If someone is scared that if they criticize someone they will be “retaliated against”, that seems like a sign that something is really bad. I’ve had to deal with some situations like this myself while organizing events (and I haven’t always done a good job) but surely you should at least ask some more questions and err on the side of caution.
Having said all that, this guy has done some research and has exposed an awful EA workplace, which is a good thing.
From that post about Nonlinear:
I reached out to some references Kat listed, which were positive to strongly positive. However I also got a strongly negative reference — someone else who I informed about the decision told me they knew former employees who felt taken advantage of around things like salary. However the former employees reportedly didn’t want to come forward due to fear of retaliation and generally wanting to get away from the whole thing, and the reports felt very vague and hard for me to concretely visualize, but nonetheless the person strongly recommended against inviting Kat and Drew.
I didn’t feel like this was a strong enough reason to bar someone from a space — or rather, I did, but vague anonymous descriptions of very bad behavior being sufficient to ban someone is a system that can be straightforwardly abused, so I don’t want to use such a system.
This pretty much explains how and why the workplace culture in so many TESCREAL orgs is so, so bad.
Edit: OH MY GOD, Emerson is the Emerson from Mugglenet dot com??? I used to read that site when I was a little Harry Potter fan. Jesus. He should have stuck to correcting people’s punctuation in the Hall of Shame.
I dunno, I didn’t get much out of it because I found all the connections hard to follow. That article might actually need a diagram showing all the connections between the people featured, but that probably wouldn’t help with the claims that TESCREAL critics are conspiracy theorists…
Remove one or two of those reward circuits, especially if they’re poorly adapted to the modern environment, and the human becomes more generally capable. I suspect that my own inability to feel love is one example, the amygdalectomy is another, and the general pattern of high-IQ people being somewhat autistic is a third.
I managed not to click on the linked blog post about the author’s inability to feel love.
Seems like Yud saw fanfiction as an arena he could advertise in and recruit from, not a community he was participating in. Hence he used all the tricks to get as many hits and reviews as possible.
They’re tarnishing the Alpha course’s¹ hard-won cult branding.
¹ They might not seem too culty based on that Wikipedia page but if I remember correctly Private Eye printed some very critical stuff about the courses and people associated with them in recent years. Details not forthcoming until I flick through my big stack of old magazines…