All of spencerg's Comments + Replies
Ben made a bunch of other changes the day of publication. I know that because I pointed out errors in his post that day, and he was correcting them based on me pointing them out (e.g., all of his original quotes from glassdoor that he claimed were about Emerson were not actually about Emerson, which he didn't realize until I pointed it out, and then he rushed to find new quotes to correct it). I'm sure he had a lot on his mind at that time, so I don't think it's egregious that he didn't add mention of the fact that he had screen shot counter evidence about...
You say: "This is inaccurate. I don't think there is any evidence that Ben had access to that doesn't seem well-summarized by the two sections above. We had a direct report from Alice, which is accurately summarized in the first quote above, and an attempted rebuttal from Kat, which is accurately summarized in the second quote above. We did not have any screenshots or additional evidence that didn't make it into the post."
Actually, you are mistaken, Ben did have screenshots. I think you just didn't know that he had them. I can send you proof that he had th...
Actually, you are mistaken, Ben did have screenshots. I think you just didn't know that he had them. I can send you proof that he had them via DM if you like.
Sure! DMd you. I might also ping Ben, though want to mostly give him space and time to write a reply and not have to worry about stuff in the comments for now.
...It sounds like you're saying this paragraph by Ben:
"Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would b
I’m surprised to hear you say this Habryka: “I think all the specific statements that Ben made in his post were pretty well-calibrated (and still seem mostly right to me after reading through the evidence)”
Do you think Ben was well calibrated/right when he made, for instance, these claims which Nonlinear has provided counter evidence for?
“She [Alice] was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days. Alice eventually g...
Do you think Ben was well calibrated/right when he made, for instance, these claims which Nonlinear has provided counter evidence for?
Yes, indeed I think in all of these quotes Ben basically said pretty reasonable things that still seem reasonably accurate to me even after reading the whole appendix that Nonlinear provided.
...She [Alice] was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days. Alice eventually gave in and ate n
I do mean theory A to specifically be a theory where he did not intentionally defraud people. I don't think the EA + non-DAE + naive utilitarianism + intentional fraud theory is one of the three most likely, that's why I didn't discuss it in detail, but I'd be interested in evidence for it (if you think there is evidence for that theory in particular that is not already mentioned in my post)
I agree that on things that are taboo to support (like this) we should expect support to be greater than publicly acknowledged support. However, a near-universal lack of public support is still evidence of a genuine lack of support. We could debate how much evidence it is. Talking to EAs 1-on-1 I also have barely found any that say they support the kind of actions that SBF was accused of, but many that condemn those actions. Again, not perfect evidence, but it provides a bit of additional evidence.
Hi Elliot. To respond to your questions:
(1) I interpreted the section "Sharing Information About Ben Pace" as making the point that it's quite easy to make very bad-sounding accusations that are not reliable and that are not something people should update to any significant degree on if one applies a one-sided and biased approach. It sounds like some people interpreted it differently, but I thought the point of the section was quite clear (to me, anyway) based on this part of it: "However, this is completely unfair to Ben. It’s written in the style of a hi...
(3) I didn't do a detailed look at every row in the "Short summary overview table", but for the ones I did look into in more detail, I found Nonlinear's counter evidence to be compelling. That table is organized by claim and is in an easy-to-navigate structure, so I suggest people take a look for themselves at the evidence Nonlinear provided regarding whatever claims they think are important.
I would have loved to hear in your own words the most important claims that you think have been rebutted, and why you think so. When I look through the appendix docume...
Are you referring to the part of the post called "Sharing Information on Ben Pace" when you say "attempted smear of Ben in retaliation for writing the post"? If so, I don't interpret that section the way you might because (from my perspective) it seemed clear that it was trying to make a point about how easy it is to make allegations sound bad when they are flimsy. Especially since the section says:
"However, this is completely unfair to Ben. It’s written in the style of a hit piece. And I believe you should not update much on Ben’s character from this.
[......
I’m glad to see that Nonlinear’s evidence is now public, since Ben’s post did not seem to be a thorough investigation. As I said to Ben before he posted his original post, I knew of evidence that strongly contradicted his post, and I encouraged him to temporarily pause the release of his post so he could review the evidence carefully, but he would not delay.
1) Do you have any concerns the section above on Ben Pace could be considered an ad hominem attack? I.e. attacking someone's character rather than their claims? [1]
2) How long do you think it would have been reasonable for Ben Pace to wait? With the benefit of hindsight, we can see it has taken nonlinear 96 days to write a response to his post. [2]
3) What specific claims do you think have been rebutted? Perhaps you can quote Ben's original piece; link to the evidence which disproves it; and include your interpretation of what said evidence shows....
Hi Tyler, thanks for your thoughts on this! Note that this post is not about the best philosophical objections, it's about what EAs actually believe. I have spoken to many EAs who say they are utilitarian but don't believe in objective moral truth (or think that objective moral truth is very unlikely) and what I'm responding to in this post is what those people say about what they believe and why. I also have spoken to Jeff Sebo about this as well!
In point 1 and 2 in this post, namely, "1. I think (in one sense) it’s empirically false to say th...
Hi Rebecca. To clarify: that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that in the version Ben showed me hours before publication none of the disparaging Glassdoor comments he used in the post (that he claimed were all about Emerson) were actually about Emerson. He has acknowledged this point. Based on me pointing this out, he hastily fix these mistakes before releasing the public version, hence you won’t find this error in the version of his post above. I use this as an example of just one of a number of what I see as important errors (based on the eviden...
Thanks Tiresias for your thoughtful comments. I agree with much of what you say but I seemingly have a few important differences of opinion:
...
"I disagree with holding all misconduct reports to incredibly high standards, such that in a report with as many allegations as this, people feel the report is basically wrong if it includes a few misinterpretations. In an ideal world, yes, all summaries of patterns of misconduct would not contain any errors. But in reality, I've found that almost all allegations of behaviors that turn out to be -- for all intents and
Just to clarify, nonlinear has now picked one claim and provided screen shots relevant to it, I’m not sure if you saw that.
I also want to clarify that I gave Ben a bunch of very specific examples of information in his post that I have evidence are false (responding to the version he sent me hours before publication). He hastily attempted to adjust his post to remove or tweak some of his claims right before publishing based on my discussing these errors with him. It’s a lot easier (and vastly less time consuming) to provide those examples in a private one-o...
Spencer -- good reply.
The crux here is about 'how bad it is to make public, false, potentially damaging claims about people, and the standard of care/evidence required before making those claims'.
I suspect there are two kinds of people most passionately involved in this dialogue here on EA Forum:
(1) those who have personally experienced being harmed by false, damaging claims (e.g. libel, slander) in the past (which includes me, for example) -- who tend to focus on the brutal downsides of reckless accusations that aren't properly researched, and...
Yes, here two examples, sorry I can’t provide more detail:
-there were claims in the post made about Emerson that were not actually about Emerson at all (they were about his former company years after he left). I pointed this out to Ben hours before publication and he rushed to correct it (in my view it’s a pretty serious mistake to make false accusations about a person, I see this as pretty significant)!
-there was also a very disparaging claim made in the piece (I unfortunately can’t share the details for privacy reasons; but I assume nonlinear will later) that was quite strongly contradicted by a text message exchange I have
To confirm: I had a quickly written bit about the glassdoor reviews. It was added in without much care because it wasn't that cruxy to me about the whole situation, just a red flag that suggested further investigation was worth it, that someone else suggested I add for completeness. The reviews I included were from after the time that Emerson's linkedin says he was CEO, and I'm glad that Spencer corrected me.
If I'm remembering the other one, there was also a claim that I included not because it was itself obviously unethical, but because it seemed to indic...
Hi all, I wanted to chime in because I have had conversations relevant to this post with just about all involved parties at various points. I've spoken to "Alice" (both while she worked at nonlinear and afterward), Kat (throughout the period when the events in the post were alleged to have happened and afterward), Emerson, Drew, and (recently) the author Ben, as well as, to a much lesser extent, "Chloe" (when she worked at nonlinear). I am (to my knowledge) on friendly terms with everyone mentioned (by name or pseudonym) in this post. I wish well...
The nearly final draft of this post that I was given yesterday had factual inaccuracies that (in my opinion and based on my understanding of the facts) are very serious
Why am I, an outsider on this whole thing, finding serious errors in the final hours before publication?
I was disturbed to see serious inaccuracies
Can you give some examples of the serious errors you found?
Could this be an instance of the rationalist tendency to "decouple"?
From one perspective, Ben is simply "Sharing information about nonlinear." What's wrong with providing additional information? It's even caveated with a description of one's epistemic status and instruction on how to update accordingly! Why don't we all have such a "low bar for publicly sharing critical info about folks in the EA/x-risk/rationalist/etc ecosystem"?
From another perspective, Ben has chosen to "search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders" and then - without ...
(Copying over the same response I posted over on LW)
I don't have all the context of Ben's investigation here, but as someone who has done investigations like this in the past, here are some thoughts on why I don't feel super sympathetic to requests to delay publication:
In this case, it seems to me that there is a large and substantial threat of retaliation. My guess is Ben's sources were worried about Emerson hiring stalkers, calling their family, trying to get them fired from their job, or threatening legal action. Having things be out in the public...
The way you define values in your comment:
"From the AI "engineering" perspective, values/valued states are "rewards" that the agent adds themselves in order to train (in RL style) their reasoning/planning network (i.e., generative model) to produce behaviours that are adaptive but also that they like and find interesting (aesthetics). This RL-style training happens during conscious reflection."
is just something different than what I'm talking about in my post when I use the phrase "intrinsic values."
From what I can tell, you seem to be arguing:
...
Preference utilitarianism and valuism don't have much in common.
Preference utilitarianism: maximize the interests/preferences of all beings impartially.
First, preferences and intrinsic values are not the same thing. For instance, you may have a preference to eat Cheetos over eating nachos, but that doesn't mean you intrinsically value eating Cheetos or that eating Cheetos necessarily gets you more of what you intrinsically value than eating nachos will. Human choice is driven by a lot of factors other than just intrinsic values (though intrinsic values play a role).
Second, preference utilitarianism is not about your own preferences, it's about the preferences of all beings impartially.
Glad you find it interesting! We tested maybe about 150 statements. Just to clarify, it's not that the depression side doesn't correlate with the anxiety side - because anxiety and depression are so correlated, any statement correlating with one is likely to correlate with the other. But when you statistically separate them (i.e., you look at what correlates with anxiety when you've controlled for depression, or the reverse), this clearer picture emerges).
While it would be great for someone to replicate these findings (to increase confidence in...
The piece that you quote says:
“The problem is not greedy capitalists, but capitalism”
Our piece says:
“Where does bad come from? Capitalism and class systems”
The piece you quote says:
“The only solution possible is for an outside force to intervene and reshape the terms of the game. Socialist revolution will be that force. With no stake in the current order, the propertyless masses will wipe the slate clean.”
Our piece says:
“View of history: Capitalism will lead to a series of ever-worsening crises. The proletariat will eventually seize the major means of prod...
I was pretty surprised by these Twitter poll results (of course, who is responding may have various selection biases involved) where I ask how people feel about organizations putting out statements along the lines of “we oppose racism and sexism and believe diversity is important” (note: the setting of my poll - I give the example of a software accounting firm or animal rights org - is quite different from the setting of the above post):
https://twitter.com/SpencrGreenberg/status/1624044864584273920
Hi! The scores are relative to a sample from the U.S. population (not people on LessWrong or the EA Forum). I suspect that the population we used may have a slightly higher-than-average IQ but I'd be surprised if it was a lot higher than average.
We haven't yet released the 40 claims we're seeing if we can replicate, but they include many of the major claims in the intelligence literature.
I created a manifold market forecasting page for whether or not grant money given by the Future Fund via FTX Foundation, Inc. will be "clawed back". Please forecast there if you have an opinion to help others stay informed on the probabilities (and I added one I just learned about from Eliezer as well):
Thanks so much, Molly, I really appreciate you taking the time to write this, as I'm sure many others here do as well!
There is one thing that really confuses me about what you've written (that I think could be relevant to quite a number of folks here) that I'm hoping you can clarify. It's related to what "FTX entities" we are talking about precisely here.
Some - perhaps many - of the grants seem to have been paid through an entity that it's not clear to me is legally/formally related to the other entities you're referring to here. And I'm wonder...
Michael on expected value calculations and legibility:
I think if you've been an effective altruist in the 1660s trying to decide whether or not to fund Isaac Newton — the theologian, astrologer, and alchemist — he had no legible project at all. That would have looked just very strange. You would have had no way of making any sense of what he was doing in terms of an EV point of view. He was laying the foundations for a worldview that would enable the Industrial Revolution and a complete transformation in what humanity was about. That's true for a lot of the things that have been the most impactful.
A quote on centralization in EA (in which Ajeya was steelmanning an argument Michael had made):
...My understanding of your position is that it's difficult to figure out what the most important causes are — to simplify a little bit and say there's one most important cause as opposed to the most important or optimal portfolio. EA has a pretty small set of intellectual leaders that are trying to think about this and then disseminating their conclusions. And because this is a really difficult project, they're going to get it wrong a lot. But they're also go
Thanks for your comment. Please note that I am conducting a lot of “background” interviews that are unrecorded and where I discuss with the interviewee at the beginning how I can/can’t use what they say. I agree that one can’t understand this topic without conducting non-recorded interviews, which is why I’m doing both.