Oh, huh. Somewhat different from my experience. I got feedback from Zvi at his office hours, and though he was certainly critical, he didn't seem rude or unkind. He pointed out a lot of real issues, and I appreciated his feedback. That said, this did result in me deciding to abandon the piece rather than trying to fix it.
I'm a reader of Zvi's newsletter and enjoy it, and have never met him in person.
However, the part that in this essay that isn't hearsay and is your interpretation puts a very heavy interpretive lens on what can be much more innocuous - e.g. looking away to the door when you ask a question, which doesn't necessarily mean "looking for signs of life and failing to find it". Given that many of these interactions are already paraphrased - to what extent, who can know - the devil may very well be in the details.
Perhaps Zvi is not a good writing mentor, and shouldn't have taken this gig in retrospect (maybe even found out for himself it's not his thing). However, I concur with the above commenter that some resentful gossiping is going on here. I will forebear my judgment until a personal experience, if I ever have one.
I paraphrased them to preserve anonymity, not to change the timbre of what was said. I've also ran the phrasing by a few people whom I was paraphrasing to check accuracy.
From your perspective this is a lot of hearsay, which is fair. From my perspective, none of this is hearsay (in the sense of passing on rumors that other people merely heard). If someone says to me "Zvi was incredibly patronizing to me about my writing thirty minutes ago and he wasn't being helpful," I don't consider that "hearsay" or "gossip". If I hear things like that from over ten people, I do start forming some context-free conclusions about someone's character.
This is a good post, and I like reading things like this that remind me that humans have gossip functions for a reason, and if you look a little, you see the ancestral environment's adaptive behavior everywhere.
Like yes let's have the Zvitalk. Ooga booga must we banish him? Lower his status? Make it clear to everyone that whatever his uses, Zvi is not a good *mentor*?
One thing I liked about Inkhaven is that, indeed, Zvi was the exception to prove the rule. Contributing writers were wonderful and helpful. Missing in this list for me is Alexander Wales, who is one of the sweetest humans I've ever met.
> Writing in public, so residents could see what his workflow is like.
I think he was fine with this one! When I sat in his office and asked him whether I could watch he looked at me like that was a stupid question "yeah yeah of course".
He's tried livestreaming himself on Twitch before so people could see him do the 3-monitors link-dumping work. (I think too few people came for it to be worth it.) We also discussed the ideal form of livestream, where his viewers could spend money to put links in front of him, e.g. YouTube lets you do this, or answer questions he asks the chat.
Zvi's use of Twitter feels similarly "guys? Guys? What do we think about this? Ls in the chat for DeepSeek? Fine. Lemme write that up."
Anyway I wrote this comment at the beginning of the post, and agree with the rest of it. Guess I'm just knee-jerking comments now.
No, sorry. I'm confident I read in my inbox Don't Worry About the Vase that he was going to "try Twitch out for this" but having just looked through my gmail archive (terrible search functions, Gmail, ugh) and also TheZvi.substack.com's search, cannot find anything.
If he's not dark triad, maybe he's just a big introvert and having people watch him and pester him constantly isn't his thing? Maybe he thought he could do Inkhaven as a favor to the rationalist community and he was wrong.
This smacks of the whole woke cancellation thing where people get in trouble for looking at people or talking to people the wrong way. I haven't seen any credible accusations of him taking advantage of anybody, so he's grumpy? Fine, I don't care.
I'm going to become a paid subscriber to his blog in 1d10 days precisely to act *against* forced collegiality like this.
Zvi mentioned in his recent post on education that he was bullied as a student, and the school expelled him instead of the bully. That was fine, though, exit is the best option when being bullied anyway. I wondered how that had happened, it's difficult to get expelled from most schools, but could more easily imagine it after reading this post.
Oh, huh. Somewhat different from my experience. I got feedback from Zvi at his office hours, and though he was certainly critical, he didn't seem rude or unkind. He pointed out a lot of real issues, and I appreciated his feedback. That said, this did result in me deciding to abandon the piece rather than trying to fix it.
I'm a reader of Zvi's newsletter and enjoy it, and have never met him in person.
However, the part that in this essay that isn't hearsay and is your interpretation puts a very heavy interpretive lens on what can be much more innocuous - e.g. looking away to the door when you ask a question, which doesn't necessarily mean "looking for signs of life and failing to find it". Given that many of these interactions are already paraphrased - to what extent, who can know - the devil may very well be in the details.
Perhaps Zvi is not a good writing mentor, and shouldn't have taken this gig in retrospect (maybe even found out for himself it's not his thing). However, I concur with the above commenter that some resentful gossiping is going on here. I will forebear my judgment until a personal experience, if I ever have one.
I paraphrased them to preserve anonymity, not to change the timbre of what was said. I've also ran the phrasing by a few people whom I was paraphrasing to check accuracy.
From your perspective this is a lot of hearsay, which is fair. From my perspective, none of this is hearsay (in the sense of passing on rumors that other people merely heard). If someone says to me "Zvi was incredibly patronizing to me about my writing thirty minutes ago and he wasn't being helpful," I don't consider that "hearsay" or "gossip". If I hear things like that from over ten people, I do start forming some context-free conclusions about someone's character.
This is a good post, and I like reading things like this that remind me that humans have gossip functions for a reason, and if you look a little, you see the ancestral environment's adaptive behavior everywhere.
Like yes let's have the Zvitalk. Ooga booga must we banish him? Lower his status? Make it clear to everyone that whatever his uses, Zvi is not a good *mentor*?
One thing I liked about Inkhaven is that, indeed, Zvi was the exception to prove the rule. Contributing writers were wonderful and helpful. Missing in this list for me is Alexander Wales, who is one of the sweetest humans I've ever met.
Yeah you're right I should have included Alexander in here
> Writing in public, so residents could see what his workflow is like.
I think he was fine with this one! When I sat in his office and asked him whether I could watch he looked at me like that was a stupid question "yeah yeah of course".
He's tried livestreaming himself on Twitch before so people could see him do the 3-monitors link-dumping work. (I think too few people came for it to be worth it.) We also discussed the ideal form of livestream, where his viewers could spend money to put links in front of him, e.g. YouTube lets you do this, or answer questions he asks the chat.
Zvi's use of Twitter feels similarly "guys? Guys? What do we think about this? Ls in the chat for DeepSeek? Fine. Lemme write that up."
Anyway I wrote this comment at the beginning of the post, and agree with the rest of it. Guess I'm just knee-jerking comments now.
No, sorry. I'm confident I read in my inbox Don't Worry About the Vase that he was going to "try Twitch out for this" but having just looked through my gmail archive (terrible search functions, Gmail, ugh) and also TheZvi.substack.com's search, cannot find anything.
If he's not dark triad, maybe he's just a big introvert and having people watch him and pester him constantly isn't his thing? Maybe he thought he could do Inkhaven as a favor to the rationalist community and he was wrong.
This smacks of the whole woke cancellation thing where people get in trouble for looking at people or talking to people the wrong way. I haven't seen any credible accusations of him taking advantage of anybody, so he's grumpy? Fine, I don't care.
I'm going to become a paid subscriber to his blog in 1d10 days precisely to act *against* forced collegiality like this.
He's definitely not dark triad, and I don't want him cancelled. It's good that you're planning on giving him money. I still enjoy his newsletter.
Expecting rationalists in person to pass at least *one* of the three gates (saying things true, useful, or kind) is not "forced collegiality".
Zvi mentioned in his recent post on education that he was bullied as a student, and the school expelled him instead of the bully. That was fine, though, exit is the best option when being bullied anyway. I wondered how that had happened, it's difficult to get expelled from most schools, but could more easily imagine it after reading this post.
Ah, perhaps we should draw a veil over speculations like this.