Daniel
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I do think it implies something about what is happening behind the scenes when their new flagship model is smaller and less capable than what was released a year ago.
I am surprised to hear this, especially “I don't think it has lasting value”. In my opinion, this post has aged incredibly well. Reading it now, knowing that the EA criticism contest utterly failed to do one iota of good with regards to stopping the giant catastrophe on the horizon (FTX), and seeing that the top prizes were all given to long, well-formatted essays providing incremental suggestions on heavily trodden topics while the one guy vaguely gesturing at the actual problem (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/T85NxgeZTTZZpqBq2/the-effective-altruism-movement-is-not-above-conflicts-of) gets ignored, cements this as one of your more prophetic works.
Just to pull on some loose strings here, why was it okay for Ben Pace to unilaterally reveal the names of Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz, but not for Roko to unilaterally reveal the names of Alice and Chloe? Theoretically Ben could have titled his post, "Sharing Information About [Pseudonymous EA Organization]", and requested the mods enforce anonymity of both parties, right? Is it because Ben's post was first so we adopt his naming conventions as the default? Is it because Kat and Emerson are "public figures" in some sense? Is it because Alice and Chloe agreed to share information in exchange for anonymity? That was an agreement with Ben. Why do we assume that the agreement between Ben Pace and Alice/Chloe is binding upon LessWrong commenters in general? I agree that it feels wrong to reveal the identities of Alice and/or Chloe without concrete evidence of major wrongdoing, but I don't think we have a good theoretical framework for why that is.
Wait, that link goes to an archive page from well after Chloe was hired. When I look back to the screen captures from the period of time that Chloe would have seen, there are no specific numbers given for compensation (would link them myself, but I’m on mobile at the moment).
If the ad that Chloe saw said $60,000 - $100,000 in compensation in big bold letters at the top, then that seems like a bait and switch, but the archives from late 2021 list travel as the first benefit, which seems accurate to what the compensation package actually was.
Maybe I'm projecting more economic literacy than I should, but anytime I read something like "benefits package worth $X", I always decompose it into its component parts mentally. A benefits package nominally worth $X will provide economic value less than $X, because there is option value lost compared to if you were given liquid cash instead.
The way I would conceptualize the compensation offered (and the way it is presented in the Nonlinear screenshots) is $1000/month + all expenses paid while traveling around fancy destinations with the family. I kind of doubt that Chloe had a mental model of how $40,000/yr in fancy travel destinations differs from $70,000/yr in fancy travel destinations. There could potentially be unrecorded verbal conversations that would make me feel differently about this, but I don't currently feel like Chloe got materially shafted other than that she probably didn't enjoy the travel as much as she thought she would.
I did notice these. I specifically used the word "loadbearing" because almost all of these either don't matter much or their interpretation is entirely context-dependent. I focused on the salary bullet-point because failing to pay agreed salary is both
1. A big deal, and
2. Bad in almost any context.
The other ones that I think are pretty bad are the Adderall smuggling and the driving without a license, but my prior on "what is the worst thing the median EA org has done" is somewhere between willful licensing noncompliance and illegal amphetamine distribution.
Yeah, I've been going back and checking things as they were stated in the original "Sharing Information About Nonlinear" post. Rereading it, I was surprised at how few specific loadbearing factual claims there were at all. Lots of "vibes-based reasoning" as they say. I think the most damning single paragraph with a concrete claim was:
... (read more)
- Chloe’s salary was verbally agreed to come out to around $75k/year. However, she was only paid $1k/month, and otherwise had many basic things compensated i.e. rent, groceries, travel. This was supposed to make traveling together easier, and supposed to come out to the same salary level. While Emerson did compensate Alice and Chloe with food and board and
I think what is bugging me about this whole situation is that there doesn't seem to be any mechanism of accountability for the (allegedly) false and/or highly misleading claims made by Alice. You seem to be saying something like, "we didn't make false and/or highly misleading claims, we just repeated the false and/or highly misleading claims that Alice told us, then we said that Alice was maybe unreliable," as if this somehow makes the responsibility (legal, ethical, or otherwise) to tell the truth disappear.
Here is what Ben said in his post, Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation:
... (read more)"Eventually, after getting to talk with Alice and Chloe, it seemed to me Alice and Chloe would
Spencer sent us a screenshot about the vegan food stuff 2 hours before publication, which Ben didn't get around to editing in before the post went live, but that's all the evidence that I know about that you could somehow argue we had but didn't include. It is not accurate that Nonlinear sent credible signals of having counterevidence before the post went live
Uh, actually I do think that being sent screenshots showing that claims made in the post are false 2 hours before publication is a credible signal that Nonlinear has counterevidence.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m currently leaning towards the position that Lightcone deserves to be sued for defamation. Maybe not for “maximum damages permitted by law” (since those are truly excessive), but you probably owe them significant material compensation.
I don't think we can engage in much "community-wide introspection" without discussing the object-level issues in question, and I can't think of a single instance of an online discussion of that specific issue going particularly well.
That's why I'm (mostly) okay tabooing these sorts of discussions. It's better to deal with the epistemic uncertainty than to risk converging on a false belief.