This was repeatedly brought up in the comments of TracingWoodgrains's LW post about Nonlinear, but I think after this post I am even more convinced that it's (probably long past) time for EA orgs to halt most or all innovation/novelty/experimentation in the space of organizational structure. It turns out that perhaps Chesterton's fence applies very strongly here, and that all those "velocity-killing" formalisms of bureaucracy probably exist for good reasons and should not be lightly abandoned. I don't know if this should elevated to some kind of global principle, but at the very least I think I personally will be adopting a code of no longer donating to any EA organization which does not publicly commit to all of
1. Everyone is either a salaried or hourly employee, or a paid contractor, under the normal laws of the applicable territory (in the US, either a W-2 or 1099 employee)
2. Romantic relationships between people and their supervisors, or between the *anyone* in the org and *anyone* in the org's senior leadership, are forbidden by policy
3. No "company housing". The org can pay you a rent stipend if need be, but there can be no mandatory requirement that you will live with other members of the org outside working hours, and frankly even having it be an option is suspicious to me
4. No mentions whatsoever of drugs during work hours or work-associated social events. I am a big fan of drugs myself, and I like to talk about them with friends and, very occasionally, even coworkers, but it appears to be a common denominator in many stories of EA orgs gone wrong that people are talking about psychedelics/nootropics to their subordinates the same way they do with their close friends, which puts those people in a very awkward position
There are other requirements I'd like to see to prevent the cultishness and abuses of power which seem endemic to all the EA horror stories, but I'm not sure how I would formalize them in a way an HR department could print out in a company handbook.
And this doesn't seem like it's asking very much. 1 through 4 are utterly uncontroversial at normal companies and charities. Indeed, an HR rep from any normal company would probably look at those and barely understand how an org could possibly not have them, but that's the situation EA keeps finding itself in, to repeated failure. Whatever gains in efficiency and efficacy at "the mission" might hypothetically come from abandoning these, they clearly have been swamped in practice by the problems they cause. I won't speak for anyone else, but personally I am now convinced that it's time to go back to being boring, organizationally speaking, and doing one's best to be efficacious despite that.
I generally agree with your comment, but want to push back a little bit about "having it be an option." I think employees should get to choose their own housemates without the employer having a veto. Living with your coworkers or (especially) your subordinates creates many thorny dynamics which not everyone handles responsibly. But it's not fair to ask people to move out of their homes for a job either.
That's fair, I may need more qualifications to that statement. What I'm trying to preempt here is the situation where an employer (either explicitly, or by nudges and incentives you don't really have the power to refuse) gets you into a housing situation where you're surrounded by other people at the org almost all the time and so a) have less opportunities to get outside feedback that something is wrong and b) in a place where housemate disputes can become workplace disputes and vice versa. I don't know how common it is for people to end up living with a bunch of their coworkers when this was not specifically asked of them; if it's a thing which happens a lot (especially in the Bay with its chronic housing shortage) maybe I need a little more nuance.
> No "company housing". The org can pay you a rent stipend if need be, but there can be no mandatory requirement that you will live with other members of the org outside working hours, and frankly even having it be an option is suspicious to me
For what it's worth, when I was considering whether to move to Africa to work for Wave (EA-ish organization working on building a mobile money system) I saw the option to live with coworkers as a strong plus (though among other things it was not enough that I decided to take the job).
I do agree it shouldn't be mandatory, but I also don't know of any case where an EA org has made it mandatory? Unless you're considering "we'll give you free housing with us or you can arrange your own housing elsewhere at your own expense" to be mandatory?
Re “ Unless you're considering "we'll give you free housing with us or you can arrange your own housing elsewhere at your own expense" to be mandatory?” - Nonlinear werent paying Chloe and Alice enough to afford their own accomodation, so I would consider that mandatory in a practical sense
It's a little hard to imagine the closest possible world in which it was legal to pay that amount, but I'm guessing it's one in which that's also an amount that would cover low-end housing?
There are dozens of organizations affiliated with EA that Open Phil hasn't funded. For a number of reasons those organizations may have a more distant relationship with the core activities of the EA movement. That's likely related to why they haven't received an Open Phill grant. Yet changing trends in what Open Phil funds tend to follow shifting priorities in EA, not the other way around.
Assuming you're not shilling for Open Phil, what might still unite all organizations Open Phil funds, and those in the EA ecosystem who at least intellectually find themselves at cross-purposes with Open Phil's agenda, is disagreement with your simply false take. On the off chance you're shilling for Open Phil, I expect the organization would reject your take as misrepresentative.
I may be missing something because I haven't read all the backstory, but...why were they in rural Puerto Rico? It sounds like the kind of org that could be run from anywhere, so why did they ever get in the position of having employees dependent on the employer for housing and vegan burgers and transportation?
They were moving around between places with low cost of living that Kat and Emerson thought were nice. I agree it's an unusual choice, and it seems to have been a very poor fit for Alice and Chloe, but the general idea of trying to get the nicest living environment for lowest cost is one that's been bouncing around EA and related spheres for a while.
$2k/person/month seems sufficient to live luxuriously even for SF or NYC. With five people travelling together that's $10k/month even before you consider how much you save on travel costs. You can rent very nice accommodations for a party of five in the Bay for $10k/month. Some examples I found in a fast search on Zillow: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/6624-Saroni-Dr-Oakland-CA-94611/24816637_zpid/
It sounds reasonable when you put it at that high level, but it's quite risky to locate a business in a place remote from the employees' homes and families. It tends to lead to employees living with the employer, with no feasible way to provide their own housing or transport without going through the employer. Not only does it allow the employees to be exploited and mistreated, but it tends to exacerbate groupthink and isolate everyone from outsiders who could provide perspective on the situation.
I agree it's risky, and clearly didn't work out in this case. I was trying to give more context on why they would do something that sounds so random from the outside.
Huh, the thing I notice most in this that doesn't seem to have been explicitly commented on is, like, the disregard of people who were sick or otherwise having medical needs, or having family emergencies. I should note that I mostly haven't read the original sources, I've primarily read just this post. But, from this post, we have:
> Alice was sick with covid and in complete isolation. She requested a vegan burger from Burger King, but Emerson and Drew refused because they wanted to work in a place with a nicer atmosphere.
She is sick! Can you not do this for someone who is sick?
> Kat and Emerson discouraged Alice from visiting her family because her trip overlapped with "some of the top figures in the field" coming to visit. (The chatlogs are suggestive that Alice timed her visit around a family emergency, but Kat doesn't explicitly mention this.)
Another similar instance!
> Emerson refused to drive Chloe to a medical errand when Chloe couldn’t drive; Kat thinks this is all right because Chloe was an assistant so she shouldn’t cost Emerson time.
It is a medical matter! Fricking help the person who needs medical help!
> Chloe claims that she had to come up with cool things for people to do in order to get them to drive her places—even for medically necessary trips.
In the screenshot Kat includes in the appendix, Chloe says "I need to upgrade my solution to lenses/glasses and can book an appointment in a mall in Mayaguez". I don't wear glasses or lenses so I don't know what this means or how serious/urgent it would be
I disagree with your assessment of there being only three factual errors in the original article and am obviously dramatically more critical of it than you are, but on net I think this is a thorough, useful, and defensible perspective on the situation. While my own angle on much of what you cover is different to your own, you bring up a lot of points worth considering. Thanks for taking the time to write this.
EDIT: To clarify, I don’t think you grapple nearly enough with the extent to which the well was poisoned and you work within and in support of that context, which I do think is bad. Given that caveat, though, the article is reasonable.
Thanks for the writeup! Very helpful. I’m curious: are you planning to cross-post this to the forum? I imagine it could be useful for some people there but I also completely understand wanting to stay away from all of that
> A person should not simultaneously be your friend, your housemate, your mentee, an employee of the charity you founded, and the person you pay to clean your house.
Decoupling hat on: This looks A LOT like the role of an apprentice (lives with you, you teach them things, pay them, and they clean up). I guess if you have an apprentice you shouldn't try and be their friend (also romantic partner) until AFTER their apprenticeship is over. If a friendship develops, change some other aspect quickly, otherwise problems will emerge.
I think that part of the shifting away from "historical" was shifting towards a model of apprenticeships where they don't live in your house or clean your countertops.
Thinking about the optimal breakdown. Let's say Alex is a rich/well funded and very social awkward so she only wants people who are ingroup in her living space. She's well meaning and don't want to abuse anyone. She also want as few people around as possible. She runs a non-profit doing [good thing]. She easily makes friends with ingroup people. She hates doing housework. She's happy to solve things with money. She wants to teach someone how to do [cool professional thing related to her non profit] that she suspect requires close proximity for months to transfer tacit knowledge.
Obviously the thing to do is Bob to live with/near her, spend 80+ hours/week around her, observing the cool work, learning the tacit skills, have this person do the annoying chores, and they will inevitably become friends. But both Alex and Bob read your post and don't want to do that. The first change would have Bob live in his own space. Maybe hire Carol to do the house work? Anything else?
People who don't want to do their own cleaning should hire professional cleaners, instead of roping friends/employees into doing it. I understand you specified that this person doesn't want a lot of strangers in their space, but...you kinda just have to either deal with having strangers in your house or doing your own cleaning.
> you kinda just have to either deal with having strangers in your house or doing your own cleaning
While Andrew's case sounds not ideal, and the Nonlinear case conflated way too many roles, I'm not convinced it's wrong in general for a housemate to trade doing more than their share of the cleaning for lower rent or for a stay-at-home spouse to do all the cleaning.
The "/" here is covering a great deal of ground—altogether too much, really. Hiring somebody to clean for you is not abusive, nor does it become so if you are friendly to them while they are your employee.
This does not look like apprenticeships typically operate, at least in modern day UK. They're much closer to a standard job with more focus on training then usual.
Unpaid workers are absolutely not employees as a legal matter, they are volunteers. Edit: or possibly interns, IF the requirements for an internship are met. Contractors are similarly not employees. So I'd give Ben Pace that one.
This one is a mess. Ben calls Alice and Chloe 'employees' and refers to other folks as 'former employees'. I think using the standard Ben was using, the total number of people in the category is probably closer to what NL is claiming than what he claimed.
On the other hand, if you interpret "employee" the way you're saying (which I think is very reasonable) then NL has probably had zero employees, and I don't know if I want to give Ben a point if Kat says 21 and Ben says 3 when there have actually been 0?
And then there's that employment law is complicated, and in many cases if you treat someone as an employee but pay them as a contractor they're actually an employee, just a misclassified and incorrectly compensated one. This seems very likely to me to be something that happened here, in which case the number of employees might be closer to what Kat claimed, but not actually in a way that reflects well on NL.
Yeah, I wouldn't really trust this organization as described to make any of the standard legal distinctions between employee, contractor, intern or volunteer.
There's a sentiment on the EA forum that your text should be there in full. I created the link post; is it okay if I copy the entire post as well? (You could do it yourself ofc, but I assume you didn't on purpose.)
> They traveled with Chloe's boyfriend, whom Kat Woods considered to "have high potential."
Chloe's boyfriend was initially invited to travel with them, then Kat (or Emerson?) decided he was low-value. I think at that point they sent him home and Chloe was isolated from then onward.
> Drew and Alice dated, but to her credit Kat disapproved.
This isn't to Kat's credit, as if she made a professional recommendation to her enter not to date her boss's brother. Kat disapproved because she is uncomfortable with polyamory.
Oh, if she explicitly said she disapproved on professional grounds, I missed that and hereby retract my previous comment (conditional on her having said that).
This is what Kat writes: "Fast forward to her dating Drew. She had a conversation with Kat a month ago about how dating him would be a bad idea for many reasons. But if they broke up, they’d just be rational adults about it. It’s fine to live and work with your ex. Kat’s just being conservative and doesn’t get how emotionally mature she and Drew are. Also, he’s very attractive and she’s in the middle of nowhere and who else is she going to date?
It’ll be fine. When she tells me and I start freaking out, because I’ve seen this happen before and it’s not going to end well, she thinks I’m just “traumatized by past poly experiences”. My concerns are not valid, but rather, a response to trauma.
To be clear, I am not traumatized by poly. I’m traumatized by people living/working/polyamorously-sleeping together and that exploding in predictably unpredictable dumpster fires. This wasn’t me saying don’t be poly. This was me saying “You shouldn’t casually date your boss’s brother and your colleague who you also live and travel with. Especially when you’re poly and he’s mono and so will inevitably break up. This is an extremely bad idea.”
...
After all of this, I tell her that I want to switch to a more professional relationship. I’m worried about Alice and Drew dating becoming a dumpster fire because when they break up it’s going to be excruciating to live and work together and it’s in all likelihood going to be a nightmare. I tell her that that’s her choice, but if she chooses to do so, I will have to be less emotionally attached to protect myself. Alice is devastated. She and I were so close, and all Alice wanted to do was sleep with her boss’s brother who she lives and works and travels with."
There's more, and it all exactly illustrates OP's points about Kat's terrible judgement and strawmanning, but it does seem like it's less about the poly side and more about exactly the sorts of concerns people have about Kat and Emerson's choices in setting up the Nonlinear "family" as they call it.
On one hand, you're like if what Kat is saying is true, then X is obviously a broken stair who people should know about. On the other hand, you're like, it's clearly out of bounds to mention their mental health history even in an anonymised form.
I don't know how you can hold both positions simultaneously. At least to me, the former seems like a stronger action than the later.
If someone is taking actions that severely hurt other people, then you should let people know about that-- whether they're neurodivergent or neurotypical. Many neurotypical people harm others in serious ways, and the mere fact of having been in a mental hospital doesn't mean you hurt anyone. Unless the mental hospital stay was directly related to some of the harm Alice allegedly caused, Kat could have provided details about the harm without describing private details of Alice's medical history.
I guess we have opposite stances on which constitutes the stronger action.
For me, incl. a detail in relation to a pseudonym to add credibility is a less strong action than actively making sure everyone knows the allegations against X under their real name.
Strength has nothing to do with it? The question is if the action is well-tailored to the problem. If someone is falsely accusing people of murder, it is important for people to know that, because otherwise they will... trust those accusations. If someone has been in a mental hospital, the only reason to make that public, usually, is to go "They're a CRAZY person who CANNOT BE TRUSTED". As a friend of many crazy people who totally can be trusted who have been in mental hospitals, I object to that.
This was repeatedly brought up in the comments of TracingWoodgrains's LW post about Nonlinear, but I think after this post I am even more convinced that it's (probably long past) time for EA orgs to halt most or all innovation/novelty/experimentation in the space of organizational structure. It turns out that perhaps Chesterton's fence applies very strongly here, and that all those "velocity-killing" formalisms of bureaucracy probably exist for good reasons and should not be lightly abandoned. I don't know if this should elevated to some kind of global principle, but at the very least I think I personally will be adopting a code of no longer donating to any EA organization which does not publicly commit to all of
1. Everyone is either a salaried or hourly employee, or a paid contractor, under the normal laws of the applicable territory (in the US, either a W-2 or 1099 employee)
2. Romantic relationships between people and their supervisors, or between the *anyone* in the org and *anyone* in the org's senior leadership, are forbidden by policy
3. No "company housing". The org can pay you a rent stipend if need be, but there can be no mandatory requirement that you will live with other members of the org outside working hours, and frankly even having it be an option is suspicious to me
4. No mentions whatsoever of drugs during work hours or work-associated social events. I am a big fan of drugs myself, and I like to talk about them with friends and, very occasionally, even coworkers, but it appears to be a common denominator in many stories of EA orgs gone wrong that people are talking about psychedelics/nootropics to their subordinates the same way they do with their close friends, which puts those people in a very awkward position
There are other requirements I'd like to see to prevent the cultishness and abuses of power which seem endemic to all the EA horror stories, but I'm not sure how I would formalize them in a way an HR department could print out in a company handbook.
And this doesn't seem like it's asking very much. 1 through 4 are utterly uncontroversial at normal companies and charities. Indeed, an HR rep from any normal company would probably look at those and barely understand how an org could possibly not have them, but that's the situation EA keeps finding itself in, to repeated failure. Whatever gains in efficiency and efficacy at "the mission" might hypothetically come from abandoning these, they clearly have been swamped in practice by the problems they cause. I won't speak for anyone else, but personally I am now convinced that it's time to go back to being boring, organizationally speaking, and doing one's best to be efficacious despite that.
I generally agree with your comment, but want to push back a little bit about "having it be an option." I think employees should get to choose their own housemates without the employer having a veto. Living with your coworkers or (especially) your subordinates creates many thorny dynamics which not everyone handles responsibly. But it's not fair to ask people to move out of their homes for a job either.
That's fair, I may need more qualifications to that statement. What I'm trying to preempt here is the situation where an employer (either explicitly, or by nudges and incentives you don't really have the power to refuse) gets you into a housing situation where you're surrounded by other people at the org almost all the time and so a) have less opportunities to get outside feedback that something is wrong and b) in a place where housemate disputes can become workplace disputes and vice versa. I don't know how common it is for people to end up living with a bunch of their coworkers when this was not specifically asked of them; if it's a thing which happens a lot (especially in the Bay with its chronic housing shortage) maybe I need a little more nuance.
> No "company housing". The org can pay you a rent stipend if need be, but there can be no mandatory requirement that you will live with other members of the org outside working hours, and frankly even having it be an option is suspicious to me
For what it's worth, when I was considering whether to move to Africa to work for Wave (EA-ish organization working on building a mobile money system) I saw the option to live with coworkers as a strong plus (though among other things it was not enough that I decided to take the job).
I do agree it shouldn't be mandatory, but I also don't know of any case where an EA org has made it mandatory? Unless you're considering "we'll give you free housing with us or you can arrange your own housing elsewhere at your own expense" to be mandatory?
Re “ Unless you're considering "we'll give you free housing with us or you can arrange your own housing elsewhere at your own expense" to be mandatory?” - Nonlinear werent paying Chloe and Alice enough to afford their own accomodation, so I would consider that mandatory in a practical sense
I do think NL was likely illegally underpaying Chloe and Alice: for example, $1k/mo is below minimum wage in Puerto Rico.
But the issue is violating employment law, not mandatory shared housing.
I don’t think so - even if it was legal to pay that amount, the intended constraints would still exist
It's a little hard to imagine the closest possible world in which it was legal to pay that amount, but I'm guessing it's one in which that's also an amount that would cover low-end housing?
I think that would just be not having a minimum wage? But also part of the issue is that the housing was necessarily high cost bc short term etc
I don't think nonlinear is very representative of EA orgs.
Can we agree, EA shouldn't closely associated with orgs that act as Nonlinear did.
I think most big orgs have most of the norms you suggest.
EA is basically what Open Phil funds. Open Phil funded Non-linear.
There are dozens of organizations affiliated with EA that Open Phil hasn't funded. For a number of reasons those organizations may have a more distant relationship with the core activities of the EA movement. That's likely related to why they haven't received an Open Phill grant. Yet changing trends in what Open Phil funds tend to follow shifting priorities in EA, not the other way around.
Assuming you're not shilling for Open Phil, what might still unite all organizations Open Phil funds, and those in the EA ecosystem who at least intellectually find themselves at cross-purposes with Open Phil's agenda, is disagreement with your simply false take. On the off chance you're shilling for Open Phil, I expect the organization would reject your take as misrepresentative.
It's not the big orgs that might be a problem, but small ones on the scale of Nonlinear.
I may be missing something because I haven't read all the backstory, but...why were they in rural Puerto Rico? It sounds like the kind of org that could be run from anywhere, so why did they ever get in the position of having employees dependent on the employer for housing and vegan burgers and transportation?
Personal preference on Kat and Emerson's part.
Well that sounds like a terrible choice
They were moving around between places with low cost of living that Kat and Emerson thought were nice. I agree it's an unusual choice, and it seems to have been a very poor fit for Alice and Chloe, but the general idea of trying to get the nicest living environment for lowest cost is one that's been bouncing around EA and related spheres for a while.
I'm not sure the low cost of living thing actually... checks out. They appear to have spent $2K/person/month on rent, for one thing.
Compare to what they would have spent to rent similar accommodations in, say, SF or NYC, though?
$2k/person/month seems sufficient to live luxuriously even for SF or NYC. With five people travelling together that's $10k/month even before you consider how much you save on travel costs. You can rent very nice accommodations for a party of five in the Bay for $10k/month. Some examples I found in a fast search on Zillow: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/6624-Saroni-Dr-Oakland-CA-94611/24816637_zpid/
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/630-Kenyon-Ave-Kensington-CA-94708/18550576_zpid/
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5698-Country-Club-Pkwy-San-Jose-CA-95138/2076324300_zpid/
Why are the options be SF, NYC, or rural Puerto Rico? Rural, suburban, or cheaper city in US or Europe should be on that list.
In any UK city (except maybe London) $2k / person / month will get you someone pretty nice.
It sounds reasonable when you put it at that high level, but it's quite risky to locate a business in a place remote from the employees' homes and families. It tends to lead to employees living with the employer, with no feasible way to provide their own housing or transport without going through the employer. Not only does it allow the employees to be exploited and mistreated, but it tends to exacerbate groupthink and isolate everyone from outsiders who could provide perspective on the situation.
I agree it's risky, and clearly didn't work out in this case. I was trying to give more context on why they would do something that sounds so random from the outside.
Huh, the thing I notice most in this that doesn't seem to have been explicitly commented on is, like, the disregard of people who were sick or otherwise having medical needs, or having family emergencies. I should note that I mostly haven't read the original sources, I've primarily read just this post. But, from this post, we have:
> Alice was sick with covid and in complete isolation. She requested a vegan burger from Burger King, but Emerson and Drew refused because they wanted to work in a place with a nicer atmosphere.
She is sick! Can you not do this for someone who is sick?
> Kat and Emerson discouraged Alice from visiting her family because her trip overlapped with "some of the top figures in the field" coming to visit. (The chatlogs are suggestive that Alice timed her visit around a family emergency, but Kat doesn't explicitly mention this.)
Another similar instance!
> Emerson refused to drive Chloe to a medical errand when Chloe couldn’t drive; Kat thinks this is all right because Chloe was an assistant so she shouldn’t cost Emerson time.
It is a medical matter! Fricking help the person who needs medical help!
> Chloe claims that she had to come up with cool things for people to do in order to get them to drive her places—even for medically necessary trips.
This again!
At least one of the medically necessary appointments was to get a glasses prescription looked at or something, not for like a broken leg or anything
Seems reasonable to class that as medically necessary, albeit not a medical emergency.
...wait were they expecting her to drive herself both without a license *and* while visually impaired and without her corrective lenses?
In the screenshot Kat includes in the appendix, Chloe says "I need to upgrade my solution to lenses/glasses and can book an appointment in a mall in Mayaguez". I don't wear glasses or lenses so I don't know what this means or how serious/urgent it would be
Oh, well, that helps at least!
I disagree with your assessment of there being only three factual errors in the original article and am obviously dramatically more critical of it than you are, but on net I think this is a thorough, useful, and defensible perspective on the situation. While my own angle on much of what you cover is different to your own, you bring up a lot of points worth considering. Thanks for taking the time to write this.
EDIT: To clarify, I don’t think you grapple nearly enough with the extent to which the well was poisoned and you work within and in support of that context, which I do think is bad. Given that caveat, though, the article is reasonable.
Thanks for the writeup! Very helpful. I’m curious: are you planning to cross-post this to the forum? I imagine it could be useful for some people there but I also completely understand wanting to stay away from all of that
> A person should not simultaneously be your friend, your housemate, your mentee, an employee of the charity you founded, and the person you pay to clean your house.
Decoupling hat on: This looks A LOT like the role of an apprentice (lives with you, you teach them things, pay them, and they clean up). I guess if you have an apprentice you shouldn't try and be their friend (also romantic partner) until AFTER their apprenticeship is over. If a friendship develops, change some other aspect quickly, otherwise problems will emerge.
I mean, historical apprenticeships were also notably abusive!
How much of that is the apprenticeship and how much is the historical?
I think that part of the shifting away from "historical" was shifting towards a model of apprenticeships where they don't live in your house or clean your countertops.
Thinking about the optimal breakdown. Let's say Alex is a rich/well funded and very social awkward so she only wants people who are ingroup in her living space. She's well meaning and don't want to abuse anyone. She also want as few people around as possible. She runs a non-profit doing [good thing]. She easily makes friends with ingroup people. She hates doing housework. She's happy to solve things with money. She wants to teach someone how to do [cool professional thing related to her non profit] that she suspect requires close proximity for months to transfer tacit knowledge.
Obviously the thing to do is Bob to live with/near her, spend 80+ hours/week around her, observing the cool work, learning the tacit skills, have this person do the annoying chores, and they will inevitably become friends. But both Alex and Bob read your post and don't want to do that. The first change would have Bob live in his own space. Maybe hire Carol to do the house work? Anything else?
People who don't want to do their own cleaning should hire professional cleaners, instead of roping friends/employees into doing it. I understand you specified that this person doesn't want a lot of strangers in their space, but...you kinda just have to either deal with having strangers in your house or doing your own cleaning.
> you kinda just have to either deal with having strangers in your house or doing your own cleaning
While Andrew's case sounds not ideal, and the Nonlinear case conflated way too many roles, I'm not convinced it's wrong in general for a housemate to trade doing more than their share of the cleaning for lower rent or for a stay-at-home spouse to do all the cleaning.
>instead of roping friends/employees
The "/" here is covering a great deal of ground—altogether too much, really. Hiring somebody to clean for you is not abusive, nor does it become so if you are friendly to them while they are your employee.
This does not look like apprenticeships typically operate, at least in modern day UK. They're much closer to a standard job with more focus on training then usual.
Unpaid workers are absolutely not employees as a legal matter, they are volunteers. Edit: or possibly interns, IF the requirements for an internship are met. Contractors are similarly not employees. So I'd give Ben Pace that one.
This one is a mess. Ben calls Alice and Chloe 'employees' and refers to other folks as 'former employees'. I think using the standard Ben was using, the total number of people in the category is probably closer to what NL is claiming than what he claimed.
On the other hand, if you interpret "employee" the way you're saying (which I think is very reasonable) then NL has probably had zero employees, and I don't know if I want to give Ben a point if Kat says 21 and Ben says 3 when there have actually been 0?
And then there's that employment law is complicated, and in many cases if you treat someone as an employee but pay them as a contractor they're actually an employee, just a misclassified and incorrectly compensated one. This seems very likely to me to be something that happened here, in which case the number of employees might be closer to what Kat claimed, but not actually in a way that reflects well on NL.
Yeah, I wouldn't really trust this organization as described to make any of the standard legal distinctions between employee, contractor, intern or volunteer.
My guess is that at the time of writing the original post, Ben thought Alice and Chloe were legally employees
For what it's worth I think they probably *were* employees: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/independent-contractor-self-employed-or-employee
There's a sentiment on the EA forum that your text should be there in full. I created the link post; is it okay if I copy the entire post as well? (You could do it yourself ofc, but I assume you didn't on purpose.)
Edit: Linkpost is here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RdiQ3n8cFJBxHRnwu/practically-a-book-review-appendix-to-nonlinear-s-evidence-1?commentId=uuo9jK8KnKFYLk9k9. (And needless to say, I see that you could have an interest in not having the text there and obviously won't copy it without permission.)
Totally fine to copy the text over! :)
Yeah this is a good take
> They traveled with Chloe's boyfriend, whom Kat Woods considered to "have high potential."
Chloe's boyfriend was initially invited to travel with them, then Kat (or Emerson?) decided he was low-value. I think at that point they sent him home and Chloe was isolated from then onward.
> Drew and Alice dated, but to her credit Kat disapproved.
This isn't to Kat's credit, as if she made a professional recommendation to her enter not to date her boss's brother. Kat disapproved because she is uncomfortable with polyamory.
Kat argues the opposite though, and I believe no evidence has actually been given that she’s lying about this?
Oh, if she explicitly said she disapproved on professional grounds, I missed that and hereby retract my previous comment (conditional on her having said that).
This is what Kat writes: "Fast forward to her dating Drew. She had a conversation with Kat a month ago about how dating him would be a bad idea for many reasons. But if they broke up, they’d just be rational adults about it. It’s fine to live and work with your ex. Kat’s just being conservative and doesn’t get how emotionally mature she and Drew are. Also, he’s very attractive and she’s in the middle of nowhere and who else is she going to date?
It’ll be fine. When she tells me and I start freaking out, because I’ve seen this happen before and it’s not going to end well, she thinks I’m just “traumatized by past poly experiences”. My concerns are not valid, but rather, a response to trauma.
To be clear, I am not traumatized by poly. I’m traumatized by people living/working/polyamorously-sleeping together and that exploding in predictably unpredictable dumpster fires. This wasn’t me saying don’t be poly. This was me saying “You shouldn’t casually date your boss’s brother and your colleague who you also live and travel with. Especially when you’re poly and he’s mono and so will inevitably break up. This is an extremely bad idea.”
...
After all of this, I tell her that I want to switch to a more professional relationship. I’m worried about Alice and Drew dating becoming a dumpster fire because when they break up it’s going to be excruciating to live and work together and it’s in all likelihood going to be a nightmare. I tell her that that’s her choice, but if she chooses to do so, I will have to be less emotionally attached to protect myself. Alice is devastated. She and I were so close, and all Alice wanted to do was sleep with her boss’s brother who she lives and works and travels with."
There's more, and it all exactly illustrates OP's points about Kat's terrible judgement and strawmanning, but it does seem like it's less about the poly side and more about exactly the sorts of concerns people have about Kat and Emerson's choices in setting up the Nonlinear "family" as they call it.
I'm legitimately confused by your stance.
On one hand, you're like if what Kat is saying is true, then X is obviously a broken stair who people should know about. On the other hand, you're like, it's clearly out of bounds to mention their mental health history even in an anonymised form.
I don't know how you can hold both positions simultaneously. At least to me, the former seems like a stronger action than the later.
If someone is taking actions that severely hurt other people, then you should let people know about that-- whether they're neurodivergent or neurotypical. Many neurotypical people harm others in serious ways, and the mere fact of having been in a mental hospital doesn't mean you hurt anyone. Unless the mental hospital stay was directly related to some of the harm Alice allegedly caused, Kat could have provided details about the harm without describing private details of Alice's medical history.
I guess we have opposite stances on which constitutes the stronger action.
For me, incl. a detail in relation to a pseudonym to add credibility is a less strong action than actively making sure everyone knows the allegations against X under their real name.
Strength has nothing to do with it? The question is if the action is well-tailored to the problem. If someone is falsely accusing people of murder, it is important for people to know that, because otherwise they will... trust those accusations. If someone has been in a mental hospital, the only reason to make that public, usually, is to go "They're a CRAZY person who CANNOT BE TRUSTED". As a friend of many crazy people who totally can be trusted who have been in mental hospitals, I object to that.