I read 438 comments on the Nonlinear allegations so you don't have to

Kat and Emerson accused of employment abuses and intimidation

“One of my tasks was to buy weed for Kat, in countries where weed is illegal. When I kept not doing it and saying that it was because I didn’t know how to buy weed, Kat wanted to sit me down and teach me how to do it. I refused and asked if I could just not do it. She kept insisting that I’m saying that because I’m being silly and worry too much and that buying weed is really easy, everybody does it. I wasn’t comfortable with it and insisted on not doing this task. She said we should talk about it when I’m feeling less emotional about it. We never got to that discussion because in the next meeting I had with her I quit my job.” - former Nonlinear employee Chloe

Last Thursday, Ben Pace from rationalist workspace Lightcone published some pretty shocking allegations about Nonlinear bosses Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz.

He says he thinks it’s very likely that two Nonlinear employees (nicknamed “Chloe” and “Alice”) experienced painful and inappropriate situations at work:

• unusually dependent on Nonlinear bosses for food, shelter and healthcare because they were living in foreign countries and paid little to no salary

• dependent on Nonlinear bosses for social needs as well (“Alice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families”)

• comments from Kat and Emerson that led them to believe they might be punished if they quit their jobs or said negative things about Nonlinear

• feeling manipulated by Kat’s compliments and tears

• asked to break the law, including driving without a licence and transporting drugs across borders

Nonlinear is an organisation that aims “to 10x the number of talented people working on x-risk by launching dozens of high impact charities.” It’s reasonable to think about it as an EA charity, even though it’s not technically a charity right now.

Kat and Emerson are the co-founders as well as romantic partners. Kat previously co-founded Charity Science with her then-husband Joey, as well as an early version of Charity Entrepreneurship. Emerson used to run a private sector digital media company. Emerson’s brother Drew also works as a permanent member of staff at Nonlinear.

Ben had a 3 hour call with Kat, Emerson and Drew the week before he published his post, where they shared some information that’s pretty compatible with what Chloe and Alice say, as well as some points they disagree on. Beyond those four points of disagreement, though, they still dispute 85 of the claims in Ben’s post, have posted evidence that they believe shows one of his claims isn’t right, and plan to publish a longer response soon.

Kat, Emerson and Drew travelled, lived and worked with Alice and Chloe (for example, in the Caribbean). Chloe was a straightforward employee. Alice was travelling with the group, expecting them to incubate her charity and eventually started receiving a small stipend - there’s some debate as to when she became an official employee, or if she ever did. They both shared information with Ben to help with this post. Chloe also wrote a comment with some stories of her time at Nonlinear, like this one:

“Kat had asked me to buy her a specific blonde hair coloring, at the time she told me it’s urgent since she had grown out her natural hair quite a lot. We were living in St Martin where they simply do not sell extreme blond coloring in the specific shade I needed to find, and Amazon does not deliver to St Martin…I ended up spending hours looking for that blonde hair coloring in different stores, pharmacies, and beauty stores, across multiple weekly grocery trips. I kept Kat updated on this. Eventually I found the exact shade she asked for - Kat was happy to receive this but proceeded to not color her hair with it for another two weeks. Then we had to pack up to travel to the Bahamas. … Kat decides to open up the suitcases to see which last minute things we can throw out to make the suitcases lighter. She reaches for the hair color and happily throws it out. My self worth is in a place where I witness her doing this (she knows how much effort I put into finding this), and I don’t even think to say anything in protest - it just feels natural that my work hours are worth just this much. It’s depressing.” - former Nonlinear employee Chloe

There have been a lot of comments on the post on the EA Forum - 438 at the time of writing. There’s a lot of sympathy for Chloe and Alice, outrage against Nonlinear, concerns that not all of the claims might be accurate, and calls for patience and rationality. LessWrong’s comments were similar, with many cross-posted comments, but somewhat less emotional and more focused on generally useful strategies to determine the truth in emotionally charged situations (things like thinking of 2-3 hypotheses and figuring out which one the evidence fits best).

I’ve picked out a few EA Forum comments that are particularly important or representative:

• Shortly after the post was published, Habryka revealed what he believes was attempted intimidation.

• Several comments vouched for Kat’s character. Amber pointed out that a person can be a good friend and a bad employer, or be kind in one situation and unkind in another. At least one of the commenters was encouraged to comment by Nonlinear.

• A lot of comments, like Marcus’s, said we should wait a week for Nonlinear to have a chance to respond before making up our minds.¹

• Spencer Greenberg said he had knowledge of several factual inaccuracies in the post.

• Holly sparked a thread about whether everyone would take away the same lessons from a post like this. She was concerned that Ben posted this mostly because he really values free access to information - but most readers would probably focus on other things, like breaking the law, or even about living with employees.

  

• Community Health weighed in with their knowledge of the situation:

That brings us to where we are today. Kat has posted counter-evidence for one of the claims in the post, but other than that, we haven’t seen a full response from Nonlinear yet. If Nonlinear publishes a response that makes me really doubt any of the headlines items, I’ll include it in a future email - you can subscribe for free to make sure you get future updates on this and other goings-on in the EA Community.

1. Today is one week from when the post was originally published. I wrote it yesterday but kept an eye out for any new responses from Nonlinear. I’m not sure when Nonlinear will publish more of a response, and I didn’t want to wait indefinitely.