EA - Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation by Ben Pace

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation, published by Ben Pace on September 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Over the past seven months, I've been working part-time on an investigation of Nonlinear, culminating in last week's post. As I'm wrapping up this project, I want to share my personal perspective, and share some final thoughts.This post mostly has some thoughts and context that didn't fit into the previous post. I also wish to accurately set expectations that I'm not working on this investigation any more.Why I Got Into Doing an InvestigationFrom literally the very first day, my goal has been to openly share some credible allegations I had heard, so as to contribute to a communal epistemic accounting.On the Tuesday of the week Kat Woods first visited (March 7th), someone in the office contacted me with concerns about their presence (the second person in good standing to do so). I replied proposing to post the following one-paragraph draft in a public Lightcone Offices slack channel.I have heard anonymized reports from prior employees that they felt very much taken advantage of while working at Nonlinear under Kat. I can't vouch for them personally, I don't know the people, but I take them pretty seriously and think it's more likely than not that something seriously bad happened. I don't think uncheckable anonymized reports should be sufficient to boot someone from community spaces, especially when they've invested a bunch into this ecosystem and seems to me to plausibly be doing pretty good work, so I'm still inviting them here, but I would feel bad not warning people that working with them might go pretty badly.(Note that I don't think the above is a great message, nonetheless I'm sharing it here as info about my thinking at the time.)That would not have represented any particular vendetta against Nonlinear. It would not have been an especially unusual act, or even much of a call out. Rather it was intended as the kind of normal sharing of information that I would expect from any member of an epistemic community that is trying to collectively figure out what's true.But the person who shared the concerns with me recommended that I not post that, because it could trigger severe repercussions for Alice and Chloe. They responded as follows.Person A: I'm trying to formulate my thoughts on this, but something about this makes me very uncomfortable.Person A: In the time that I have been involved in EA spaces I have gotten the sense that unless abuse is extremely public and well documented nothing much gets done about it. I understand the "innocent until proven guilty" mentality, and I'm not disagreeing with that, but the result of this is a strong bias toward letting the perpetrators of abuse off the hook, and continue to take advantage of what should be safe spaces. I don't think that we should condemn people on the basis of hearsay, but I think we have a responsibility to counteract this bias in every other way possible. It is very scary to be a victim, when the perpetrator has status and influence and can so easily destroy your career and reputation (especially given that they have directly threatened one of my friends with this).Could you please not speak to Kat directly? One of my friends is very worried about direct reprisal.BP: I'm afraid I can't do that, insofar as I'm considering uninviting her, I want to talk to her and give her a space to say her piece to me. Also I already brought up these concerns with her when I told her she was invited.I am not going to name you or anyone else who raised concerns to me, and I don't plan to give any info that isn't essentially already in the EA Forum thread. I don't know who the people are who are starting this info.This first instance is an example of a generalized dynamic. At virtually every s...