Chiming in to provide additional datapoints. (Apologies for this being quite late to the conversation; I frequent The Other Forum regularly, and LW much less so, and only recently read this post/comments.) My experience has been quite different to a lot of the experiences described here, and I was very surprised when reading.
I read all of the people who have had (very) negative experiences as being sincere and reporting events and emotions as they experienced them. I could feel what I perceived to be real distress and pain in a lot of the comments, and this was pretty saddening.
Note: I really don’t like posting personal information on the public internet, for both personal preference and professional reasons. (I felt sure I wanted to post this, though.)
Background: I dated Nate on-and-off for ~6 years (from 2016-2022). We’re now friends on good terms.
How I experienced Nate’s communication over the years:
One of the subthreads in Thomas Kwa's MIRI research experience was about his experience working with Nate. In the comments, some other people brought up their own negative experiences. There was a lot of ensuing discussion about it.
Thomas felt this was distracting from the points he was most interested in (e.g. how infohazard policies slow down research, how new researchers can stop flailing around so much, whether deconfusion is a bottleneck to alignment, or the sharp left turn, etc).
I also somewhat regretted curating the post since we normally avoid curating "community politics" posts, and while the post had a lot of timeless content in both the OP and the discussion, it ended up being a major focus of the comments.
So, I'm moving those comments to this escape-valve-post, where the discussion can continue in whatever direction people end up taking while leaving the original post to focus on more timeless topics that are relevant whether or not you're plugged into particular social scenes.