can reasonably expect to get in such cases.

Thanks for writing such an exhaustive post; it can't have been easy.

Yes

It was a short timeline. I don't remember exactly but we told senior leadership and the board quite soon after we decided to start dating.

No, we didn't do anything wrong. Like I said, we followed the policy.

People were upset that we were dating but not because there was some coverup or anything. Some folks had strategic disagreements with me and us dating made that a larger problem.

I think the disagreement here is that we followed the CEA policy and were told explicitly and in writing at the time by the board that our dating had nothing to do with their decision. That doesn't mean staff weren't upset.

My read is that Bostrom had reason to believe that the email would come out either way, and then he elected to get out in front of the probable blowback.

As evidence, here is Émile Torres indicating that they were planning to write something about the email.

That said, it's not entirely clear whether Bostrom knew the email specifically was going to be written about or knew that someone was poking around in the extropian mailing list and then guessed that the email would come out as a result. 

In any case, I think it's unlikely that he posted his apology for the email unprovoked.