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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29679 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Great post. This whole controversy is pretty fascinating but also seems like something you could sink dozens of hours into learning about without coming to any clear conclusions about what actually happened, who's telling the truth, etc. Nevertheless, here are a few things that come to mind after reading a bit about it.

  • The original investigation by Ben Pace seems clearly negligent. Perhaps you could justify giving Nonlinear very little time to respond, but many of the claims in the original post are presented with evidence that seems to amount to little more than "Alice and Chloe told me this and they seem trustworthy to me (even though lots of people told me Alice is not trustworthy." The post also claims that "I personally found Alice very willing and ready to share primary sources with me upon request (texts, bank info, etc)" but often does not reference the primary sources supporting various factual claims that it makes.
  • The original post also features almost no quotes or perspectives from other employees of Nonlinear. But if you are claiming that Nonlinear has an abusive work culture, such perspectives seem clearly relevant. There is one section labelled "Perspectives From Others Who Have Worked or Otherwise Been Close With Nonlinear" but this section is very vague and often makes claims that are not backed up with quotes. The quotes it does include are lacking context and it's often unclear who they are attributed to. For example, one quote is preceded by "Another person said about Emerson:" But we are not told who this person is or what their relationship to Emerson is.
  • These people seem to have a pathological obsession with anonymity. I understand the argument for keeping some people's identities secret, but often so much information about people being quoted is removed that it is hard to tell how to evaluate it. One example is described in the previous bullet point. For another example, see the list of 28 times 'Alice' accused people of being abusive from the Nonlinear response post. It includes things that are almost impossible to evaluate like:
  1. Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
  2. Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
  3. Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
  4. Alice accused [Person] of [abusing/persecuting/oppressing her]
  • More generally, it strikes me that both reports are very badly written. Compare them to basically any investigative report by a high quality news organization like the New York Times. No matter what you think about the NYT's bias, accuracy, etc, their articles are typically clear and easy to read. They clearly lay out the context for the story and the overall narrative and they manage to do so while supporting most of their claims with specific quotes from either named individuals or people whose role in the story is clearly explained and they typically include quotes from outside experts to contextualize things. Importantly, they also do so relatively concisely. Ben Pace's original report is about 10,000 words! And yet, it does a worse job providing context, evidence for its main claims, and a clear narrative than many 2000 word NYT articles.
  • Part of the reason both reports are so badly written is that they spend so long on haranguing the readers about how they should feel about the evidence provided. The original report begins with a paragraph-long "epistemic status" and spends a huge amount of verbiage analyzing the author's (i.e. Ben Pace's) own opinions about how much to believe what he wrote. But these feelings seem to mostly boil down to "I think that Alice and Chloe are fairly trustworthy and feel that there is evidence supporting their accusations." But instead of spending so many words saying this, why not just present the evidence as clearly as you can? I understand that some of the evidence may be inconclusive, but then why not present it as such and let readers draw their own conclusions? To an outsider, the post has an atmosphere of "I, Ben Pace, am a responsible and trustworthy person and so you should trust that I have studied this issue carefully even though I won't present most of my evidence."
  • Ignoring the truth or falsity of the various accusations, the whole setup sounds pretty crazy. Even if Nonlinear is not at all abusive, it seems like a terrible idea to accept a job where you'll be viewed as "part of the family" or "part of the gang." And why were they jetting around the world, staying in exotic locations in the Bahamas, etc anyway? Is that necessary or helpful in doing work on AI safety? I realize that Nonlinear was supposed to be at least partly an incubator, but to me it seems to have been much looser and blended work and personal life much more than most other incubators. Perhaps that's what some people want, but it seems to come with big risks (which this blowup demonstrates).

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